The crossroads between Camelot and Canterbury

ARTS HUB UK: Like any aspect of our culture, history goes through fads and fashions, and how we present "our story", or even a famous story, changes over time - Matt Miller revisits historical places after a gap of 15 years and finds the stories about Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales are different to the way he heard them the first time, or not even being told at all.
[This is archived content and may not display in the originally intended format.]
Artshub Logo

Arts Hub UK: At first it seemed like little had changed in my 15 years’ absence from the UK. That’s until I saw a BBC TV drama series depicting a modern-day account of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

All I knew about the Tales were that they were rather bawdy according to my parents’ post-Victorian view of what they were about, it was not until I looked up the BBC website on the series as they were being used to encourage new writers and writing material for the BBC that I realised that there was a lot more to the Tales than just the tales themselves.

Unlock Padlock Icon

Unlock this content?

Access this content and more

Matthew Miller
About the Author
Matt Miller has written articles for YHA Magazine and various independent travel and business publications. He is keen to get away from business and technical writing and do more creative writing. This includes getting support to publish his first book based on discovering the crossroads between The Pilgrim's Way, a route linked by a series of old pubs and coaching inns that were used as the backdrop to tales in one of the earliest pieces of English literature, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, and that of stories learned along The Alternative Way, a name he has given to the road that leads west to the possibly fictional sites of Camelot and Avalon.