A portly Miller, barely sober enough to sit on his horse, rambles on about the flighty wife  of a crotchety old carpenter and the scholar she takes as her lover. To get some time alone together, the scholar and the wife  play various tricks that involve feigning madness, staging a biblical flood, and exposing themselves in public. But the parish clerk  is also lusting after the wife, and comes by every night  to sing outside her house. This becomes so tiresome  that she tries to scare him away by hanging her rear end out the window  for him to kiss. When this appears not to work, her scholar decides  to try farting in the same position, but this time, the clerk  is waiting with a red-hot poker. This might all sound like a bawdy joke, but it’s part of one of the most esteemed  works of English literature ever created: The Canterbury Tales, which seamlessly blends the lofty  and the lowly. The work consists of 24 stories, each told by one  of Chaucer’s spirited characters. Narrators include  familiar Medieval figures such as a Knight, a Clerk, and a Nun, and the less recognizable Reeve, and Mancible, and others. The Tales are written in Middle English, which often looks entirely different  from the language spoken today. It was used between the 12th  and 15th centuries, and evolved from Old English due to increased contact  with European romantic languages after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most of the Middle English alphabet  is still familiar today, with the inclusion  of a few archaic symbols, such as yogh, which denotes the y, j, or gh sound. The loquacious cast of the Tales  first meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark. They have a journey in common: a pilgrimage to Canterbury  to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett, a martyred archbishop who was murdered  in his own Cathedral. Eager and nosy for some personal details, the host of the Inn  proposes a competition: whoever tells the best tale  will be treated to dinner. If not for their pilgrimage, many of these figures would never  have had the chance to interact. This is because Medieval society followed  a feudal system that divided the clergy and nobility  from the working classes, made up of peasants and serfs. By Chaucer’s time, a professional class of merchants  and intellectuals had also emerged. Chaucer spent most of his life  as a government official during the Hundred Years' War, traveling throughout Italy and France, as well as his native England. This may have influenced the panoramic vision of his work, and in the Tales, no level of society is above mockery. Chaucer uses the quirks  of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty notions of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. The varied dialects, genres,  and literary tropes also make the work a vivid record of the different ways Medieval audiences  entertained themselves. For instance, the Knight’s tale  of courtly love, chivalry, and destiny riffs on romance, while the tales of working-class narrators are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sexual deviance, and slapstick. This variation  includes something for everyone, and that’s one reason why readers continue to delight in the work in both Middle English and translation. While the narrative runs  to over 17,000 lines, it's apparently unfinished, as the prologue ambitiously  introduces 29 pilgrims and promises four stories apiece, and the innkeeper never crowns a victor. It’s possible that Chaucer was so caught up in his sumptuous creations that he delayed picking a winner - or perhaps he was so fond  of each character that he just couldn’t choose. Whatever the reason, this means that every reader is free to judge; the question of who wins is up to you.