THE YEOMAN'S TALE

The second in a series, after The Knight’s Tale (2021), loosely based on The Canterbury Tales.

As Geoffrey Chaucer, Court Poet and Comptroller of Woollens, leaves on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, he little knows that his plans will be ruined by a peasant uprising. Chaucer’s traveling companions, a mixed bag of historical and fabricated eccentrics, range from his fellow poet John Gower to a prioress, Madame Eglantyne, and her lapdog. Their leader and organizer, Harry Baillie, owner of the Tabard Inn, gets them only a few days into their trip before they run into the thousands of peasants led by Wat Tyler and the priest John Ball, who aim to make England a classless society. Stripped of all but their horses, they’re forced to return to London, where the powers that be ignore Chaucer’s warnings. Under the leadership of yeoman Tom Hardesty, the pilgrims make the Tabard Inn into a defensible fortress. Hardesty meanwhile discovers the body of a woman in the Thames with her throat cut and brings it to the inn, where the ever curious Chaucer can’t resist investigating. Even after a second murder, his sleuthing must play second fiddle to surviving when the peasants attack and King Richard’s advisers dither over what to do.

A grim but often amusing historical mystery leaving plenty of tales yet to tell.