There is fairly general agreement that the modern reader's appreciation of Chaucer's writings can be enhanced by providing the reader with guides to Chaucerian background' - literary, historical and cultural - and students of Chaucer are fortunate in having at their disposal a large number of books covering various aspects of Chaucerian background. One field which is less well covered is Chaucer's language: it is true that certain aspects of Chaucer's syntax and lexis have been dealt with in fairly recent years, but other subcategories of Chaucerian English, such as phonology and morphology,...