No story is an island. Chaucer doesn’t provide us with an omnibus of unconnected pilgrim’s tales. In his telling of their imagined telling, he describes how the stories are listened to and received, heard in a context, and are questioned and countered and called out.

The Canterbury Tales vary stylistically, and by genre, and are in robust dialogue with each other. They draw on the vernacular, on scholarship, on jokes and on European sources, the latter of which may or may not be known to their imagined auditors and actual readers. This canonical sequence of tales is in fact a contestation, structuring the pecking order of its performers, and undermining it at the same time.

The bawdy and hilarious Miller’s Tale, in which a husband is cuckolded and the seducer gets his comeuppance from a rival, is a wonderfully improbable deceit in which the husband is persuaded into a barrel suspended in the loft, while buttocks are bared at dark windows. It is a searing rebuttal of the idea of aristocratic chivalry, the subject of the opening tale told by a questionable Knight, who is put firmly in his place, namely knocked from it. There’s little the reader can rely on. Having concluded his story, the miller is then humiliated in the Reeve’s tale, from which courtly love and extramarital affection are pointedly absent. Meanings and values are highly unstable and nobody’s safe in their saddle.

The Canterbury Tales have no particular direction of travel, whatever the title suggests. The convoy fails to reach its destination. Far from providing a solid foundation for a national literature, this unfinished collection, and the apology from Chaucer which accompanies it, is a sloping and slippery platform of hazard for readers and writers. And that’s been a good thing. We must think on our toes or our arses expose.

First circulated as handwritten manuscripts from 1380, first printed in 1476 by William Caxton, and available to read here