Order of The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, mostly in verse, written by Geoffrey Chaucer chiefly from 1387 to 1400. They are held together in a frame story of a pilgrimage on which each member of the group is to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. Fewer than a quarter of the projected tales were completed before Chaucer's death. It is uncertain in what order Chaucer intended the tales to appear; moreover it is very possible that, as a work-in-progress, no final authorial order of tales ever existed.

Several different orders are evident in the manuscripts of the work; in addition certain orders and structures of the Tales have been proposed by scholars.

The table below enumerates all the pilgrims mentioned in the General Prologue, plus two that materialise later in the tales, and the stories they tell. It also compares the orders in which stories appear in various sources.

Scholarly arrangements

Manuscripts: Over 80 manuscripts containing all or part of The Canterbury Tales exist. The six tabulated below represent the four main orders (El, Cx, La, Pw) in which tales appear in the manuscripts, plus two significant anomalous arrangements (Hg, Ha). All manuscript orders (except Hg*) were collated by Furnivall.

(+G = Manuscript includes the non-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn after the Cook's initial abortive attempt to tell a tale.)

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