Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Pilgrims, Stories and Middle English

The Canterbury Tales is a long poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, begun around 1387 and left unfinished at his death in 1400. Within the frame of a pilgrimage from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, a varied company of travellers tell stories to pass the time. The work is one of the founding texts of English literature and the richest portrait of late medieval English society that any writer of the period left behind.

Chaucer’s life at court

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, probably between 1340 and 1343, the son of a prosperous wine merchant, John Chaucer. Around 1357 he appears in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, the wife of Edward III’s son Lionel. Service as a page in a great household was the usual route into royal favour for a young man of his background.

In 1359 and 1360 Chaucer fought in France during the Hundred Years’ War and was captured; the king contributed to his ransom. In the mid-1360s he married Philippa de Roet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. Her sister Katherine Swynford later became the mistress and then the third wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, which tied Chaucer to the most powerful family in England.

Chaucer was never a full-time writer. He travelled on royal business to France, Flanders and twice to Italy, in 1372–73 and 1378, where he encountered the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. From 1374 to 1386 he was controller of customs on wool and hides in the Port of London, living in a house over Aldgate. Later he served as a justice of the peace and member of parliament for Kent and, from 1389 to 1391, as Clerk of the King’s Works under Richard II.

Before the Canterbury Tales he had already written The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for John of Gaunt’s first wife Blanche, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde, a long love tragedy set in Troy. These works borrowed from French and Italian models, but they were written in English for an English court audience.

The pilgrimage frame

The General Prologue opens in April, when spring makes people long to go on pilgrimage. Its first line, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote”, is among the best-known in English. The narrator, a version of Chaucer himself, is staying at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across London Bridge, when “nyne and twenty” pilgrims arrive, all bound for Canterbury.

Their destination was the shrine of St Thomas Becket, the archbishop killed in his cathedral in 1170 (see the murder of Thomas Becket). By Chaucer’s time Canterbury was the most popular pilgrimage site in England, and the road through Kent was busy with travellers, inns and sellers of badges and relics.

The Host of the Tabard, Harry Bailly, proposes a game. Each pilgrim will tell two tales on the way out and two on the way back, and the teller of the best story will win a free supper at the inn on their return. This device allowed Chaucer to bring together stories of every kind, from chivalric romance and saints’ lives to bawdy comic tales called fabliaux, sermons, beast fables and moral treatises.

The plan was never carried out. Only 24 tales survive, some of them broken off, and the pilgrims never reach Canterbury in the text. The tales survive in groups, usually called fragments, whose intended order is still debated by scholars.

The pilgrims

The General Prologue describes each pilgrim in turn, and these portraits are a major reason for the poem’s fame. The company spans most of English society below the high nobility: a Knight and his son the Squire, a Prioress, a Monk and a Friar, a Merchant, a poor Clerk of Oxford, a Man of Law, a Franklin (a wealthy landowner), five guildsmen with their Cook, a Shipman, a Physician, the Wife of Bath, a poor Parson and his brother the Plowman, a Miller, a Manciple, a Reeve, a Summoner and a Pardoner.

Chaucer’s narrator presents most of them with apparent admiration while letting the details speak against them. The Monk loves hunting more than his monastery, the Friar knows every tavern, and the Pardoner sells pig bones as saints’ relics. The Parson, by contrast, is a sincere priest who practises what he preaches.

The tales often fit their tellers. The Knight tells a long romance of love and rivalry set in ancient Athens; the drunken Miller answers with a crude comic tale about a carpenter, which the Reeve, himself a carpenter, takes as an insult and answers in kind. The Wife of Bath, married five times, opens her performance with a long prologue on marriage and the authority of experience over books.

These quarrels and interruptions give the collection a dramatic life that earlier story collections, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, did not have in the same way. Characters argue, take offence and comment on each other’s stories, so that the frame becomes a story in its own right.

A picture of late medieval England

The Canterbury Tales was written in a troubled period. The Black Death of 1348–49 and later outbreaks had killed perhaps a third or more of England’s population, shaking old social relations. In 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt brought rebels into London, close to Chaucer’s home at Aldgate. Critics of the Church, led by the theologian John Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, attacked the wealth and corruption of the clergy.

The poem reflects these tensions without taking sides openly. Its satire of greedy churchmen echoes widespread complaint, and its pilgrims include people whose wealth came from trade and the professions rather than birth. The Wife of Bath grew rich from cloth-making, a booming industry after the plague.

The language of the poem also marks a change. For three centuries after the Norman Conquest, French had been the language of the court and Latin the language of learning. In the later 14th century English regained ground in law, government and literature, and Chaucer wrote in the English of London, the dialect that would contribute most to later standard English. Much of the poem is in rhyming couplets of ten-syllable lines, a form Chaucer was among the first to use in English.

Manuscripts and printing

No copy in Chaucer’s own hand survives. The Canterbury Tales is known from more than 80 manuscripts, complete or fragmentary, most of them made in the 15th century. Two of the earliest and most important, the Hengwrt manuscript in the National Library of Wales and the richly decorated Ellesmere manuscript in the Huntington Library in California, were copied within a few years of Chaucer’s death. The Ellesmere manuscript includes small painted portraits of the pilgrims, among them Chaucer himself.

In about 1476 William Caxton, who had brought the new technology of the printing press to Westminster, printed the Canterbury Tales. It was one of the first substantial books printed in England. A second edition, around 1483, added woodcut illustrations of the pilgrims.

Myths and facts

Myth: Chaucer was the first person to write literature in English. Old English poetry such as Beowulf is centuries older, and Chaucer had important contemporaries writing in English, including William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, John Gower and the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Chaucer’s influence, not his priority, made him central.

Myth: Chaucer wrote in Old English. He wrote in Middle English, the language between about 1100 and 1500. It looks unfamiliar but is far closer to modern English than the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons.

Myth: Chaucer invented thousands of English words. Many words are first recorded in his writings, but that often reflects how much of his work survives rather than true invention. He borrowed freely from French and Latin, as other writers of his time did.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1340–1343: Geoffrey Chaucer is born in London.
• 1359–1360: he serves in France and is captured and ransomed.
• 1374: he becomes controller of customs in the Port of London.
• 1381, June: the Peasants’ Revolt reaches London.
• c. 1387: Chaucer begins work on The Canterbury Tales.
• 1389–1391: he serves as Clerk of the King’s Works.
• 1399, September–October: Richard II is deposed, and in October Henry IV confirms Chaucer’s royal grants.
• 1400, October: Chaucer dies, traditionally on 25 October, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
• c. 1476: William Caxton prints the first edition of the Tales.

Legacy

Chaucer’s reputation was secure soon after his death. Fifteenth-century poets such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve praised him as their master, and Hoccleve had Chaucer’s portrait painted in a manuscript of his own poem so that his master’s likeness would not be forgotten. In 1556 a new tomb was made for him in Westminster Abbey, and later burials of poets nearby created Poets’ Corner.

The Canterbury Tales has been retold, modernised and adapted ever since, from Dryden’s verse translations to modern stage versions, films and novels. Its characters, especially the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, have become types recognised far beyond the study of medieval literature.

Why it matters

The Canterbury Tales showed that English could be a language for great literature, and it fixed a vivid picture of 14th-century England in the reader’s imagination. Its frame of storytelling pilgrims, each with a distinctive voice, made the work both a collection of stories and a social comedy, and that combination still draws readers more than six centuries later.