Human Nature and the Canterbury Tales When Geoffrey Chaucer began writing the Canterbury Tales, he had a long road ahead of him. He intended to tell two stories of each of the thirty pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, and then two more of each pilgrim on the way back from Canterbury. Of these, he completed only twenty-four. However, in these tales, Chaucer describes both the pilgrims and their stories with startling realism. In “The Nun's Priest's Tale,” “The Canon's Yeoman's Tale,” “The Friar's Tale,” “The Reeve's Tale,” and “The Cleric's Tale,” Chaucer demonstrates his extraordinary insight into human nature. By comparing and contrasting these tales, one can see the universality of human nature as shown by Chaucer. One human trait evident in these selections is greed. Avarice drives the hearts of many men, be they a common miller, a conjurer, or a supposed religious canon, and Chaucer was aware of this. In the tales containing these three characters, Chaucer describes the greed of these characters. The Reeve tells his fellow pilgrims the story of a miller who "was a thief... of corn and flour, and cunning at that; his habit was to steal" (Chaucer 125). The summoner in "The Friar's Tale" "has profited greatly for himself," and as the devil observes of him in this tale, "You seek wealth, acquired no matter how" (Chaucer 312, 315). The canon in the first part of "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale", as well as the Yeoman himself, had been driven by the goal of converting base metals into gold, and "even if we never achieved the desired conclusion we still continued to delirious in our illusion" (Chaucer 478). The second canon of which the Yeoman speaks is many times worse than his own canon and master, using h...... middle of paper ....... Works CitedBalliet, Gay L. "The Wife in Chaucer's Reeves's Tale : Siren of Sweet Vengeance." Notes on the English Language 28.1 (1990): 1-5.Baylor, Jeffrey. “The Failure of the Intellect in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale.” Notes on the English Language 28.1 (1990): 17-19.Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Old and Middle English. Ed. Jeffrey Helteman and Jerome Mitchell. Detroit: Sale Research, Inc., 1994. Edden, Valerie. "Sacred and Secular in the Clerk's Tale." The Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992): 369-376. Fehrenbacher, Richard W. "'A Yeerd Enclosed Al About': Literature and History in the Nuns' Priest's Tale." The Chaucer Review 29.2 (1994): 134-148. Whittock, Trevor. A reading of the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1970.