Household Tales · Chapter
The Twelve Idle Servants explained
Twelve servants boast about their extreme laziness, each describing how they avoid work through various excuses and mishaps, from ignoring their master to letting their horse run wild, ultimately celebrating idleness as a virtue.
What happens
Twelve servants boast about their extreme laziness, each describing how they avoid work through various excuses and mishaps, from ignoring their master to letting their horse run wild, ultimately celebrating idleness as a virtue.
Themes in this chapter
Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished
The servants' idleness leads to neglect and accidents, yet they boast without consequence, subverting the typical moral of punishment for vice.
Characters to notice
- the servants
The twelve idle servants who boast about their laziness and neglect of duties.
- the master
The master who calls the servants and eventually pushes the cart out himself.
Key passages
“The care of my body is my principal work, I eat not a little and drink still more.”
The first servant claims his main job is to look after himself by eating and drinking heavily.
Highlights the servant's self-centered laziness.
“I let it rain on in God’s name. At last came a splashing shower, so heavy indeed, that it pulled the hair out of my head and washed it away, and I got a hole in the skull; I put a plaster on it, and then it was all right.”
The third servant describes lying in the rain until his hair washed off and he got a skull injury, which he simply patched up.
Illustrates extreme neglect of personal safety due to laziness.
“I had no fancy for carrying the heavy books to my master any longer or fetching them away again. There was no end of it all day long.”
The eleventh servant quit his job because he was tired of constantly moving heavy books for his master.
Shows the servant's disdain for repetitive work.