Canterbury High Street: Chaucer and Other Things

After our train journey down from Oxford and setting up our tents, we made our way to the centre of Canterbury, and walked down the High Street. 

A few minutes in, we encountered some Chaucer imagery:

Have only ever briefly skimmed into short sections of The Canterbury Tales (1400).

In Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, the Catholic/Christian commentator  Joseph Pearce (2019: 50) points towards Chaucer's Middle English being far easier to understand and read than the more Germanic Old English of the writer of Beowulf.

Pearce (Ibid) concedes that Chaucer is more difficult to read than the early Modern English of Shakespeare, but that with a decent "modicum of effort",The Canterbury Tales are understandable.

Interestingly, Pearce (Ibid) describes some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as being "bawdy", with The Miller's Tale standing out in this respect, despite the "overarching moral" of the tales being "profoundly Christian".

Anyway, after the Chaucer images, we came across the curiously-named Houdinis Bar:

 

For some reason, the guy below seemed to be determined to get on my picture of Houdinis:

Maybe he'd just come out of the place?

Nearby, we passed The Cricketers pub which was here when I first visited Canterbury in the summer of 1994.

 And then we spotted a strange old building, the Freemasons Museum, near the bottom of the High Street:

Not a big fan of the Freemasons, to be honest. For me, they kind of represent a polar opposite of Chaucer's Christian worldview.

Of course, the cryptic symbols on the door kind of gave me the creeps:

 The entrance to the Freemasons Museum lay round the back of the building:

Went in once many years ago, in about 2000 or 2001, and a jovial Jewish man offered his own take on Catholic-Freemason antipathy throughout history. Also saw a Knights Templar outfit inside the Freemasons Museum.