The traditional estates were specific to men (although the clergy also included nuns); women were considered a class in themselves,[1] the best-known example being Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath.
[citation needed] The commons included everyone who did not belong to the first two estates, primarily rural peasants and the urban bourgeois or middle class.
They had none of the privileges or luxuries that the first two estates enjoyed, although the rise of capitalism in the late 14th century resulted in the bourgeois gaining relatively more power.
Among 14th-century English authors, John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer were three of the most prominent writers of the time to include estate satire in their works.
Gower was aggressive in his approach; Chaucer was more subtle and more successful, making himself to be the fool of the joke and subverting many of the conventions of the genre.