Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_, based upon Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediæval romances. And yet the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints' legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry, moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower." The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant belong to the class of _fabliaux_, a few of which existed in English, such as _Dame Siriz_, the _Lay of the Ash_, and the _Land of Cokaygne_, already mentioned. The _Nonne Preste's Tale_, likewise, which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of _fabliaux_, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, _Dou Coc et Werpil_, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the early English poem of _The Fox and the Wolf_, to the popular animal saga of _Reynard the Fox_. The _Franklin's Tale_, whose scene is Brittany, and the _Wife of Bath's Tale_ which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French _lais_, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful _lais_ of Marie de France.
Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says,
Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor parson in the _Canterbury Tales_, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper's swearing "by Goddes bones."