One of Chaucer’s remarkable metaphors in the Canterbury Tales compares human life to a large barrel that is slowly tapped until there is nothing left. In the Prologue to his Tale, the Reeve tells us that Death, as a tapster, began emptying the cask at his birth and has been emptying it ever since, so it is now almost empty. Chaucerian scholarship has paid well-deserved attention to this metaphor, with V. A. Kolve being the first to show how it relates to other images that frame and organise the different parts of the Canterbury Tales.

Although the metaphor is otherwise widespread, as we will see below, the Reeve’s brief remark is the only passage in Chaucer’s masterpiece to feature the fascinating tapster figure, other than the line mentioning ‘any gaylard tappestere’, allegedly visited by Absolon in the Miller’s Tale (MilT 3336). How-ever, the tapster plays a prominent role in the early fifteenth-century continuation of the Canterbury Tales preserved in Alnwick, duke of Northumberland's Library, MS 45, known as the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn. It is a relatively extensive story, more than half of which describes the adventures of the Pardoner. During the pilgrims’ dinner at The Checker of the Hoop inn, the Pardoner starts flirting with a tapster named Kitt.