As the Wife of Bath concludes her Tale, Friar Huberd has some choice words for her:

It is not clear whether the friar is responding specifically to the Tale, with its depiction of the hag's sermon on “gentilesse,” or to the Wife's own Prologue sermon on the “wo that is in mariage”: he probably objects to both. Either way, his comment not only implies that moral “scole-matere” may be unfit matter for pilgrimage tale-telling, but more significantly registers his resistance to the appropriation of clerical “auctoritees” and a “prechynge” voice by this widowed “dame.” Whether or not the Friar is alluding to “[l]ate fourteenth-century Lollardly activities,” it is clear that “his comments read as a reaction to the Wife's words which threaten the established monopoly of authorized men on religious interpretation.” The authority to preach, a public form of “religious interpretation” and always a contested element of clerical discipline, had rarely been more controversial than during the last decades of the fourteenth century, when debate began to rage over the proposition by some Wycliffites that laypeople, women included, should be able to preach the gospel.