Most readers of the Canterbury Tales will agree that its opening fragment, in its movement from the Knight's Tale to the Cook's Tale, produces an unraveling of textual authority. Lee Patterson has argued convincingly that a similar movement occurs across Fragments II and III, with an important difference. The Wife of Bath's Tale subverts “the authoritarian orthodoxy of the Man of Law,” and opens the way for the even less decorous quarrel between the Friar and the Summoner – a quarrel that begins with the Friar's declaration that

But unlike Fragment I, which ends in complete irresolution with the Cook's Tale, the Summoner's Tale closes Fragment III with a scene in the feudal court of a lord of the manor. In quitting the Friar, the anti-fraternal game played there also demonstrates the efficacy of feudal lordship. Fragment III thus restores to some extent the lay authority Fragment I had called into question.

I would like to take this argument a step further. Fragment III is followed in most manuscript orders by the Clerk's Tale, the collection's first public exemplum, which combines an exploration of monarchical authority with a return to the genre of the Man of Law's Tale. This alerts us to another difference between Fragment I and Fragments II and III.