What medieval English work by Geoffrey Chaucer is famous?

The story behind the answer

Because it’s Geoffrey Chaucer’s most celebrated work, a frame narrative of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Through their stories and the vivid “General Prologue,” it offers sharp portraits of medieval society—from knight to miller—while pioneering the use of vernacular Middle English at a time when Latin and French dominated learned writing.

Composed in the late 14th century, it blends satire, romance, fabliau, and moral allegory, mostly in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, with a few prose tales. Chaucer planned many more stories than the roughly two dozen completed, yet the collection’s humor, realism, and social range helped shape English literature and gave later writers a model for linked storytelling.