The Reeve can Play at That Game

"The Reeve's Tale" isn't as original as "The Miller's Tale" and arguably not as raunchy. The Reeve, who happens to also be a carpenter, gets revenge on the Miller for his tale about a cuckolded carpenter by telling one about a miller cuckolded even worse. It's not clear whether he interprets the Miller's Tale as a deliberate insult but his own tale is so full of gratuitous spite it's funny. The Miller's carpenter is a jealous idiot, the Reeve's miller is a jealous idiot and a malicious thief. When he skims grain off a couple young scholars, their revenge is to ravage both his wife and his virgin daughter.

The miller's wife goes to the wrong bed because one of the scholars, John, moves the cradle from the foot of her bed to the foot of his. According to Wikipedia, there's some debate about whether the other scholar, Aleyn, rapes the daughter or if they have consensual sex. Considering he jumps her before she knows what's happening, I'd call it rape, albeit a rape she ends up enjoying. Which is the sort of thing that only happens in porn usually. In this case, it fits perfectly with the Reeve's thoroughly malicious narrative take-down.

"The Miller's Tale" was intended to "quite" the Knight's, you could look at it as a kind of revenge. The revenge of the average, uneducated man against the refinement of a higher class. The Reeve may have had the same thought and gives this little monologue to his miller when he plots to steal grain from the scholars:

This miller smyled of hir nycetee,
And thoghte, ‘al this nis doon but for a wyle;
They wene that no man may hem bigyle;
But, by my thrift, yet shal I blere hir yë
For al the sleighte in hir philosophye.
The more queynte crekes that they make,
The more wol I stele whan I take.
In stede of flour, yet wol I yeve hem bren.
“The gretteste clerkes been noght the wysest men,”
As whylom to the wolf thus spak the mare;
Of al hir art I counte noght a tare.’

The Reeve, as a serf but also an official who serves to administrate a lord's lands, is both lower class enough to join the fray and upper class enough to do it not quite so deftly, or with as much good humour.