Chaucer is the most famous English poet of the medieval period, and one of the greatest story-tellers of all time. A courtier and civil servant most of his life, he wrote many poems, some modelled after the French and Italian literature of the Renaissance. But he is known primarily for his Canterbury Tales, written around 1387 in the ‘Middle English’ spoken at the time. This long narrative poem describes a merry group of thirty pilgrims who start out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to visit the shrine of the ‘holy blisful martir’ Thomas Becket. The pilgrims agree to tell two tales each, and between Chaucer’s descriptions of the participants and the kinds of stories they tell we get a very vivid picture of a crosssection of fourteenth-century English society.
Not surprisingly, seven of the pilgrims are related in one way or another to the church, and they are in the main as worldly as the rest and hypocritical to boot. This portrait corresponds dramatically with the protests of the Lollards and the complaints of the peasants at that time. In fact, the most obnoxious individual of the whole party is the Pardoner; who sells fake relics. 150 years later the Reformation was triggered by Martin Luther’s reaction to a Pardoner named Tetzel. Significantly, however, Chaucer demonstrates in the description of the country parson and his brother the ploughman that he had a deep understanding of the part that true, Christlike religion played in medieval life. Of the parson, Chaucer says (Neville Coghill’s translation):
This noble example to his sheep he gave, First following the word before he taught it, And it was from the gospel he had caught it... His business was to show a fair behaviour And draw men thus to Heaven and their Saviour.
Chaucer was the first great English literary figure to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Around his grave in the south transept are the tombs and monuments of many famous writers, and this section of the Abbey is now widely known as ‘Poet’s Corner’.