ELDE'S STA FF AND his babbling narrative in Parlement of the Thre Ages demonstrate how old age can function as a prosthetic for a group of texts, joined by chance or opportunity together in a manuscript. But this connection lives on outside of the London Thornton MS. Indeed, outside of London lies Norfolk and the home of Chaucer's Reeve, a fictive figure heading to Canterbury whose exclamations of age-related impairments and inability to act reinforce just how powerful those narratives of impairment can become. But whereas Parlement's Elde harnessed an aging body to mirror the embodied truths of his narrative and vice versa, the Reeve accounts for age in different, but equally powerful and discursive ways. The Reeve, once a carpenter and now a figure of manorial power, utilizes the debate between the ages, trickery, greed, and finally, old age's inevitability to go beyond Elde's confessional tale.

An actively hostile and deeply personal tale that strikes at the youth of the Miller, arguing both against his drunken outburst and the Reeve's own self-presentation, this narrative ultimately echoes the best advice of Cato in Cicero's De Senectute, which implicates both the tale teller and its target: old age's best advantage is its release of the aged from the shackles of desire. By using narrative to personally depict the Miller's descent in aging, the Reeve shows how narratives about the conditions of old age— from loss of innate heat to loss of hair, desire, and physical ability— replace some of that bodily force, making good on the Reeve's promise in his prologue to meet force with force. But this force rebounds. Acknowledging that the Reeve's tale actually condemns him is a well-worn path— and one that his narrative confirms. Yet simultaneously the Reeve also accounts for how old age represents both impairment and potency, demonstrating how age and narrative prosthesis operate throughout the tale. Because aging is inevitable and the decline associated with it as well, the narrative he gives must implicate him. But from the lexicon of age-related complaints comes not only a leveling— all must age if they live— but also a signal that these narratives of impairment and age take on this potency for the Reeve and others like him because they condemn him to debility andinactivity.