General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales



The General Prologue is the assumed title of the series of portraits that precedes The Canterbury Tales. It was the work of 14th century English writer and courtier Geoffrey Chaucer.

Synopsis
The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the general prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. Chaucer is in the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, where he meets a motley crew of middle-class folk from various parts of England. Coincidentally, they are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the Shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. In the Prologue, Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social 'degree':


 * To telle yow al the condicioun,
 * Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
 * And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
 * And eek in what array that they were inne,
 * And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

The pilgrims include a knight, his son a squire, the knight's yeoman (who maintains numerous resemblances to Robin Hood), a prioress accompanied by a second nun and the nun's priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a parson, his brother a plowman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, the host (a man called Harry Bailly), and a portrait of Chaucer himself. The order the pilgrims are introduced places them in a social order, describing the nobility in front, the craftsmen in the middle, and the peasants at the end. A canon and his yeoman later join the pilgrimage and tell one of the tales.

Structure
The General Prologue seems deliberately disorganised, implying the confusion of the assorted rabble that has set out for Canterbury on that day. While the genre of the Canterbury Tales as a whole is a "frame narrative," the General Prologue constitutes an example of "Estates Satire", a genre that satirizes the corruption that occurs within the three medieval social estates (clergy, nobility, and peasantry). However, the General Prologue also provides an ideal member of each estate as a model with which the others can be compared and contrasted - the Parson, the Knight (technically not a nobleman, but the highest-ranking layman present), and the Plowman.