The Tabard inn at Southwark, then a suburb of "London borough without the walls," was a great rendezvous for pilgrims who were journeying to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury—that Saxon archbishop who had been murdered by the minions of Henry II. Southwark was on the high street, the old Roman highway from London to the southeast. A gathering of pilgrims here is no uncommon occurrence; and thus numbers and variety make a combination of penitence and pleasure. The host of the Tabard—doubtless a true portraiture of the landlord of that day—counts noses, that he may distribute the pewter plates. A substantial supper smokes upon the old-fashioned Saxon-English board—so substantial that the pilgrims are evidently about to lay in a good stock, in anticipation of poor fare, the fatigue of travel, and perhaps a fast or two not set down in the calendar. As soon as they attack the viands, ale and strong wines, hippocras, pigment, and claret, are served in bright pewter and wood. There were Saxon drinks for the commoner pilgrims; the claret was for the knight. Every one drinks at his will, and the miller, as we shall see, takes a little more than his head can decently carry.
First in the place of honor is the knight, accompanied by his son, the young squire, and his trusty yeoman. Then, in order of social rank, a prioress, a nun and three priests, a friar, a merchant, a poor scholar or clerk of Oxford, a sergeant of the law, a frankelein, a haberdasher, a weaver, a tapster, a dyer, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a poor parson, a ploughman, a miller, a manciple or college steward, a reeve or bailiff, a sompnour or summoner to the ecclesiastical courts, a pardoner or seller of papal indulgences (one hundred and fifty years before Luther)—an essentially English company of many social grades, bound to the most popular shrine, that of a Saxon archbishop, himself the son of a London citizen, murdered two hundred years before with the connivance of an English king. No one can read this list without thinking that if Chaucer be true and accurate in his descriptions of these persons, and make them talk as they did talk, his delineations are of inestimable value historically. He has been faithfully true. Like all great masters of the epic art, he doubtless drew them from the life; each, given in the outlines of the prologue, is a speaking portrait: even the horses they ride are as true to nature as those in the pictures of Rosa Bonheur.
And besides these historic delineations which mark the age and country, notwithstanding the loss of local and personal satire with which, to the reader of his day, the poem must have sparkled, and which time has destroyed for us, the features of our common humanity are so well portrayed, that to the latest generations will be there displayed the "forth-showing instances" of the Idola Tribus of Bacon, the besetting sins, frailties, and oddities of the human race.
Satire.—His touches of satire and irony are as light as the hits of an accomplished master of the small-sword; mere hits, but significant of deep thrusts, at the scandals, abuses, and oppressions of the age. Like Dickens, he employed his fiction in the way of reform, and helped to effect it.
Let us illustrate. While sitting at the table, Chaucer makes his sketches for the Prologue. A few of these will serve here as specimens of his powers. Take the Doctour of Physike who
Knew the cause of every maladie,
Were it of cold or hote or wet or drie;
who also knew
... the old Esculapius,
And Dioscorides and eke Rufus,
Old Hippocras, Rasis, and Avicen,
and many other classic authorities in medicine.