Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in 1392. He wanted to include characters from all over England in his story but he died before finishing it. It is one of the most well known stories in Middle English. The Middle English period ran from the conquest of England by William the Conqueror all the way to the 1400s.
When the printing press was invented writers and printers started standardising the way words were spelled to give their books a bit more consistency and to make the printing process more straightforward. Before the printing press was invented people wrote mostly phonetically although there were some standards. Here are the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales read in the original Middle English
