Chaucer's Characters

Out of all the caracters in The Canterbury Tales, the one most likely to endure the longest is the knight. The main reason for this is that the knight is the least complicated out the characters: he is just an exaggerated knight. He seems to be the embodiment of the medieval era, chivalrous and polite, but, as he appears to the reader, is constantly either off on some crusade or making a pilgrimage to some holy site. (This inferrence comes from the observation that the knight appears to have come straight from battle, pulled of his armor, and headed straight for Canterbury. Thus, it seems like fighting and going on pilgrimages are all he does.
Such a one-dimensional character will find it hard to vanish from our culture, as it is so easy for writers to churn out yet another cookie-cutter knight. Other, more complex, characters may eventually disappear, as writers stop using the exact combination of attributes that makes up the archetype, but the knight will not, because a charater who does nothing but act "heroic" will always exist in some form or another.