1 It takes place in spring.
2 The awakening of nature, which is paralleled by people’s spiritual awakening.
3 The narrator is in Southwark, at The Tabard Inn. He is going on pilgrimage to Canterbury.
4 He meets twenty- nine other pilgrims there.
5 They are going to ride to Canterbury.
6 He decides to join them because both he and the pilgrims are going to the same destination and because he has socialized with them.
7 His final intention is to describe all the pilgrims, focussing on their social
condition, their clothes and their profession. He decides
to start with the description of a knight.
2
1 April 2 showers / rains 3 sweet 4 birds 5 twenty-nine
6 inn 7 classes 8 Canterbury 9 friends 10 condition /
status 11 clothes 12 profession
3
1 b 2 d 3 a 4 c
4
The narrator: Chaucer himself, who initially speaks using the first person singular, and then the first person plural when he becomes one of the pilgrims. He is initially alone at the Tabard Inn, intending to go to Canterbury to venerate Thomas Becket’s tomb. When the group of twenty-nine pilgrims arrives at the same inn, he meets them and soon becomes their friend, which reveals his lively personality. His interest in narrating is emphasized at the end of the Prologue, when he declares his intention to describe each of the pilgrims in detail.
The pilgrims: at first Chaucer focuses on pilgrims in general, that is, he speaks of those people coming from all parts of England who go to Canterbury to celebrate Becket. They include the Palmers, those pilgrims who have already visited Jerusalem, and carry a palm leaf in remembrance of that. Secondly, Chaucer focuses on the pilgrims he meets at the inn. There are twenty-nine ofthem, and they are ‘sundry’, meaning they come from different areas of the nation and from different social classes, too. This adjective also seems to imply that among the pilgrims there are different genders: men and women.
They are all friends with one another, regardless of their social, economic and cultural differences – which denotes
how modern Chaucer’s England may actually have been.