An Unfinished Project of Chaucer’s Later Years
The Canterbury Tales was a major project of Geoffrey Chaucer’s later years; 1387 can serve only as an approximate chronological marker. In his study of the work’s sources in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Skeat places the conception of the collection after 1386 or 1387 and discusses internal calendrical clues in explicitly conjectural terms. Such scholarship cannot be turned into a record of publication of the entire work on a particular date.
Chaucer served as a customs official in London, a member of Parliament for Kent, and clerk of the king’s works, as well as undertaking diplomatic missions abroad. Wetherbee emphasizes that these experiences familiarized him with the different worlds of court, law, and commerce. At his death around 1400, the collection remained incomplete. Existing material, later-added tales, and connecting passages together formed the text; its occupational characters are not a roster from a single actual journey.
The Storytelling Agreement at the Inn
The General Prologue opens with springtime and pilgrimage. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on London’s south bank, the narrator meets twenty-nine fellow travelers preparing to go to Canterbury. The host, Harry Bailly, proposes that each person tell two stories on the outward journey and two on the return. The winner, judged for substance and entertainment, will receive a meal paid for by the others when they return to the inn. The host accompanies them as judge.
The surviving tales fall far short of the plan of four per person. Some characters never get a turn, and some stories break off midway. Chivalric romance, religious narrative, beast fable, bawdy comedy, and prose admonition therefore do not form a neatly arranged collection of genre specimens. The travelers’ interruptions, disputes, and speaking order give each tale a particular audience and occasion, creating a second level of plot outside the stories themselves.
Speaking Order and Diverse Social Voices
After the Knight finishes his tale, the Host intends to invite the Monk to follow. The drunken Miller insists on speaking first, answering the Knight with a tale about a carpenter and his wife. The Reeve immediately objects to a subject that brings shame upon husbands. The narrator claims a duty to record good and bad tales alike and tells unwilling readers to turn the page and choose another, returning responsibility for selection to them.
Wetherbee interprets the successive contributions of the Knight, Miller, and Reeve as a movement from solemn narrative to parody and then personal retaliation. Their status and tastes shape their expression without guaranteeing that their views are right. Chaucer also writes himself into the company, exposing the limitations of an apparently naive narrator. Readers must distinguish the characters’ self-descriptions from the problems their stories actually reveal.
Manuscripts and a Poet Who Continued the Journey
As the collection passed down in manuscripts, its ordering and individual readings varied. The Hengwrt manuscript is now catalogued as Peniarth MS 392D and the Ellesmere as EL 26 C 9; modern textual scholarship frequently compares them. Skeat used Ellesmere as an important base text, while Wetherbee notes that its copying and arrangement may have regularized meter and syntax. Fine handwriting alone cannot establish that every word is closer to Chaucer’s own.
The prologue to John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes supplies direct evidence of early reception. He has a monk named Lydgate arrive in Canterbury and meet the pilgrims at their inn. On the return journey, prompted by the Host, the monk begins his own tale. Another poet thus continued the journey framework Chaucer had left. The work’s influence appears in verifiable reuse of scenes, characters, and rules of storytelling.
Caxton’s Two Editions and Their Revision
William Caxton printed the first edition in the 1470s and a second in the early 1480s. The second edition’s preface relates that a reader identified many departures from Chaucer’s original in the first and lent a manuscript treasured by his father for use in revision. The preface also acknowledges additions and omissions in the copy previously used for setting type. This publisher’s account shows that printing still depended on comparison among different manuscripts.
Comparing the two editions, Bordalejo counted about three thousand textually significant variants in wording, word order, or word forms, excluding additions or omissions of whole lines. The second edition therefore cannot be described as changing only a few words. She also notes that some new readings can help identify errors shared by Hengwrt and Ellesmere. The move from manuscript to print did not end textual variation; it added new witnesses to transmission and new problems for textual criticism.