In brief
In April, at the Tabard inn in Southwark, a poet falls in with a party riding to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The innkeeper, Harry Bailly, offers them a game: each will tell stories on the road, the best teller wins a supper at the others’ expense, and he will be judge. A knight goes first, and then the drunken miller refuses to wait his turn. What follows is about two dozen tales, mostly in verse: romances, dirty jokes, a saint’s life, a sermon and a fable about a cockerel.
Geoffrey Chaucer worked on it from about 1387 until his death in 1400 and did not finish. The party never arrives. It is less a gallery of medieval types than an argument, conducted by people who dislike each other, about who gets to speak and whether a story can be trusted.
The argument
The word that drives the book is quyte, to pay back. The Knight has barely finished a long, noble romance when the Miller shouts that he has something “to quyte with the Knightes tale” (Miller’s Prologue) [gloss: to repay it with]. His story moves the Knight’s plot, two young men wanting one woman, to a carpenter’s house in Oxford. The Reeve, a former carpenter, answers with a story that humiliates a miller. The Friar and the Summoner do the same to each other’s trades. Every tale has to be read twice: once for what it says, once for why this person is saying it to that one.
No tale has to be Chaucer’s. The narrator washes his hands before the Miller begins: “Blameth nat me if that ye chese amis” [gloss: do not blame me if you choose badly]. He tells the squeamish, “Turne over the leef, and chese another tale”, and adds the line on which the book balances: “And eek men shal nat make ernest of game” (Miller’s Prologue) [gloss: and one should not turn a game into earnest].
The Host’s game is meant to reward “Tales of best sentence and most solas” (General Prologue) [gloss: most meaning and most pleasure]. The rest of the book shows that those two rarely travel together. The Parson refuses fiction outright. The Nun’s Priest offers a talking chicken and advises, “Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (Nun’s Priest’s Tale) [gloss: take the grain and leave the chaff], without saying which is which. I think that tale, not the Parson’s, is the book’s real statement of method.
The plan and the wreck
The opening promises “Wel nyne and twenty in a companye”, and the portraits come to about thirty. Harry Bailly’s rule is exact: each “shal telle tales tweye, / To Caunterbury-ward”, and on the way home “othere two” (General Prologue). That would make about 120 tales. Chaucer wrote twenty-four, a fifth of the plan.
Not all of those are finished. The Cook’s bawdy London story stops after a few dozen lines, and a scribe notes: “Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na more” (Cook’s Tale). The Franklin cuts off the Squire’s romance with a compliment that may be a rebuke: “In feith, Squier, thou hast thee wel y-quit” (Words of the Franklin). The Knight stops the Monk’s list of fallen men with “good sir, na-more of this” (Nun’s Priest’s Prologue), and the Host stops Chaucer’s own.
The surviving pieces are blocks with uncertain joins: Skeat’s nine Groups, or the ten Fragments of most modern editions. Manuscripts disagree about their order. There are traces of second thoughts. The Shipman’s Tale still speaks as though a wife were telling it: “The sely housbond, algate he mot paye” (Shipman’s Tale) [gloss: the poor husband must always pay]. It was probably meant for another pilgrim. And when the Parson’s turn comes at dusk, the Host says “Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon” (Parson’s Prologue) [gloss: we lack only one more tale], which fits a plan of one tale each and no return journey. Chaucer may have quietly cut his scheme.
The voice
The opening sentence is eighteen lines long, and it moves from the zodiac to the sick: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote” (General Prologue) [gloss: when April with its sweet showers]. The pilgrimage arrives as one more natural urge, along with birds who cannot sleep: “And smale fowles maken melodye”.
The narrator seems to admire everyone. The Knight is “a verray parfit gentil knight”, and the grasping Physician “a verrey parfit practisour”, in nearly the same words. The Prioress is “ful simple and coy”: “Hir gretteste ooth was but by sëynt Loy” (General Prologue). E. Talbot Donaldson’s 1954 essay “Chaucer the Pilgrim” separated the dim traveller from the poet behind him.
Then each teller gets a register. Sir Thopas, which Chaucer gives himself, parodies doggerel romance so well that the Host cannot stand it: “Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a tord” (Sir Thopas) [gloss: your filthy rhyming]. Chaucer replies with the long prose Tale of Melibeus, which may be the last laugh.
The Retraction
The Parson’s Tale ends the book, and then a short prose paragraph follows under the heading “Here taketh the makere of this book his leve” (Retraction). The author asks for prayers, and asks Christ to forgive his “translacions and endytinges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns”. Then he lists them, Troilus among them, and “The tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sounen in-to sinne” [gloss: those that tend towards sin], along with “many a song and many a lecherous lay”. He excepts his Boethius and his saints’ lives.
Critics still argue over whether this is repentance, formula or joke; it is found in many of the best early manuscripts. To me the key is “thilke”. He revokes only the tales that lead astray and leaves the reader to decide which, as the Miller’s Prologue told us to do. Boccaccio ends the Decameron by defending his pen, and Chaucer by asking pardon. The companion page gives the Italian side.
What came from Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio is Chaucer’s great silent creditor. Chaucer visited Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378, and came home with Italian poems. The Filostrato became Troilus and Criseyde. The Teseida, nearly ten thousand lines, was cut down to become the Knight’s Tale. The Monk’s tragedies follow the design of Boccaccio’s Latin De casibus. Yet Chaucer never once names him, and there is no evidence that they met.
The Decameron is harder. About a quarter of the Tales have parallels there, the Clerk’s and the Franklin’s with the tenth day, the Reeve’s, the Shipman’s and the Merchant’s with bawdier ones. Most have closer parallels elsewhere, so many scholars doubt Chaucer had a copy to hand. The Clerk says he “Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk”, and names him as “Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete” (Clerk’s Prologue). That is Petrarch’s Latin version of Boccaccio’s story; its first author has vanished.
The structural difference matters more. Boccaccio’s ten are friends of one class, in a garden, taking turns under agreed rules. Chaucer’s people have nothing in common but the road. They interrupt, they get drunk, and their game breaks down. That idea is not in Boccaccio.
The people
Harry Bailly
The Host of the Tabard is loud, henpecked by his own account, and a poor critic who is always sure of himself. Southwark records name a real innkeeper, Henry Bailly.
The Wife of Bath
Alisoun of Bath is a clothmaker with five husbands, a gap in her teeth and impaired hearing: “But she was som-del deef, and that was scathe” (General Prologue) [gloss: somewhat deaf, which was a pity]. Her prologue, more than twice as long as her tale, starts from a challenge to every book on the subject: “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, were right y-nough to me / To speke of wo that is in mariage” (Wife of Bath’s Prologue).
Her fifth husband, Jankin, reads to her nightly from an anthology of wicked wives. She tears out a page, he strikes her, and that blow is the cause of her deafness. Asking who wrote such books, she has the great line of the quarrel about women: “Who peyntede the leoun, tel me who?” Yet she is a man’s ventriloquism, built out of the texts she attacks. Her tale opens with a knight who commits rape and is sentenced to find out what women want. He learns the answer, “Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee” (her tale), and the story gives him an ending he has not earned. George Lyman Kittredge’s 1912 essay made her the start of a “marriage group” continued by the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin.
The Pardoner
The Pardoner sells indulgences and fake relics, among them “pigges bones”. The narrator’s portrait mocks his body: “A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot”, and “I trowe he were a gelding or a mare” (General Prologue). Critics still dispute whether this marks him as a eunuch or as homosexual. His prologue is a professional confession. His one text is “Radix malorum est Cupiditas”, greed is the root of evil, and he preaches it for money. “For, though myself be a ful vicious man”, he says, “A moral tale yet I yow telle can” (Pardoner’s Prologue).
He can. Three drunken rioters set out to kill Death, “Deeth shal be deed, if that they may him hente”, and an old man who cannot die directs them: “To finde Deeth, turne up this croked wey” (Pardoner’s Tale). They find gold and kill each other for it. Then he tries to sell relics to the listeners he has just told were cheated. The Host turns on him with an obscene threat, “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond”, and for once the talker is silenced: “This pardoner answerde nat a word”. The Knight has to make them kiss.
The Prioress
The genteel Prioress tells the book’s ugliest story, of a child murdered by Jews for singing a hymn, and of Satan, “That hath in Iewes herte his waspes nest” (Prioress’s Tale). Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, a century before. Readers argue over whether Chaucer is exposing her cruelty or sharing it.
How it was made
Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1343 to a London wine merchant’s family. He served as page, soldier and envoy, from 1374 to 1386 as Comptroller of Customs for London, then as member of parliament for Kent and clerk of the king’s works. Those jobs put him among the people the Prologue describes. He died in 1400. In 2022 Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki published new records which suggest that the notorious 1380 release by Cecily Chaumpaigne, long read as an accusation of rape, belongs to a labour dispute with her former employer. They do not rule out violence.
No manuscript in his hand survives, and there are 84 manuscripts of the Tales and four printings before 1500. The two that matter most are early and look to be by one scribe: the Hengwrt manuscript in the National Library of Wales, with an order of tales all its own, and the luxurious Ellesmere manuscript in the Huntington Library, illuminated with portraits of the pilgrims. Since John Manly and Edith Rickert’s edition of 1940, scholars have increasingly trusted Hengwrt’s text and Ellesmere’s order.
Chaucer wrote a short poem cursing his scribe Adam for careless copying. In 2004, in an essay published in Speculum in 2006, Linne Mooney identified the Hengwrt–Ellesmere scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, by comparing the hand with Pinkhurst’s signed entry in the oath book of the Scriveners’ Company. It has not held firm. Jane Roberts raised objections in 2011, and Lawrence Warner’s Chaucer’s Scribes (2018) argues that Pinkhurst did not copy Hengwrt or Ellesmere and that the poem cannot carry the identification. Mooney replied in 2024. The attribution is disputed, not a fact.
Readers and critics
William Caxton printed the Tales at Westminster in 1476. John Dryden’s preface to his Fables (1700) gave the book its lasting compliment, “God’s plenty”. F. J. Furnivall’s Chaucer Society printed the manuscripts side by side, which made Skeat’s text possible.
Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) showed how the portraits rework a stock genre, withholding its judgement. Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1989) read the Wife and the Pardoner as tests of how the book treats those at its edge.
Afterlives
Lydgate wrote himself into the party, and Shakespeare and Fletcher made The Two Noble Kinsmen from the Knight’s Tale. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film of 1972 won the Golden Bear at Berlin. Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014) retells the whole sequence as performance poems, and Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (2021) moves Alisoun to north-west London.
How to read it
- Know what the free text is. The link here is Walter W. Skeat’s complete Middle English text, volume 4 of his Oxford Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1900), founded on seven manuscripts printed by the Chaucer Society. It is unexpurgated but old: it uses Groups, not Fragments, prints I for J (“Iankin”), sets variants under the text, and adds The Tale of Gamelyn as an appendix, which is not by Chaucer.
- Know what the free modern one is. D. Laing Purves’s edition, also on Gutenberg, is respelt Chaucer with glosses, not a translation. Despite the words “Edited for Popular Perusal” the verse is nearly uncut and keeps the rude words, though its transcriber flags a word of Victorian censorship in the Wife’s Prologue. It shortens the prose Melibeus and the Parson’s Tale, with summaries. Gutenberg offers no complete modern translation; Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer website has free interlinear ones.
- Buy one if you can. Jill Mann’s Penguin (2005) is the best Middle English text for a general reader, and The Riverside Chaucer (1987), edited by Larry Benson, is the scholars’ standard. Nevill Coghill’s Penguin verse translation (1951) is lively but free.
- Read it aloud. Pronounce most letters, including many final -e’s, and the metre comes back.
- Do not go in order. Start with the General Prologue, then the Miller, the Wife, the Pardoner and the Nun’s Priest.
- See the manuscript. Ellesmere is free to browse.
Glosses in square brackets on this page are added for the modern reader and are not part of Chaucer’s or Skeat’s text.
Read next
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (about 1353). The other great frame of the century, with a plague where Chaucer has a road.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (about 1385). His finished masterpiece, taken from Boccaccio.
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (about 1320). The pilgrimage that Chaucer’s answers comically; the Wife’s Tale and the Friar’s both name Dante.