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Introduction
The middle Ages was a period in European history where religious beliefs, jobs, and money separated individuals. During this time, a class system began to emerge. The middle class emerged, a social group between the working and upper class, including professionals, business employees, and their households. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a medieval composition comprising twenty-four short stories touching on themes such as pride and marriage. Love, religion, and death. In written work, many authors can portray economic and societal transformation through novels, tales, and poems. The medieval community was harsh for its hierarchical organization because of the feudal system and harsh estate sections, including the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. Moreover, Middle age individuals guided by religion presumed that a supreme being directed those divisions in the community for the prosperity of the society. Chaucer describes the utility and variety of the working class through the information of diverse characters and by underpinning the education values of the middle class. The paper aims to positively depict the rise of Medieval England’s middle class in positive perception by uniting all the groupings together during the pilgrimage.
The medieval period is renowned for its notorious estate groupings, mainly the commoners, nobility, and the church, which set out the identity borders of medieval people. The responsibilities of the clergy were to pray for the entire community, while the nobility was responsible for protecting the nobility and the clergy (Yıldız, 2022). Similarly, the peasants were supposed to labor and provide food for the noble class and the clergy. The system of the three estates was per the feudal structure. The snow chain joined medieval individuals and recommended that everybody acknowledge the estate they were affiliated with as God doomed them. The entire community would function best if individuals behaved well in their respective estates.
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer as a Portrait of the Rising Middle Class in the Middle Ages
The dramatic financial, governmental, and societal changes of the 14th century devastated the unbending system of feudalism. Those reforms generated the warnings of the feudal realm and far-reaching upward mobility, slowly creating the middle classes comprising social climbers of common origin (Yıldız, 2022). Individuals living in the Medieval period could not own a recognizable ground in the feudal system. As a result, they strived to look for a recognizable identity on the frontiers of the three territories (Yıldız, 2022). These included the Black Death, the Hundred Years of War between France and England, and the 1381 Peasant revolt, which weakened feudalism (Yıldız, 2022). The powers of the estates were damaged by the 14th century owing to the social transformations attributable to the time’s political, economic, and social environment.
The gaps among the residents of the estates were perverted due to the upward mobility of the peasants, forming a middle class whose representatives would only be partially included in each of the three estates. That means that the Medieval community created other groups within itself rather than the Jews and the Saracens, who were primarily considered monstrous others. The Black Death struck England, killing 30 – 40 percent of the working-class individuals and putting the remaining ones in great demand (Silvia, 2019). England’s urbanization increased its population from eighteen thousand to forty-five thousand residents (Silvia, 2019). That implies that peasants, artisans, and merchants took advantage of the situation and benefited a lot. Bit by bit, the conflict among the territories started to become blurred. It was unavoidable to witness the emergence of the working class; the individuals in the three estates were aware of the thinkers and authors of the time.
In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer reflects on these changes in his literary works and shows how he supports them. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales depicts the emergence of the working class during the Dark Ages through the utilization of tales’ characters, their vernacular, tone, and actions (Swanson, 2019). The poem lays the foundation for a more thorough understanding of the classes and feudalism in the Dark Ages. Most of the characters in Chaucer’s literary works fit into the various jobs and molds that would make them part of the working class.
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer are vastly acknowledged as a matchless depiction of the English community, particularly in the fourteenth century. It delineates the borderline members of the society as the products of the social transformation and upward movement of the medieval moments, which gave rise to the middle class. The tales depict the pressure of the late 14th-century community between the three estates and feudalism, as the old and new order between the middle-grouping and emerging capitalism (Swanson, 2019). In his collection of stories, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays the emergence of the working class in middle-age England in a positive appraisal by uniting the nobility, clergy, and commoners (Swanson, 2019). That is also demonstrated by emphasizing the levels of training for the middle class and by identifying the inclusivity and utility of the middle grouping through the information on diverse responsibilities.
The poet Chaucer utilized a form of well-educated, significant middle-grouping characters to portray their growth positively by establishing these different responsibilities in support of the pilgrims. The story The Canterbufrom all social groups would join hands on general works during the dark agesry Tales shows that the Middle Ages were productive, vibrant, and of solid experience (Silvia, 2019). It also maintains that individuals from all social groups would join hands on general works during the dark ages. According to Chaucer, the strict separation of the world into three estates started to fall in late 14th century England, and by his time, there was a rise of the middle grouping (Silvia, 2019). The poet is highly conscious of the cultural divisions of the three estates. The general introduction of the poem is a demonstration of irony between estates.
The use of vernacular instead of Latin by Chaucer helps the reader better understand the rise of the middle class because this language was commonly used. In addition, his constant use of characters in the middle class, including lawyer, miller, cook, physician, and clerk, reflects the emergence of the middle class (Swanson, 2019). An analysis of The Canterbury Tales’ characters informs more about the social-economic classes of the time. the characters in The Canterbury Tales tellsFor instance, the established upper class is well depicted by the character Knight and his companion. The London guildsmen and the wealthy Merchant also stand for the growingly confident and privileged classes that thrived in European cities in the late medieval period.
Another illustration of this is the Oxford Cleric, a middle-class learner of philosophy. The character is full of knowledge and virtue and very intellectual. He is an ideal and perfect example of a student of logic and philosophy (Stavsky, 2020). The many collections of the poem are penned in styles that conform to the characters of Chaucer. The Knight represents a historic romance penned in a beautiful rhythmed couplet. Both the style and genre account for the fact that the character is literate and a little archaic. While the Knighthood groupings were yet crucial in medieval England, their belief in prosperity and authority was not exclusive to older generations.
The Man of Law’s Tale
The story “The Man of Law’s Tale” starts with a Saracen prince becoming enamored with Custance, the daughter of the Rome Emperor and a fair Christian maiden. Custance is married to the sultan when he vows to become a Christian (Stavsky, 2020). Even though deeply sad about the marriage, Custance assents to the match, and the princess’ mother, angry over her son’s disloyalty to their religion, promises to avenge and protect their faith. The son comes to Syria, and bridal ceremonies begin, culminating in a lavish dinner at the Sultaness’ castle (Stavsky, 2020). Once the visitors are congregated, Custance’s mother commands all Christians, including her son and proselytes be murdered. This story marks Chaucer’s sole textual confrontation with the most potent religious rival of Christianity, Islam (Stavsky, 2020). It is, therefore, indelibly connected to the crusading and has garnered significant critical attention. The theme of conversion, crusaders, and killing feature distinctly in crusade mysteries, becoming a solution and response to local disputes.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The Canterbury Tales serves as a virtuous manual of the dark ages since, in the multiple stories, Chaucer demonstrates the troubles of this world. For instance, Chaucer uses the Friar and the religion to demonstrate what the religious institutions are doing and what they should be doing (Villarreal, 2019). Contextualizing these stories in terms, the storyteller valorized his retraction; the story depicts analogs among Hilton, Kempe, Rolle, Cloud-author, and Julian as the five essential centers of England mystics. Chaucer uses the Friar and the religion to demonstrate what the religious institutions are doing and what they should be doing (Villarreal, 2019). In the narrative, “Gap-toothed Wide of Bath,” the gap between the front teeth in women signified lustful characteristics during this time. Though there is no scientific proof, it has been common thinking in folklore since the Middle Ages that an insatiable lust characterized middle-aged women. With the dominant medieval discourses on sex, pervasive competition, and fragile control, Chaucer further appraises masculine stereotypes in the frame story of the heroic discourse (Villarreal, 2019). The poet protects marriage against spiritual beliefs that hold it inferior to abstinence.
Conclusion
The Canterbury Tales is considered the most outstanding modern image of life during the 14th century and is a better insight into the human world. Within the stories, the author utilized the descriptions of characters to build a comic and crucial image of the English community, particularly the church during the Middle Ages. Regardless of the social transformations in the fourteenth century, the Middle Ages community was yet a society of inferiors and superiors where there was no accepted place for the intermediates in the established identifications. Chaucer employed a diversity of valuable, middle-class, and knowledgeable characters to demonstrate their emergence constructively by showing these different characters beneficial to the rest of the pilgrimage. While the author narrated a rise in the medieval class power and authority in his story’s characters, the tales were practical in that they mirrored how medieval England was experiencing transformations.
References
Silvia, D. S. (2019). Some fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. In B. Rowland (Ed.), Chaucer and Middle English Studies (pp. 153-163). Routledge.
Stavsky, J. (2020). Translating the Near East in the Man of law’s tale and its analogues. The Chaucer Review, 55(1), 32-54. Web.
Swanson, R. (2019). Social structures. A New Companion to Chaucer, 435-449. Web.
Villarreal, A. (2019). Canterbury tales: The wife of bath’s prologue and tale. An Open Companion to Early British Literature.
Yıldız, N. (2022). The medieval borderline identities: The guildsmen in history and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 10(19), 83-97.
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