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Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400)

About The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer began work on The Canterbury Tales about 1387, and intended that each of his thirty pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. However, he only completed the General Prologue and wrote stories (not all of them complete) for twenty-four of the pilgrims before he died in 1400.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. Chaucer casts himself as a character in the tales, telling us in the General Prologue that he joins them at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, which was then just outside London, and getting in several sly jokes at his own expense. The Host of the Tabard suggests a storytelling contest to pass the time on the journey. The pilgrims range in social status from the nobility (the Knight) to the peasantry (the ploughman) as well as tradesmen and members of religious orders. They also include women as well as men. Although Chaucer's short descriptions of each member of the party are detailed and individual, together they create a portrait of the men and women of mediaeval England in every walk of life as vivid as the illuminations in a manuscript. Their tales are as individual and contrasting as the people themselves, ranging from courtly romances to downright vulgarity and bringing to life the personalities, opinions and disagreements of the tellers.

The Canterbury Tales are made up of separate tales linked by prologues which introduce each speaker. Although each separate tale represents a wide variety of medieval stories, Chaucer links them beautifully into the overall narrative, and gains good effects by the tales he chooses to put next to each other. So, for example, after the Knight has told a noble romance of courtly love, the Miller tells a bawdy and vulgar story aimed at the Reeve (the steward of a manor), and the Reeve revenges himself with a story in which a miller's wife and daughter are seduced. The tales themselves offer an insight into the characters of the teller – particularly that of the Wife of Bath, who has no time for the ideals of courtly love and ideas of her own about sexual attraction and the relations between men and women. Many stories satirise the church, either in the person of the teller or in the tale told, especially the Pardoner, who demonstrates how he uses people's hopes of salvation in a confidence trick.

In a personal confession at the end of the tales, Chaucer writes a retraction for all his secular writings and those of his tales that might be thought to be sinful. Even for a poet as vivid, imaginative and pungent as Chaucer in his writings, he was well aware of the demands of society and the church for conformity of thinking.