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Middle Ages

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 5 to 7
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.38

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    friar, haberdasher, money-hungry, retold, suspense, tapestry, bearing, clergy, literature, medieval, physician, social, nobility, absolute, travelers, priest
     content words:    Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral

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The Canterbury Tales
By Sharon Fabian 		  
1     What do you do to pass the time on a long trip? Do you play video games or watch a DVD? Do you listen to your favorite CDs? Do you play tic-tac-toe or travel bingo?
 
2     Those are all good ways to pass the time, but travelers back in the Middle Ages couldn't have played even tic-tac-toe while they traveled. In medieval times, people traveled either on foot or on horseback, but there was one activity that they could enjoy to pass the time, and that was storytelling.
 
3     Sometimes medieval travelers told and retold stories that they had heard before. Sometimes they invented new stories.
 
4     Geoffrey Chaucer used this idea of a group of storytelling travelers as the frame for his Canterbury Tales.
 
5     The Canterbury Tales tells of a group of pilgrims traveling on horseback to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They plan to take turns telling stories to pass the time.

Paragraphs 6 to 15:
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