Jonty Claypole

And the other thing he brings in is the competitive element.

The young people under the Cameron would never do anything as tawdry and indecorous as have a competition about their tails.

Whereas Chaucer's like, no, he's got a sort of John Ball aggressiveness.

He said, this is a race.

We're going to see who does it best.

So the knight is described first, and he then goes on to give these thumbnail sketches, although some thumbnails are larger than others, of the other 28 pilgrims.

And we're not going to go into each of them.

We'll just pull out a few of the greatest hits.

We get a whole group of religious characters, and these are the characters who have jobs associated with the church, which you have to kind of look up what they are.

A summoner, a pardoner, the reeve, and...

I think one of the things that comes across is we are in a very different world.

We are in the world of Catholic England in a way that no other literature, you know, much beyond this point does.

And one of the things Chaucer is often doing is questioning, you know, where holiness lies.

How many of these characters with their salaried religious jobs or their stipends or their little money spinners are people of integrity?

He's constantly probing it.

And I think it's fair to say that the pardoner is one of the ones who comes off comes off worst of all, doesn't he?

It's a terrible job being a pardoner.

Essentially, what you're doing is you take money generally from from poor people and you pardon their sins.

It's a scam.

And it's also a huge industry.