General Prologue

The first lines from the General Prologue at the opening folio of the Hengwrt manuscript.

Illustration of the knight from the General Prologue. Three lines of text are also shown.

The Tabard Inn, Southwark, around 1850

The General Prologue is the first part of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Synopsis[]

The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the General Prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where he meets a group of "sundry folk" who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, a martyr reputed to have the power of healing the sinful.

The setting is April, and the prologue starts by singing the praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants. The setting arguably takes place in April being that travel conditions are not up for travel in real life during this time.^[1] This abundance of life, the narrator says, prompts people to go on pilgrimages; in England, the goal of such pilgrimages is the shrine of Thomas Becket. The narrator falls in with a group of pilgrims, and the largest part of the prologue is taken up by a description of them; Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social 'degree.' According to The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 1, "The narrator, in fact, seems to be expressing chiefly admiration and praise at the superlative skills and accomplishments of this particular group, even such dubious ones as the Friar's begging techniques or the Manciple's success in cheating the learned lawyers who employ him".^[2] Chaucer arguably points out the virtues and vices of each of the pilgrims as described within the work. It is up to the reader to determine the gravity and underlying meaning of Chaucer's methods in doing so

To telle yow al the condicioun,

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne,

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

The pilgrims include a knight, his son a squire, the knight's yeoman, a prioress accompanied by a second nun and the nun's priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a parson, his brother a plowman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, the Host (a man called Harry Bailey), and a portrait of Chaucer himself. At the end of the section, the Host proposes that the group ride together and entertain one another with stories. He lays out his plan: each pilgrim will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whoever has told the most meaningful and comforting stories, with "the best sentence and moost solaas" (line 798) will receive a free meal paid for by the rest of the pilgrims upon their return. The company agrees and makes the Host its governor, judge, and record keeper. They set off the next morning and draw lots to determine who will tell the first tale. The Knight wins and prepares to tell his tale.^[3]

The Tales[]

• General Prologue
• The Knight's Tale
• The Miller's Tale
• The Reeve's Tale
• The Cook's Tale {Unfinished}
• The Man of Law's Tale
• The Tale of Gamelyn intended by Chaucer for a tale by "The Squire"?
• The Wife of Bath's Tale
• The Friar's Tale
• The Summoner's Tale
• The Clerk's Tale
• The Merchant's Tale
• The Squire's Tale
• The Franklin's Tale
• The Physician's Tale
• The Pardoner's Tale
• The Shipman's Tale
• The Prioress's Tale
• Sir Thopas Tale told by Chaucer {Unfinished}
• The Tale of Melibee told by Chaucer
• The Monk's Tale
• The Nun's Priest's Tale
• The Second Nun's Tale
• The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
• The Manciple's Tale
• The Parson's Tale
• Chaucer's Retraction
• The Plowman's Tale, a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales
• Siege of Thebes (poem), a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales
• Prologue and Tale of Beryn, a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales which tells of the epilogue after the Pilgrims arrive in Canterbury

Gallery of the Pilgrims[]

• 

  The Knight

• 

  The Squire

• 

  The Prioress

• 

  The Second Nun

• 

  The Nun's Priest

• 

  The Monk

• 

  Herbert The Friar

• 

  The Merchant

• 

  The Clerk of Oxford

• 

  The Sergeant of Law

• 

  The Franklin

• 

  Roger The Cook

• 

  The Shipman

• 

  The Physician

• 

  The Wife of Bath

• 

  The Parson

• 

  Robin The Miller

• 

  The Manciple

• 

  Oswald The Reeve

• 

  The Summoner

• 

  The Pardoner

• 

  Geoffrey Chaucer from the Ellsmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales

• 

  The Canon Yeoman {not part of the original prologue but added at the end of the Tales}

Structure[]

The General Prologue establishes the frame for the Tales as a whole (or of the intended whole) and introduces the characters/story tellers. These are introduced in the order of their rank in accordance with the three medieval social estates (clergy, nobility, and commoners and peasantry). These characters are also representative of their estates and models with which the others in the same estate can be compared and contrasted.

The structure of the General Prologue is also intimately linked with the narrative style of the tales. As the narrative voice has been under critical scrutiny for some time, so too has the identity of the narrator himself. Though fierce debate has taken place on both sides, (mostly contesting that the narrator either is, or is not, Geoffrey Chaucer), most contemporary scholars believe that the narrator is meant to be some degree of Chaucer himself. Some scholars, like William W. Lawrence, claim that the narrator is Geoffrey Chaucer in person. While others, like Marchette Chute for instance, contest that the narrator is instead a literary creation like the other pilgrims in the tales.^[4]

Manly attempted to identify pilgrims with real 14th century people. In some instances such as Summoner and Friar, he attempts localization to a small geographic area. The Man of Law is identified as Thomas Pynchbek (also Pynchbeck) who was chief baron of the exchequer. Sir John Bussy was an associate of Pynchbek. He is identified as the Franklin. The Pembroke estates near Baldeswelle supplied the portrait for the unnamed Reeve.^[5]

Sebastian Sobecki argues that the General Prologue, in which the innkeeper and host Harry Bailey introduces each pilgrim, is a pastiche of the historical Harry Bailey's surviving 1381 poll-tax account of Southwark's inhabitants.^[6]

Translation[]

First 18 lines[]

The following are the first 18 lines of the General Prologue. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard.

In modern prose:

When April with its sweet showers has pierced March's drought to the root, bathing every vein in such liquid by whose virtue the flower is engendered, and when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has also enlivened the tender plants in every wood and field, and the young sun is halfway through Aries, and small birds that sleep all night with an open eye make melodies (their hearts so goaded by Nature), then people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers seek faraway shores and distant saints known in sundry lands, and especially they wend their way to Canterbury from every shire of England to seek the holy blessed martyr, who helped them when they were ill.^[9]

References[]

External links[]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: General Prologue (Chaucer)

• Side by side Translation into Modern Verse - Illustrated at the Wayback Machine (archived September 8, 2017)
• Modern Translation of the General Prologue and Other Resources at eChaucer
• "Prologue to The Canterbury Tales" – a plain-English retelling for non-scholars.