ABSTRACT
The Canterbury Tales is probably the best-known poem written in ME. Chaucer started work on it in about 1387. 1 His plan was highly ambitious, and the work was unfinished; the completed part is some 17,000 lines long. The poem is about a storytelling contest. A group of pilgrims are travelling from London to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, a popular destination for pilgrimages. The Host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark proposes that each pilgrim should tell four stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The prize for the best story will be a free supper at the Tabard on their return. In fact only twenty-four stories are told.
