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From the Tabard Inn to Canterbury
Melvyn Bragg
travels to the great mediaeval cathedral of Canterbury, with
its shrine to the martyr, St Thomas 脿 Becket. It inspired the
pilgrims described by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1395 in The Canterbury
Tales, as they set out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark. Chaucer
decided to write in English, which was beginning to take over
from the Norman French of court and government and the Latin
of church and learning.
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Chaucer
- the champion of English
The fact that
Chaucer wrote in English (now referred to as Middle English),
rather than French or Latin like many of his fellow writers,
meant that ordinary folk could enjoy the Canterbury Tales and
their vivid characters - among them the sexy Wife of Bath with
her five husbands, the snobbish Prioress and the cynical Pardoner.
Chaucer captured the vividness, humour, bawdiness and poetry
of spoken English. That is what makes his Tales so irresistible,
according to Terry Jones, ex Python and children's writer.
The
Canterbury Tales
The late fourteenth
century world was still very much one of the spoken word. Books
were copied out by hand and were a rare luxury till the advent
of the printing press 70 years later. The educated elite could
read, but they preferred to hear texts read out loud for entertainment.
The Canterbury Tales, with their earthy humour and and vivid
dialogue, were a runaway success. Although they sound just like
ordinary people talking, the Tales are in fact a complex work
of literature - a long poem with rhymes as Dr Ruth Evans of
Cardiff University emphasised
Chaucer's
dialects
In Chaucer's
time, English still had marked regional differences. He wrote
in the East Midlands dialect (covering London, Oxford and Cambridge),
the most influential in forming Modern English. But he knew
the Northern dialect too and it is spoken by the two northern
clerks in the Reeve's Tale. Martin Starkie, of the Chaucer Centre
in Canterbury, illustrates this with a reading from Neville
Coghill's translation of the Canterbury Tales into modern English.
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