Nothing gives us a better insight into medieval life than Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Written in the late 14th century in the vernacular, it gives us an idea of ​​the wide range of people who made up the different classes of society. The poem describes the chivalric class, the clergy and those who worked for a living, thus also describing the different classes. Chaucer gives us insight into 14th century society by giving us small details about people's clothing, behavior, and professions; thus giving us information about the lower and middle classes, not previously addressed in the literature. Geoffrey Chaucer survived the peak of the Black Death at around the age of six, where twenty percent of the English population (approximately fifty percent of the European population) quickly died within five years. . He was born into a prosperous family of wine merchants, who were wealthy enough to send Chaucer to become a page of another wealthy family as a child and receive an education. During his life he held many types of titles and professions, allowing him to meet many types of people within social classes, likely giving him the background information needed to create the wide range of characters found in The Canterbury Tales. This story, in which many people from all walks of life in 14th century society gather at this inn in Southwark and together walk the last forty miles on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Christian martyr Thomas Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral. “Medieval Christians believed that a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine had a special spiritual benefit” (Spielvogel 272). They believed that by taking a long journey and visiting a county, it would bring them closer to God and their entry into society. From the chivalric, higher class, to the lower and middle classes of clergy and working types of people. Without these poems, these people would never have been written about and the unique small crafts found in medieval times would never be known about. Works Cited Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Lawall 1701-1769.Field, Richard. "Life expectancy." business.ualberta.ca 2002. April 18, 2011. .Freudenrich, Craig Ph.D. "How Knights Work" HowStuffWorks.com January 22, 2008. April 18, 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. .Lawall, Sarah, ed. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 8th ed. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2006. Spielvogel, Jackson J. Western Civilization. 6th ed. Belmont: Thomson Higher Education, 2006.