But although Chaucer lived in stirring times, although he was a soldier and a courtier, he does not, in the book by which we know him best, write of battles and of pomp, of kings and of princes.  In this book we find plain, everyday people, people of the great middle class of merchants and tradesmen and others of like calling, to which Chaucer himself belonged.  It was a class which year by year had been growing more and more strong in England, and which year by year had been making its strength more and more felt.  But it was a class which no one had thought of writing about in plain fashion.  And it is in the Canterbury Tales that we have, for the first time in the English language, pictures of real men, and what is more wonderful, of real women.  They are not giants or dwarfs, they are not fairy princes or knights in shining armor.  They do no wondrous deeds of strength or skill.  They are not queens of marvelous beauty or enchanted princesses.  They are simply plain, middle-class English people, and yet they are very interesting.

In Chaucer’s time, books, although still copied by hand, had become more plentiful than ever before.  And as more and more people learned to read, the singing time began to draw to a close.  Stories were now not all written in rhyme, and poetry was not all written to be sung.  Yet the listening time was not quite over, for these were still the days of talk and story-telling.  Life went at leisure pace.  There was no hurry, there was no machinery.  All sewing was done by hand, so when the ladies of a great household gathered to their handiwork, it was no unusual thing for one among them to lighten the long hours with tales read or told.  Houses were badly lighted, and there was little to do indoors in the long winter evenings, so the men gathered together and listened while one among them told of love and battle.  Indeed, through all the life of the Middle Ages there was room for story-telling.

So now, although Chaucer meant his tales to be read, he made believe that they were told by a company of people on a journey from London to Canterbury.  He thus made a framework for them of the life he knew, and gave a reason for them all being told in one book.

But a reason had to be given for the journey, for in those days people did not travel about from place to place for the mere pleasure of seeing another town, as we do now.  Few people thought of going for a change of air, nobody perhaps ever thought about going to the seaside for the summer.  In short, people always had a special object in taking a journey.

One reason for this was that traveling was slow and often dangerous.  The roads were bad, and people nearly all traveled on horseback and in company, for robbers lurked by the way ready to attack and kill, for the sake of their money, any who rode alone and unprotected.  So when a man had to travel he tried to arrange to go in company with others.