Of course, there exist several important differences between narratives such as the Becket legend, The King of Tars, and Bevis of Hampton and The Man of Law's Tale, not the least of which lies in that Chaucer's narrative belongs to a larger work of tremendous complexity, The Canterbury Tales. As such, we cannot draw any deeper conclusions about the treatment of conversion in The Man of Law's Tale without addressing the place and function of the tale and its teller within the larger scope of The Canterbury Tales. Here, it is not only necessary to examine the role of The Man of Law's Tale in The Canterbury Tales, but also to interrogate the Man of Law and to evaluate both his portrait in The General Prologue and his relationship to the story he chooses to tell on the way to Canterbury and to the shrine of Thomas Becket. These questions have been the subject of long discussions for over a century; in the following pages, I will only raise them to further elucidate Chaucer's approach to the conversion of the Other, trying to gage the extent to which the disinterest towards the process of conversion noted in the previous chapter belongs to Chaucer or simply to the Man of Law. Where a simple reading of narratives such as the Becket legend and Bevis of Hampton can lead us to understand the story's underlying message about baptism and conversion, this is not the case with The Man of Law's Tale. Having assessed the tale's ambiguous and ultimately negative approach to conversion, we must now ask whether the tale's apparent distaste for conversion constitutes yet another facet of the character fabricated by Chaucer or whether these views in fact align themselves with the poet's own understanding of the role of conversion in interacting with the Muslim Other in England in the late fourteenth century.

In undertaking such an analysis of The Man of Law's Tale and its teller and trying to ascertain the place and function of both in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I will set aside the Becket legend for a while, focusing instead on the relationship between the Man of Law and other pilgrims. Yet, it is important to remember that the Becket legend and The Man of Law's Tale both belong to the genre of popular devotional literature.