Having asked Harry Bailly to ‘com forth’ and be the first to ‘kisse’ his spurious ‘relikes everychon’, the Pardoner suffers what is probably the most robust put-down in the entire Canterbury Tales.

This passage has been the subject of substantial exegesis recently, particularly by those who wish to claim that the Pardoner's alleged homosexuality does indeed matter. Monica McAlpine, whose 1980 article on that subject set the course of much subsequent criticism, saw it as the result of the Pardoner's assault on ‘Harry's heterosexual sensibilities’. Following up on this initial outing of the Host as a homophobe, Steven Kruger argued that at this point he ‘could not stand farther from Christian spirituality’. That is to say, Harry ‘is drawn strongly away from the spiritual’ as he ‘fully involves himself in the debased physical world presented by the Pardoner as his own’.