The Lawyer's Tale
The Host checks his watch, realizes that it's 10am already, then spends a paragraph and a half eloquently convincing everybody that they need to stop wasting time.
To that end, he tells the Lawyer that he needs to get on with his story. The Lawyer says, I'm definitely not shirking my duty or anything, but frickin' Chaucer over here has already written all the stories and everybody knows them all by heart. Well, except the stories with all the weird demonic- and incesty-type stuff, he definitely hasn't written THOSE down, naturally. But look at him, his pen hasn't stopped scribbling since we set out this morning, so you know he's going to make a book out of our stories, and I bet we're not even going to get royalties. Anyway I think I do have one tale to tell, but I'm not even going to bother to rhyme it because I know Chaucer will fix it in post (he does).
But first, let me go on a half-page tirade about how terrible it is to be poor, which I will eventually segue into telling you that I learned this story from a merchant.
Part 1
In Syria there lived a bunch of rich merchants who liked to spend their money going on vacations. One day they went to Rome and met the emperor. More importantly, they met the emperor's daughter Constance, who they all agreed was a shining example of Christianity (despite none of them being Christian) and who should be made Queen of Europe (despite none of them being European).
Eventually the merchants returned home and told tales of their adventure to the sultan, because that's just the kinds of movers and shakers these guys are. When they tell him about Constance, the sultan says, dang, I gotta have her. After doing some research, he decides that marriage is a more feasible plan to obtain the lady than performing magic (I am not making this up). The rub here is that she would never be allowed to marry somebody who isn't a Christian; but the sultan says, no worries, I'm totally ready to denounce my religion for her, let's make this happen.
Somehow the Holy Roman Emperor says, yep, I'll marry off my daughter to a Syrian sultan. Coincidentally, he also suddenly has a lot more gold to count. He arranges to have Constance ripped from her life to be sent over to a new culture in an unfamiliar land, along with a bunch of bishops the pope picked out to perform the promised christening on the sultan.
The sultan's mother isn't happy about this, however, because no son of hers is gonna be a Christian, not if she has any say about it. She gathers together a council and announces that she has a plan. The council all emphatically agrees to the plan, despite it not being clear to me if she ever actually said what the plan was. But she may or may not have implied there would be blood. Again, the writing is difficult to parse at times.
The sultan's mother announces to her son that she's going to convert too, and convinces him to hold a big feast when the foreigners arrive.
Part 2
The ship from Rome arrives, and the sultan is elated, and there is much celebrating. Everybody convenes for the feast hosted by the sultan's mother, and the sultan and all the Christian bishops promptly get stabbed.
Turns out, the mother wanted the throne, and figured a mass assassination of a foreign envoy was a smarter play than just pushing her kid down the stairs.
But Constance doesn't get killed. Instead, they throw her on a boat by herself and push her in the vague direction of Italy. Now, if you're thinking, "so why didn't they just kill her?", Chaucer is one step ahead of you! He references the biblical tale of Daniel and the Lion's Den, saying the reason they didn't kill Constance was the same reason the lion didn't make a snack out of Daniel: because God willed it.
I think the real reason has something to do with plot convenience. Also they throw treasure on her boat for no reason and it never becomes relevant.
Constance sails around for three years, surviving only on the food that was left for her (this is compared to Jesus feeding the masses with a single loaf of bread, so I'll let it slide). Not only does her boat pass Italy by, but it somehow misses the entirety of mainland Europe and instead washes ashore in England.
There she's found by the constable of the local castle and his wife. They are both pagans, but they like Constance so much and she has such strength of conviction that they convert to Christianity before too long.
Also Constance lost her memory while she was at sea for three years. It's not really relevant yet, but I didn't know where else I should squeeze that in.
Around this time, Satan starts getting a little upset around how good a Christian she is and plots a little temptation. He finds a local knight and makes the guy lust after her. However, she is an extremely good Christian and rebuffs all of his advances. Fortunately, the knight is a secure and reasonable person who understands that rejection is okay and it's best to accept it and move on.
Yeah just kidding he actually wants her to die. And he has a foolproof plan to make it happen: one night while the constable is away, he sneaks into the castle, murders the constable's wife, and puts the bloody dagger in Constance's bed so that she will be caught and subsequently executed.
…Listen, if your only two criteria are "I want her to die" and "I'm willing to kill a person for this", I think you can draw your line between those a little goddamn straighter. Are you kidding me with this?! Is this woman cursed to watch everybody around her die while she survives purely due to questionable decision making? And don't even start with that "but God willed her to live!" crap. I'm starting to think the will of God is just an excuse for poor writing.
And on top of that, it doesn't even work. The king of the castle shows up to figure out what happened, and everybody in the castle is like, wow, we can't believe she did this. Except the knight, who says yeah, it was totally her, killer's instinct in that one. So he's a little sus.
Constance prays in front of everybody for salvation, and the king goes, a'ight, somebody bring me a bible, and if the knight swears on it that she's guilty, then she's guilty. The knight puts his hand on the bible and says she absolutely did it. Then his head explodes. God really ain't messing around today, so he shows up to tell everyone off for suspecting Constance, and everybody becomes Christian on the spot.
The king marries Constance, and everybody is happy, save for—real shocker here—the king's mother. She hates Constance, although there's no real reason why except that she's a mean person. Maybe she was out the day that guy's head exploded so she never converted.
Constance gives birth to a son while the king is off fighting the Scots. A letter is sent to inform the king, but it's intercepted by his mother who alters it to read "the kid is very icky and probably a demon." The king is sad, but he writes back that he's going to hold off judgement until he can actually see the kid. His mother yoinks that letter too, and the message that comes across is that Constance is to be put back in her boat once more and set out to sea again. And send the ugly demon-kid with her.
Also, thus far in the plot a tragedy has befallen literally everybody that Constance converted to Christianity. Really mixing your messages here, Chaucer.
Part 3
The king comes back, finds out what happened, and has his mother killed, but it's too late; Constance is back floating the seas. Not only does she do this for another five years, but the currents somehow take her back into the Mediterranean.
There is a brief misadventure where the boat lands at some random castle and everybody just stares at her and shrugs until the castle steward gets a little lusty and decides to pay her a visit. He gets tossed overboard and drowns, and Chaucer is very determined not to give Constance any credit for this, claiming that she's way too weak to defend herself, so it must have been God. I think the idea here is that she is being rewarded for her unwavering faith during all of these trying times, although this seems incredibly goddamn stupid because she wouldn't even NEED divine intervention if God wasn't putting her into these situations to begin with. So I guess God's the dick here. Anyway I guess the boat is back at sea again although Chaucer doesn't mention how.
The camera cuts back over to Syria, which doesn't actually exist any longer because the Roman emperor got pissed at what happened to all his bishops and sent a senator to take an army and burn it all down. This apparently took as long as it took the Greeks to sack Troy, because he's on his way home when he bumps into Constance and her kid on the open ocean. Conveniently, he doesn't recognize her, and she still can't remember anything prior to England, so they both kinda just shrug and he takes her back to stay at his house in Rome.
Speaking of England, her husband the English king is kinda feeling bad about putting his evil mother to death, and decides to repent by making a pilgrimage to Rome. This leads exactly where you would expect, and he is reunited with his wife and son, and everybody is happy.
Then Constance says, "Hey, you should meet with the emperor. Also, don't mention that I'm his daughter."
At this point, the king should say "hey, I thought you lost your memory," but I guess Chaucer is just eager to wrap this up. I know I am. Anyway, she also reunites with her father the emperor, and everybody is happy a second time, and Constance says "Awesome, I never want to go anywhere ever again," and the king says "sounds great, now let's go back to England."
The king dies a year later so she ends up going back to Rome anyway. At some point her son Maurice is crowned emperor, and there was an actual Roman emperor called Maurice, except it's not the same guy. Chaucer knows we're not up on our Roman line of succession but sure didn't count on Wikipedia to call him out on his bullshit.
Here ends the Tale of the Lawyer.