The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 short stories, mostly in verse, written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The stories are framed as part of a fictional contest among a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. The work is considered Chaucer's greatest achievement and a foundational text of English literature, notable for helping to establish English vernacular writing as a serious alternative to French and Latin. Scholars generally believe the Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The General Prologue introduces about 30 pilgrims, and Chaucer's stated plan was for each to tell four stories—two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return—for a total of roughly 120 tales. Whether a complete version exists remains unresolved. There are 84 surviving manuscripts and four incunabula editions, more than for any other vernacular English literary text except *Prick of Conscience*, though scholar Derek Pearsall cautions that this comparison is misleading because *Prick of Conscience* benefited from its religious subject matter. Fifty-five of these manuscripts appear to have been originally complete; 28 are so fragmentary that it is unclear if they were copied individually or as part of a set. The tales vary between manuscripts, with minor differences often due to copyist errors, while larger variations suggest Chaucer may have added to or revised the work as it was being copied and distributed. No manuscript survives in Chaucer's own hand. The two earliest known manuscripts, both likely copied by the same scribe, are MS Peniarth 392 D (the "Hengwrt") and the Ellesmere Manuscript, a deluxe illustrated version. Until the 1940s, scholars favored the Ellesmere as closer to Chaucer's intentions, but after John M. Manly and Edith Rickert's work, the Hengwrt gained preference. The first printed edition was William Caxton's 1476 version, one of the earliest books printed in England. Only ten copies of this edition are known, including one at the British Library and one at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts has been identified as Adam Pinkhurst, based on a poem apparently by Chaucer that names his scribe as "Adam." This identification, though controversial in Middle English palaeography, is widely accepted as plausible. There is no consensus on whether a complete version exists or on Chaucer's intended order of the tales. Textual and manuscript clues support two main modern ordering methods. Some scholarly editions divide the tales into ten "Fragments," where tales within a Fragment are closely linked and show internal order, but connections between Fragments are less clear. The most common modern order follows the Fragment numbering, ultimately based on the Ellesmere order. In the Victorian era, F. J. Furnivall's nine "Groups" (1868) were standard, used by Walter William Skeat in his *Chaucer: Complete Works* for Oxford University Press through most of the twentieth century. Furnivall's ordering is now rarely followed; his "Group C" does not match any extant manuscript, existing only because he felt the three tales in Group D were insufficient for the ten miles between Rochester and Sittingbourne. An alternative order, seen in the early 15th-century manuscript Harley MS. 7334, places Fragment VIII before Fragment VI. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, as do VI and VII, and IX and X in the oldest manuscripts, while Fragments IV and V vary in position. Chaucer wrote in a London dialect of late Middle English, which differs markedly from Modern English. Philological research shows that final -e was pronounced (so *care* sounded like [ˈkaːrə] unless followed by a vowel), and silent letters like the *k* and *gh* in *knight* were sounded ([kniçt]). Vowel letters were also pronounced differently because the Great Vowel Shift had not yet occurred; for example, the long *e* in *wepyng* ("weeping") was pronounced [eː], similar to modern German.