Canterbury Tales Knight Quotes

Fortune has dealt us this adversity: Some malign aspect or disposition Of Saturn in some adverse position Has brought it on us; nothing's to be done: It stood thus in our stars when we were born; The long and short of it is this: Endure.

Into two ranks did the armies dress themselves, and, when that their names were read aloud, so that in their numbers there would be no guile, each Knight did respond unto his name. Then were the gates shut, and then did the cry resound: “Do now your duty, young Knights proud!

Whether because of anger, sickness, the position of the stars, wine, woe, or a change in temperament, something does cause us full oft to say or do an untoward thing. A man may not wreak vengeance for every wrong. Temperance must be determined, according to the occasion, by every person of good judgment. And, therefore, did this wise, worthy Knight, in order to live in harmony, promise forbearance unto her, and she unto him truly swore that never would he find fault in her.

Each season the people of Canterbury re-enact Becket’s death: it is the monkish version, because till now no other kind of history has been available. Crowds line the streets—excited, as if the tale might come out different this year. Hot pasties are sold. There are processions with drummers and pipes, and then the show begins. The knights get tuppence and some beer, but the lad who plays the saint gets a shilling, for the knights make him suffer, smashing him on the flags as the old archbishop was smashed. As Becket calls on Christ, a child crouching behind the altar squirts the scene with pig’s blood. The actor is carried away. Then everybody gets drunk.

She had devoted time to improving her reading and was now more than proficient. The shelf she'd first cleared with Bianca overflowed with tales of King Arthur and his knights, Ovid's poetry, plays by Sophocles, Aristotle and Aeschylus, Apuleius, names she loved repeating in her mind because the mere sound of them conjured the drama, pageantry, passion, transformations and suffering of their heroes and heroines. One of her favorite writers was Geoffrey Chaucer-- his poems of pilgrims exchanging stories as they traveled to a shrine in Canterbury were both heart aching and often sidesplittingly funny. Admittedly, one of the reasons she loved Chaucer was because she could read him for herself. It was the same reason she picked up Shakespeare over and over, and the works of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. They all wrote in English. Regarded as quite the eccentric, the duchess was a woman of learning who, like Rosamund, was self-taught. Her autobiography, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, a gift from Mr. Henderson, gave Rosamund a model to emulate. Here was a woman who dared to consider not only philosophy, science, astronomy and romance, but to write about her reflections and discoveries in insightful ways. Defying her critics, she determined that women were men's intellectual equal, possessed of as quick a wit and as many subtleties if only given the means to express themselves-- in other words, access to education.

The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.

The University of Leicester recently announced that it would stop teaching Geoffrey Chaucer in favour of modules on race and sexuality. The English department was told that texts like The Canterbury Tales, Mort d’Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf would no longer be taught and that mediaeval literature would be banned. Viking myths and sagas, the role of the church and the state in literature – all gone. Nothing written before 1500 AD will be taught. Paradise Lost seems likely to disappear though the University of Leicester did agree that teaching on William Shakespeare would remain in place. It seems that Shakespeare isn’t yet quite old enough to be banished.