Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous
“Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and
crucially he chose to write it in English. Other
important works were written in English
around the same time, if not earlier, including
William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” and the anonymous “Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight”. But the “Canterbury Tales” is usually considered the first great works of English
literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English,
as opposed to French or Latin.