Reminders of the cult of saints were omnipresent in Chaucer's society. Saints’ days far outnumbered other kinds of holidays, and churches celebrated the major ones with processions to an altar with the saint's image or relics, special hymns in the saint's honour and readings about the saint's life. These occasions were so embedded in the culture that both ecclesiastical and secular documents habitually dated events in terms of the nearest saint's day instead of giving the month and numerical day. Carved and painted images of the saints were everywhere, too – present not only in churches and private homes but even in secular public contexts like city gates – inviting the faithful to remember them and pay them homage. Modern readers, especially those of us from non-Catholic backgrounds, are often inclined to envision Chaucer as sceptically detached from all such manifestations of late-medieval piety. Given his satire against corruptions in the Church and his austerely reformist portrayal of the good Parson, we may even expect to find him agreeing with the followers of Wyclif, who urged the faithful to pray directly to God rather than any saint, condemned the veneration of relics and images as idolatrous and regarded the retelling of most saints’ legends as a waste of time, or worse, because it distracted attention from sound, Bible-centred teaching. Chaucer's actual treatment of these issues, however, is surprisingly nuanced.

Even the Pardoner's Tale, which vividly demonstrates the ways in which unscrupulous churchmen could exploit an ignorant laity's trust in the power of relics, does not quite close down the hope that the genuine relics of a saint might heal bodies and souls. The Pardoner's Epilogue not only ends on a charitable note, with the Pardoner being forgiven and accepted back into the group of pilgrims, but also makes two surprising allusions to specific relics and posthumous miracles of Thomas Becket which reinforce the implicit message that the pilgrimage itself is worth making.