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Starvard University · Chaucer
Meet the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales in plain modern English, hear a few of Chaucer's famous lines as he wrote them, and finish by telling a pilgrim's tale of your own.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
About six hundred years ago, a group of travelers rode to Canterbury telling stories to pass the time: a knight, a miller, a wife with five husbands, a sly pardoner, and more. Their poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote down their tales in the English of his day. We will read them in modern English, peek at a few famous original lines, and enjoy one of the funniest, wisest books ever made.
Chaucer wrote in the late 1300s, when English was still finding its feet as a language of literature. French and Latin carried the prestige, and Chaucer helped prove that English could do everything they could: romance, comedy, philosophy, and plain talk. He worked as a courtier, a soldier, a diplomat, and a customs official in London, so he met every kind of person his poem describes. The Canterbury Tales was left unfinished at his death in 1400, and even unfinished it changed English writing for good.
You do not need Middle English to love this book, and this course will not ask you to learn it. Every tale here is taught in modern English, in clear summaries and retellings. Where a line is famous enough that you deserve to hear Chaucer's own music, we give the original words with a translation right beside them, and we keep those moments short. Think of it as listening to a great grandfather tell stories: mostly you follow the sense, and now and then you stop just to enjoy the sound of his voice.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Geoffrey Chaucer lived from about 1343 to 1400, in an England still recovering from plague, at war with France, and ruled by kings he served in person. He was not a monk in a tower. He fought as a young soldier, carried diplomatic letters across Europe, and worked for years as a controller of customs on the wool trade in London, one of the busiest jobs in the kingdom. That working life is the secret of his poem. He had stood in docks, courts, inns, and kitchens, and he remembered how each kind of person talked.
The language he wrote, Middle English, sits between Old English and the English you speak. Much of it looks familiar once you slow down, because the spelling is looser and many endings still sound in the voice. Here is the most famous opening in English poetry, exactly as our edition prints it: "WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, The drought of March hath pierced to the root." In modern English: when April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root. Rain, roots, and new growth: the whole poem starts with spring waking the world up.
A few habits will carry you through every quotation in this course. Words like hath mean has, eke means also, and many final e letters were once sounded softly. Chaucer also loved putting the verb late in a line, so read for the sense and let the rhythm help you. Honest note: this course teaches in modern English throughout, and that is a fair trade. You lose a little music, and you gain the jokes, the arguments, and the stories at full strength, which is where Chaucer most wants to meet you.
Lesson 2
The poem opens at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, south of the Thames, where twenty nine pilgrims have gathered by chance on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Chaucer the narrator joins them, talks with every one, and promises to describe each pilgrim before the journey starts: what they do, what they wear, and what they are really like. The Host of the inn, Harry Bailey, proposes the game that frames the book. Each pilgrim will tell tales on the road, and the best storyteller wins a supper paid for by the rest.
The portraits are the glory of the Prologue, and they work by small, telling detail. The Knight comes first, a veteran of fifteen mortal battles who is modest as a maid and still wearing his stained campaign tunic, because he rode straight from his voyage to his pilgrimage. Chaucer sums him up in one line worth hearing in the original: "He was a very perfect gentle knight." Around him gathers a cross section of England: his son the Squire, singing and in love; a Prioress with perfect table manners and a tender heart for small animals; a Monk who loves hunting more than prayer; a Friar who knows every tavern; a Merchant, a Clerk, a Lawyer, a Franklin, and craftsmen of the town guilds.
Watch how Chaucer praises and gently exposes in the same breath. Some pilgrims, the Knight, the Clerk, and the poor Parson, earn real admiration. Others get compliments that slip sideways, so you smile first and judge second. Nobody in the parade is only a job title, and that is the point. By the time the company rides out through the morning gate, you feel you could recognize any of them in a crowd, and you are ready to hear what stories such people would tell.
Lesson 3
The Knight tells the first tale, and it is a grand romance in the high style, set in ancient Athens under Duke Theseus. Two young knights of Thebes, the cousins Palamon and Arcite, lie wounded after battle and are imprisoned in a tower for life, with no hope of ransom. From their window they see Emily, the sister of Theseus's wife, walking in a garden below, and both fall in love with her at first sight. The prison that held their bodies now holds their hearts, and the cousins who loved each other become rivals in a moment.
Fortune turns, as it always does in this tale. Arcite is freed through a friend's plea but banished from Athens on pain of death, which leaves him free and miserable while Palamon stays jailed and near Emily. Arcite sneaks back in disguise and serves in Emily's household, and when the two meet by chance in a grove, they arrange to fight a duel for her. Theseus discovers them, spares their lives, and turns private violence into public order: a great tournament in one year, a hundred knights on each side, and the winner to marry Emily.
The tournament is the tale's set piece, with temples to Venus, Mars, and Diana, prayers from all three young people, and a battle described like a festival of war. Palamon's side wins, but Arcite, thrown from his horse by a fury sent at Saturn's request, dies of his injuries after a deathbed speech that forgives his cousin and commends him to Emily. Years later, after proper mourning, Palamon and Emily marry. The Knight's moral is woven through the splendor: human beings strive, the gods and fortune dispose, and wisdom means making virtue of necessity.
Lesson 4
When the Knight finishes, the Host calls on the Monk, but the Miller, drunk and cheerful, insists on telling next, and Chaucer warns us plainly that what follows is a churl's tale, earthy and rude. An honest note before the fun: the comedy in this lesson is bawdy medieval humor about bodies, trickery, and comeuppance, told to get laughs at someone's expense. Read it as the pilgrims heard it, as a tavern joke with a sharp edge, and notice who ends up humiliated and why.
The Miller's Tale is a small masterpiece of plotting. In Oxford, the carpenter John keeps a young wife, Alison, and lodges a clever student, Nicholas, who plots to spend a night with her. Nicholas pretends a vision that a second flood is coming, persuades John to sleep in a tub hung from the rafters so he can cut the rope and float when the waters rise, and slips down to Alison. Meanwhile the parish clerk Absolon, lovesick and fastidious, comes serenading under the window and is tricked into kissing the wrong target in the dark. His revenge with a hot iron goes astray onto Nicholas, whose cry for water wakes John, who cuts his rope and crashes to the floor, and the whole town laughs at the carpenter.
The Reeve, Oswald, is a carpenter by training, and he takes the tale as a personal insult. His answer is a revenge story in kind: a dishonest miller who steals grain from his customers is outwitted in his own house by two students he tried to cheat, and his pride, his goods, and his dignity all take a beating in one night. Back and forth the tales fly, trade answering trade, and Chaucer shows you something true about people. Stories on this road are not just entertainment. They are how the pilgrims praise, tease, and settle scores with each other.
Lesson 5
Alison of Bath is the most famous voice in the whole book, and her Prologue is longer than her tale. She is a cloth maker of real skill, well traveled on pilgrimages, and married five times, starting at age twelve, a fact she reports without a blush. Her opening lines announce her method, and they deserve the original words: "Experience, though none authority Were in this world, is right enough for me To speak of woe that is in marriage." In modern English: even if no book backed me up, my experience is authority enough for me to speak about the troubles of marriage.
What follows is part memoir, part sermon turned upside down. She quotes the clerks and scripture scholars who warned against remarriage and answers them from her own life, text for text, with wit and total confidence. She describes frankly how she managed her older husbands, what she wanted from marriage, and how her fifth husband, the clerk Jankyn, read aloud each night from a book of wicked wives until she tore its pages and he struck her deaf in one ear. They made peace when she won what she calls mastery, and after that, she says, they never argued again.
Her tale matches her life. A knight of King Arthur's court, condemned to die for a crime against a young woman, is sent by the queen to learn within a year what women most desire, or lose his head. The answer, given by an old woman who then claims him in marriage, is that women most want sovereignty: to be treated as partners with a say over their own lives. Chaucer gives a woman of the 1300s an argument about dignity inside marriage that still sounds startlingly current, and he gives it to her at full length, in her own unforgettable voice.
Lesson 6
The Pardoner is the pilgrimage's most unsettling traveler. His trade is selling pardons and fake relics, pieces of cloth and bone he passes off as holy, to frightened people who hope to buy their way out of guilt. In his own Prologue he confesses all of it cheerfully. His preaching theme, he tells us, is always the same one sentence of Latin: "Radix malorum est cupiditas." That means the love of money is the root of evils, and he preaches it, by his own admission, purely so that listeners will pay him.
His tale is a dark little sermon story set in Flanders during a time of plague. Three young rioters, drinking in a tavern, hear that Death has taken a friend of theirs, and they swear a drunken oath to find Death and kill him. An old man they mock on the road tells them they will find Death under a certain tree. Under the tree they find not a person but a heap of gold coins, and at once their fellowship dissolves into plotting. Two stay to guard the gold while the youngest goes to town for provisions, and each party plans to kill the other and keep everything.
The ending lands like a hammer. The two at the tree stab the returning youngest, then drink the wine he has poisoned for them, and all three find Death exactly where the old man said. The Pardoner then turns to the pilgrims, in character to the last, and tries to sell them his relics on the spot, which earns him a furious reply from the Host. The tale works because Chaucer lets a corrupt man tell a completely true story about greed. The messenger is rotten, the message is not, and sitting with that discomfort is the lesson.
Lesson 7
After the Monk's long list of tragedies bores the company, the Host asks the Nun's Priest for something merrier, and he delivers the book's most charming animal fable. On a poor widow's farm lives a rooster named Chanticleer, splendid in plumage, exact in crowing, and proud of both. His favorite hen is Pertelote, whom he adores, and one morning he wakes groaning from a terrible dream of a beast, reddish, doglike, with burning eyes, that seized him in the yard.
Pertelote, practical and unimpressed, scolds him roundly. Dreams, she says, come from overeating and bad digestion, and she prescribes herbs and a good purge. Chanticleer answers with a lecture, citing ancient authorities and famous dreamers whose dreams came true, and the two debate like scholars in a library, which is exactly the joke and the delight of it. He decides, gallantly and foolishly, that he will not fear a dream, and struts into the yard where a fox has slipped through the hedge and is waiting in the cabbages.
The fox, Sir Russel, does not pounce. He flatters. He praises Chanticleer's father and begs to hear the son sing with his eyes closed, just as his father did, and the vain rooster stretches his neck, shuts his eyes, and is snatched up in a moment. The farm erupts in chase, and Chanticleer, carried on the fox's back, saves himself with the fox's own weapon. He suggests the fox shout a boast at the pursuers, the fox opens his mouth, and the rooster flies to a tree. Each animal closes with a moral for the other: never trust a flatterer, and never talk when you should keep silent. It is a barnyard tale that gently mocks learning, pride, and all of us.
Lesson 8
Your final lesson is to join the company. Chaucer's frame is an invitation that has worked for six centuries: put a teller on a road, give the teller a reason to talk, and let the tale reveal the teller. Start by inventing your pilgrim the way the General Prologue does, through telling detail rather than a label. Choose a trade or a stage of life, one object they carry, one habit they cannot hide, and one quiet contradiction, like the Knight's stained tunic on a man of perfect courtesy. Two or three such details and your pilgrim is already walking toward Canterbury.
Now choose the tale your pilgrim would tell. A proud pilgrim tells a story where pride gets its comeuppance or its crown. A kind one tells of mercy. A sly one, like the Pardoner, may tell a true story for false reasons, and that tension is advanced work, so handle it only if it excites you. Keep the shape simple and old: a clear beginning, one turning of fortune in the middle, and an ending that lands the moral without preaching it flat. If you get stuck, borrow a Chaucer move. Let two characters debate, like Chanticleer and Pertelote, or let a stranger on the road, like the old man in the Pardoner's Tale, point the way.
Write it short, about the length of one of these lessons, and read it aloud before you call it done. Chaucer wrote for the ear, and your ear will catch flat lines your eye forgives. Do not worry about imitating Middle English. Write in your own modern voice, the way this course has read him, and let one borrowed line shine if you want it, translation and all. Then share it, ideally with someone who will laugh in the right places. The contest at the Tabard was never really about the supper. It was about the company a good story makes, and now you are part of it.
Sources
This course is taught from Chaucer's own poems in a classic edition that is free for anyone to read. The full text, with the Middle English originals and helpful notes, is free to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You started with a spring morning in Southwark and a company of strangers, and you finished having heard a knight's romance, two comic duels, a wife's defense of her life, a pardoner's confession, and a rooster's narrow escape. You can read Chaucer in modern English with confidence, quote a few of his own lines, and tell a tale in a borrowed voice. Congratulations, and may your road always have good company and good stories.
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