The Canterbury Tales

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Canterbury Tales begins with a group of strangers at a London inn, about to set off on a road trip to visit the bones of a murdered archbishop. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote this collection in Middle English between 1387 and 1400, and it became something few works ever manage: a book that changed the very language in which it was written. The pilgrims are heading to Canterbury Cathedral to pray at the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, who was killed there by knights loyal to King Henry II. But the journey itself, and the twenty-four stories told along the way, became one of the paramount works of English literature. Who were these pilgrims, and what did they argue about? Why did Chaucer never finish the book? And how did a collection of often bawdy, sometimes scandalous stories end up shaping the English language itself?

• 2. A Book That Remade English

  ›

  William Caxton printed the first edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1476, making it one of the first books printed in England using a printing press. Only ten copies of that edition survive, with one held by the British Library and another at the Folger Shakespeare Library. That the book reached Caxton's press at all is remarkable, because Chaucer wrote in a dialect of London Middle English that sounded nothing like the language spoken today. The word knight was pronounced with both the k and the gh sounded, something like kniçt. The word weeping began with a long e vowel, closer to the sound in modern German, because the Great Vowel Shift had not yet rearranged English pronunciation. These are not minor details. Scholars have established that the silent final -e was a load-bearing part of Chaucer's grammar, helping distinguish singular adjectives from plural and subjunctive verbs from indicative. Scribes who copied the tales after Chaucer's death dropped the final -e because the sound had already faded from speech, giving later readers the false impression that Chaucer himself was inconsistent. The metre Chaucer used throughout most of the tales, a line of five stressed syllables often alternating with unstressed ones to produce ten or eleven syllable lines, was probably inspired by French and Italian models. It would develop into what later centuries called the heroic metre, and it is a direct ancestor of iambic pentameter. The argument that the Tales helped move English vernacular writing into the mainstream, at the expense of French and Latin, is one scholars take seriously, though not all agree.

• 3. Manuscripts and Missing Pages

  ›

  No manuscript exists in Chaucer's own hand. Every surviving copy was written by a scribe, and there are 84 manuscripts plus four editions printed before 1500, more than for any other vernacular English literary text except Prick of Conscience. Fifty-five of those manuscripts are thought to have originally been complete; twenty-eight are so fragmentary that scholars cannot tell whether they were copied individually or as part of a larger set. The two earliest known manuscripts, the Hengwrt (formally MS Peniarth 392 D) and the Ellesmere Manuscript, appear to have been copied by the same scribe. Until the 1940s, scholars preferred the lavishly illustrated Ellesmere as closer to Chaucer's wishes. Following the work of John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, the balance shifted toward the plainer Hengwrt. The copyist of both has been identified as a scrivener named Adam Pinkhurst, a finding that carries special weight because a poem apparently written by Chaucer addresses his own scribe by the name Adam. The identification is widely accepted as plausible, though it remains contested in the field of Middle English palaeography. The tales themselves vary from manuscript to manuscript, in both minor and major ways. Some variations trace to copyists' errors; others suggest that Chaucer continued revising and adding to the work even as copies were being made and possibly distributed. Scholars believe the Tales were incomplete when Chaucer died. In the General Prologue he introduced roughly thirty pilgrims and stated his intention to write four stories from each pilgrim's perspective, two outward and two on the return. That would have produced around 120 stories. Twenty-four survive.

• 4. Where the Stories Come From

  ›

  Chaucer first traveled to Italy on a diplomatic mission in 1372, and it was possibly on that trip that he encountered the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. The two works share a striking structural kinship: both use a frame tale in which different narrators tell a series of stories. A quarter of the tales in The Canterbury Tales parallel a tale in the Decameron. Most of those parallels, however, have closer matches in other sources, which leads some scholars to doubt that Chaucer had a copy of Boccaccio's book in front of him as he wrote. New research suggests that the General Prologue, in which the host Harry Bailey introduces each pilgrim, may be a pastiche of an actual surviving document: the historical Harry Bailey's 1381 poll-tax account of the inhabitants of Southwark. Harold Bloom has argued that the pilgrimage structure itself draws on the pilgrim figures of Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy. Chaucer also drew heavily on the Bible, on the Classical poetry of Ovid, and on two contemporary Italian writers, Petrarch and Dante. Chaucer was the first English author to draw on Petrarch and Dante at all. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy appears in several tales, as does the work of John Gower, whom the source identifies as a friend of Chaucer's. No earlier work in English is known to have organized a story collection around the device of pilgrims on a pilgrimage, though storytelling contests had existed for centuries. In 14th-century England, a group called the English Pui held singing contests judged by an appointed leader; the winner received a crown and, like the winner of Chaucer's contest, a free dinner.

• 5. The Pilgrims and Their World

  ›

  In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of the Peace, and by 1389 he was Clerk of the King's Works. It was during those years that he began writing the Tales, in the middle of one of the most turbulent stretches in English history. The Catholic Church was splitting apart in the Western Schism. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 had shaken London. King Richard II was eventually deposed. Many of Chaucer's close friends were executed, and Chaucer himself moved to Kent to escape the violence. That upheaval runs through the text. The Tales mention Lollardy, the early English religious movement led by John Wycliffe. They describe pardoners fraudulently claiming to collect for St. Mary Rouncesval hospital. They are also among the first English literary works to mention paper, then a new technology that made the spread of written language possible in ways England had not seen before. Chaucer divided his cast among the three medieval estates: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Convention dictated that the Knight, representing the highest social class, open the storytelling. But when the Miller pushes forward to tell his tale next, the book's social order cracks open. The scholar Helen Cooper, along with Mikhail Bakhtin and Derek Brewer, describe that crack as the opposition between what they call "the ordered and the grotesque, Lent and Carnival, officially approved culture and its riotous, and high-spirited underside." The word pitee illustrates how the same language divided along class lines: to upper-class characters it means noble compassion, but in the Merchant's Tale it refers to sexual intercourse.

• 6. Corruption, Faith, and Pilgrimage

  ›

  Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral by knights of King Henry II during a dispute between the Church and the Crown. Miracle stories connected to his remains spread quickly after his death, drawing pilgrims from across England. After the Black Death devastated Europe, that faith in church authority began to fracture. Chaucer's Pardoner openly admits to the corruption of his own practice while continuing to hawk his wares among the other pilgrims. Pardoners in 14th-century England sold church indulgences, documents believed to relieve the temporal punishment due for already-forgiven sins, and were widely known to abuse this power. Summoners, who brought sinners before church courts, could write false citations and extort money from the people they threatened. Chaucer's Summoner is shown to be guilty of the very sins he prosecutes, and is hinted at having a corrupt relationship with the Pardoner. The Prioress and the Monk fall short of their orders in a different register: both are expensively dressed and show signs of luxury and flirtatiousness. The Second Nun, by contrast, is depicted as the ideal: her tale concerns a woman whose chaste example draws others to the church. The Prioress's Tale tells of Jews murdering a pious Christian boy, a blood libel that Chaucer did not invent but absorbed from a story well known in the 14th century and reproduced here as part of the English literary tradition. The scholar Jean Jost describes the whole pilgrimage as a liminal experience, a crossing between the known world and an unknown one, with the sacred and the profane coexisting at every step.

• 7. Additions, Adaptations, Legacy

  ›

  The incompleteness of the Tales drew other writers in almost immediately. John Lydgate wrote The Siege of Thebes around 1420, preceding it with a prologue in which the pilgrims arrive at Canterbury and Lydgate places himself among them as a monk who heard Chaucer's stories firsthand. It was first printed as early as 1561 by John Stow. An anonymous 15th-century author wrote the Tale of Beryn, which follows the pilgrims into Canterbury and features the Pardoner's doomed pursuit of Kate the barmaid, before the Merchant restarts the storytelling with a tale of a young man named Beryn who travels from Rome to Egypt and is swindled by local businessmen. The tale of Beryn derives from the French tale Berinus and was printed in a 1721 edition by John Urry. In later centuries the work kept generating new versions. The 1944 film A Canterbury Tale, written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was made as wartime propaganda: it opened with medieval pilgrims in Kent, then cut to the same countryside during World War II, making Chaucer's pilgrimage a frame for arguing what made Britain worth defending. Jonathan Myerson's animated series from 1998 to 2000 was nominated for an Oscar and won the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film and four Primetime Emmys. Zadie Smith debuted her first play, The Wife of Willesden, in 2021, setting the Wife of Bath's story in a contemporary bar crawl with the tale itself placed in 17th-century Jamaica; the work transferred to the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2023. On the 26th of April 1986, Garrison Keillor opened the first live television broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion by reading the original Middle English of the General Prologue aloud, then said of those six-hundred-year-old words: 'Although those words were written more than 600 years ago, they still describe spring.'