AT THE END of the Knight's Tale, the narrator of the Tales reports the unanimity of the pilgrims:

The terms of this unanimity are given in status and age: the gentlefolk, in particular, find the value of the story the Knight has told, as well as both young and old. But oldness really is paramount here: from the beginning of his tale, the Knight has been conscious of the past, aware of the value of what is old, even as his tale seems to focus on the traditional concerns of the young: love, battle. Indeed, even as the Knight tells a tale, much of the tale's power is found in its age, a fact apparent from the tale's first line: “Whilom, as olde stories tellen us” (1.859). And much of what the tale tells us as readers in the twentyfirst century about old age can be seen in the workings of Saturn toward the end of the tale, in the depiction of the old god, whose discussions of disease, age, and infirmity are central to his power, even if the human figures of the tale fail to see this. Even though these strategies are frequently deployed— the temporal framing of the tale, the inclusion of Saturn as a mover of divine disorder or an older order— I see in the Knight's frequent citations of oldness from the beginning more than a commonplace. While many messages about oldness and old age exist in the Tales and late medieval England— old age and its effects might be negative, old stories are important, and age can be a source of debility and impairment as well as authority and veneration— this framing has consequences for how these lines at the end of the tale can be understood, which I use a map for Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England.