Everyone who has ever written on the ‘age of Chaucer’ has located the late fourteenth century as a time of political and social turbulence, with an unruly royal court, a difficult relation between Richard II and his parliaments, the Lollard movement against Church corruption, the discontent that led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – a turbulence accompanied by the clamour of developing social groups, particularly the mercantile and commercial interests that feature so strongly in the composition of the Canterbury pilgrimage, and the increased ‘visibility’ of women in many areas of socio-political life. It has been something of a cliché in past writing on Chaucer to rehearse his relative indifference to the political events around him, but much recent criticism has insisted on seeing his work in a detailed social and historical context, notably Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer (1989). Strohm argues that the Canterbury Tales is very much a response to a new sense of the ‘competing social interests’ that constitute the history of the period, and that in this work we see the ‘maintenance of social order … on terms receptive to previously excluded or underacknowledged ranks and groups’. The Tales are sensitive to fresh and more flexible models of governance and hierarchy required by changing social patterns, and in a sense they offer no less than a new definition of the State itself:

Strohm's book ends on the assertion that Chaucer's work allows ‘readers in posterity a continuing opportunity to refresh their own belief in social possibility’; whatever the turmoil in the world around him, the Tales show that ‘competing voices can colonize a literary space and can proliferate within it without provoking chaos or ultimate rupture’. There is dissension and argument between the pilgrims, but it is placated, and this commonwealth survives intact.