there had come into that inn at nightfall a good twenty-nine in a company, all sorts of people who had fallen by chance into fellowship, and pilgrims were they all, who meant to ride toward Canterbury.

“Wel nyne and twenty”: Skeat’s note says wel “is here used like our word, full or quite,” a full twenty-nine, though his Glossary also offers “about” for this line. Either way it is a number given casually, and readers have been counting the pilgrims in the portraits that follow ever since. They have fallen together “by aventure,” by chance; Skeat writes its sound as av·entü·r’, the stress on the first and last syllables. The word is our “adventure,” which first meant whatever happens to come. Felawshipe is company, from felawe, a companion or fellow. Hostelrye is an inn, and Skeat notes that a hostler was at first the keeper of an inn, “and not, as now, the servant of an inn who looks after the horses.”