musing as Dickens yet as
mediaeval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be
asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what
were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were, of course,
taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though
much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept
it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived
from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good
man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete
stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its
very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older
society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original
freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar
like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on
the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a
chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass
band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that
he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such
pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the
Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be
realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a
sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of
labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather
the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be
approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects
of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.

The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands in
the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular
revels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten
god, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends
did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at
Margate thinks about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the
bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as
the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs.
Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that soc