The narrative frame that Chaucer chooses for the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury, as the Hengwrt manuscript heads the work, is only intermittently about a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is a collection of stories, a ‘book of tales’, set in motion by the Host's suggestion at the end of the General Prologue that the journey should become the opportunity for a competition, with a reward for the winner:

Harry, it appears, is to be the arbiter, both of the contest and of any arguments that take place along the way, with a severe financial penalty for anyone who objects. From this moment on, the pilgrimage is relegated to the background, even in most of the links, to be replaced by something like a fourteenth-century Man Booker Prize – or perhaps, since most of the tales (as it is too easy to overlook) are in verse, a T. S. Eliot Prize.

The very modernity of such a scenario is perhaps one reason why it has been backstaged in much Chaucer criticism. The nineteenth-century scholars who largely established the parameters of the critical tradition had to look back to Athenian drama or Theocritus-influenced eclogues to find poetic contests, but they regarded the naturalistic novel as the highest development of fiction; their emphasis on the pilgrimage over the competition followed inevitably.