The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a frame story by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in Middle English in 1387–1400; its framing device is a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, and it is composed mostly in iambic pentameter. The Poetry Foundation dates it to circa 1375–1400 and mentions a theory that Chaucer left off writing the tales in the mid-1390s, some five or six years before his death.⁠[1][2]

In the frame, twenty-nine pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, and Harry Bailey, the host of the Tabard, decides to join them and act as their leader; each pilgrim is to tell four stories, two on the way there and two on the way back, and the best teller will have a dinner at the others’ cost when the company returns to the Tabard.⁠[3]

The original plan called for 120 tales, four told by each of thirty pilgrims, and Chaucer was not one quarter through it. The tale-tellers run the spectrum of the middle class, from the Knight to the Pardoner and the Summoner, and each uses his tale as a weapon or tool to get back at or even with the previous teller.⁠[2]

Chaucer died on October 25, 1400, and was buried at the entrance to the chapel of St Benedict in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, now known as “Poets’ Corner”; he never finished The Canterbury Tales.⁠[4][2]

The Hengwrt Chaucer, held by the National Library of Wales, is an early and important manuscript of The Canterbury Tales; it may have been written at the end of the fourteenth century, before Chaucer’s death or soon afterwards. In 2004 Professor Linne Mooney identified its scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, who also wrote the Ellesmere Chaucer now in the Huntington Library, San Marino.⁠[5]

The Ellesmere Chaucer, Huntington Library EL 26 C 9, is a beautiful and elaborately decorated manuscript of The Canterbury Tales dated about 1400–1410 that came from the Bridgewater House Library; it contains a series of illustrations of the narrators of the Tales, including a famous image of Chaucer on horseback.⁠[6][7]

William Caxton printed the first edition of The Canterbury Tales at Westminster in about 1476–1477 in his Westminster type 2:135B; the folio edition has 374 leaves, is dated on the evidence of its paper stocks and uses no woodcuts.⁠[8][9]

Merton College describes it as the first book Caxton printed in England, and so the first book ever printed in England; the first edition has no preface, and around 21 copies survive in various states of disintegration.⁠[10]

In 1483 Caxton printed his second edition of The Canterbury Tales. In its preface he mentions the first edition, recounting how a “gentylman” had pointed out that the book contained errors and offered a manuscript owned by his father that was “very true and according unto his own first book”.⁠[10]

The second edition opens with Caxton’s “Proheyme” (prologue) and uses 23 woodcuts, 47 in all including repeats.⁠[11]

The Hengwrt manuscript belonged to Fouke Dutton, a draper of Chester who died in 1558; by the 1570s it was associated with the Banestar or Bannester family, and a memorandum dated 1625 refers to Andrew Brereton (d. 1649) of Llanfair-is-gaer. It then entered the library of Robert Vaughan (c. 1592–1667) of Hengwrt, where the collection remained until it was bequeathed in 1859 to W.W.E. Wynne of Peniarth.⁠[5]

In 1904 Wynne’s son sold the manuscripts to Sir John Williams, who in 1909 gave the Peniarth manuscripts, including the Hengwrt group, to the newly established National Library of Wales, where it has remained ever since.⁠[5]

In 1917 Huntington purchased the Bridgewater library privately through Sotheby’s, and with it the Ellesmere manuscript, which came from the Bridgewater House Library.⁠[7][6]

On July 8, 1998, Christie, Manson & Woods auctioned in London early English printing by William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde from the Wentworth library, the property of the trustees of Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels settlement and other family trusts; Caxton’s first edition of The Canterbury Tales (lot 2) was bought for £4,621,500 by Sir Paul GettyJohn Paul Getty Jr.John Paul Getty Jr. (1932–2003), known as Sir Paul Getty, was a son of oil businessman J. Paul Getty and a Britain-based philanthropist and book collector who made large gifts to the National Gallery, the British Film Institute and cricket, and received an honorary KBE in 1986.Open the full entry (J. Paul Getty Jr.), with Maggs Bros bidding on his behalf.⁠[12][13]

Bound in red leather and estimated at only £500,000 to £700,000, the copy set a new price record for any printed book; it was also the last copy of the first edition remaining in private hands.⁠[14][13]

From January 27 to May 2, 1999, the Morgan Library in New York presented the exhibition “The Wormsley Library: A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty, K.B.E.”, showing more than one hundred works from Getty’s collection, among them a rare copy of William Caxton’s edition of The Canterbury Tales.⁠[15]

In October 2023 the British Library made its entire collection of medieval manuscripts related to Geoffrey Chaucer freely available online, more than 60 items including many versions of The Canterbury Tales and four different copies of William Caxton’s printed editions.⁠[16]

On December 8, 2023, Merton College announced that its copy of Caxton’s first edition had been fully digitised; one of the best-preserved surviving copies, it carries hand-added decoration including gold illumination, and its text has been corrected throughout.⁠[17]

The list of surviving first-edition copies in the Caxton and Beyond database includes a copy in the Wormsley Library. Sir Paul Getty bought the Wormsley estate in Buckinghamshire from the Fane family in 1985 and built a castellated library to house his books and manuscripts; the estate now belongs to Mark and Caterina Getty and their family.⁠[9][18]

Descriptions of the Wormsley Library from 2020 and 2026 both list the first edition of Caxton’s Canterbury Tales among its highlights; in June 2026 the library was still offering librarian-led tours to small groups of visitors.⁠[19][20]

National Library of Wales: Official website: https://www.library.wales/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Merton College: Official website: https://www.merton.ox.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

Wormsley: Official website: https://wormsley.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]