In the 1390s Geoffrey Chaucer satirized indulgences and other clerical swindles in his Canterbury Tales, in which the entertainingly venal Pardoner (a common term for an indulgence salesman) prefaces his tale with a pseudo-confession, boasting that he dupes gullible Christian folk into buying fake relics, and berates them so much for their sins that they rush to purchase indulgences from him, making him extremely rich.
