Canterbury Tales: the Knight's Tale

The Knight’s Tale

The Knight in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is very distinguished, honest, honorable, generous, courteous, noble, brave, and courageous. He is a Christian man and has fought in many battles that cover a forty year span. He always killed his man and led the “van” or Vanguard (which means he was at the front not the back). The Knight has one son traveling with him on this journey and that is the Squire or knight in training. The Knight is one of only four Canterbury pilgrims (the others being the Parson, the Oxford Cleric, and the Plowman) whom Chaucer treats without a hint of irony in his General Prologue. Indeed, these three characters are more like nostalgic idealizations of people whom Chaucer greatly admired, but they are figures of a bygone age, much to the writer's regret. In the case of the knight, this admiration is no great surprise, because Chaucer himself was in royal service for most of his life, although his duties were more to do with diplomacy than fighting. However, he would have mixed with and known the knightly class at first hand, and had no reason to disparage the men who defended the monarchy of which he himself was such a devoted servant. The medieval knight developed into the gentleman, and it is no accident that the word "courteous" has the same root as "courtly", and that the royal court was peopled by knights who maintained, for example, the tradition of "courtly love" by which women were admired from afar and received tokens of love and pledges to defend their honor, even if they gave no sign of returning the affection. There is no prologue to the Knight's Tale, unless one counts the last few lines of the General Prologue. These tell that the host decides who shall tell the first tale by the drawing of lots, and the knight literally draws the short straw. This meets with general approbation, and so the knight begins his tale. The tale is, as might be expected, a chivalric romance, although it should more accurately be...