You can see that this line is heavily ironic. After telling us this, Chaucer the pilgrim adds, goggle-eyed with admiration: “He was a noble pillar to his Order” (Coghill 8). When the girls became pregnant the Friar paid their dowries so that other men would marry them.

For example, Chaucer tells us that Friar Hubert, despite his vow of chastity, seduced young girls.

The contradiction between the admiring tone and the facts produces irony. The attitude of the narrator to most of the pilgrims he describes is one of naive admiration, but often this admiration exists side-by-side with facts about the pilgrim which are anything but admirable. The Prologue describes twenty-seven, and in addition mentions three priests and a nun who attend the Prioress.Ĭhaucer joins the pilgrimage as first person narrator, but it’s important to distinguish Chaucer the Pilgrim-Narrator from Chaucer the Poet. The Pilgrims’ PortraitsĬhaucer says that there were twenty-nine pilgrims and himself. No poet captures springtime’s happiness, freshness, hopefulness and sense of renewal better than Chaucer does in the reverdie that opens The Canterbury Tales. Conventional descriptions of spring were called reverdie, meaning “re-greening” ( vert is French for “green”). That’s why a whole body of poetry and poetic conventions developed around the theme of spring. Spring was a time of celebration, of new life, new love and new hope. People would begin to move around, to trade goods, to plant crops, to see to their business and family affairs, to begin new ventures, and to go on pilgrimage. Roads clogged with frozen mud over winter became passable. People looked forward to the awakening of trees, plants and flowers, the mating of birds and animals, and the joyfulness of warm breezes. In England in the Middle Ages, by contrast, a much smaller population lived close to the soil, to vegetation and to animals. The turning of the year to spring still matters in the northern hemisphere, even though most Europeans now live in crowded and polluted cities, detached from nature. In Australia, these days mark the beginning of autumn, but in England it’s the beginning of spring. In these classes we happen to be studying Chaucer in late March and early April, at about the same time of year that the pilgrims set out for Canterbury. The text referred to throughout is Nevill Coghill’s translation of The Canterbury Tales into modern English (London: Penguin, 2003). This introduction to the first three sections of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales focuses on structures, social classes, characterisation and ethics.

Chaucer the general prologue