Sophie Gee

So pricketh him, natur, in hir karajas.

What he's basically saying is,

Chaucer, by the way, finds the idea of birds having sex unbelievably funny.

There's a whole Canterbury tale that is about it called The Nun's Priest's Tale, where we hear about how the hero bird feathers or has sex with his wife 20 times in one night.

So this is one of Chaucer's favourite jokes.

But basically what we're learning about in this opening sentence is nothing about religious pilgrimage.

It's that people have been having a desperate, dreary, terrible time all winter in England, and not just all winter, but as we're about to find out, for approximately the last decade of kind of political and social turmoil.

It's spring, they're at the pub, they're having a few drinks, they're feeling lusty and full of vigour, and they're going to go off on this quote-unquote pilgrimage because they're frankly feeling unbelievably frisky.

I think this starts to...

unfold some of what is so unbelievably incredible about Chaucer.

And so for anyone listening to this who hasn't ever actually looked at the physical appearance of the physical words of Middle English and that opening sentence, I really encourage you, we'll drop a link in the notes so you can do it, to just have a look at what the text looks like, because we see this world opening up that's so alive and

and so full of human drama, so full of human life, even though it has nothing to do with the ostensible topic of the poem.

Yeah, 24 shops, apparently.

Love that.

I love the sort of excitement of Chaucer having a documentary past.

Oh, boy, am I enjoying myself today.

Yeah.

And so a couple of quick things.

The king at the beginning of Chaucer's life is Edward III.

He is a Plantagenet.