The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)

Structure

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s masterpiece, describe late Medieval society. It is an unfinished work, containing only 23 of the original 120 short stories. Its protagonists are a group of pilgrims from three social classes (the nobles, the clergy and the middle class) travelling from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral on a pilgrimage to St Thomas à Becket’s grave. The pilgrimage represents the frame containing all the stories. The pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn, whose host sets up a competition to find the best story-teller. The poem is divided into two parts: the General Prologue, which presents the characters, and the pilgrims’ tales.

Characters

The author borrowed the idea of bringing together a collection of short stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron, but, while the storytellers in the Italian poem all belong to the nobility, those in The Canterbury Tales represent three Medieval social classes: the low nobility, the clergy and the middle class, or people with a profession. High nobles and peasants were excluded because they didn’t travel with pilgrims. The characters are at the same time conventional, as they represent their classes, and realistic, since they are individuals with their own personalities. The narrator of the poem, one of the pilgrims, presents them from his own personal point of view and his mildly ironic outlook shows his sympathy for almost all of them. The result is a gallery of characters in a constant balance between their individuality and their universal types.

▲ William Caxton’s edition of The Canterbury Tales (1485).

Social groups in The Canterbury Tales

In the poem the narrator presents some of the characters from the three main social groups of the late Middle Ages. • The low nobility: the Knight with his Yeoman, and the Squire. • The clergy: the Prioress, the Nun, the Second Nun, the Poor Parson, the Pardoner, the

Monk, the Friar, and the Canon with his Yeoman. • The characters with a profession: the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Reeve, the Merchant, the

Clerk, the Summoner, the Man of Law, the Franklin, the Cook, the Manciple, the Shipman, the Physician, the Host, the Dyer, the Weaver, the Carpenter, the Tapestry-Maker and the

Haberdasher (the last five belong to trade guilds). The last group is the largest to show that the feudal system was coming to an end, with new classes rising in economic and social importance. The institution of chivalry declined in the fourteenth century; most knights preferred to be hired as mercenaries in the Hundred Years’ War, and the idea of conducting wars against the infidel, which was a knight’s first duty, was dying out, as well as the practice of fighting in formal duels.

CHECK IN

1. What were Chaucer’s innovations in literature? 2. Explain the features of the characters in The Canterbury Tales. 3. In what way did The Canterbury Tales reflect the crisis of the feudal system?