Where It All Goes Down
Late 14th century, On Pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, England/ On the Pardoner's Sales Trips / In a town and its environs in Flanders
The pilgrims in Chaucer's tales are traveling in the spring of some year in the late 14th century. They meet up in a lively Inn in Southwark, outside London, on their way to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas Becket, an archbishop of Canterbury who was gruesomely murdered in 1170 by followers of King Henry II. Becket was made a saint in 1173 and his relics were venerated by people all over Europe. He was a hugely popular martyr because he had insisted on putting the Church first and the government second. Imagine that.
Much of the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale is not the tale itself, but the Pardoner's interaction with the Canterbury pilgrims, where he describes all the clever techniques he uses to sell fake relics and expensive pardons to unsuspecting customers. We're not only on pilgrimage, then, but also with the Pardoner on his sales trips.
These two settings are pretty similar; in both, the Pardoner is giving a speech before a diverse Christian audience. Because of this, it can be difficult to keep straight when the Pardoner is addressing his imagined audience of potential pardon and relic-buyers, and when he's talking to the Canterbury pilgrims. By the end of the Tale, the Pardoner himself has confused the two audiences. He tries to sell pardons and relics to the pilgrims, never mind the fact that he's already confessed his stuff is fake—he's a real salesman.
The Pardoner's actual Tale takes place in Flanders, in Belgium. It begins in a tavern which, no surprise, is a hotbed of all kinds of vices and lechery. (Lots of sermons used taverns to symbolize the ultimate example of sin.) The Pardoner uses the tavern setting as a jumping-off point for a long discussion of the "tavern sins" – drunkenness, lechery, gambling, and blasphemous swearing, not to mention dancing girls. When he returns to his story about the "rioters," they're already at the bar, and pretty drunk, before 9 o'clock in the morning. It's safe to assume that these guys don't have jobs – we can add idleness to their list of sins.
After the rioters decide to kill Death, they take to the road between their town and his. Like the tavern, the road was a symbolic setting in medieval England. In real life, roads could be dangerous places, with no law enforcement folks around, making them a haven for a criminal element that survived by robbing travelers. When a person takes to the road in a story, then, he'd better be ready to meet with something or someone unexpected.