The Steward's Tally

by Geoffrey Chaucer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Heere bigynneth the Prologe of the Stiwardes Taille.

Lordynges, ye han herd of many a knyght
That rood for love and for his lady bright;
But of a stiward that vitaille boghte,
And what it coste, and who the money oghte,
Ye herde it nevere, for no clerk it wroot,
Save oon; the mys han eten it, God woot.
And for the Hoost hath stynted me of ryme,
In prose I telle it, and in litel tyme.

Heere bigynneth the Taille.

---

I found this tale in no romance. I found it in a roll of accounts, the kind I kept myself for twelve years at the wool quay, written in a clerk's hand at Caerleon on Usk, and the clerk's name was at the head of the roll, where the mice began. So I cannot tell you who he was. I can tell you that he spelled badly and added well, and that of the two I would rather have the second in any man who keeps my money.

You have heard of Sir Kay in many books. You know he was King Arthur's steward and his foster-brother, that he had a tongue like a hedging bill, that he mocked young knights who came to court in rusty harness and was afterwards unhorsed by them, generally in front of ladies. All this is true, and I will not defend him, because the books say it and who am I. I will only say that the books were written by knights' men, and that no one ever wrote a romance about the man who bought the pepper.

This was at Pentecost, in the year that the roll does not give.

---

It was King Arthur's custom on a high feast that he would not sit down to meat until he had heard of some marvel or seen some adventure come into his hall. Everyone knows this. It is a fair custom, and a knightly one, and it made the king famous in every land where men tell stories. What it made him in his own kitchen I will now set down.

For that Pentecost the steward had laid in, according to the roll: two oxen and the half of a third; fourteen swans; a porpoise, salted, out of Bristol, which came up the river by boat and stank before it arrived; forty dozen eggs; sixty capons; a hundred and twenty geese; three barrels of herring for those whose vows forbade the rest; wine of Gascony, eleven tuns, and of Rhenish two; pepper, a pound and a half; ginger; saffron, half a pound, at a price I will not write because you would not believe it and the roll is not certain; almonds; rice; sugar in loaves; galingale; and of bread so much that the clerk wrote a figure, crossed it out, and wrote a larger one.

Of the subtleties I will say nothing, for I was not there and the roll names only their cost. There was a castle of pastry. There was a swan dressed again in its own feathers after roasting, so that it seemed to swim on a sea of green jelly, and it was carried in by two boys, and the second boy was the one who was paid extra.

All this was ready at the third hour. The king heard mass. The queen heard mass. The knights of the Table Round heard mass, some of them twice, because a second mass is a good place to be seen. Then they came into the hall and sat down at the boards, and the boards were bare except for the salt and the bread, because the meat could not come up until the adventure came in.

And no adventure came.

---

I have seen a great many feasts held back, and I will tell you what happens, because it does not change from Caerleon to Westminster. At first everyone is gracious. The knights speak of the adventures of other Pentecosts, which were remarkable: the year of the white hart, the year of the sword in the floating stone, the year a damsel rode in on a mule without a bridle and wept and would not say why. The ladies listen. The king smiles at the door.

Then it is noon, and the knights tell the same adventures again, but shorter.

Then it is past noon, and men begin eating the bread, which is not courteous, and breaking it under the board so that it should not be seen, which is less courteous still. Sir Gawain did not, for he was the most courteous knight in the world. He sat with his hands folded and looked at the door with such patience that it was a kind of reproach, and the knights on either side of him stopped eating bread because of it, and hated him a little.

Below in the kitchen, Hamo the cook stood over his sauces.

Now a sauce is a living thing and has a short life. Hamo had made a cameline for the swan, of cinnamon and ginger and bread soaked in vinegar, and a sauce of green herbs for the fish, and a pepper sauce, black, for the porpoise, which needed all the help it could get. By noon the cameline had a skin on it like boiled milk. By the ninth hour it had a skin on the skin. The capons had come off the spit at the third hour, and they were standing in rows on the dresser, dying slowly of cold, and their fat was going white.

Sir Kay came down the kitchen stair. He did not have to; the steward does not have to go anywhere. But he came down, and he stood by Hamo, and he looked at the capons.

"How long?" he said.

"They were done at tierce," said Hamo. "Now they are only finished."

Kay lifted the lid of the great cauldron, where the beef was keeping warm in its own broth, and put it back down. He took a spoon and broke the skin on the cameline and looked at what was under it, and he did not say anything, which for Kay was a kind of grief.

"Sixty capons," he said at last. "At twopence. Ten shillings, standing on that board, going white."

"The geese are worse," said Hamo. "Geese don't forgive."

"No," said Kay. "No more do I."

And he went up the stair again. But he did not go into the hall. He went out through the screens and across the court, past the well, past the dogs, who knew him and did not get up, to the gate.

---

My auctour does not say why he went there. I would not presume to say it either. Perhaps he thought that if an adventure was coming it would come by the gate, as they generally do, and that a steward who went to fetch it might save the king's dinner a quarter of an hour. Perhaps he only wanted air. A kitchen at Pentecost with a cold dinner in it is not a place where any man wants to stand.

At the gate was the porter, a man called Glewlwyd, who had been porter there since before the king was born and believed that the castle belonged to him. He was sitting on his stool in the shade of the arch, eating a heel of bread, as was the custom on high feasts among those not bound by the king's custom.

"Has anything come?" said Kay.

"Nothing," said the porter. "Nothing at all. Not a knight. Not a dwarf. Not a lady on a white palfrey. It's a poor year."

"Nothing at all?"

The porter jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the bridge.

"Her," he said. "She's been there since Thursday. I send her off and she comes back. I've told her the king doesn't hear pleas at Pentecost. She doesn't listen. She hasn't got the English, or she says she hasn't."

Kay looked.

On the bridge over the Usk, on the downstream side, out of the way of the carts, a woman was sitting on the parapet. She was not young. She had a grey hood and a grey kirtle tucked up for walking, and her feet were bare and very dusty, and she had her shoes tied together and slung round her neck to save them. Under one arm she held a goose. It was alive. It looked at Kay in the way that geese look at everyone, as if it knew what he had done and meant to tell.

In her other hand was a stick of hazel about a span long.

Kay went out over the bridge to her. I give you what they said as my auctour gives it, which is in English, though they spoke in the Welsh. Kay was Welsh before he was anything, Cai son of Cynyr, though the French books have made him into a Frenchman with a French name and a French temper. He was the only man at that court, the roll says, apart from the porter and the grooms, who could have answered her in her own tongue. And he answered her.

"What is your name, mother?"

"Nest," she said. And then the name of her father and of his father, which my auctour wrote down and the mice have eaten, and I could not spell it if they had not.

"What do you want at the king's gate?"

She held out the stick.

---

You will know what a tally is, if you have ever been owed money by a great lord. For those who have not, God keep you so: a tally is a stick of hazel or willow, squared, on which the debt is cut in notches across the grain. A cut the breadth of a man's palm for a thousand pounds; a thumb's breadth for a hundred; the little finger's for twenty; a pound the breadth of a swollen barleycorn; a shilling a little narrower; and a penny only a slit of the knife, with no wood taken out at all. Then the stick is split down its length through all the notches, and one half is kept by him that owes and the other by him that is owed, and when the day comes to pay, the two halves are laid together, and if the notches meet, the debt is true, and no clerk on earth can argue with it, because no clerk on earth can grow wood.

So it is said. In my own experience the clerk does not argue with the stick. He only tells you to come back after Michaelmas.

Kay took the stick from her hand. On it were three cuts of a shilling, and on the flat side, scratched with the point of a knife, a mark like a pothook with a bar through it.

He knew the mark. It was the mark of Roger Pygge, his purveyor for the cantref of Gwynllŵg, whom he had sent out a fortnight before with two carts and a boy, to take up geese for the king's Pentecost at the king's price.

"Nine geese," said Nest. "I had eleven. He took nine and left me this and two. One of the two the fox had on Tuesday. This is the other."

The goose said nothing, but its look was eloquent.

"He gave you the tally," Kay said, "so that you could be paid."

"He said I would be paid at the castle. So I came to the castle. The porter said not on a feast day. I said the feast is eating my geese, so it is the feast I'll speak to." She looked at him. "Are you the feast?"

"I am the steward," said Kay.

"Then you're the man who has my geese."

My auctour says nothing for a while after this. I will say nothing either.

---

The hall, when Kay came back into it, was in the state of a hall at the tenth hour that has been promised a marvel since the third. The king was still smiling at the door, but the smile had gone stiff at its edges, the way a sauce goes. The queen was talking to her ladies in a low voice about something else entirely. Sir Gawain still had his hands folded. Several knights had stopped pretending not to eat bread.

Kay walked up the hall between the long boards with the tally in his hand, and behind him, with her shoes round her neck, came Nest, carrying her goose.

The hall looked at the goose.

"Sire," said Kay, and bowed, and the bow was very low and very correct and it was the most insolent thing anyone in that hall had seen all day, "you would not eat until an adventure came to your court. Here it is. It has brought its own goose, in case we have not enough."

There was a moment, and then the hall laughed, the way a hall will laugh when it is hungry and has been given leave. Sir Dinadan laughed until he had to hold the board. Even some of the ladies laughed. Gawain did not laugh, and the queen did not, and the king did not.

"Steward," said the king, "this is not a jest for Pentecost."

"It is no jest, sire. Ask her."

So Arthur asked her, through Kay, who put her Welsh into French for the king in a flat voice, without ornament, the way a clerk reads out a writ. Her name. Her place, which was a hamlet on the moor above the river, where nothing was worth stealing except the geese. The purveyor. The two carts and the boy. The nine geese. The fox. And then, at the end, she held up the stick.

Sir Gawain stood.

He was, as I have said, the most courteous knight in the world, and I will not mock him, because he meant it. He said that a poor woman had been wronged in the king's name by a man who wore the king's livery, and that no greater shame could come on a king's house, and that if the king would give him leave he would arm and ride at once against the false purveyor, wherever he was hidden, and bring him bound to the king's feet before the moon was up.

The hall liked this very much, and several knights began to stand too, because an armed riding is very nearly an adventure, and if it was an adventure then they could eat.

"Sit down, Sir Gawain," said Kay. "You will not find him by moonlight. I know where he is."

"Then tell me."

"He is in the kitchen, sir, in a hundred and twenty pieces, and some of them are with a sauce of ginger. You may ride against him with a knife."

---

I do not ask you to love Kay. Nobody did. But you must grant that it was hard for anyone to answer him, and nobody did that either.

The king was silent for a long space. Then he said, "Steward, fetch me the other half."

Kay sent a boy for the coffer. It came up the hall on two boys' shoulders, an iron-bound chest that lived in the wardrobe behind the buttery, and it was set before the high table, and Kay opened it with a key from his belt. It was full of sticks. Hazel and willow, short and long, bundled in hundreds with cord, each bundle labelled on a slip of parchment with the name of a cantref and a purveyor and a date: Gwent Is Coed, Gwynllŵg, Ergyng, Ystrad Yw. They rattled when the boys set the chest down, like dry bones, or like dice.

Kay found the Gwynllŵg bundle, and in it the sticks with Roger Pygge's pothook, and he went through them one by one in front of the whole court, and the court waited. It was the second thing it had waited for that day.

Then he took one out and laid it against the stick in Nest's hand.

The two halves met. The three shilling cuts ran on from one half into the other without a step. The grain of the hazel went on from her side into his as if it had never been parted, a little dark knot in it that had been split clean through the middle and now was whole.

The whole hall, my auctour says, could see it was the same wood.

"Three shillings," said Kay. "For nine geese. At fourpence. It is a fair price."

"It is a fair price," said the king, "if it is paid."

"It will be paid, sire. After Michaelmas, with the rest."

"How many more are there?" said the queen.

It was the first thing she had said. Kay looked at the chest.

"Of geese only? Or of everything?"

"Of everything."

My auctour gives Kay's answer as a figure, and then the figure is crossed through, and then there is a larger one. I will not give either. You would not believe them, and in any case the mice have been at the larger.

---

Now here I could tell you, if I were a maker of romances, how King Arthur rose up in his wrath and emptied his treasury on the floor of the hall, and paid every tally in the chest, and swore that never again would his purveyors take one egg in his name unpaid; and how the poor of Gwent blessed him to the end of their days, and how that Pentecost was remembered over all the other Pentecosts. You would like it. I would like it. It would be easy to write.

But I have the roll in front of me, and it is not what the roll says.

The roll says that the king called his chamberlain and had him bring a purse, and out of his own purse, not the treasury's, paid Nest six shillings, which was twice her geese, and a penny for her shoes, because she had walked to Caerleon barefoot to save them. The roll says that the king held this to be an adventure fit for the custom, being a wrong done in his name and come into his hall, and that therefore the court could eat. And the roll says that the rest of the tallies in the chest were to be paid after Michaelmas, as before.

Then the meat came up.

It came up cold. The swan sat on its green sea, and the sea had set hard round its breast, so that the swan seemed to be frozen into a pond in January and was very much admired. The porpoise came up in its black pepper sauce, and the pepper had done all it could. The capons were white and stiff and tasted of the dresser. The cameline had to be cut with a knife. The knights ate all of it, and praised it, and asked for more, and it was the best dinner many of them had eaten in their lives, because it was the tenth hour and they had heard two masses on an empty stomach.

Nest was set at the end of the lowest board, beside the porter, who did not like it. A boy put a goose in front of her, a roast one, cold, glistening a little where the fat had set. She looked at it a long time. Then she took out her knife and ate it, all of it, slowly, with bread, and she gave the bones to the live goose under the board, which ate them. I do not know whether it was one of her own nine. Neither did she. Neither, my auctour says, did Kay, who went down the hall once while she was eating, and stopped beside her, and stood a moment, and went on.

---

That night, when the hall had been swept and the boards taken off their trestles and the dogs let in to finish what the knights had left, Kay sat in the wardrobe behind the buttery with a candle and the roll, and made his entries for the day. My auctour was there, I think, because the hand of the roll changes at this point to a hand that is better at spelling, and I take it that the clerk had gone to bed and the steward was writing it himself, as I wrote my own when I was Controller and the king would have it so.

Most of what he wrote that night is swans, and capons, and wine, and the price of saffron, which the mice have spared.

And then, below the saffron, a single line:

Item, to Nest of the moor above Usk, for ix geese taken by R. Pygge, purveyor, at the king's command paid from the king's purse, vi s. i d.

And below that line, where the steward perhaps began to write something else, the parchment has been eaten away in a neat half-moon, the shape of a small mouth, and whatever he wrote there is gone.

Heere is ended the Stiwardes Taille.

---

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Galfrīdō Chaucērō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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