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On a spring evening some thirty pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, about to set out for the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and the innkeeper proposes a contest: each will tell stories on the road. Knights and millers, a nun, a monk, the five-times-married Wife of Bath and a con-man Pardoner tell romances, saints' lives, sermons and very rude jokes.
Context and significance
Chaucer was writing the Tales at his death in 1400 and never finished, but the General Prologue alone is a gallery of medieval English society. His Middle English can look difficult at first; reading it aloud helps a great deal. The collection invites comparison with the frame story of the Arabian Nights and with Boccaccio's Decameron.
About the author
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was the son of a London wine merchant and spent his life in royal service: as a page, a soldier captured in France and ransomed with the king's help, a diplomat on missions to Italy and a controller of customs in the port of London.
In his spare time he wrote Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, and he was one of the first to make English, rather than French or Latin, the language of serious poetry. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, beginning the tradition of Poets' Corner.