Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales Continue to Lure Tourists to Canterbury

Gulf News ^ | August 8, 2014

[nickcarraway]

Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, is the city’s biggest tourist attraction with a million visitors every year

After nearly 1,000 years, murder in the cathedral is still luring visitors to Canterbury.

It was in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1107 that Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, viciously, by four knights who believed they were doing the bidding of King Henry 2. As a result, Becket became a martyr and the cathedral a place of pilgrimage to his shrine.

The homicide was the subject of Murder in the Cathedral, a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, and was more famously immortalised in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century work, The Canterbury Tales, told in now obsolete Middle English, which focused on one such journey in what had become an annual spring pilgrimage:

[nickcarraway]

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote...

[Don Corleone]

the drough of march pierced to the rooth and bathed every vein in swish liquor of which vertu engendered is the flow'r.....

I liked the Millers tale myself.

[Oratam]

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales Continue to Lure Tourists to Canterbury

I was satisfied to wander Southwark looking for that tavern where all the action takes place.

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks nickcarraway.