06/06/2021
The age of Chaucer covers the period from 1340 to 1400. Chaucer is the true representative of his age as Pope is of the eighteenth century and Tennyson is of the Victorian era. His works breathe the political, social, economic and religious tendencies of his time. The middle of the fourteenth century was the transitional period in which Chaucer was born. The elements of Renaissance were breeding. “He stands on the threshold of the new age, but still hedged in a backward gazing world.”
The fourteenth century in England was the most important of the medieval centuries. It covered the period of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, the Hundred Years War with France and the great economic and social changes which we associate with the decay of villeinage. During its years, two kings were deposed and murdered, and dynasties began to rise and fall. The antagonism to the church and the demand for the freedom of thought, which was to culminate in the Renaissance and the Reformation were beginning to be manifested in this pregnant century. It was of supreme importance for the understanding of English history that we should have a dramatic, piquant and all embracing picture of real medieval life before the great changes should arrive and Chaucer has given us this picture in his Canterbury Tales.
