The franklin's tale opens with a description of a marriage of apparently idyllic happiness. Arveragus and Dorigen's marriage follows a long courtship where the knight Arveragus served his lady Dorigen through many acts of chivalry, and their union will to some extent preserve this model of male deference. Arveragus swears:

In return Dorigen swears to be his ‘humble trewe wyf’ (758). The narrator approves this as a ‘humble, wys accord’ (791) and goes on to explain that, paradoxically, Arveragus is:

This arrangement has been seen as utopian – most famously by Kittredge, who argued that ‘a better has never been devised or imagined’ and asserted, as I mentioned in the Introduction, that it was Chaucer's own ideal. Indeed, it leads to more than a year of marital bliss.

However, it contains a contradiction that is more than a merely elegant oxymoron. Although Jill Mann argues that the alternation between ‘lordshipe’ and ‘servage’ represents a flexible, fluctuating relationship, the fact is that Arveragus' public role is going to show no such flexibility.