Chaucer’s Ideas of an Immoral World in The "Lak of Stedfastnesse"

Avarice is the ultimate mechanism for diluting a compassionate man’s generosity, driving him into corrupt practices. These effects of greed are developed through Geoffrey Chaucer’s, The Canterbury Tales, in which he implements various forms of mockery to reveal loss of ethics. Chaucer satirizes human life, presented through pilgrims of diverse backgrounds, constituting medieval society in fourteenth-century England. One of these characters is the Doctor, an educated pilgrim who pursues learning and medicine for financial gain. His hypocritical nature can be further concluded in Chaucer’s poem, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, advancing the author's perspective in which a principled world becomes absent as time progresses and the growing hunger for wealth heightens. Therefore, Chaucer’s ideas of an immoral world are characterized by the Doctor due to his unprofessional desire for maximum revenue.

By expressing the Doctor’s appetite for self-riches, Chaucer assembles his proposition of widespread human weaknesses poisoning society. The Doctor is well informed about astrology and medications to treat his patients; however, Chaucer suggests that the Doctor’s medical advice is influenced by greed. He collaborates with pharmacists in prescribing expensive and irrelevant remedies that will hereby be futile for the patient: “He gave the man his medicine then and there / with all his apothecaries in a tribe”. Individuals practicing medicine have a moral obligation to provide the correct methods of care for patients. The Doctor’s prevarications eliminate the capacity to ditifully serve as a physician, even though Chaucer presents the character as a prowess. By using medical eminence, the Doctor abuses his power since he can easily prescribe false prescriptions and ultimately obtain great profits. Thus, “Lak of Stedfastnesse” highlights the Doctor’s deceitful qualities because his costly treatments were fueled by desires for gold in given the opportunity to exploit upright standards to achieve depraved objectives. The Doctor utilizes such opportunities to receive revenue. This character participates to travel to Canterbury to give ‘respect’ to Thomas Becket even though “He did not read the Bible very much”. The Doctor's purpose for partaking in this pilgrimage is to acquire money by using prestige to manipulate multiple pilgrims into purchasing ineffective medicine. By seizing any chance to procure riches, the character reduces his virtue by fashioning a deceptive religious attitude, expanding upon Chaucer’s satirical impiety. In addition to the pilgrim’s impious behavior, he is constantly shown to commit many falsehoods for personal gain as the Doctor’s actions become more habitual. In, “Lak of Stedfastnesse” Chaucer implies, “Trouthe is put doun, resoun is holden fabel / and vertu hath now no dominacioun”. Chaucer renders a lamentable tone, depicting reighoutness and honesty as imaginary attributes since it has been saturated with vicious, powerful lust. The Doctor’s dishonesty and insincerity towards patients parallels Chaucer's beliefs of a world corrupted by the thirst for power because the pilgrim ensues an iniquitous demeanor as his desires magnify. Overall, Chaucer expresses ideas of society's rotten manner by conveying the Doctor as a greedy fraud.

Unprincipled passions cultivated through the fancy of pleasurable superfluities will generate destruction in the community. The modern public corrupts the healthcare system in which relishes for profit consequently increase a patient’s suffering, but this industry is not the only culprit. Human trafficking steals innocence and freedom for money, embodying human nature as merciless. “Lak of Stedfastnesse” can be used to describe these models of inhumane acts in modern times in which the poem calls for a new age of rectitude and obliterate mercenaries. Therefore, Chaucer ultimately advocates for any individual with honorable characteristics resting at the core to be a model for societal manners. A miniscule amount of respectable decency will miraculously mask avarice until it will be a lasting fable.