ABSTRACT
It is natural in the 20c, when we are so conscious of the technical facilities that enable us to be more mobile than our predecessors, to assume that in earlier times only exceptional people with exceptional business to conduct did much extensive travelling. Before 1170 this assumption might have some validity, but for the period 1170-1370 it certainly did not. Growing numbers of people, sometimes quite poor people, travelled widely (which necessarily meant long) - to such an extent that we must suppose the affinities of their own speech with its local peculiarities were weakened, and that the need was felt for some sort of lingua franca, free at least from the more extreme localisms. We all really know this in connection with the late 14c, when Chaucer's pilgrims, drawn from the middle class in its widest extent, are described as having between them undertaken journeys which must have occupied substantial periods of their lives; and for that very journey they had come together 'from every shires ende OfEngelond'.
