The Canterbury Tales is more than a collection of stories, many of them taken from popular folk tales or existing stories in other languages.

Authors Avatar

The Canterbury Tales is more than a collection of stories, many of them taken from popular folk tales or existing stories in other languages. It is a picture of life in England in the fourteenth century. The three main levels of society at the time are represented in the stories – knights, the clergy and the common people. In addition, the professional classes and the merchant class have their representatives. The tales are the social comment of the highest order. Chaucer is cynical about many aspects of society but none more so than the church. He shows in several stories the corruption of organised religion at the time and portrays the highest members of the church as pleasure loving and wealthy, in contrast to the most basic tenets of abstinence and poverty espoused officially by the church.

An analysis of the tales for elements of anti-clericalism as responses to the prevailing political, social, and religious setting requires some basic historical knowledge about Late Middle Age conditions in England, as well as the belief that literature in general reflects the historical conditions under which it is written because a piece of literature cannot be fully understood without such historical knowledge.

In the years before the Reformation, members of the Catholic clergy were notorious for their immoral acts. The abuses of clerical power and privileges by the medieval clergy permeated all parts of their daily lives. Members of the Catholic clergy were financially, politically and socially corrupt. Each of these corruptions made up the enormous religious corruption that was the logical result of such debauchery.

For a common man there were the routine church services, held daily and attended at least once a week, and the special festivals of Christmas, Easter, baptisms, and marriages. In that respect the medieval Church was no different to the modern one. There also were the tithes that the Church collected, usually once a year. Tithes were used to feed the parish priest, maintain the church and to help the poor. The Church fulfilled the functions of a “civil service” and an education system (Davies 440). The Church was in control of literacy and literary production at the time of Chaucer's life and writing, and that women were generally excluded from these activities. For boys, early learning took place at home or in the hands of the village priest. Higher learning occurred at Church-supported schools whose content was initially geared toward the training of clergy. Most of the texts studied were in Latin or Greek and were hence inaccessible to the vast majority of peasants and tradesmen. Many texts, especially histories, had been written by monks or other clerics who consequently interpreted events in favor of the Church's, or the ruling class's, perspective.

Join now!

The clergy was notorious for sucking money out of the people any way they could. The wealth of the Church can be compared to the wealth of a whole nation at that time. What made the matters worse was that the Church was not using the skimmed money for legitimate purposes. It was unashamedly obvious that the money ended up in the clergy’s own pocket.

The immorality of the Church was so exposed that it was even reflected in the literature of the period, of which Canterbury Tales are an example.

It was into this clerical atmosphere that Chaucer ...

This is a preview of the whole essay