Imagine leaving to go on a voyage to Canterbury. Traveling down the road to the designated meeting place, you see this short, stocky, extremely unattractive man riding up further along on the path. As you get closer you ask him where he is traveling? But before he can answer, you begin to stare at a huge wart on the end of his nose with stray black hairs growing out of it. But you can't stop staring at his hideously, large, wide nostrils without thinking of all the other things on his nose. Topping it all off with his crude answer to your simple question. With a heavy heart you discover he will be accompanying you on this voyage to Canterbury. On the way to the meeting place he tells you how he would steal corn and sell it for three times as much. Looking him over again you see that he has a sword on his side. This leads you to assume he loves to fight and looking at his build you do not think many could defeat him. You sigh to yourself; this is going to be a "LONG" voyage! The pilgrim being described here is the miller. On page 1319 in our textbook, Davis the Miller's description continues. The Miller's character stands out from all the others by his use of language, his naughty story he tells, and by the way he is compared to other pilgrims on the voyage to Canterbury (Chaucer, 1319). .
Chaucer states that the Miller loved to tell jokes of harlotries, that are hard to understand and crimes. One of the more important parts of his appearance is the fact that he had a wide mouth and very hot breath. This could mean a lot of different things. One way of interpreting his mouth is that he talked a lot and was always saying things to instigate a fight. Another way to interpret this is that when he told stories they were very long and wordy. He could never get to the point. Making his stories hard to follow and very hard to understand. It is obvious through the story he told, that he had a very crude vocabulary.