Chaucer was surely a medievalist, not only because he lived in the 14th century but also because he depicted the life of the middle ages in almost all his poetry from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The very idea of the pilgrimage is medieval in conception. Pilgrimages to sacred shrines were frequent in those days. Pilgrims used to travel in groups for both safety and company. One of the more frequented shrines was that of St. Thomas in Canterbury, which is also the destination of Chaucer’s Pilgrims. Chaucer showed his skills in story telling but his lyrical gift was infinitely less than that of the great Elizabethans. The secular drama, in which he would surely have been excellent, was nonexistent in those days. The only department of poetry open to his pursuit was thus of story telling. When you consider the sweetness of his early tales, the glittering color and high chivalrous tone intermingled with comedy in some of his stories, vivid character sketches like in Prologue, you won’t be able to name any other narrative English poet whose achievements can be matched against Chaucer.

Chaucer faithfully depicts the social conditions of his time. Not only does he describes members of various professions and trades, but also gives a fair idea about the eating habits, the dresses and the entertainment available at the time. Some of his accounts are considered to be so accurate that they can be used to write the history of England in the 14th century. Chaucer gave a microcosm of English society in the Prologue. He throws light on both the secular and the ecclesiastical life of the period. The Knight, the Squire and the Yeoman represent the agricultural feudalism of the time. The Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Wife of Bath and the five Guildsmen represent the new urban class which started out in London at that very age. The prioress, Monk, Friar, Clerk, Parson, Summoner and Pardoner are the ecclesiastical figures representing the good and bad sides of the religion. The pilgrims’ party visited many medieval towns and country sides. The party is void of any representation from the royal court or higher nobility as they would not have joined such a common gathering of individuals. As far as dresses were concerned, each member wore the distinctive color of the society to which he belonged to. Chaucer also details the commercialism and the mercenary mentality of the people. Barring a few characters, the pilgrims valued money and gold above everything else and their lives were governed by this fact.

In spite of all the classic portraying of characters, there are several elements of modernity in Prologue. His realistic portrayal of characters, his objectivity and detachment in his treatment of life and characters, his irony and satire and the conversational or colloquial note in his style are all hallmarks of modern literature.

Popular literature till Chaucer’s time had been occupied mainly with the gods and the heroes of the golden age. But he attempted the new realistic task of portraying men and women as they were and described them to the readers in a way that they can be identified as every day people in their own neighborhood. His characters are recognizable as true to life and they have for this reason become a permanent possession of English literature. Beowulf and Roland are ideal heroes, figures of fancy but the merry host of the Tabard Inn, the fat Monk, the parish Priest, the kindly Plowman and the poor Clerk strike as people we know around us and are sometimes acquainted to us. He gives us a picture of the contemporary English life, its work and play, its deeds and dreams, its fun and sympathy and hearty joy of living such as no other single work of literature does.

If all Chaucer’s work is regarded together, it shows his progressive advance towards truth. He found poetry remote from Nature, its essence being fiction in the accepted belief, which its task was the ingenious transposition of reality in accordance with artificial rules. Chaucer submitted to the received code, dreamt with his contemporaries; he too had visions of allegorical figures and he combined them with imagination and beauty. He sought the material of his books by reading the works of others. Then he reached the point where only a thing as interesting as Nature seemed diverse to him. Chaucer’s poetry, especially The Canterbury Tales and the Prologue puts an end to the Middle Ages and inaugurated modern English poetry.

Chaucer shows a wide sympathy. The Prologue clearly illustrates this. For some characters, Chaucer feels affection and respect. About all the others he has so much curiosity that he feels interested in them. As he is not easily repelled, no one is excluded from his interest. Nor does he feel bitter. There is no bitterness in his portraits of even the Summoner and the Pardoner who are contemptible fellows. He loves the world’s variety and feels grateful to human defects because they differ from human virtues. In portraying characters, Chaucer has no axe to grind. He does not show any marked ethical intentions; he is not a social reformer. While his portrayal of characters is sympathetic, it also shows his objectivity. He is not an egoist and he does not thrust his own preferences and prejudices upon us.

Chaucer’s irony and satire are also among his modern characteristics. Most of the portraits in the Prologue are satirical, with irony as the writer’s most powerful wagon. Chaucer exposes the vanities and absurdities of the Prioress, the worldliness of the Monk and the Friar, the greed of the Summoner, the hypocrisy and the frauds of the Pardoner. The exposure is effected through the use of irony in each case and there is no direct criticism or denunciation. The Prologue also lays the foundations of later comic fiction.

The conversational tone that Chaucer employs in the Prologue is noteworthy too. Chaucer frequently employs a phrase to remind us that we are listening to a storyteller’s speaking voice. The effect is not of reading a dead poem, but of listening to living popular phrases.