In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims are traveling to Canterbury.
The collection uses a pilgrimage as its framing device. A group of travelers meets at the Tabard Inn in Southwark before setting out toward Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. The Host proposes that each pilgrim tell stories during the journey, creating a structure that connects tales from different genres and voices.
Chaucer wrote the work in Middle English during the late fourteenth century, but he did not complete the full storytelling plan. The General Prologue introduces many pilgrims, including the Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath, Clerk, and Pardoner. Their portraits often combine social observation, humor, and criticism.
The destination is important because Canterbury had become a major pilgrimage site after Becket’s murder in the cathedral in 1170. A common misunderstanding is that the tales form a single continuous plot. They are instead a collection of stories embedded within a journey, with links and conversations between narrators.