Geoffrey Chaucer presents a broad portrait of life in his Canterbury Tales both in the depiction of the pilgrims themselves and in the characters in the stories the pilgrims tell one another to pass the time. One of his problems in shaping this lengthy project was a perceived need to achieve variety within a coherent and unified framework. He achieved unity first by means of his central premise--that these varied pilgrims were united on the road by their intention to reach Canterbury in the prescribed time and for a religious purpose. He achieved variety through his selection of the people to be on this trip, reflecting members of those segments of society which would be represented on such a journey, leavened at times with additional characters such as innkeepers and the like they would encounter on their trip. In addition, there is unity in the secondary premise that each of these pilgrims would help pass the time by recounting tales to the others, and these tales often come in groups which complement one another thematically or in some cases offer a form of balance between opposing points of view. Variety is further achieved through the characters told about in these stories, offering an even broader cross-section of the society that produced these people. The controlling image for the book is the pilgrimage itself, and it is around this event that everything else is shaped.
As noted, the pilgrims themselves constitute a variety of types, each with his or her individual idiosyncracies, points of view, and character traits. There are both males and females among the group, and there are also groupings according to profession. There is a clear division between those who are clerics and those who have non-religious occupations. There is a knight and his squire, a physician, a man of law, a shipowner, a cook, and a miller, and with the Wife if Bath, they are set against the clerical group--a nun, a prioress, a pardoner, a ...