The Grand Procession

Now let's return to considerations of the importance of the Host as the Eucharist. While Chaucer lived, more and more splendid features were incorporated into the feast celebrating the gift of the Eucharist. Specially composed liturgies, elaborate processions and dramatized presentations were added.

Entire communities became involved in these activities (at Chester, York, etc.). Each year, E. K. Chambers (The Mediaeval Stage) tells us, "the leading ceremony was a great procession in which the host (the consecrated bread of the Mass), escorted by local dignitaries, religious bodies and guilds, was borne through the streets and displayed successively at out-of-door stations." The feast "provided new contexts of meaning for the [E]ucharist in the feast's evolving iconography."

In the early morning of the feast day the Eucharist (the Host), reverently displayed, was raise up for all to see. (The priest's elevating of the Host during the Mass became identified with the Consecration, the moment when the bread became Christ.) The procession then formed as they left the church to travel through the streets of the city. (This tradition still lives today in many  places.) Worshipers--traditionally dignitaries, clergy, religious, guildsmen and others--followed in procession. These fourteenth-century attendees would naturally move at a walking pace.

Miri Rubin, in her comprehensive study of the history of the Eucharist in the medieval world, tells of a mid-fourteenth-century sermon that holds an interesting relationship to the scene we are reviewing. The sermon was composed for Corpus Christi and contains "vibrant references to tale and allegory." It depicts Christ on His journey to heaven.

Christ is portrayed as an honored man who mounts a horse; this is understood as the action of the priest at Consecration when he "raises[s] Christ aloft in his hands." The equestrian ride which follows is then compared to the exposition of the Eucharistic Host as it is carried through the streets. As we have noted before, the underlying images of Christ to be seen in Chaucer's words are often the expression of a medieval thought pattern; they are not the poet's individual creativity for the Canterbury Tales, but adaptations of imagery from his day-to-day world.
     Picture the poet as one of the spectators at this grand display; see his fertile imagination scanning the scene before him as he transposes it into his final masterpiece--the Canterbury Tales.


What we are told as Chaucer's pilgrims prepare to set out hardly reflects real preparations for a trip. This is, in fact, one of the first indications that the poet is constructing a fantasy. And his fantasy parallels the elements of a Corpus Christi procession.

Here is Chaucer's description of the Canterbury pilgrims setting forth. First, notice what is not said. We hear (see) nothing of preparations--no breakfast, no transport of possessions, no saddling of horses, no sounds or movements, no mention of weather, nor attitudes of the pilgrims. Who was the first one ready? Who caused a delay? Instead, here is the entire departure sequence. At the break of day up rose the Host and gathered us together in a flock and forth we rode. That's all. And the journey has begun.
     We are given no pertinent information as they proceed through the city. Do they ride two by two, or single file, or as a close group through the streets?
     There is another similarity between the flock of pilgrims that accompanies the Canterbury Host and worshipers who make up a Corpus Christi procession. In both cases the group includes dignitaries, religious and guild members.
     And finally, although we assume they are on horses, they move slowly--so slowly that Chaucer says they go at little more than a walking pace! As was pointed out earlier, that's the expected pace of the Corpus Christi procession.
     Chaucer has set us up. We're about to be taken for a ride--and we're hardly aware of it.