The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read Highlight

The poem was sufficiently new and popular that other writers exploited it after Chaucer’s death. The “Tale of Beryn” is included in some versions as the Merchant’s Tale, and a popular, though anonymous, Canterbury Interlude told of the Pardoner’s attempts to seduce a bar-maid, Kit the Tapster, ending in his humiliation. The poet John Lydgate, in the fifteenth century, introduced his Siege of Thebes with a prologue telling how he met up with the Canterbury Pilgrims, who asked him to read his magnum opus. Neither Harry Bailly nor Geoffrey Chaucer interrupt the work.