The Canterbury tales is a story of a journey through the Canterbury pilgrimages- a route of 90 miles to cover 50 miles as the crow flies. As a pilgrimage route it was the medieval equivalent of a tourist circuit, like the harbors cruise ships stop in today. Any villages which existed would certainly have capitalized on the income from travelers coming through the area. Several of the characters in the tale are quite wealthy yet ever day (for 10 days) they all eat together outdoors as well as camp under the stars. Aside from actually stating that there were no villages that is about as conclusive as it gets.
There are a couple reasons why this is not conclusive at all.
- The villagers might lack the license and/or capital to make a business. A hamlet does not accommodate fourteen pilgrims on a whim.
- The pilgrims (or too many of them) prefer to camp out for reasons of the pilgrimage (penance or whatever).
- The Tales are, as far as we can tell, fiction.
What you are missing is that it is not "on a whim", pilgrimages are established routes, it's like saying the town can't fill support a travel stop on a whim when there are people coming through every week on a well traveled route- pilgrimages were some of the most well traveled routes of the period.
secondly pilgrimages do ot require camping, in fact nobles often took pilgrimages that were in reality simply an excuse to go travel.
Point 3 is valid, but we do not have a lot of other references, and given the author he would at least have known about what he wrote when it came to this pilgrimage. Certainly, the descriptions of how they ate meat communally were accurate.
I did not miss that, but if the tourism is as profitable as you suggest, it does not really matter if there were villages. The lord of the land would establish the wayposts to reap the profit.
That depends on the pilgrim. Pilgrims come in all sorts.
Re point 3, as a matter of poetics, as long as the pilgrims would spend some nights camping, the story is plausible. A night in a village would break it. The medieval village would not be able to accommodate them together. To keep up their contest, they have to stay together, something they can only plausibly do by camping or in a town affording a professionally operated inn. Even if staying in a village were the norm, camping might make the most plausible story possible.
I disagree with your arguments above, but I believe the key point I was making- that there was more room, fewer people, and that the relative isolation originally assumed was based on actual situations and not just "backwards thinking" as you indicate has been well established aside from the finer points of Chaucer.
On the topic of village distribution, there's a convenient map of all the settlements mentioned in the Domesday Book available here: Map | Domesday Book. There's no scale provided, but for reference there's 102 miles between London and Birmingham.
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Keeping in mind as well that the Brittish Isles were one of the more heavily populated areas of Europe as well. That being said if you select 25 or more households there are some large areas devoid of markings, and priests have much larger dark areas.
Sure, but you do not need 25 households for your covenfolk to have some cousins to liaise with and to adjust their moral compass.
Not even looking at villages, you will have individual homesteads scattered about. Wood collectors/cutters, hunters, and varies other jobs are advantaged by being closer to the wilds than most villages are. Then you have to outlying farms and such which will spring up in safer areas. Those outlying farms will over the course of several generations build up into new villages. All of these might have several miles separating them from their nearest neighbor but would serve as a point in the chain of connection.
Covenants which are isolated because they are in locations which make even the narrow links in the chain not possible (on a mountain, deep in caves, in a sealed regio, etc) are the ones which develop covenfolk that are strange. History has shown that people completely cut off develop in strange ways and you are looking at 22 generations for the oldest isolated Covenants which is more than enough time for them to get truly strange.
Covenfolk don't have to be strange to be different, and islation is not required ither- if you are 5 links way from the nearest church than the culture of the covenant might be fairly distinct from church doctrine on a number of details like how extra work is looked upon. The church standards are mentioned in city and guild, not town and country, where if a calf is born on the sabbath you better well deliver the calf instead of worrying about what the church will say.