ABSTRACT
The pilgrimage was simply a fiction designed to account for the tales, which were composed not by the various pilgrims, but by Sir Geoffrey Chaucer. The plan of the Canterbury Tales is that Chaucer imagines himself setting out from the Tabard Inn, Southwark, in company with the Host of the Tabard and twenty-nine other pilgrims on a journey to the shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. In Chaucer's hands the story assumed the characteristic piety and wonder of the Golden Legend. Custance was an ideal type of womanhood, purity, tenderness, faith and constancy personified—an uncanonized saint. Chaucer often pokes tun at the clergy, but he never jibes at the miraculous absurdities of pious legend. The Parson's Tale is Chaucer's last word, and it reveals him as a sound churchman. Yet The Canterbury Tales, to go no further, contain japes which must have shocked the Prioress and the Monk, if not the poor Parson.
