The Canterbury Tales

“ Canterbury Tales.
The Canterbury Tales, and especially the Prologue, are so full of allusions and expressions that either require or invite illustrations, that no commentary upon them can be considered exhaustive. ”

“ When it became his fortunate lot to multiply editions of the Canterbury Tales, and to render them accessible to a much larger class of the people than in the days when he himself first knew the solace and the delight of literature, he applied himself to the task with all the earnestness of an early love. ”

“ There is no buffoonery, as in the Canterbury Tales, but a wise equable serenity that contemplates man and woman, beauty, temptation, danger, sorrow, struggle, honour, this world and the next, with a Knightly equanimity that nothing can disturb. ”

“ It is the first time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each character but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it but fuses all into a poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." ”

“ It is true that most people prefer to read the great masters of poetry, in later times; but the "Canterbury Tales" are interesting and instructive to those who study the history of language and literature. They are links in the civilization of England. They paint the age more vividly and accurately than any known history. The men and women of the fourteenth century, of all ranks, stand out to us in fresh and living colors. ”

“ Almost at once he took up the Legend of Good Women, with its Prologue and twenty stories, but again abandoned it for a larger scheme. It is also tolerably clear that the Monkes Tale originally took its rise from a similar desire to write a succession of lives of illustrious men; and that the first conception of this idea preceded that of the Canterbury Tales. We thus see our author constantly striving after the endeavour to produce some great original work; and the Canterbury Tales was, in fact, the result of the latest and greatest of these endeavours. ”

“ It befell on a day in that season, as I rested at the Tabard in Southwark, ready to wend on my pilgrimage to Canterbury, with heart full devout, that at night there was come into that hostel a company of sundry folk, full nine and twenty, by chance fallen in fellowship, and all were pilgrims that would ride toward Canterbury. ”

“ It was obvious that, if this treatise was to be inserted among the Canterbury Tales, it could only be assigned to the Parson, who is made, accordingly, to warn the company that he dislikes rime, and can only tell them 'a mery tale in prose'; see I 46. The word mery sometimes meant what we should now call 'interesting'; and it probably interested a much larger number of people in those days than it can possibly do at the present time. Our ancestors, at times, certainly inclined to serious discourses, such as the present age has no relish for. ”

“ If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? ”

“ The thorough knowledge and sure portrayal of men and women which, belong to his mature work extend through, many various types of character. It is a commonplace to say that the Prolog to 'The Canterbury Tales' presents in its twenty portraits virtually every contemporary English class except the very lowest, made to live forever in the finest series of character sketches preserved anywhere in literature ”

“ Characters based on “The Canterbury Tales.”
MEN
WOMEN
The Wife of Bath (Alisoun) . The Prioress (Madame Eglantine) . A Nun, her attendant. Mistress Bailey, of the Tabard Inn. II. Characters not based on “The Canterbury Tales.”
MEN
Richard II, King of England. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, uncle of the King, brother-in-law of Chaucer, and patron of Wycliffe. ”

“ In that pleasant season of the year when the April showers and the soft west wind make the grass and flowers to spring up in every mead and heath, and birds welcome the shining days, it is the custom with people from all parts of the country to set forth on pilgrimages to foreign lands, and more especially to pay their vows at the shrine raised in Canterbury to the holy martyr St. ”

“ The Canon's Yeoman says plainly that he had seen the pilgrims ride out of their hostelry in the morrow-tide. In the Manciple's Prologue (H 2) there is mention of a little town called Bob-up-and-down, 'under the Blee, in Canterbury way'; and the Cook is taken to task for sleeping on the road in the morning (H 16) , which cannot, in any case, be the morning of the day on which they started from Southwark. In the Parson's Prologue (I 5) there is mention of the hour of 4 p.m., and the Parson undertakes to tell the last tale before the end of the journey. ”

“ Stand up, good Canterbury! Thy truth and thy integrity is rooted In us, thy friend. Give me thy hand, stand up; Prithee, let's walk. Now, by my holidame, What manner of man are you? My lord, I look'd You would have given me your petition, that I should have ta'en some pains to bring together Yourself and your accusers; and to have heard you, Without indurance, further. CRANMER.
Most dread liege, The good I stand on is my truth and honesty. If they shall fail, I, with mine enemies, Will triumph o'er my person; which I weigh not, Being of those virtues vacant. ”

“ Now, in passing from Sittingbourne to Canterbury, we find that the distance is divided into three very nearly equal parts by the situations of Ospringe and Boughton, giving five miles for each portion. The distance from Ospringe to Canterbury, only ten miles, left very little to be done on the last day; but pilgrims liked arriving at Canterbury in good time. Chaucer says, as plainly as possible, that the pilgrims really did rest all night on the road, at a place which can only be Ospringe ”

“ Indeed, Canterbury is a city of great memories.
Augustine was, of course, the monastery’s chief treasure, and next came the body of St Mildred which was given to the house by Canute. It must never be forgotten by those who would look at things mediæval with mediæval eyes, that in those days the dead were more powerful than the living; even kings humbled themselves before the bones of dead saints. ”

“ But it is not history—not the story of dead events—that chiefly fascinates us in Canterbury, or, indeed, in any such city; it is the lives of the men who made that history, who took part in those events. Here, as we walk the streets, we think of Augustine, of Thomas, of the Black Prince, of many another; and of many great men of letters—Chaucer, Erasmus, Marlowe, Thackeray, Dickens, Stanley: the first painting for us the Canterbury of his own days, the last that of past times. ”

“ The creations of romantic fiction were unreal beings distinguished by different names, by the different insignia on their shields, and by the degree in which they possessed the special qualities which formed the ideal of mediæval times. The story of their lives was but a series of adventures, strung together without plan, the overflow of an active but ungoverned imagination. The pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury are men and women, genuine flesh and blood, as thoroughly individual [43] and distinct as the creations of Shakespeare and of Fielding. ”

“ Repeated in D. 1062.
4633. 'Mes retiengnent le grain et jettent hors la paille'; Test. de Jean de Meun, 2168.
4635. my Lord. A side-note in MS. E. explains this to refer to the Archbishop of Canterbury; doubtless William Courtenay, archbishop from 1381 to 1396. Cf. note to l. 4584, which shews that this Tale is later than 1381; and it was probably earlier than 1396. Note that good men is practically a compound, as in l. 4630. Hence read good, not gōd-e. ”

“ Canterbury is ancient and beautiful; no place for the mere tourist who fancies that in an hour or two of sight-seeing he can learn to know and love her: she is like a beautiful woman, whose charms never stale; like a good woman, ever showing to those who love her some fresh enchantment. ”

“ They feel in times, with vapour etern: they feel in their seasons, by the emission of an eternal breath or inspiration (that God loves, &c.)
36. The idea of this stanza is the same with that developed in the speech of Theseus at the close of The Knight’s Tale; and it is probably derived from the lines of Boethius, quoted in note 91 to that Tale.
37. In this and the following lines reappears the noble doctrine of the exalting and purifying influence of true love, advanced in “The Court of Love,” “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” &c. ”

“ The passers-by of to-day are not those whom we should see, for we should bend our mind’s eye on monk, priest and pilgrim, on knight, dame and squire, or king, queen and prince; it needs no vivid imagination to call up these shades of the past. But above all and through all the pageantry of old days looms the church; Canterbury is a city of churches, of priories, monasteries, hospitals. There is St Dunstan’s, where in the Roper vault they say is the head of Sir Thomas More ”

“ FIRST VIEW As we stand upon the summit of Bell Harry Tower—more happily called the Angel Steeple—of Canterbury Cathedral, looking down upon city and countryside, much of the history of England lies spread beneath our feet: the Britons were at work here before the Romans came marching with their stolid legions; here to Ethelbert, Saxon King of Kent, St Augustine preached the gospel of Christ; in the church below, Becket was murdered and the Black Prince buried; to this city, to the shrine of St Thomas, came innumerable pilgrims, one of them our first great English poet ”

“ This splendid church, representing the finest achievement of Norman master-builders and workmen, rising high above the domestic quarters of the monastery and standing forth conspicuously from every part of the little walled city, then consisting, to a considerable extent, of low wooden houses, had now reached the stage in its development when it was to be the scene of the murder which was to make Canterbury the most famous resort of pilgrims in Europe. ”

“ The tasteful piety which is so universal in England, and is of such constant effect of godliness in an age not otherwise much vowed to it, keeps the revered place within and without in perfect repair; and I hope it is not too fantastic to suppose it in tacit sympathy with any stranger who lingers in the church-yard, and stays and stays for the beautiful prospect of Canterbury from its height. We drove from it through some streets of old houses stooped and shrunken with age, to that doting monument of the past which calls itself the Dane John, having forgotten just what its right name is. ”

“ The momentary tie has poetical vitality, from the fact that it is borrowed from the heart of the time and of England. They are Pilgrims from all quarters to the shrine of England's illustrious and favourite Saint, the martyr of Canterbury. They have gradually mustered into cavalcade in coming up from the shires to the metropolis, one excepted—the Poet. He falls into their party, by the hap of sleeping the night preceding the journey out from the capital at the same inn, in the suburb towards Canterbury—Southwark. ”

“ And eke my wit sufficeth not thereto
To tellen all; wherefore my tale is do.* *done
Squier, come near, if it your wille be,
And say somewhat of love, for certes ye
*Conne thereon* as much as any man.” *know about it*
“Nay, Sir,” quoth he; “but such thing as I can,
With hearty will, — for I will not rebel
Against your lust,* — a tale will I tell. *pleasure
Have me excused if I speak amiss;
My will is good; and lo, my tale is this.”
Notes to the Prologue to the Squire’s Tale
1. Women connen utter such chaffare: women are adepts at giving circulation to such wares. ”

“ A walled city generally holds more easily that elusive quality of romance for which the intelligent mind so often hungers than a town that has long ago discarded its old tower-studded girdle. And among the half-dozen or more English towns still possessed of their old mural defences Canterbury holds a high place, because within its walls there are still, in spite of railways and motors and the horrors of twentieth-century advertising, a hundred byways and nooks where the atmosphere of Elizabethan and pre-Reformation England still lurks. ”

“ Who may know what is in the heart of God? Perhaps after all, after this age of ice, Canterbury will rise again and my little son even may hear them singing in the streets, gay once more and alive with endless processions that noble old song:
For though St Thomas be forgot in Canterbury, he is on high and valiant, and one day maybe he will return from exile as before, to accomplish wonderful things. ”

“ These women that thus weened her to please,
Aboute naught gan all their tales spend;
Such vanity ne can do her no ease,
As she that all this meane while brenn’d
Of other passion than that they wend;* *weened, supposed
So that she felt almost her hearte die
For woe, and weary* of that company. *weariness
For whiche she no longer might restrain
Her teares, they began so up to well,
That gave signes of her bitter pain,
In which her spirit was, and muste dwell,
Rememb’ring her from heav’n into which hell
She fallen was, since she forwent* the sight *lost
Of Troilus ”

“ I am rejoiced to hear of your happy visit to that dear home at Canterbury. I cannot say with what thankfulness I think on all the grace which our God and Saviour has shown there, and how delighted I am that you all should have the unspeakable joy of being employed as the Lord’s agents for conveying the glad tidings of life to precious souls. ”

“ Not by that way only did the vast crowds reach Canterbury, for there was scarcely a road that at some period of the year did not send its contribution to the throng which jostled through the gates into the narrow streets leading to the monastery gateway. Year after year wealth poured into the Cathedral coffers, and pilgrims went away lighter in spirits and in purse, but each carrying with them the little leaden bottle in which the infinitely diluted blood of the martyr mixed with water was distributed. ”