as a gallant yellow-haired boy he had faced Wat Tyler and his
rioters, till as a worn and broken prisoner he yielded the crown
to Henry of Lancaster, the son of John of Gaunt. But before the
broken King died in his darksome prison Chaucer lay taking his
last rest in St. Benet's Chapel in Westminster. He was the first
great poet to be laid there, but since then there have gathered
round him so many bearing the greatest names in English
literature that we call it now the "Poet's Corner."

But although Chaucer lived in stirring times, although he was a
soldier and a courtier, he does not, in the book by which we know
him best, write of battles and of pomp, of kings and of princes.
In this book we find plain, everyday people, people of the great
middle class of merchants and tradesmen and others of like
calling, to which Chaucer himself belonged. It was a class which
year by year had been growing more and more strong in England,
and which year by year had been making its strength more and more
felt. But it was a class which no one had thought of writing
about in plain fashion. And it is in the Canterbury Tales that
we have, for the first time in the English language, pictures of
real men, and what is more wonderful, of real women. They are
not giants or dwarfs, they are not fairy princes or knights in
shining armor. They do no wondrous deeds of strength or skill.
They are not queens of marvelous beauty or enchanted princesses.
They are simply plain, middle-class English people, and yet they
are very interesting.

In Chaucer's time, books, although still copied by hand, had
become more plentiful than ever before. And as more and more
people learned to read, the singing time began to draw to a