Many students regard physics as an isolated, sophisticated and perhaps a boring branch of science. Meanwhile, physics is embedded in most events and issues of society, culture and everyday life. To find and include such relevant contexts is one of the challenges for every physics teacher. Here we present our findings, which concern the classic "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer. Some important questions are still open and disputed, such as the dates of events in the story. In particular, physics can provide a method for an approximate estimation of the dates and places of the events in the tales. This paper provides some of the details.