‘Tee hee!’ she cried and clapped the window to

All Chaucer’s earlier writing can be seen to lead to his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. He probably began writing it around 1387 and the work was uncompleted at his death in 1400. The idea of using a series of linked stories appears in The Legend of Good Women, but the greatest innovation is to use the ‘here and now’: the London area and English society of the time. Originally, 120 tales were planned, with each of thirty pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury telling two tales on the way there and two on the way back. Rather less than a quarter of the project was realised, but the whole range of genres, styles, and subjects which history and tradition, England and Europe offered Chaucer were exploited in these tales.