s
of the Canterbury Pilgrims" portrayed characters of every social
class, including the knight with his squire, abbot, prioress, nun,
priest, monk, friar, poor parson of the country, summoner (who
enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of the church
courts), pardoner (sold pardons from the pope), scholar, attorney,
doctor, merchant, sailor, franklin, yeoman, haberdasher, tapestry-
maker, ploughman, cook, weaver, dyer, upholsterer, miller, reeve,
carpenter.

There were Chaucer stories about a beautiful and virtuous wife
disliked by her mother-in-law, the difficulty of marriage between
people of different religions, the hatred of a poor person by his
brother and his neighbor, rich merchants who visited other
kingdoms, the importance of a man himself following the rules he
sets for other people's behavior, the spite of a man for a woman
who rejected him, the relative lack of enthusiasm of a wife for
sex as compared to her husband, a mother giving up her own comfort
for that of her child, the revenge killing of a murderer by the
dead man's friends, the joy of seeing a loved one after years of
separation, that life is more sad than happy, that lost money can
be retrieved, but time lost is lost forever.

Other stories in the Canterbury Tales were about two men who did
not remain friends after they fell in love with the same woman,
about a child who preferred to learn from an older child than from
his schoolteacher, about a wife who convinced her husband not to
avenge her beating for the sake of peace, about a man who woke up
from bad dreams full of fear, about a man wanting to marry a
beautiful woman but later realizing a plain wife would not be
pursued by other men, about a man who drank so much wine that he
lost his mental and physical powers, about a woman who married for
money instead of love, about a man who said something in
frustration which he didn't mean, about a person brought up in
poverty who endured adversity better than one brought up in
wealth, about a wife who was loving and wise, about a good
marriage being more valuable than money, about a virgin who
committed suicide rather than be raped, about a wife persuaded to
adultery by a man who said he would otherwise kill himself, about
three men who found a pile of gold and murdered each other to take
it all, about an angry man who wanted to kill, about a malicious
man who had joy in seeing other men in trouble and misfortune,
about a man whose face tu