2 ms·

The Canterbury Tales were trying to show the viewpoints of people from a wide variety of social backgrounds.

• woopwoop 11mo ago
  But in this world the distribution of social backgrounds in the population had very low entropy. Over 90% of people were just working the land.
  • nephihaha 11mo ago
    If Chaucer had just had subsistence farmer after subsistence farmer telling their tales it would be very boring. Even in such a society, there were a number of different roles at the bottom of it. Some people were shepherds or drovers rather than just scraping the soil, others were producing cloth and clothing, others were fishermen, others were midwives and so on. All these were useful at the time and used by peasants.
    • woopwoop 11mo ago
      Yes, Malthusian society was very boring, that's my point.