Perhaps, but it still tells you nothing at all about how the literate people of Chaucer’s day read.
~~
And in fact, there is a major difference between how we read now and they read then.
Until the standardization of spelling and the arrival of print, everyone moved their lips while they read. This was true of Chaucer’s day and true of Shakespeare’s. Reading was a auditory process. You said words that were written, and listened to yourself. Even today, that’s the easiest way to read Chaucer or Sir Wawan and the grene cny3t (er, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight). If you do, you find the spelling issues fall away, and suddenly you’re getting it, even if the passage looked impenetrable when you saw it initially.
The text below has a couple of letters we no longer use, a few others represent sounds that differ from the represented by that letter today, and there are some archaic words. Once you’ve learned those, you can sound it out and understand what’s going on pretty easily
Þen comaunded þe kyng þe kny3t for to ryse;
And he ful radly vpros, and ruchched hym fayre,
Kneled doun bifore þe kyng, and cachez þat weppen;
And he luflyly hit hym laft, and lyfte vp his honde,
And gef hym Goddez blessyng, and gladly hym biddes
Þat his hert and his honde schulde hardi be boþe.
‘Kepe þe cosyn,’ quoþ þe kyng, ‘þat þou on kyrf sette,
And if þou rede3 hym ry3t, redly I trowe
Þat þou schal byden þe bur þat he schal bede after.’
Gawan gotz to þe gome with giserne in honde,
And he baldly hym bydez, he bayst neuer þe helder.
Þen carppez to Sir Gawan þe kny3t in þe grene,
‘Refourme we oure forwardes, er we fyrre passe.
Fyrst I eþe þe, haþel, how þat þou hattes
Þat þou me telle truly, as I tryst may.’
‘In god fayth,’ quoþ þe goode kny3t, ‘Gawan I hatte,
Þat bede þe þis buffet, quat-so bifallez after,
And at þis tyme twelmonyth take at þe an oþer
Wyth what weppen so þou wylt, and wyth no wy3 ellez
on lyue.’
Þat oþer onswarez agayn,
'Sir Gawan, so mot I þryue
As I am ferly fayn
Þis dint þat þou schal dryue.
To understand the difference, think about the difference in being able to read music. Some can read a score well enough to to work out how to play something, but with a little struggle. Others can sight-read at speed while singing or playing, but can’t sit down and ‘read’ a score silently in their heads, while some can.
When it comes to reading text, we’re nearly all in the last group. These days it’s embarrassing to move your lips while you read. If you do, people will call you stupid. We now read visually, using pattern recognition to identify whole words instead of letters–rather than audibly by listening. This way is a great deal faster. We now can read faster than we speak, but that’s a comparitively recent change: the visual trick depends on having standardized spellings, and only began becoming the norm after spellings began to be regularized in about the 17th century.
