Preview: Section 1

Spring’s renewal stirs people toward pilgrimage, and the narrator joins a varied company at the Tabard inn before the ride to Canterbury. He pauses the journey to describe the pilgrims as they appear to him, beginning with three connected by a noble household and by service in war or woodland.

Lists of places, accomplishments, clothes, and equipment become portraits. The verse balances an ideal of honorable conduct against lively physical detail, while unfamiliar Middle English forms and Purves’s inserted glosses can make a sentence look denser than its underlying action.