Alyson of Bath, cloth-maker, widow, pilgrim, and five-times-married authority on love and marriage, is riding the spring roads from Southwark to Canterbury in lively company. There’s Sir Calidore, courteous and courtly to his fingertips; Robin the miller, loud, brash, and cheerfully unrefined; Friar Hubert, smooth of tongue and slippery of conscience; Madam Eglantine, a nun and prioress, proper as prayer and careful as lace; and Harry Bailey, genial host of the pilgrimage and keeper of good order. To pass the miles, Harry proposes they tell stories, and as it’s spring and the world is bursting into bloom, Alyson, naturally, takes the floor. Before she tells her tale, she is invited to speak of her five husbands: the first three rich old men (how else can a poor girl survive?), then the handsome Guillaume de Lory, charming but unfaithful, who can’t keep pace with the formidable woman she has become, and finally the delicious Jankyn, whose smile was July and whose body was August. That, she decides, is quite enough to be going on with. She has another story to tell. This time it is a tale of courtly love: a young knight named Roland, a terrible crime in a forest, and a punishment narrowly escaped when Queen Guinevere sets him a task, a year and a day to discover what women most desire. With his servant Dogwood, Roland wanders the world in search of an answer no one can agree on. As the story unfolds, the pilgrims listening are quietly tested: Sir Calidore’s courtly ideals begin to wobble, Robin’s bravado is exposed, Friar Hubert’s easy certainties slip, and Harry Bailey finds himself uncomfortably implicated. And Madam Eglantine, a nun and prioress ‘married’ to Christ, feels something stir - the wild rose beneath the habit, “the pink beneath the grey”, beginning to show. Along the road there is laughter, argument, music, chaos, hilarity, poetry and tenderness, but beneath it all, deeper questions surface.