8. Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales.'—A combination between the great nobles and the higher clergy might, at the end of the fourteenth century, meet with temporary success; but English society was too diversified, and each separate portion of it was too closely linked to the other to make it possible for the higher classes to tyrannise over the others for any long time. What that society was like is best seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was in many ways the exact opposite of Langland, and was the precursor of modern literature as Wycliffe was the precursor of modern religion. He was an inimitable story-teller, with an eye which nothing could escape. He was ready to take men as he found them, having no yearning for the purification of a sinful world. Heroic examples of manly constancy and of womanly purity and devotion, are mingled in his pages with coarse and ribald tales; still, coarse and ribald as some of his narratives are, Chaucer never attempts to make vice attractive. He takes it rather as a matter of course, calling, not for reproof, but for laughter, whenever those who are doing evil place themselves in ridiculous situations.
A gentleman riding out with his hawk: from the Luttrell Psalter.
9. The Prologue of the 'Canterbury Tales.'—Whilst, however, there is not one of the Canterbury Tales which fails to bring vividly before the reader one aspect or another of the life of Chaucer's day, it is in the prologue that is especially found evidence of the close connection which existed between different ranks of society. Men and women of various classes are there represented as riding together on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and beguiling the way by telling stories to one another. No baron, indeed, takes part in the pilgrimage, and the villein class is represented by the reeve, who was himself a person in authority, the mere cultivator of the soil being excluded. Yet, within these limits, the whole circle of society is admirably represented. The knight, just returned from deeds of chivalry, is on the best of terms with the rough-spoken miller and the reeve, whilst the clerk of Oxford, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, and who followed in his own life those precepts which he commended to his parishioners, has no irreconcilable quarrel with the begging friar or with the official of the ecclesiastical courts, whose only object is to make a gain of godliness.
10. Chaucer and the Clergy.—In his representation of the clergy, Chaucer shows that, like Langland, he had no reverence for the merely official clergy. His "poor parson of a town," indeed, is a model for all helpers and teachers. The parson is regardless of his own comfort, ever ready to toil with mind and body for his parishioners, and, above all, resolved to set them an example, knowing
That if gold ruste, what schulde yren doo?
For if a prest be foul, on whom we truste,
No wondur is a lewid man to ruste.[23]
The final character given to him is:—