The Canterbury Tales Trivia
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100 free The Canterbury Tales trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Canterbury Tales trivia for anyone who once memorised 'Whan that Aprill' or just remembers the rude bit in the Miller's Tale. The quiz starts with the frame: Middle English, the years of composition, Becket's shrine, the Tabard in Southwark, Harry Bailey the Host, the four tales each pilgrim was meant to tell, who drew the short straw to go first, and how many tales actually got written. It covers the manuscripts and printing too: Hengwrt and Ellesmere, Adam Pinkhurst, the Huntington Library, Caxton's 1476 edition, the ten Fragments and the four tales in rhyme royal. The tale-by-tale section takes in Palamon and Arcite and Arcite's fatal horse, the Miller 'quiting' the Knight, Nicholas's fake flood and Absolon's misdirected kiss, the Wife of Bath's giant prologue and the loathly lady's answer, the Pardoner's Radix malorum, his three rioters and fake relics, Chauntecleer and Pertelote and the fox's fatal vanity, plus the Prioress, the Summoner, Lollardy, Powell and Pressburger and Pasolini. It ends with Chaucer himself: the vintner's son, the ransom at Reims, Katherine Swynford, a gallon of wine a day, the customs house, the astrolabe for his son, Troilus, and the first grave in Poets' Corner. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Tales, the General Prologue, the individual tales, the Ellesmere manuscript and Chaucer's life, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone; the expert tier reaches the 858 lines of the Prologue and the four rhyme-royal tales.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what language are The Canterbury Tales written?
Middle English
Middle English was his choice although he read Latin, French and Italian; writing in the everyday London speech of his time let him catch his pilgrims' accents and dialects.
Q 02How many tales does The Canterbury Tales contain?
24
24 tales are all the collection holds: some pilgrims never get a turn and the party never starts for home, so most scholars think Chaucer died with it unfinished.
Q 03Whose shrine at Canterbury Cathedral are the pilgrims travelling to visit?
Saint Thomas Becket
Saint Thomas Becket was the archbishop murdered in his own cathedral in 1170; the Prologue says pilgrims seek the martyr because he helped them when they were sick.
Q 04Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales under which king?
Richard II
Richard II was king, and the great rising of his reign reaches the Nun's Priest's Tale, where a farmyard chase out-shouts Jack Straw's rebels.
Q 05At which Southwark inn do the Canterbury pilgrims gather at the start of the journey?
The Tabard
The Tabard was a real inn on Borough High Street: it burned in Southwark's great fire of 1676, and its rebuilt successor, long known as the Talbot, was pulled down in the 1870s.
Q 06In The Canterbury Tales, what is the name of the Host, the innkeeper who judges the storytelling contest?
Harry Bailey
Harry Bailey gets his name when the Cook addresses him, and a real Southwark innkeeper of that name sat in Parliament in Chaucer's day.
Q 07By the Host's plan, how many tales should each Canterbury pilgrim tell?
Four: two going and two returning
Four: two going and two returning would have made about 120 stories, but Chaucer came nowhere near that and his pilgrims never even start the journey home.
Q 08How do the Canterbury pilgrims decide who will tell the first tale?
They draw straws
They draw straws and the shortest falls to the Knight; when he finishes, the drunken Miller barges in ahead of the Monk, whom the Host had asked to go next.
Q 09According to the famous opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, in which month does the pilgrimage begin?
April
April's sweet showers, the opening lines say, pierce the drought of March to the root, and that is when folk long to go on pilgrimages.
Q 10What prize does the Host promise the Canterbury pilgrim who tells the best tale?
A free supper
A free supper, paid for by all the other pilgrims, waits at the inn on their return, and the Host, who will serve it, appoints himself the judge.
Q 11Which Italian work shares plots with several of The Canterbury Tales?
Boccaccio's Decameron
Boccaccio's Decameron has its storytellers trade tales while sheltering from the plague; several of its plots recur in Chaucer, yet some scholars doubt he ever had a copy to hand.
Q 12Which two early manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, one now kept in Wales, were copied by the same scribe?
Hengwrt and Ellesmere
Hengwrt and Ellesmere share a scribe, named in 2004 as Adam Pinkhurst, the 'Adam' Chaucer chides in a poem for careless copying, though later scholars dispute it.
Q 13Which library got the best-known illustrated Canterbury Tales manuscript when a railroad magnate bought it in 1917?
Q 21Which play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, first staged around 1613, is based on the Knight's Tale?
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in 1634 under both men's names, yet it took until the 20th century to win a regular place among Shakespeare's works.
Q 22What does the drunken Miller mean when he vows to 'quite' the Knight's Tale?
Repay it
Repay it: 'quite' is kin to 'requite', and the contest runs on it, as one pilgrim after another answers the tale before with a story aimed at its teller.
Q 23In the Miller's Tale, which disaster does Nicholas falsely predict to trick the old carpenter?
A flood greater than Noah's
The Huntington Library, California
The Huntington Library, California got it when Henry Huntington bought an English family's whole library; most modern editions print the tales in this copy's order.
Q 14Who printed the first edition of The Canterbury Tales, around 1476?
William Caxton
William Caxton, a cloth merchant who learned printing on the Continent, set up England's first press at Westminster in 1476 and made the Tales one of its first books.
Q 15Which famously patient wife endures her husband's cruel tests in the Clerk's Tale?
Griselda
Griselda never protests as her husband takes away her children and pretends to remarry, and the Clerk ends by telling wives not to copy her: such meekness would be unbearable.
Q 16Which fraudulent science does Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman expose in the tale he tells?
Alchemy
Alchemy has ruined the Yeoman himself: years of failed gold-making for his master left him deep in debt, he says, and turned his once-rosy face the colour of lead.
Q 17How does the Host react when Chaucer the pilgrim tells his rhyming tale of Sir Thopas?
He cuts it short
He cuts it short: the Host calls the rhyming worthless, so Chaucer answers with the long prose Tale of Melibee.
Q 18Which stanza form do the Clerk's and Man of Law's tales use instead of Chaucer's usual couplets?
Rhyme royal
Rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza Chaucer brought into English, carries four of the tales; it became the favourite form for long narrative poems for over a century after him.
Q 19Which two knights compete for Emelye in the Knight's Tale?
Palamon and Arcite
Palamon and Arcite are sworn friends until each glimpses Emelye from their prison window in Athens; Duke Theseus finally makes them settle it in a tournament.
Q 20In the Knight's Tale, how does the knight who wins the tournament for Emelye die?
His horse throws him
His horse throws him when Pluto, at Saturn's request, sends up a terror from hell to startle it; dying, he tells Emelye to marry the rival he has just beaten.
A flood greater than Noah's is due on Monday night, he says, so the carpenter hangs tubs in the roof as lifeboats and sleeps in one while Nicholas slips off to bed with Alisoun.
Q 24In the Miller's Tale, what does Alisoun offer Absolon at her dark window instead of a kiss on the lips?
Her backside
Her backside is what Absolon kisses in the dark; he comes back for revenge with a red-hot plough blade from the blacksmith, and it is Nicholas who gets branded.
Q 25How does the Wife of Bath's Prologue compare in length?
Twice as long as her tale
Twice as long as her tale, it is far longer than any other pilgrim's prologue: she needs the room to recount her five marriages and to argue that marrying again is no sin.
Q 26Why is the Wife of Bath deaf in one ear?
Her husband struck her
Her husband struck her after she tore pages from the book of wicked wives he kept reading aloud; by her account she won the quarrel and made him burn the book.
Q 27In the Wife of Bath's Tale, what does the knight learn women most desire?
Sovereignty over their husbands and lovers
Sovereignty over their husbands and lovers is the answer that saves his life; the old woman who supplied it claims him as her husband, then turns young and fair once he lets her choose.
Q 28Which Latin text, a warning against greed, does the Pardoner take as the theme of every sermon?
Radix malorum est cupiditas
Radix malorum est cupiditas, 'greed is the root of evils', comes from 1 Timothy; he cheerfully admits that he preaches against avarice only to part his hearers from their money.
Q 29What are the three rioters of the Pardoner's Tale looking for when they meet the Old Man?
Death, to kill him
Death, to kill him, is their drunken vow after the plague takes a friend; the Old Man points them to an oak where they find gold instead, and they murder one another over it.
Q 30How does the youngest rioter in the Pardoner's Tale plan to keep all the gold?
He poisons their wine
He poisons their wine on a trip into town, but the other two have agreed to stab him on his return; they do, then drink his bottles, and nobody lives to spend the gold.