General Prologue

The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where he meets a group of 'sundry folk' who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, a martyr reputed to have the power of healing the sinful.

The setting is April, and the prologue starts by singing the praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants.

[3] The pilgrims include a knight; his son, a squire; the knight's yeoman; a prioress, accompanied by a nun and the nun's priest; a monk; a friar; a merchant; a clerk; a sergeant of law; a franklin; a haberdasher; a carpenter; a weaver; a dyer; a tapestry weaver; a cook; a shipman; a doctor of physic; a wife of Bath; a parson and his brother, a plowman; a miller; a manciple; a reeve; a summoner; a pardoner; the Host (a man called Harry Bailey); and Chaucer himself.

Whoever has told the most meaningful and comforting stories, with "the best sentence and moost solaas" (line 798) will receive a free meal paid for by the rest of the pilgrims upon their return.

The opening lines of The Canterbury Tales show a diversity of phrasing by including words of French origin like "droghte," "veyne," and "licour" alongside English terms for nature: "roote," "holt and heeth," and "croppes.

[8] Sebastian Sobecki argues that the General Prologue is a pastiche of the historical Harry Bailey's surviving 1381 poll-tax account of Southwark's inhabitants.

In modern prose: When April with its sweet showers has pierced March's drought to the root, bathing every vein in such liquid by whose virtue the flower is engendered, and when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has also enlivened the tender plants in every wood and field, and the young sun is halfway through Aries, and small birds that sleep all night with an open eye make melodies (their hearts so goaded by Nature), then people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers seek faraway shores and distant saints known in sundry lands, and especially they wend their way to Canterbury from every shire of England to seek the holy blessed martyr, who helped them when they were ill.[12] Tales Manuscript tradition