The Portrait of the Pardoner

The main purpose of this lesson was to understand the portrait of the pardoner and the role of a pardoner in medieval society.

The first thing we done in lesson was to look at an image shown on the board and discuss in pairs what we think the image could be conveying. The image is shown below:

Chain Of Being

After discussing in pairs we came together as a class and began to share our ideas about the image. We discussed how the picture could be showing different levels of hell or perhaps a sort of hierarchy towards god. In the end we came to the conclusion that the image was showing the chain of being.

The chain of being is a Christian concept that states the hierarchal order of life on earth. The chain of being is as follows:

• God
• Angels 
• Humans
• Animals
• Plants

After this activity we then moved on to pondering on the role of a pardoner. Normally after committing a sin a person would need to seek advice on how to gain penance in order to gain forgiveness from god. (penance is a way to gain forgiveness i.e praying or giving up your time for others) A pardoner’s role is essentially to eliminate the need for penance after committing a sin. A pardoner would ask for money in exchange to give someone forgiveness from god. The amount of money asked for by the pardoner would depend on the severity of the sin committed.

For people seeking a path to heaven in the middle ages a pardoner would have seemed such an easy method to gain forgiveness from god so naturally people would not mind paying sometimes large sums of money to a pardoner in order to gain forgiveness.

Pardoners also offered biblical relics in exchange for money; they would claim to own the bones of saints which they would sell to people for sometimes very large amounts of money. More often than not however these ‘biblical relics’ were jus bones of animals. We talked about how greed; a sin in itself was often a sin that could be associated with pardoners.

For the last part of the lesson we began to annotate the portrait o fthe pardoner. Through carefull analysis of the text we began to depict key physical aspects of this particular pardoner. with these physical attributes we built up a picture of the pardoner.

“this pardoner  hadde heer as yellow as wex’ (line 677) = the pardoner has bright blonde hair

“dischevelee, save his cappe, he rood al bare.” (line 685) = he has dishevelled (dirty) hair and was bareheaded apart from a skullcap.

“a vericle hadde he sowed upon his cappe” (line 687) = a vernicle is a medal that is representative of a pilgrimage to Rome.

These are jus a few examples of the annotations we made, homework was to draw a picture of the pardoner based on what we depicted from the portrait of the pardoner.