The Canterbury tales : a study of certain of the characters and their tales as an expression of Chaucer's concern regarding abuses among the priesthood and religious orders during the 14th century
When one considers The Canterbury Tales, which is generally accepted as being Chaucer's most important work, as a whole, one encounters two facts which immediately suggest an interest in the religious and ecclesiastical states and a deep concern resulting from the prevalence of abuses in the lives of these representatives of the Church. The first of these facts is Chaucer's use of the concept of a pilgrimage as framework for his tales. One cannot, of course, completely discount the suggestion that the poet's use of this framework could have been motivated by the fact that, in the fourteenth century at any rate, only a pilgrimage could have provided a socially acceptable dimension for keeping so diverse a group of people together for long enough to tell their tales. However, the fact that a pilgrimage was fundamentally a religious act was, I feel, a more important consideration to the poet in his choice of this particular framework for his tales. Baldwin, writing about the significance of pilgrimages in the middle ages says: "Pilgrimage was a well-established feature of European society, it was a journey of devotion to a holy shrine. At first simply a pious act, pilgrimage had, in the course of time, been adopted by the Church as a form of canonical penance." John Norton-Smith sees a probable connection between the poet's Retractation and his choice of a pilgrimage-framework when he says: "the biologically based metaphor of the pilgrimage of life and the final spiritual resignation of the author suggests a powerful tendency towards an acceptance of the orthodox 'other-worldly' religious view of human activity". A pilgrimage was, therefore, primarily a penitential activity designed to turn the mind and the heart to the love of God. Since the abuses of which the religious and clergy were accused were, for the most part, the result of a weakening of the life of penance and self denial and a turning away from divine love, the poet's choice of a pilgrimage as the framework for The Canterbury Tales might also be interpreted as the first indication Chaucer gives of his concern regarding the abuses he observed in the fourteenth-century Church. The second indication that Chaucer used The Canterbury Tales as a vehicle through which to express his concern regarding the religious and ecclesiastical abuses he observed, is the inclusion among his twenty nine pilgrims of no fewer than eleven who are directly or indirectly involved in the religious or clerical life and who represent every kind of ecclesiastic and religious with whom the faithful were likely to come in frequent contact. It is an indisputable fact that the clergy and religious still accounted for a large percentage of the population in the fourteenth century, but there does not appear to be any indication that this number is as high as would be expected if Chaucer's main aim in the assembling of his pilgrimage was to obtain a cross section of fourteenth-century society. In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales Chaucer sets the scene for what might be described as a systematic revelation of fourteenth-century religious and ecclesiastical abuse. In his seemingly innocuous and often amusing portrait, Chaucer had to find ways of achieving his aim without having recourse to conventional moralizing and without exposing himself to the social and occupational hazards which a direct attack on the clergy and religious might involve at this time. He achieved his aim by arranging his pilgrims in such a way that a description of each character was required and each was obliged to tell at least one tale. The poet further precluded any unpleasant consequences which could have resulted from his revelation of various types of abuse by inventing a narrator-a rotund, insignificant figure who, in the eyes of the Host and of the other pilgrims, could produce no better poetry than a few stanzas of doggerel verse.
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Department of English Language and Literature