Best known for a small handful of the Canterbury tales – the collection offers a portrait of a society on the make for all it's worth – a generally flawed but attractive company; with only two major exceptions Chaucer shows no inclination to pass judgement. His true contempt is reserved for the clerical conmen like the Pardoner and the Summoner who brag about their skill in exploiting the poor.

It's a long time now since Terry Jones Pythonised the figure of the Knight leaving general readers with the impression that all his campaigns had the same degree of moral justification as some grant the recent invasion of Iraq. Entertaining as the theory is, it won't stand scrutiny. The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is a form of 'estates satire' – estates are the medieval equivalent of class but divinely ordained rather than economically determined. The standard account identifies three ideals of fourteenth-century society – those who fight (the Knight), those who pray (the Parson), and those who labour (the Ploughman). The three provide a yardstick against which the general failings of less perfect beings can be measured; remaining somewhat shadowy figures devoid of the rich wealth of individual detail that delineates the other pilgrims.

The academic in me also wants to think that Chaucer hints at a fourth ideal: the clerk, admittedly the eternal student, stands for all who gladly learn and gladly teach – though as the students in the tales of the Miller and the Reeve demonstrate the stereotype of the smart-arsed undergrad obsessed with drink and fornication is nothing new.

As the Lollards were quick to point out, pilgrimage in the fourteenth century had degenerated into a medieval package tour. From the outset the religious motivation of the company (which includes Chaucer's own comically ineffectual alter ego) is in doubt.

A blow-out supper at the Tabard Inn ensures that the pilgrims are drunk enough to agree when Harry Bailley (the original Pub Landlord) proposes the story telling contest. Nor do they seem to realise that the proposed prize, a supper at the Tabard, will swell mine host's takings still further – nice one, Harry!

The pilgrims eat, drink, jest and take their turns to tell stories. But the niceties of social precedence break down immediately as the drunken Miller insists on telling his tale after the Knight's romance. It turns out to be a wonderfully obscene parody of the Knight's tale in which a hapless carpenter is ingeniously cuckolded. The paranoid Reeve, originally a carpenter by trade, butts in to get even with another story in which a scheming miller is outwitted and both his wife and daughter are "swived". Further quarrels errupt…and Bailley's pompous attempts to preserve decorum are doomed to failure.

The Canterbury Tales also presents us with a compendium of medieval genres: romance, fabliau, animal fables, saints lives, allegories, autobiographical confessions, an early criminal narrative, and even a sermon.

This narrative skill was matched by an extraordinary feeling for the way ordinary people speak. The Host ties himself in subjunctive knots trying to be genteel when addressing the Prioress, the northern accents of two Cambridge students hint at misplaced confidence in their ability to outwit a miller, the affecting delight with which the Wife of Bath recalls a life hard lived tinged with the melancholy awareness of fading beauty, and the sinister professional slickness of the Pardoner's sales pitch can still sicken us.

As only a man at the top of his game would dare to do, Chaucer equips his own naive persona with a tale of such dire poetic incompetence that it is rudely howled down by the other pilgrims. And who wins supper at the Tabard Inn? We shall never know because the collection was unfinished when Chaucer died at the turn of the fourteenth century. Perhaps it was always his intention that his reader should be the final arbiter.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey – close to what would later become Poets' corner. His place there probably reflects his status as a royal servant and the fact that he lived just round the corner rather than his fame as a poet. There were no professional writers in the fourteenth century – Chaucer depended upon sinecures from the court for his income – but his work and reputation established the idea of the poet in the English imagination. There had been great poets writing in the English of their day long before Chaucer, but we know nothing of their lives, and only one or two names. He is the first English poet of whom we have a painted portrait and the first great literary personality in the English canon with followers who proudly claimed to be following in his poetic footsteps.

Though in some ways the society Chaucer wrote about is changed beyond recognition, ordinary English men and women with all their humorous, pugnacious, and endearing individuality still emerge with greater vitality in his brilliant narratives than in the writings of many more recent poets. Don't take my word for it. While the Open University offers as yet no opportunity to study Chaucer, there are many cheap and accessible editions of his work in modern translation available and when reading these have whetted your appetite, do try the original – the spelling is strange to the modern eye but not hard to master and, with occasional help from a glossary, Chaucer is easier to understand than Shakespeare.

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Content last updated: 31/01/2006

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