The background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

In his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) explains that April is the month when people get the idea of making a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage at the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The tales are those supposedly told by a motley set of pilgrims bound on just such a venture.

Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry II, had been murdered in 1170, and the practice of making a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, where the murder took place, had started almost from that date. Indeed, it was Henry himself who made the first pilgrimage, as penance for his angry words that had led to the murder of a man who had once been his best friend.

By the time of the pilgrimage of the Tales, some two hundred years later, undertaking a pilgrimage had become less of a religious rite and more of a vacation. As we read the General Prologue it becomes clear that only a few of these pilgrims have religious devotion as their motive. Most of these people are determined to enjoy themselves.

It is perhaps no coincidence that none of the pilgrims is accompanied by a wife or husband, so there is plenty of opportunity for flirting and bawdiness. Indeed, we learn later that the Wife of Bath is using the trip to find herself a new husband.

Whether Chaucer ever made such a pilgrimage is not known, but it is quite possible, given that we know that his wife was ill in the Spring of 1387, that he was probably not otherwise occupied on state business at the time, and that making a pilgrimage to Canterbury under such circumstances was a natural thing to do; he states explicitly that many of the more devout pilgrims (not necessarily among his current colleagues!) made the journey to pray for cures for illness.

The pilgrims gather at an inn, The Tabard in Southwark (the area south of the Thames opposite the City of London). They will stay the night there and start out on their pilgrimage the following morning. We can imagine Chaucer chatting with everybody over a drink and making many mental notes about each of them.

It has been suggested that some of Chaucer’s pilgrims were based on real people, and much energy has been expended on trying to find matches for them. There was a real innkeeper in Southwark called Henricus Bailly, who was also a Member of Parliament, and the knight, the shipman and the man of law have also been mentioned as having possible real models. However, it is extremely unlikely that most of the cast of characters that gathered at the Tabard Inn were anything other than the fruit of Chaucer’s imagination.

In the Prologue to the Tales Chaucer provides pen-portraits of most of the tale-tellers, who are a cross-section of English society at the time. It is noticeable that many of them earn their living from the Church, in one way or another, but only one of them (the parson) could be described as a sincere Christian. Chaucer is thus able to make a social commentary about English life in the 14^th century, warts and all.

The Canterbury Tales are therefore not just a masterpiece from the point of the tales themselves but they open a window on an age long gone.

 © John Welford

See also: 

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: an overall view
Sources used by Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales