In the prologue to The Cook’s Tale, the Host chides the Cook for all the seemingly bad food he has sold to them. In reality, though, this tale was to be a tale to repay the earlier narrators. At the end of his prologue, the Cook suggests that he will tell a tale about a publican (tavern owner) but decides to wait until the return trip home. This fits with Chaucer’s original plan of having the pilgrims tell stories both on the way to Canterbury and back.
This fragment of a tale, which Chaucer neither finished nor deleted, is not long enough for one to predict accurately what happens to young Perkin Reveler, but the indications are that he falls rapidly into sin. The early implications are that this unfinished tale was to be of the same general type as the Miller’s and the Reeve’s and was apparently to have dealt with the total perversion of the human soul. To say more would be pure conjecture.
