ABSTRACT
Bubonic plague, the ‘Black Death’, reached England in the autumn of 1348. Geoffrey Chaucer was only a boy, perhaps five years old, but he would live through several more outbreaks of the Black Death in his lifetime. The swift, all-encompassing nature of the disease is captured by him in one of the Canterbury Tales, as some young revellers hear a bell toll as a corpse is carried through the streets for burial. At the time of Chaucer’s birth in the 1340s, Edward III had been king of England for more than a decade. Essentially, England in the fourteenth century was aligned with the Church of Rome. The beginnings of religious change were starting to be felt, with reformers such as the Lollards calling for the Bible to be available in English rather than Latin, but real change was a long way off, and religious belief was secure, so secure that Chaucer’s work contains many jokes that centre on Christianity.
