What Role Does The Squire Play In Canterbury Tales

Regardless of era, travel has always been a key theme, or plot driver, throughout much of the world’s literature. Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is no exception. In the General Prologue, Chaucer uses the travelling history of some of the key pilgrims on the pilgrimage to characterize the pilgrims and help the audience understand more about the character, simply through grasping their experiences in different places throughout their lives. The noble Knight, whose crusades from Prussia to Morrocco (and near everywhere in between), had shaped him into the very “worthy” aristocrat that Chaucer describes him as is heavily reliant on his travels to describe his character. The Squire had also travelled to many foreign

However, it is an amalgamation of the places where the Squire has travelled in his short life, with the apparent motives for his battles abroad, which imply that Chaucer intends the Knight to contrast to his righteous father. But how can a man who can ride his horse with such prowess, and is even accomplished in noble arts such as “floytynge” (playing the flute), be seen negatively compared to his father? It begins with the theory that, due to his lack of experience of different times and places throughout the world, that the Squire is verging on immature. The the Knight is told to have fought in at least 15 different crusades throughout Europe during his Knighthood, making him a very “wys” (wise) soldier, who fought only for his religion, and no monetary or ulterior motive. Contrasting to this, it is indicated that the Squire fought in the army for his country, during the Hundred Years War, but his real drive is unlikely to have been doing his “lordes werre”. Instead, Chaucer says that the Squire’s travels through France and Holland were to “stonden in his lady grace”, in essence, to woo a women whom he fancied. From this we can draw the conclusion that while the Squire is already a very skilled warrior, he still has a great deal to learn before his character matures, and he becomes more worthy of the title of a noble Knight. The variance between the travels of the

Were it not for the concept of the pilgrimage, this large and extremely varied group of people would never have had an opportunity in society to properly interact. Therefore, it is the concept of the travel itself that allowed the narrator to meet every pilgrim he describes in the General Prologue. The spiritual and physical journey that the pilgrims embark on is the idyllic setting for the tale-telling competition, which is eventually how the full characterisation of the pilgrims occurs throughout the