Geoffrey Chaucer: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (April Showers)

Geoffrey Chaucer was the author of the Canterbury Tales, which is an anthology of 24 short stories that are supposedly being told by people who are traveling from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  The Canterbury Tales were mostly in verse and were written in Middle English. They were enormously popular at the time and may have had the effect of promoting the use of the (Middle) English vernacular (as opposed to Latin or French) among English writers.

No manuscripts in Chaucer’s own hand exist, and there is disagreement about the order of the stories within the collection. The late Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) was a Chaucer scholar and wrote a book that suggested that Chaucer might have been murdered because he was close to King Richard II (Who murdered Chaucer? : a medieval mystery)

Here’s a copy of the text of The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue | The Poetry Foundation.

Here’s audio of how the prologue probably sounded in Middle English: The Canterbury Tales Prologue in Middle English

Here’s a video summary of the General Prologue: The Canterbury Tales – General Prologue Video Summary