1380s–90s
Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of tales told by a group of pilgrims as they travel to Canterbury can lay claim to be England’s first masterpiece of creative literature in the vernacular English of its time, rather than in the French or Latin used at court and in church. But Chaucer did not only ‘give the people a voice’; he also produced a work whose breadth and variety of tone and character ranks with Shakespeare and Dickens.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–c.1400) combined a life as a royal official with his writing. His other works include The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for the Duchess of Lancaster; The House of Fame and The Parlement of Foules (Fowls), two ‘dream-vision’ poems; and Troilus and Criseyde, a poem about Troilus and Cressida in the Trojan Wars, which some critics consider to be one of the finest love poems in the language. But it is The Canterbury Tales with which his name is indelibly associated.
In the Tales, the pilgrimage to St Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury – a popular act of medieval religious devotion – is a simple device linking a succession of disparate stories. Each of the pilgrims is briefly introduced in the General Prologue, and then presented in more detail in separate prologues to their own tales. All this is interspersed with squabbles, bickering and boisterous exchanges with Harry Bailly, landlord of the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, London, where the group gathers at the start of the poem. Not all the pilgrims introduced (such as the Ploughman) eventually reappear to tell their tales, so there is evidence the poem was never fully finished. The General Prologue sets the scene, in its Middle English vernacular:
Whan that Aprille, with his shoures sote [showers sweet]
The droghte [drought] of March hath perced [pierced] to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich [sweet] licour,
Of which vertu [by virtue of which] engendred is the flour [flower] …
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages …
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury, with ful devout corage,
At nyght [night] were come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne [nine] and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle [by chance we met]
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
A pilgrimage was one of very few occasions in the Middle Ages when a cross-section of society might be gathered together in an informal way, which is crucial for the social commentary of Chaucer’s poem. There are no aristocrats – the Knight is the highest-ranking member of the party, and fittingly tells the first story – and no member of the lowest social classes; but the pilgrims still cover a wide spectrum. Many of them, such as the Prioress, the Monk and the Friar, have close connections to the church, but the group also includes a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant and various tradesmen. There is the five-times-married and well-travelled Wife of Bath, who is particularly conscious of her social position, and the vulgar Miller, with a hairy wart on his nose, a red beard and mouth as big as a furnace. There is the prosperous Franklin or landowner, of whom Chaucer says, ‘It snowed in his house of meat and drink’, and a humble Ploughman, fresh from laying dung in the fields.
Chaucer presents himself as a wide-eyed, trusting and naïve narrator – but his acute observations reveal the foibles and hypocrisies of all the pilgrims, except for the Knight, the Parson and the Ploughman. These three are depicted as moral and upright representatives of military, religious and civil life. In contrast, the Prioress wears a brooch with the motto Amor vincit omnia (‘Love conquers all’), suggesting a life not wholly devoted to religion; while the Monk has no time for sacred texts that forbid holy men from hunting; and, although the Man of Law appears ‘discreet and full of reverence’, he still ‘seemed busier than he was’. All but two tales are in verse, but they vary greatly in their style and mood, from the courtly language of the Knight’s Tale to the crude humour of the Miller’s and the Merchant’s. The overall effect is one of light, subtle and reflective satire. There is little doubt that Chaucer intended the poem as a whole to cast an ironic light on the manners and morals of his time.
One of the triumphs of the poem is that, at a time when French was the language of the Court, the law and high society in general, The Canterbury Tales was written largely in English, the language of the people. Chaucer’s style is often mannered and almost courtly in tone, with an abundance of French borrowings and Latin words – but in the speech of some of his pilgrims he brings the rough vernacular of ordinary people into English literature.
The pronunciation of The Canterbury Tales reflects a radical change in spoken English during Chaucer’s time, as the language emerged from more than two centuries of French domination. Words like droghte (drought) or nyght (night), as in the extract above, were pronounced with the ‘gh’ sounding almost like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish ‘loch’; perced (pierced), with a vowel that would sound Scottish today, and the final ‘ed’ spoken as a separate syllable, so that the word would have been pronounced ‘pairs-ed’; licour (liquor, or sap) would have a long final syllable, as in the modern ‘tour’; the long vowel in swete (sweet) would be more like ‘ay’ than ‘ee’; and the final ‘e’ would be pronounced, so the word would sound like ‘swayt-uh’.
The continuing influence of the French language meant that a word such as engendred would have had a nasal ‘on’ sound, and the ‘-age’ suffix in pilgrimage and corage (courage) would have a long ‘ah’ vowel and a soft Gallic ‘g’ like a ‘zh’.
Chaucer added to his mix of elements aspects of the high culture of contemporary Europe. He had travelled widely, and he borrowed stories from Boccaccio, Dante and contemporary French literature. The total combination probably accounts for the most important literary influence of The Canterbury Tales, in the way that the pilgrims and their tales juxtaposed high and low culture, the language and manners of the court with those of the village. Such inclusivity would become characteristic of the English tradition.