The Knight’s Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

This is the first Canterbury Tale

The knight is one of only three Canterbury pilgrims (the others being the parson and the ploughman) whom Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400) treats without a hint of irony in his General Prologue. Indeed, these three characters are more like nostalgic idealizations of people whom Chaucer greatly admired, but they are figures of a bygone age, much to the writer’s regret.

In the case of the knight, this admiration is no great surprise, because Chaucer himself was in royal service for most of his life, although his duties were more to do with diplomacy (perhaps even espionage) than fighting. However, he would have mixed with and known the knightly class at first hand, and had no reason to disparage the men who defended the monarchy of which he himself was such a devoted servant.

The medieval knight developed into the gentleman, and it is no accident that the word “courteous” has the same root as “courtly”, and that the royal court was peopled by knights who maintained, for example, the tradition of “courtly love” by which women were admired from afar and received tokens of love and pledges to defend their honour, even if they gave no sign of returning the affection.

There is no prologue to the Knight’s Tale, unless one counts the last few lines of the…