The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale

The company at the beginning of this story is joined by two men: one is a Canon, and the other is the Canon’s yeoman. Both of them are riding tired horses and they are very polite.

The host asks if the Canon wants to tell a tale, but the Yeoman volunteers to thell one. He also lets slip that he and the Canon spend most of their time making “illusions”, or rather they borrow money and then they disappear instead of give them back.

At first the Canon tells to the Yeoman to shut up, but when he realizes that the Yeoman won’t keep their secrets he decided to run away. Since the Canon is gone, the Yeoman decides to tell to everyone all he knows.

The Yeoman starts telling that during the seven years, in which he stayed with the Canon, he tried to learn alchemy. He described some of the results of their experiments: broken pots and explosions were the protagonists. Then he notes that anyone who practices alchemy will lose everything he has; if the Canon would fail at an experiment, he would throw everything out and start over, even if some of the equipment or materials were very expensive.

The Yeoman asserts that nothing is what it seems to be: nice-looking apples are rotten, seemingly-wise men are fools, and men who seem trustworthy are thieves.

In the second part of his tale, the Yeoman tells about another Canon who is so terrible that he can’t be described with words. One day he visited a London priest and he asked him if he could lend to him some gold. The priest agreed, but three days later the Canon returned to pay him back.

The Canon asked to the priest if he wanted to see his “maistrie” or rather a magic trick, and the priest agreed. The canon put a small amount of quicksilver (mercury) in a melting pot and then he put all on hot coals. When the priest isn’t looking, however, he tucked a fake wax coal full of silver into the fire. When the fake coal melted, the silver spilled over the top of the melting pot, making it look like the canon has changed the quicksilver into real silver. Then the Canon pretended to make gold in the same way.

The canon then tells the priest that if he were caught, he would be killed as a sorcerer. This so impresses the priest that he payed the canon even more than he would have. The Yeoman concludes the tale telling that if you practice alchemy, you will go to the hell.