Prologue to Canterbury Tales

1. Chaucer’s
Prologue

2. Chaucer’s life
• He was amongst the most innovative of fourteenth-century writers,.
• He was born in the early 1340s, of a prosperous family of wine
merchants
• Had connections with court
• So he knew many fields of life
• In 1360 he was captured while serving in the army in France, and
the king himself contributed to Chaucer's ransom, an indication of
his already established court connection.
• During the 1360s he saw further military service abroad, and was
sent on many missions to Italy and France.
• Certainly he came into contact with most of the men of importance in
London.
• He died in 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

3. Chaucer’s works
• Chaucer 's work is often thought of as belonging to three
basic phases, known as the French , Italian and English
periods.
• During the first part of his career, he even translated at
least part of the great French romance La Roman de la
Rose, which was a lasting influence on his own work,
while The Book of the Duchess and some early drafts of
other tales probably belong to this period.

4. • With The Canterbury Tales, however, which probably
took shape during the 1380s, Chaucer entered a new
phase.
• As well as his longer poems, Chaucer is known to have
written several lyrics , to have translated Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy ,a medieval favourite , and
even to have written a scientific manual, A Treatise on
the Astrolabe.

5. The Canterbury Tales
• The Canterbury Tales ostensibly concerns the
pilgrimage made by a group of some thirty men and
women, from London to the shrine of St Thomas, the
twelfth-century martyr, at Canterbury.
• Pilgrims traveled to visit the remains of Saint
Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was
murdered in 1170 by knights of King Henry II. Soon
after his death, he became the most popular saint in
England.
• Chaucer describes each pilgrim in The General
Prologue and at the end sets up a framework for the
story-telling which follows.
• Each pilgrim promises to tell four stories , two on the
way to Canterbury and two on the way back.

6. • The narrator tells us that as he prepared to go on such a
pilgrimage, staying at a tavern in Southwark called the
Tabard Inn, a great company of twenty-nine travelers
entered.
• The pilgrims represent a diverse cross section of
fourteenth-century English society.
• Medieval social theory divided society into three broad
classes, called “estates”: the military, the clergy, and the
laity.

7. • In the portraits that we will see in the rest of the General
Prologue, the Knight and Squire represent the military estate.
• The clergy is represented by the Prioress (and her nun and
three priests), the Monk, the Friar, and the Parson.
• The other characters, from the wealthy Franklin to the poor
Plowman, are the members of the laity.
• These lay characters can be further subdivided into
landowners (the Franklin), professionals (the Clerk, the Man
of Law, the Guildsmen, the Physician, and the Shipman),
laborers (the Cook and the Plowman), stewards (the Miller,
the Manciple, and the Reeve), and church officers (the
Summoner and the Pardoner).