THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS***
E-text prepared by Roy Brown
THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
Being Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Retold for Children
By M. Sturt, BA and E.C. Oaken, MA
INTRODUCTION
Geoffrey Chaucer lived mere than five hundred years ago, when Edward II. waged war in France, and the peasants rebelled in England against his son, Richard II, Yet for all this, England was then "Merrie England." Her trade prospered, men laughed and sang and delighted in tales, in art, end in out-door life.
Chaucer was not a poet who lived apart from his fellows, but one who dealt constantly with men and affairs, and loved his fellow-men. He was an important person in his time. He began life as a page boy at Court, where he saw great ladies and gallant courtiers, and heard music and took part in pageants and processions. He fought for the king in France and was taken prisoner by the enemy; but the king sixteen pounds for his ransom and he returned to England. He went to France again and to as ambassador on the king's business. Thus he met famous men in foreign lands and saw the beautiful land of Italy, where in his day lived two Italian poets whose names are as famous as Chaucer's own, one of whom he makes his Clerk mention--Petrarch of Padua. He saw, too, the fine buildings and paintings which Italian artists were making, whose fame has spread abroad throughout world. Chaucer loved all this colour and beauty, and carried it in his mind, so that when he again came to London he remembered it and wrote of it.
He was a member of Parliament, and a civil servant too, whose work it was to collect the customs. He had to make long records of his accounts all day; but at night returned with joy to his house above the Aldgate in the walls of London. There he pored over his books, and "dumb as any stone," he tells us, he read, and dreamed, and wrote.
But when spring came, no more indoors for him! Away he went, out to the fields, which then came to the edge of the Thames and to the very walls of the city. There in the bright sunshine he sought his favourite flower, the daisy, and met men in the open roads and lanes, and because he liked men and respected them, they talked to him very freely of their lives and doings. Often in April he saw motley companies of men and women riding out of the stuffy narrow streets of the town, away along country roads by hedgerow and meadow, to some distant shrine, where they would pray to the saints for prosperity and help.
Chaucer one day went with such a company, and he has left us his record of it. The Canterbury Tales describe better than any history book the people of Chaucer's time. You will find that in their dress and manners they are often strangely different from ourselves; but in much we are very like to them. All kinds and conditions of men are there, good and bad. There is love for honour and beauty, laughter for a jest, impatience for a dreary tale, ridicule for a worn-out one, good-fellowship and joy in the open air, loose tongues and travellers' stories, drinking by the way, and mishaps by the road. Travelling was difficult, for the roads were full of holes and very muddy and dirty, and a man must either walk or go on horseback. Some of the party had bad horses and some were anything but expert riders, so that it took four days to ride the fifty-six miles from London to Canterbury. The nights were spent at inns where many shared one room, and beds were not as clean as they might have been. But the pilgrims made a happy party, as you will see, for they beguiled the way with stories. Chaucer tells these stories in his account of his pilgrimage. He never completed the account, however, but left some gaps in the story. The general plan of the work is clear enough, and in this little book the gaps have been bridged in a manner consistent with Chaucer's account of the journey.
Chaucer's language is different from ours of today, and although easy to read when one is used to it, is difficult at first. Therefore these tales are retold in this little book in our present-day language and in prose instead of verse. They lose much of Chaucer's vivacity and spirit by this translation, but try and read the originals for yourself one day, and learn to love one who has been dear for his humanity, kindliness and humour to poets and ordinary folk alike, from 1370 to now.
