the cook, to boil the chickens and the marrow-bones, and bake the pies
and tarts,--mostly people from the middle and lower ranks of society,
whose clothes are gaudy, manners rough, and language coarse. But all
classes and trades and professions seem to be represented, except
nobles, bishops, and abbots,--dignitaries whom, perhaps, Chaucer is
reluctant to describe and caricature.

To beguile the time on the journey to Canterbury, all these various
pilgrims are required to tell some story peculiar to their separate
walks of life; and it is these stories which afford the best description
we have of the manners and customs of the fourteenth century, as well as
of its leading sentiments and ideas.

The knight was required to tell his story first, and it naturally was
one of love and adventure. Although the scene of it was laid in ancient
Greece, it delineates the institution of chivalry and the manners and
sentiments it produced. No writer of that age, except perhaps Froissart,
paints the connection of chivalry with the graces of the soul and the
moral beauty which poetry associates with the female sex as Chaucer
does. The aristocratic woman of chivalry, while delighting in martial
sports, and hence masculine and haughty, is also condescending, tender,
and gracious. The heroic and dignified self-respect with which chivalry
invested woman exalted the passion of love. Allied with reverence for
woman was loyalty to the prince. The rough warrior again becomes a
gentleman, and has access to the best society. Whatever may have been
the degrees of rank, the haughtiest nobleman associated with the
penniless knight, if only he were a gentleman and well born, on terms of
social equality, since chivalry, while it created distinctions, also
levelled those which wealth and power naturally created among the higher
class. Yet chivalry did not exalt woman outside of noble ranks. The