Introduction

When April's sweet showers have soaked the earth, twenty-nine pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, ready to ride together to Canterbury to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket. The innkeeper proposes that each tell stories on the way, and that the best storyteller be treated to supper by the rest on their return. Among the pilgrims are a knight, a prioress, a miller, a reeve, a lawyer, a doctor, the Wife of Bath with her five husbands, a pardoner, a poor parson and Chaucer himself, nearly every kind of person in fourteenth-century English society. Their tales include chivalric romance, saints' legends and beast fables as well as bawdy jokes of the street, each reflecting the character of its teller. This volume translates the General Prologue and the most famous tales.