Jonty Claypole

He is interested in the hurdy-gurdy, the melee, the mix of social classes.

He throws us straight into the city of London and he brings together a completely disparate group of people.

Of his pilgrims, we have people very high up the social strata, like the knight, right down to a ploughman, an illiterate workman.

So he's interested in challenging social hierarchies and challenging the class system.

As the narrator, he's very cunning.

He says at one point in the general prologue, I should list everyone in order of social rank, but I

I'm not very smart and I can't keep it all in my head.

So I'm just going to have to get it out.

So he's trying to give reasons why he's breaking these social laws.

He's also not interested in a uniting theme.

He's not interested in anything so decorative as today's theme as this.

He loves the idea that his tales are going to swing as they do from tragic pathos and poetry to the bawdy and everyday.

And the pilgrims, as the Canterbury Tales go on, are constantly grabbing the mic off each other.

So, you know, enough, enough.

That story's, you know, I don't want to hear any more about these posh people.

I'm going to tell her.

And so he's innately multi-genre, as we might say today.

And Peter Aykroyd, many years ago, did a book called Albion about the English imagination and talked about Chaucer defining the mongrel spirit of the English imagination, this crossbreeding.

And I think it's sort of true.

So he's interested Chaucer in a way that Boccaccio isn't, in an aesthetic crossbreeding, in a diversity of people and backgrounds.