Chaucer is the first of the great English poets, and one of the few to attract the general reader. His work is rich in comedy and pathos, and his tales have an immediate appeal which is enhanced by the romance and colour, as well as the distress, of the times in which he lived. His world - that of the second half of the 14th century - is rich in cultural interest. It was a time of peasant revolt and passionate religious dissent, of new exploration and new individualism, of the emergence of the City of London as an economic and cultural force and of the ascendance of the vernacular over Latin and French. Yet through it all, there was a remarkable flowering of the arts...