ABSTRACT
Chaucer speaks to us directly from fourteenth-century England. His work still lives, though only a few physical fragments o f that time remain, such as parts of the Tower o f London, where the Queen M other o f the 15-year-old king, Richard II, and grown-up courtiers cowered in fear as peasants rampaged through London in 1381 and insulted the royal family. Richard II’s great Hall of Westminster, a couple of miles away, can still be seen with the glory of its hammerbeam roof; and parts o f Westminster Abbey. A few churches survive, at least in part — not the great Gothic St Paul’s, destroyed in the Fire o f London in 1665 to be replaced by W ren’s masterpiece, but the already ancient St Bartholomew the Great, in the City, whose huge twelfth-century chancel survives. Scattered through England are the footprints of the past. Some of the Pilgrims’ Way between London and Canterbury can still be walked, though the heavy incrustations of later centuries and the bulldozers and concrete o f recent times have hidden much.
