Several of the
tales which Chaucer makes his people tell are founded on these
tales. Indeed, nearly all his poems are founded on old French,
Italian, or Latin tales. But although Chaucer takes his material
from others, he tells the stories in his own way, and so makes
them his own; and he never wrote anything more truly English in
spirit than the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
Some of these stories you will like to read, but others are too
coarse and rude to give you any pleasure. Even the roughness of
these tales, however, helps us to picture the England of those
far-off days. We see from them how hard and rough the life must
have been when people found humor and fun in jokes in which we
can feel only disgust.
But even in Chaucer's day there were those who found such stories
coarse. "Precious fold," Chaucer calls them. He himself perhaps
did not care for them, indeed he explains in the tales why he
tells them. Here is a company of common, everyday people, he
said, and if I am to make you see these people, if they are to be
living and real to you, I must make them act and speak as such
common people would act and speak.
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