tapestry-worker; 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