One of the favorite formulas for stories in the Western world is that of the trickster attempting to play a trick on someone and the tables being turned. The Reeve’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale are fine examples of this technique.
The Reeve’s Tale involves a crooked miller and two students who are determined that the miller will not be able to fool them but are fooled nonetheless. The basic human truth that Chaucer implies is that a university student is not necessarily wise in the way in the world and that a scheming miller can get the best of inexperienced youth. The distrust expressed by the miller of the college students in still a universal view. And certainly, the two students are easily robbed of their grain. The reader is secretly satisfied to see two determined students being proven wrong — they boasted that they could never be cheated. The revenge that the students take — first one student, John, bedding down with the daughter, and then in a mix-up, Alan bedding down with the Miller’s wife — is highly comic.
The Reeve’s Tale is an excellent variation on the old idea of the trickster (the miller, in this case) who, although he succeeds in tricking the students, gets his due when the young and virile students obtain sexual favors in the miller’s own bed with the miller’s wife and daughter.
