landons blogs

In class we went over 4 different topics that revolved around the 14th century such as; Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century, mid evil, and middle english. Canterbury was writen in iambic contamider sometime between 1386 and 1400. It was and oral tradition that was left unfinished because Chaucer died in the middle of writing it. It was ment to have 30 pilgrams telling 4 stories each for a total of 120 stories each

My group was Chaucer so I am going to start off by tell yall all about chaucer and his life. Chaucer was born in London in 1328, and went o cambridge of Oxford. In 1386 Chaucer was elected to shire of kent, some of his famous book are Troilus and Criseyde, the book of dutchess, and canterbury tales. Chaucer came from a poetic family, his father and grandfather were both great poets, he was a member of the middle class. Goeffrey Chaucer died in London and was buried in westminster Abbey, and was remembered as the first great poet of the english nation.

Middle English is a really strange languege to me, first off it was the language of Chaucers time period. It was influenced by the french and the words didnt have s’s on the end of them, even if they were plural words, and there were N’s on the end of everything i think. The language has rythem and sentacts (which means theat the structure of the wrighting has an impact on the meaning). The wierdest thing i heard about he language was that every single letter in the word in pronounced.

14th Century was a time of change in my mind, In 1315 there was a famine, along with that the bubonic plague was around, people were unable to provide there family so a lot of the time you saw people eating there babys and children just to have food (the saying “only the strong survive” was exactly right). Over 20,000,000 people died because of the famine and the plague. There was a large movement in class also, because the poor would get land because the rich were dying. Also at this time there was a ton of bad weather so more poeple died because crops were getting flooded. Thomas Becket, the arch bishop of canterbury was assessinated in 1170. Also it was a time of warfare, which was said to create all men as equal, when going into battle you had to use your own weapons, and if you owed money to the governament, you would bring someone to battle with you to repay you debt. The holy roman empire fell.

in class we looked over the General prologue alot more and dicovered that the Canterbury tales was written differently then most books. In the Prologue Chaucer listed out all the charactor in the book starting with the knight and ending with the pardoner which shows the order of class in which they lay. In my mind Canterbury is a lot frankenstien because in both books (or novels whatever you want to call it) the narrator is telling a story inside of another story.