Chaucer's original plan called for two tales from each pilgrim on the journey to Canterbury and as many on the return, together with an account of their experiences during and after the pilgrimage. Of this prodigious design he completed only about a fifth, 24 tales in all, several being incomplete, scattered over the whole journey to Canterbury. Most of the tales are connected with each other by passages, usually called prologues and "links,' in which the narrative of the pilgrimage is carried on, and which contain some of the best and liveliest writing in the poem. Several of the characters, such as the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, reveal their own views and characters with ex traordinary frankness; between others there are lively quarrels; tiresome tales are twice broken off by weary auditors; as the party is nearing Canterbury they are joined by a rascally canon who makes a dishonest living by feigning to practise alchemy, and whose servant, after frightening his master away by his indiscreet loquacity, entertains the company with a tale of another such impostor; throughout, com menting and keeping things harmonious and lively, moves the burly, canny figure of Harry Bailey, Host of the Tabard Inn, the self-ap pointed of*the party.
Of the tales each is in general admirably adapted to the person who tells it; the pious tell of religion, the soldiers of chivalry, the vulgar of licentiousness. Most of them fall into well-recognized classes of mediaeval narrative poetry. The tales of the Knight, Squire, Wife of Bath Sand Franklin are romantic; Chaucer himself, as a character on the pilgrimage, tells the burlesque romance of (Sir
tact fully unwilling to compete seriously among his own creations; the tales of the Miller, Reeve, Cook, Shipman, Sumner, Merchant, Canon's Yeoman and Manciple are (or are of the nature of) fabliaux, more or less drastically realistic and often very coarse comic tales; those of the Man of Law, Monk, Pardoner, Friar and Clerk are moral tales of various kinds; the tale of the Nun's Priest is a mar velously witty beast-fable; the Physician's is the Latin story of Virginia, ultimately from Livy; the Prioress', of the Christian child killed by the Jews, and the Second Nun's, of Saint Cecelia, are saints', legends; Chaucer's second tale, of Melibeus and his moralizing wife, Prudence, is a didactic prose-work; as is the Parson's, on the sacrament of penance and the seven deadly sins, introduced at the end because it seemed fitting to approach the holy city "in some vertuous sentence." Hardly any of the tales are original in their groundwork; originality in plotting was even less regarded as desirable in the Middle Ages than by Shakespeare; and they are of various and remote origins. The tales of the Squire, Merchant and Pardoner are ultimately Oriental; those of the Manciple (Ovid's tale of the talking crow) and Physician are from the classics; the Clerk's ideal and pathetic story of patient Griselda is from Petrarch's Latin version of the last novel in Boccaccio's
Chaucer probably worked on the bury Tales' to near the time of his death. The order and dates of the writing of most of them have not been determined, but there is little reason to believe that any except the Knight's and Second Nun's antedated the beginning of the poem as a whole. It is clear that the order in which they are now printed is far from being the order in which they were written; that the work was extended and filled in at various times and in divers manners, and that it was by a con tinuation of this process of inserting tales and joining them by links that Chaucer intended to complete the poem and make it continuous. In gradually building up the morlc Chaucer did got cover -141 tracks, in cases a Owe of plan is evident, for he was not always a careful polisher and reviser. A study of the 60 or more manuscripts of the poems shows a probability that by supplying the connecting links he had drawn the work together, at the time of his death, into eight volumes or con tinuous fragments unconnected with each other (not wholly the same as the nine "groups" in modern editions, which do not seem quite to fit the facts), but that even they were by no means put in their final form. Chaucer's intentions as to arrangement can be pretty well discovered by references to times, tales already told and such places along the road as Rochester, Sitting bourne and the Bleau Forest, but for every group of tales he may not have decided on the position, and the arrangement of modern edi tions may represent rather what he would have done than what he did. Some parts of the work were certainly known to the world before the author's death, and others may have been; but it seems very unlikely that the 'poem as a whole, as we have it, was put forth otherwise than by Chaucer's literary executors. The arrangement of none of the manuscripts can agree with his intention, and there are many other evidences that his death determined, as it were, a fortuitous cross-section of the growing work. The (Canterbury Tales' therefore re main the most unfinished and fragmentary of great poems.