Sophie Gee

I speak in Franglais, in fake French, and I love all animals.

And this week, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.

No, they'd have to do a retitle these days.

So the Canterbury Tales are fiction.

They're the imaginary story of a religious pilgrimage that sets out from a pub in London, the Tabard Inn in Southwark, to be exact, and ends in Canterbury Cathedral.

At the beginning of the story, the pilgrims who are going on the trip meet up in this pub and the innkeeper, whose name is Harry Bailey, says that they're going to occupy themselves on the long walk ahead with a storytelling competition.

That's where Got Talent comes in.

Each pilgrim is going to tell two stories on the way out and two on the way back.

And at the end, he, Harry Bailey, is going to decide whose story was the best.

When Chaucer wrote these poems, no one had written anything remotely like it before.

The idea that you could just write down the stories that people tell when they've been drinking all night at the pub caused a literary revolution.

And that's what we're talking about today.

When Chaucer wrote the tales in the 1380s and 90s, he was also doing something radical by writing in English.

Since the Norman or French conquests of Britain in 1066, anyone who knows their British history dates will instantly recognise that one, the daily language of courts and parliaments and most diplomatic, i.e.

international, communication was in French.

The particular version of French used in England was Anglo-Norman, and as a spoken and written language, it had gradually replaced Old Norse and the Anglo-Saxon dialects that we heard about in our episode on Beowulf, which was written in the late 10th century.

And at the same time, Latin became the language of record keeping and was used in almost all official written documents during Chaucer's day.

But all over Britain, ordinary people were speaking versions of English.

So there was a class division between the court and the church and those who wielded power and the words spoken on a daily basis by most ordinary people.

Chaucer weighed in and closed that division by writing the Canterbury Tales.