Geoffery Chaucer's Canterbury tales

The First Road trip

In Geoffry Chaucer's Canterbury Tales a group of ten or so individuals make a pilgrimage form London to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the relics of a saint buried there. In his tale Chaucer brings together a wide range of classes with a wide variety of problems, quirks, and opinions. Many of these characters need not be based on actual people of Chaucer's time "because most of them had long inhabited literature"(218). He could take and established trait in a character and expand upon it and develop them more fully. The Character of the Wife of Bath becomes a blending of the "lady","the witch/temptress", and "the virgin", making her appear more like a human being than a flat one dimensional caricature. Many of Chaucer's religious character's also display the flaws of everyday human beings, and make a statement about the hypocrisy of the church.
When Chaucer is making his comments about medieval society's appearance of hierarchy, when in reality Chaucer's family belonged to the budding middle class. His father was a successful wine merchant who could afford to give his son opportunities he himself could not have had. The social "gap between the commoners and the aristocracy would...have been bridged by Chaucer's family in the course of three generations".(214).