In the book The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer includes a varied group of people that go on the journey to Canterbury. He includes, in Nevill Coghill’s words, “a concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous. . .” Many of the characters in Chaucer’s book can be described exactly by these words, as there are many different personalities, ages, and classes on the journey to Canterbury.
To begin, an example of a nation of high and low class would be the Doctor compared to the Plowman. In the book, the doctor is described as being intelligent, as “no one alive could talk as well as he did” (Chaucer 155).…