What's the Reason for Their Pilgrimage?

The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales makes it clear that the diverse group who met at Southwark are off to Canterbury for, "The hooly blisful martir to seke". In essence they are off to pay homage or to show religious reverence (and receive some saintly favor) to Saint Thomas Becket. The only other motivation for the pilgrimage - apart from this desire - is that since it is springtime and nature is waking from the winter stasis, it follows that humans are apt to similarly wake and venture from their local habitats. The soundness of that logic is inconsequential since by "follows" I refer only to the fact that the line "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages" literally follows in line from the description of nature's springtime bustle. (We discussed this briefly in class.) But what was Chaucer thinking? Why did he choose this context for his playful poem?

The online Catholic Encyclopedia (newadvent.org) defines a pilgrimage as, "journeys made to some place with the purpose of venerating it, or in order to ask there for supernatural aid, or to discharge some religious obligation". That much we know from inferences made of the text. But the origin of the idea is further described as locally evolved:

The idea of a pilgrimage has been traced back by some to the primitive notion of local deities, that is, that the divine beings who controlled the movements of men and nature could exercise that control only over certain definite forces or within set boundaries...Hence, when some man belonging to a mountain tribe found himself in the plain and was in need of divine help, he made a pilgrimage back again to the hills to petition it from his gods. It is therefore the broken tribesmen who originate pilgrimages. (Emphasis is mine.)

The pilgrims can be seen as broken tribesman, to some degree, who need to be renewed in some way through pilgrimage to their chosen or local religious site. And the adventure of the pilgrimage can be seen as a series of confessional monologues leading up to the purification or relief from moral guilt at the end of their journey.

Now, possibly by way of a too large leap, we can see the real pilgrimage - in a theatrical or dramatic context - as an obligation of the pilgrims to their creator Geoffrey Chaucer. Is Chaucer as the poet doing what the Catholic Encyclopedia claims that in making a pilgrimage humans are trying to recreate that which, "(in Christianity) God would Himself satisfy the craving He had first Himself created"? That is, an attempted act of perfect being? Are these characters perfect in their sketches by way of their perfectly rendered imperfect humanity which thereby transcribes the pilgrimage onto us in that we (or medieval Englishmen/women) reflect their condition(s)? It seems a pilgrimage facilitates their trilateral discourse in ways that any other context of medieval society would not.

Perhaps none of this illuminates the text any more than might be obvious but would the roadside forum i.e. pilgrimage be the only way for a medieval poet to gather these characters together in a way that would be believable enough to satisfy the suspension of disbelief which is contingent on the "could it happen" as opposed to the "would it happen". Yes, it seems, a pilgrimage of this variety could have happened making the question of whether or not it would have happened immaterial. And that would be enough for a dramatist.