Chaucer planned roughly 120 pilgrim stories and stopped at twenty-four
Geoffrey Chaucer sent some 30 fictional pilgrims from London toward Becket's shrine, each supposed to tell four stories. Most scholars think he died with the project unfinished at twenty-four, yet that incomplete contest became a cornerstone of English writing, helping the everyday vernacular win ground from French and Latin.
Chaucer worked on the collection between 1387 and 1400, writing mostly in verse and in a London dialect of late Middle English. The frame is a competition: the innkeeper Harry Bailey introduces the travellers, and the best teller earns a free dinner, much like the English Pui, a singing club whose winner took a crown and a meal. Recent research argues the General Prologue parodies the real Harry Bailey's 1381 poll-tax list of Southwark residents. No earlier author is known to have hung a story collection on a pilgrimage.
Character, not theme, drives the order. The Knight speaks first, hinting that rank will decide who follows, until the Miller barges in and the class ladder collapses into open exchange. Chaucer barely notices the road itself. He borrowed freely: Boccaccio's Decameron offers more parallels than any other work, with a quarter of the tales echoing one of its stories, though most have closer relatives elsewhere, so he may simply have read it, perhaps on his 1372 diplomatic trip to Italy. Ovid, the Bible, Dante, Petrarch, Boethius and his friend John Gower also surface.
Nothing survives in Chaucer's own hand. There are 84 manuscripts plus four editions printed before 1500. The two earliest, Hengwrt and Ellesmere, came from one scribe, now identified as Adam Pinkhurst; because a Chaucer poem names his copyist Adam, some think the two men worked together, a debated but widely accepted idea. William Caxton printed the work in 1476, and just 10 copies of that edition are known.
Reading it aloud as Chaucer did means sounding letters now silent: the k and gh in knight, and a final -e on many words, since the Great Vowel Shift had not yet happened. Later scribes dropped that -e, making him look careless, but it carried grammar, separating singular adjectives from plural ones. Even the running order is unsettled; modern editions usually follow ten Fragments, while F. J. Furnivall's nine Groups of 1868 have fallen out of use.
Source: The Canterbury Tales
