The Canterbury Tales

A Cross-Section of Fourteenth-Century Character Types.

Begun about the late 1380s and still incomplete at Chaucer's death in 1400, the Canterbury Tales comprise the most famous story collection in medieval literature. Like the journey to escape the ravages of the plague in Boccaccio's Decameron, the frame that holds together this collection of tales is the purportedly random meeting of 29 individuals at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, southeast of the city of London. The common goal of this group of "sundry folk" is to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. In some ways, this pilgrim group presents a cross-section of late fourteenth-century English people and professions. At the top of the social hierarchy are an aristocratic knight and his entourage (his squire son and their attending yeoman). Also represented are various strata of the clerkly class (an Oxford clerk and a lawyer) and assorted clergy and male and female religious persons (several nuns, a parson, a summoner, a friar, a monk, and a pardoner). Chaucer makes sure to also include representatives of the mercantile class from which he himself originated (a franklin, a merchant, some guildsmen, and a cloth-weaving female entrepreneur from Bath). In a parallel to Langland's agricultural laborers and his title character Piers Plowman, Chaucer went on to include members of the agricultural peasantry (a plowman, a miller, and a reeve), though how they could have afforded the time or the funds to travel on a pilgrimage is left to the reader to wonder about. Chaucer's treatment of the portraits of the pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Tales features stock character types from the tradition of medieval estates satire, which assigned recognizably …