But he appears to have written the Parson's Tale , a treatise about sin , virtue and penitence , as a religious text to knit up the actually extremely diverse groups of tales he had already completed. In most manuscripts it appears as the last of the series. It also includes the metaphor of human life itself as a spiritual journey towards the Heavenly city of Jerusalem.
There is thus a shift in tone between most of the Tales , as they have been left to us, and the Parson's Tale , which is not only religious itself but includes two passages that make the earthly pilgrimage into a symbol of the soul's journey on:.
X The Canterbury Tales clearly became popular soon after Chaucer's death. Many manuscripts survive and it was printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chaucer's brilliant notion of using a mixed group of Canterbury pilgrims as the frame-story for a collection of tales has captured the imagination of many writers in centuries up to the present day.
Quite early on, writers had the idea of writing continuations, something made easy because Chaucer left his own poem so incomplete. Several survive from the first half of the fifteenth century.
Three show interest in taking further the scenario of the Canterbury pilgrimage. John Lydgate , a monk of Bury St Edmunds , presents his lengthy poem, The Siege of Thebes , as if it is one of the tales told on the return journey. His prologue depicts Lydgate himself coming on his own pilgrimage to Canterbury, to give thanks to St Thomas after being ill, and happening to stay at the same inn as the pilgrims. The Host invites him to join them, saying that Lydgate looks thin and sickly and needs good food, ale, and entertainment.
The next morning Lydgate is invited to tell the first tale of the journey back. The Tale of Beryn is an anonymous tale which its author presents as a continuation of the Canterbury Tales.
The tale itself is loosely based on a French romance. The introduction, like Lydgate's, describes the pilgrims at their inn the 'Chequer of Hope' at Canterbury. The picture this author gives of the pilgrims is largely very secular : the Pardoner sets himself up, he thinks, for a night of love with the barmaid the author comments that his story isn't a very holy one.
The author describes the pilgrims exploring Canterbury as tourists, a valuable, if perhaps over-comic, description of the contemporary pilgrim's experience. The text may have a direct relationship with Canterbury's role business, one could say as England's major pilgrimage centre: it has been suggested that it was composed in connection with the Canterbury Jubilee celebrations, held every fifty years to mark St Thomas's death, in John Bowers suggests the monks may have been anxious to encourage pilgrims and combat Lollard disapproval of pilgrimages.
If so, however, one would expect a rather more determinedly religious work to have been written for the occasion. The text provides a valuable picture of everyday people visiting the shrine and some of the practices there. They go to the Cathedral. Even here, a comic eye for secular preoccupations shows these pilgrim's devotions as mixed with less holy concerns.
They go to make their offerings of silver brooches and rings; there is a struggle for precedence at the Cathedral door and the Knight, taking charge, directs the ecclesiastical pilgrims to go in first; then a monk sprinkles their heads with holy water and the Friar wants to take this job over himself - because he want to peep at the Prioress's face; the Knight goes forward to St Thomas's shrine, together with his more upper-class companions, 'to do what they were come for and after for to dine' a very Chaucerian rhyming of shrine and dine , the holy and the profane mingled together, even for these pious and dignified pilgrims ; but the Miller and Pardoner and the other 'ignorant sots', wander round the building, pretending to be gentlemen and understand the heraldry, and then making ludicrous mistakes trying to interpret the stained glass windows.
The Host orders them to the shrine and there they kneel, say their rosaries, kiss the holy relics , with a monk-guide instructing them as to what these are. Then they go to other holy places and hear the divine service.
Everyone buys pilgrims' tokens, so people at home will know which saint's shrine they have visited. The Miller and Pardoner steal some of the pilgrim badges on sale at the Cathedral the Summoner insists on sharing their loot. Everyone has a cheerful dinner. The Monk, Parson and Friar go out and have a drink with an old Canterbury friend of the Monk, while the Prioress and Wife, feeling too tired to walk much, go and look at the flowers in the garden.
That night the Pardoner gets cheated by the barmaid. They all set out next day and the Merchant offers to tell the tale: the Tale of Beryn. The Ploughman's Tale is an anonymous poem which purports to be one of the Canterbury tales. It tells how the Ploughman sets out on his Canterbury pilgrimage. In a conversation with the Host he says that he is so poor because, although he works hard, the priests demand that laymen pay for their livelihood too.
The Host invites him to preach and tell 'some holy thing'. The tale is a protest against corrupt clerics. It seems close to Lollard ideas. It is presented as a debate between the Griffin, a predator, defending the current state of the Church and the Pelican, an emblem of Christian love, deploring its abuses.
Finally the Phoenix the risen Christ? What these three continuations indicate is that Chaucer's original work could be seen as both a highly secular approach to pilgrimage and as a work where serious religious attitudes also felt at home.
The world of Chaucer's pilgrimage has clearly been read as comic and basically secular in tone by both Lydgate, a monk, and the anonymous author of the Tale of Beryn , whom the only manuscript describes as a Canterbury monk. At the same time, the decision of the author of the Plowman's Tale to associate his text with the Canterbury pilgrims may show that readers also viewed Chaucer's poem as one with a strong interest in religious issues and, especially, reformist attitudes associated with the lollards.
As evidence for the responses of early readers, these three texts should therefore warn modern readers against assuming that the Canterbury Tales should be taken either as an essentially religious composition or as an essentially frivolous one. John M. In origin a Germanic word meaning a chest or reliquary, this term describes something which contains a sacred object. It can thus be applied to an elaborate tomb around the body of a saint, a cabinet containing a relic or to the whole architectural complex where such a body or relic rests.
Remains of a saint or articles which have been in contact with a saint and in which some of the saint's power is believed to reside. The Canterbury Tales. A collection of stories, most in rhyme, some in prose, set in the s, first published in A group of pilgrims exchange tales on the way to and from the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Translation courtesy Gerard NeCastro of eChaucer machias. Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury. When the sweet showers of April have pierced to the root the dryness of March and bathed every vein in moisture by which strength are the flowers brought forth; when Zephyr 1 also with his sweet breath has given spirit to the tender new shoots in the grove and field, and the young sun has run half his course through Aries the Ram, and little birds make melody and sleep all night with an open eye, so nature pricks them in their hearts; then people long to go on pilgrimages to renowned shrines in various distant lands, and palmers 2 to seek foreign shores.
And especially from every shire's end in England they make their way to Canterbury, to seek the holy blessed martyr 3 who helped them when they were sick. Chaucer added yet another innovation: first he presented each of the pilgrims as in a kind of portrait gallery in The Prologue, and then let each of them tell a story, a piece of self-revelation.
Once he had this idea, he elaborated it: he let the pilgrims react to the stories: to quarrel, to joke, to take offence. This has left us the large-scale compilation of 'The Canterbury Tales' in which Chaucer parades the pilgrims with colour and vivacity. It is not known exactly when Chaucer began the Tales, though the pilgrimage is traditionally dated The pilgrims - 'wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye'- , so a group of about twenty-nine met at the Tabart Inn in Southwark, London, where they hired horses and had a meal.
From here they set out to the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral. The highest ranking pilgrim was the brave Knight , whose Tale was the longest. He was in the company of his son, a Squire with curled locks, and their servant, a Yeoman. The fashionable Prioress was the first of Chaucer's female pilgrims; she was together with three priests and another nun.
Then there was a Monk , one of the eight ecclesiastics among the pilgrims, who loved riding. Chaucer's Limiter Friar was a hypocrite, who cynically exploited religion, for which the Summoner wants his revenge on him in his Tale about an ailing man who is preyed by the friar on his sickbed.
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