Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Context:
The Canterbury Tales is the most famous and critically acclaimed work of Geoffrey Chaucer, a late-fourteenth-
century English poet. Little is known about Chaucer’s personal life, and even less about his education, but a
number of existing records document his professional life. Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the
only son in his family. Chaucer’s father, originally a property-owning wine merchant, became tremendously
wealthy when he inherited the property of relatives who had died in the Black Death of 1349. He was therefore
able to send the young Geoffrey off as a page to the Countess of Ulster, which meant that Geoffrey was not
required to follow in his ancestors’ footsteps and become a merchant. Eventually, Chaucer began to serve the
countess’s husband, Prince Lionel, son to King Edward III. For most of his life, Chaucer served in the Hundred
Years War between England and France, both as a soldier and, since he was fluent in French and Italian and
conversant in Latin and other tongues, as a diplomat. His diplomatic travels brought him twice to Italy, where
he might have met Boccaccio, whose writing influenced Chaucer’s work, and Petrarch.
In or around 1378, Chaucer began to develop his vision of an English poetry that would be linguistically
accessible to all—obedient neither to the court, whose official language was French, nor to the Church, whose
official language was Latin. Instead, Chaucer wrote in the vernacular, the English that was spoken in and
around London in his day. Undoubtedly, he was influenced by the writings of the Florentines Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, who wrote in the Italian vernacular. Even in England, the practice was becoming increasingly
common among poets, although many were still writing in French and Latin.
That the nobles and kings Chaucer served (Richard II until 1399, then Henry IV) were impressed with
Chaucer’s skills as a negotiator is obvious from the many rewards he received for his service. Money,
provisions, higher appointments, and property eventually allowed him to retire on a royal pension. In 1374, the
king appointed Chaucer Controller of the Customs of Hides, Skins and Wools in the port of London, which
meant that he was a government official who worked with cloth importers. His experience overseeing imported
cloths might be why he frequently describes in exquisite detail the garments and fabric that attire his characters.
Chaucer held the position at the customhouse for twelve years, after which he left London for Kent, the county
in which Canterbury is located. He served as a justice of the peace for Kent, living in debt, and was then
appointed Clerk of the Works at various holdings of the king, including Westminster and the Tower of London.
After he retired in the early 1390s, he seems to have been working primarily on The Canterbury Tales, which he
began around 1387. By the time of his retirement, Chaucer had already written a substantial amount of narrative
poetry, including the celebrated romance Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer lived through a time of incredible tension in the English social sphere. The Black Death, which
ravaged England during Chaucer’s childhood and remained widespread afterward, wiped out an estimated thirty
to fifty percent of the population. Consequently, the labor force gained increased leverage and was able to
bargain for better wages, which led to resentment from the nobles and propertied classes. These classes received
another blow in 1381, when the peasantry, helped by the artisan class, revolted against them. The merchants
were also wielding increasing power over the legal establishment, as the Hundred Years War created profit for
England and, consequently, appetite for luxury was growing. The merchants capitalized on the demand for
luxury goods, and when Chaucer was growing up, London was pretty much run by a merchant oligarchy, which
attempted to control both the aristocracy and the lesser artisan classes. Chaucer’s political sentiments are
unclear, for although The Canterbury Tales documents the various social tensions in the manner of the popular
genre of estates satire, the narrator refrains from making overt political statements, and what he does say is in
no way thought to represent Chaucer’s own sentiments.
Chaucer’s original plan for The Canterbury Tales was for each character to tell four tales, two on the way to
Canterbury and two on the way back. But, instead of 120 tales, the text ends after twenty-four tales, and the
party is still on its way to Canterbury. Chaucer either planned to revise the structure to cap the work at twenty-
four tales, or else left it incomplete when he died on October 25, 1400. Other writers and printers soon
recognized The Canterbury Tales as a masterful and highly original work. Though Chaucer had been influenced
by the great French and Italian writers of his age, works like Boccaccio’s Decameron were not accessible to
most English readers, so the format of The Canterbury Tales, and the intense realism of its characters, were
virtually unknown to readers in the fourteenth century before Chaucer. William Caxton, England’s first printer,
published The Canterbury Tales in the 1470s, and it continued to enjoy a rich printing history that never truly
faded. By the English Renaissance, poetry critic George Puttenham had identified Chaucer as the father of the
English literary canon. Chaucer’s project to create a literature and poetic language for all classes of society
succeeded, and today Chaucer still stands as one of the great shapers of literary narrative and character.
Language in The Canterbury Tales:

The Canterbury Tales is written in Middle English, which bears a close visual resemblance to the English
written and spoken today. In contrast, Old English (the language of Beowulf, for example) can be read only in
modern translation or by students of Old English. Students often read The Canterbury Tales in its original
language, not only because of the similarity between Chaucer’s Middle English and our own, but because the
beauty and humor of the poetry—all of its internal and external rhymes, and the sounds it produces—would be
lost in translation.
General Prologue:
At the Tabard Inn, a tavern in Southwark, near London, the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims.
The pilgrims, like the narrator, are traveling to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The
narrator gives a descriptive account of twenty-seven of these pilgrims, including a Knight, Squire, Yeoman,
Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer,
Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner,
Pardoner, and Host. (He does not describe the Second Nun or the Nun’s Priest, although both characters appear
later in the book.) The Host, whose name, we find out in the Prologue to the Cook’s Tale, is Harry Bailey,
suggests that the group ride together and entertain one another with stories. He decides that each pilgrim will
tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whomever he judges to be the best
storyteller will receive a meal at Bailey’s tavern, courtesy of the other pilgrims. The pilgrims draw lots and
determine that the Knight will tell the first tale.

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