chivalric romance The principal kind of romance found in medieval Europe from the 12th century

onwards, describing (usually in verse) the adventures of legendary knights, and celebrating an
idealized code of civilized behaviour that combines loyalty, honour, and courtly love.
allegory a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human
life or for a political or historical situation
ballad a kind of poem or song that tells a story (such as a story about a famous person from
history), a narrative composition in rhythmic verse suitable for singing
Breton lay poetic form so called because Breton professional storytellers supposedly recited
similar poems, though none are extant. A short, rhymed romance recounting a love story, it
includes supernatural elements, mythology transformed by medieval chivalry, and the Celtic
idea of faerie, the land of enchantment.
fablia - a short, usually comic, frankly coarse, and often cynical tale in verse popular
especially in the 12th and 13th centuries
folk tale - a story that parents have passed on to their children through speech over many
years
legenda nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition fromearlier times and popularl
y accepted as historical.

at the Tabard Inn, just south of London, the poet-pilgrim falls in with a group of twenty nine
other pilgrims who have met each other along the way.
The Knight is the person of highest social standing on the pilgrimage though you would never know
it from his modest manner or his clothes.
The Knight's 20-year-old son is a striking contrast to his father. True, he has seen some military
action, but it was to impress his lady not his Lord God. Unlike his parent, he is fashionably dressed.
The Prioress is the head of a fashionable convent( ). a gold brooch on her
rosary embossed with the nicely ambiguous Latin motto:Amor Vincit Omnia, Love conquers all.
Another member of the church is the Monk who, like the Prioress, is supposed to stay in his
monastery but who, like her, finds an excuse to get away from it, something he does a lot. He has
long since lost any of the monastic ideals he may have set out with, and he now prefers travel, good
clothes, good food, good hunting with well-equipped horses, in place of the poverty, study and
manual labor prescribed by his monastic rule. He may not be a bad man, but he is not a good
monk.
The Friar, another cleric, is even less a man of God than the Monk. A member of a mendicant
order of men who lived on what they could get by begging, he has become a professional fundraiser,
He can find good economic reasons to cultivate the company of the rich rather than the poor.
The Clerk is the first admirable church member we meet on the pilgrimage. "Clerk" meant
a number of related things: a cleric, a student, a scholar. This clerk is all three, devoted to
the love of learning and of God, the quintessential scholar, who would rather buy a book
than a coat or a good meal, totally unworldly.
The Sergeant of the Law is a successful but unostentatious, high-ranking lawyer who sometimes
functions as a judge. We are told with just a touch of irony, that he is, like many of the pilgrims,
the very best at what he does, a busy man, but "yet he seemd busier than he was."
In the Wife of Bath we have one of only three women on the pilgrimage. Unlike the other
two she is not a nun, but a much-married woman, a widow yet again. Everything about her
is large to the point of exaggeration: she has been married five times, has been to Jerusalem
three times and her hat and hips are as large as her sexual appetite and her love of talk.
The second good cleric we meet is more than good; he is near perfection. The priest of a small,
obscure and poor parish in the country. He has not forgotten the lowly class from which he came.
Unlike most of the other pilgrims, he is not physically described, perhaps because he is
such an ideal figure.
His brother, the Plowman, probably the lowest in social rank on the pilgrimage is one of the
highest in spirituality, the perfect lay Christian, the secular counterpart of his cleric brother.