The English Period (1384-1400) [604522]

The English Period (1384-1400)
•It is the most significant period of Chaucer’s creation ( The
Canterbury Tales)
•The pilgrimage to Canterbury has its roots in the history
of England.
•Henry II (1110-1135) acceded to the throne at the age of
twenty-one, being the first king of the house of Anjou.
The conflict that remained in history during Henry II’s
reign is the conflict he had with Thomas-a-Becket.
•Becket opposed the royal attempt at ruining Church
authority.

•The king forced him under threat of death to sign the
Clarendon Constitution.
•He left England and persuaded Pope Alexander III to
threaten England with an interdict under which the priests
were not allowed to perform religious services in any
church throughout the country. He was murdered on
December, 29th 1170.
•The entire Christian Europe was revolted. The British
people took the side of the martyr and for three centuries,
the pilgrimage to Canterbury was to become one of the
permanent features of English life.

•It is believed that in 1387, when Chaucer’s wife Philippa
died, Chaucer might have made a pilgrimage to
Canterbury .
• Chaucer was undoubtedly familiar with Canterbury and
the road to it, as he frequently travelled to the Continent
on Crown business and the normal route from London to
France was through Canterbury.
•Chaucer’s idea of writing a collection of stories was not
new in the Late Middle Ages.

•The first collection of tales worth mentioning is John
Gower's Confessio Amantis
•The First Day of Boccacio's Decameron resembles The
Canterbury Tales more closely than the works of Gower.
•Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has many speakers, rather
than just one (as in The Confessio Amantis).
•It differs from Boccaccio's Decameron in that the
speakers are not from a single social class (as are
Boccaccio's elegant young Florentines)
•The speakers are drawn from a broad range of society

•The main features of The Canterbury Tales are, according
to Rob Pope, variety and complexity: “on the one hand
there is the flexibility and variety of the speaking voice; on
the other there is the underlying order of the verse form.
Sometimes Chaucer opts for an essentially formal style,
and sometimes he opts for a more familiar, colloquial one.
And often he mixes formal and informal styles to produce
an ever more complex texture. Again, the key to an
understanding of the smaller as well as the larger effects
of Chaucer’s verse is its sheer’ variety’.”

•There are three entities : 'Chaucer the narrator’, ‘Chaucer
the man’ and ‘Chaucer the Work’.
•Laura Kendrick thinks that Chaucer’s work “involves a
contest between gentles and churls engaged on the
playing ground of fiction, with the churls' fabliaux and
beast fables repeatedly overturning with blatantly infantile
desire the repressive authority embodied in the gentles'
fictions, and with the gentles ever reasserting the powers
of censorship and sublimation through their romances,
saints' lives, tragic exempla, and sermons.”

•The total number of stories should have been one
hundred and twenty. There are only twenty completed
tales, and there is an additional tale told by the Canon’s
Yeoman, who was not an original member of the band.
•The linking element between the different tales is the
Host, “who gives a unity of character, almost as great as
the unity of frame-story, to the whole work, inviting,
criticising, admiring, denouncing, but always keeping
himself in evidence”

•The General Prologue is essentially descriptive rather
than narrative
•Rob Pope calls The General Prologue an estates satire, a
survey of various classes or estates of late medieval
society (pilgrims are figures of fun)
•Chaucer’s plan was rather to create a cross-section of
Medieval middle-class society than to describe a mere
pilgrimage to Canterbury
•The members of the Middle Ages society not present in
The General Prologue are the representatives of the
nobility and the serfs and villains.

•With the exception of the narrator, Chaucer’s alter ego
who was a writer, the many branches of artistry that
flourished in the Middle Ages are not present in The
Canterbury Tales
•The band of pilgrims is made up of several groups and
also people who travelled on their own.
•The first group – the Knight, the Squire, and the Yeoman;
the second group -the Prioress with her attendant nun.

•Other groups are the Pardoner, the Summoner; the
Franklin and the Man of Law; the Guildsmen and their
Cook, the Parson and the Plowman. The Monk, the Friar,
the Merchant, the Manciple, the Clerk of Oxford, the
Shipman, the Wife of Bath, and the rest are single
travellers.
•The point of departure, Tabard Inn, is a very human and
worldly place
•Their ultimate destination and the very reason they are
assembled at the inn is holy .

•Chaucer is looking at each of the pilgrims in terms of rank,
clothing, physical and moral state and the person’s actual
reason for being on the pilgrimage (‘estaat’, ‘array’,
‘condicioun’ amd ‘cause’ respectively).
Chaucer was ironic not only to the clergy but also to other
social classes: for instance the doctor is criticised for his ill
treatment of his patients. Being more of an astrologist
than a physician, he investigates his patients’ humour and
he reads their stars

•In the Middle Ages, four humours were recognised, each
of which represented a distinct psychological and
physiological type.
•The melancholic person was reckoned to be cold and dry
and identified with earth; the phlegmatic was cold and
moist like water; the choleric was dry and hot like fire, the
sanguine was warm and moist like air. In this way,
‘humours’ were tied in with the physical side of human
beings; their bodily flows and drives.

•Chaucer concludes that the Doctor was a perfect
practicing physician, who gave his patients medicines
from time to time. He was also a good businessman,
since giving people medicines meant sending them to the
apothecaries in a tribe, and thus each made money from
the other’s guile;/ They had been friendly for a goodish
while.
•In his General Prologue apology, Chaucer reveals his
attempt to repeat the other pilgrims' words, which may
make his story true and objective, but also vulgar or rude

•Rob Pope distinguished six types of stories in The
Canterbury Tales: court romances, fabliaux, sermons,
holy lives, confessions and moral tracts.
•Court romances are tales which explore notions of love
and war in a court setting. The plot usually revolves
around the competition between two noble men for one
noble woman. Court romances are characterized by
elaborate, highly idealized forms of courtship (sometimes
called “courtly love”) and elaborately ritualistic behaviour
in general (The Knight’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale,
The Merchant’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale)

•Fabliaux are stories dealing with an extended joke or trick;
by the end everyone receives a kind of justice.
•While court romances draw on stories of solemn knights
and ladies, fabliaux take as their main characters
tradesmen, minor clerics and the peasantry.
•Greed, hypocrisy, and pride are invariably punished ( The
Reeve’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Cook’s Tale, The
Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, The Friar’s Tale and The
Summoner’s Tale )