The Pardoner's Tale
short story by Geoffrey Chaucer
"The Pardoner's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the order of the Tales, it comes after The Physician's Tale and before The Shipman's Tale; it is prompted by the Host's desire to hear something positive after the physician's depressing tale. The Pardoner initiates his Prologue—briefly accounting his methods of swindling people—and then proceeds to tell a moral tale.
The tale itself is an extended exemplum. Setting out to kill Death, three young men encounter an Old Man who says they will find him under a nearby tree. When they arrive they discover a hoard of treasure and decide to stay with it until nightfall and carry it away under the cover of night. Out of greed, they murder one another. The tale and prologue are primarily concerned with what the Pardoner says is his "theme": Radix malorum est cupiditas ("Greed is the root of [all] evils").
Frame
In the order of The Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale are preceded by "The Physician's Tale". This is a harrowing tale about a judge who plots with a "churl [low fellow]" to abduct a beautiful young woman.
The public source identifies “The Pardoner's Tale” as short story by Geoffrey Chaucer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pardoner's, Tale and short.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1116798. VIAF identifies the subject as 269707726. The Library of Congress control number is n87932774. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Pardoner's Tale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.