Jonty Claypole

OK, so Chaucer's rooting us in the real world.

He was a sort of London celebrity, a larger than I figure.

He owns the Tabard Inn.

He was an MP.

You get the impression he's got a bit of this sort of Reggie Cray about him as well.

He's probably a bit of a local gangster, too.

And actually, there's been an amazing piece of scholarship done, which has shown that when the infamous poll tax was being recorded in 1381, the one that caused the peasants' revolt, Harry Bailey, because he was the MP in the area, was collecting the taxes for Southwark, or at least overseeing it.

And his name is on documents that list the names of the people who have paid or haven't paid, and their professions.

are written beside it.

And those professions are written in English.

So it's part of this shift to English in legal documents.

But also the implication is that the general prologue itself is a sort of joke and a nod and a wink about the poll tax itself.

Because what he does, the narrator is he's listing people, he's listing their professions, but then he's showing how people are much more than a list, that characters break away from their boundaries.

They have inner lives and they can't be contained by a legal document.

Harry is the one who says, OK, well, you're not going to head off to Canterbury and you're all going to tell two tales and it's a competition.

To round off this section, I just want to say something about Southwark and Canterbury and why they're significant.

So why does Chaucer root this book in Southwark?

And one of the reasons why is that Southwark is not only a very multicultural centre in what has become a very multicultural city, it also sits outside the jurisdiction of the City of London.

It's south of the river.

It's not controlled by the laws of the City of London.