The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) are an anthology of twenty-four short stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. They are mostly in verse, and are presented as part of a fictional storytelling contest held by a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
The Canterbury Tales are widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus, and they are revered as one of the paramount works of English literature. The Tales had a major effect upon the development of English literature itself. They may have been responsible for the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream English literature, as opposed to French or Latin.
Most scholars think the Tales were incomplete at the end of Chaucer's life. In the General Prologue, some 30 pilgrims are introduced. According to the Prologue, Chaucer's intention was to write four stories from the perspective of each pilgrim, two each on the way to and from their ultimate destination, Saint Thomas Becket's shrine (making for a total of about 120 stories).
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The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula (printed before 1500) editions of the work, which is more than for any other vernacular English literary text with the exception of Prick of Conscience. This comparison should not be taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity in the century after Chaucer's death, because, according to Derek Pearsall, it is unfair considering that Prick of Conscience had all the benefit of the "preservation of a dogmatic religious subject-matter". Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been originally complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set. The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists' errors, while it is suggested that in other cases Chaucer both added to his work and revised it as it was being copied and possibly as it was being distributed.
There are no manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales surviving in Chaucer's own hand. The two earliest known manuscripts, which both appear to have been copied by the same scribe, are MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), and the Ellesmere Manuscript, a deluxe, illustrated manuscript. Until the 1940s, scholars tended to prefer the Ellesmere manuscript as closer to Chaucer's intentions; following John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, scholars increasingly favoured Hengwrt. The first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxton's 1476 edition. It was one of the first books to be printed by Caxton, the first person in England to print books using a printing press. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The copyist of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts has been identified as a scrivener named Adam Pinkhurst. Since a poem, apparently by Chaucer, identifies his scribe as a man named "Adam", this has led to the hypothesis that the scribe who copied these two important manuscripts worked with Chaucer and knew him personally. This identification has been the subject of much controversy in the field of Middle English palaeography, though it is widely accepted as plausible.
Order
There is no consensus as to whether a complete version of the Tales exists, and also no consensus regarding Chaucer's intended order of the stories. Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales.
Some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a Fragment are closely related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation, usually with one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. However, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Consequently, there are several possible orders; the one most frequently seen in modern editions follows the numbering of the Fragments (ultimately based on the Ellesmere order).
In the Victorian era, it was common to use the nine "Groups" identified by F. J. Furnivall (1868) under the auspices of the Chaucer Society (which Furnivall himself had founded). For example, Walter William Skeat followed this ordering in his Chaucer: Complete Works, which was used by Oxford University Press for most of the twentieth century. However, Furnivall's ordering is seldom followed today; the position of its "Group C" matches none of the extant manuscripts, its only raison d'être being that Furnivall did not consider the three tales in Group D "sufficient for the 10 miles between Rochester and Sittingbourne."
An alternative ordering (seen in the early 15th-century manuscript Harley MS. 7334) places Fragment VIII before VI. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, just as VI and VII, IX and X do in the oldest manuscripts. Fragments IV and V, by contrast, vary in location from manuscript to manuscript.
Language
Chaucer mainly wrote in a London dialect of late Middle English, which has clear differences from Modern English. From philological research, some facts are known about the pronunciation of English during the time of Chaucer. Chaucer pronounced -e at the end of many words, so that care (except when followed by a vowel sound) was [ˈkaːrə], not as in Modern English. Other nowadays silent letters were also pronounced, so that the word knight was [kniçt], with both the k and the gh pronounced, not . In some cases, vowel letters in Middle English were pronounced very differently from Modern English, because the Great Vowel Shift had not yet happened. For instance, the long e in wepyng "weeping" was pronounced as [eː], as in modern German or Italian, not as . Below is an IPA transcription of the opening lines of The Merchant's Prologue:
No manuscript exists in Chaucer's own hand; all extant copies were made by scribes. Because the final -e sound was lost soon after Chaucer's time, scribes did not accurately copy it, and this gave scholars the impression that Chaucer himself was inconsistent in using it. It has now been established, however, that -e was an important part of Chaucer's grammar, and helped to distinguish singular adjectives from plural and subjunctive verbs from indicative.