In Chaucer's England saints gave their names to churches and monasteries, to towns and villages. Their shrines and relics affirmed their continuing presences. Their names pepper the General Prologue and the tales. Chaucer tells a saint's legend in the Second Nun's Tale, a miracle of the Virgin in the Prioress's Tale, and creates a hybrid of the two genres in the Man of Law's Tale. Within the narrative structure of the saint's legend, Chaucer gives voices to those often unheard: women and children. Cecilia, the little clergeon and Custance use their voices at crucial moments in their tales to instigate change and establish their relationship with the divine.

Painted on church walls, carved in stone and wood, depicted in brilliant glass, saints surrounded the faithful when they walked into not only monumental cathedrals but their local parish churches, often adorned with images of titular saints, local saints and the Virgin Mary. That these held significance for the ordinary medieval person is witnessed by bequests made to images in medieval wills. Chaucer and his audience would also have been familiar with saints through the liturgy. Almost every day in the Sarum liturgical calendar commemorates a saint or a feast of the church. Individual communities expanded the calendar by celebrating saints of local importance. Propers (specific service elements) for saints’ feast days appear in the Sarum breviary, the service book used to celebrate the daily canonical hours. Even if they did not own a breviary, members of the increasingly literate middle class could have access to or own these calendars as well as litanies and other devotions to saints found in books of hours. For those who could afford them, decorated books of hours provided portable images of the saints. More elaborate books of hours frequently incorporate images of the original owner, demonstrating individual personal connection with the devotional object.

‘The hooly blissful martir for to seke’

Chaucer builds the Canterbury Tales framework on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas Becket. Becket, born around 1118, served Theobald the archbishop of Canterbury and Henry II, who appointed him successor to Theobald.