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Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400)

We know more about Chaucer's life than we do about Shakespeare's, because he had a public career so there are many mentions of him in official records of the time. However, little is known of his early life apart from a few official records. His family were wine-merchants who lived in London, and Chaucer was probably educated at St Paul's Almonry.

Chaucer next became a page to the Countess of Ulster, wife of King Edward III's third son Prince Lionel. In 1357 her household accounts record that she bought him a short cloak, a pair of shoes and some black and red breeches. Although a page's duties included running errands and making beds, the post enabled an ambitious boy to acquire the best possible lessons in good manners and courtly behaviour and meet many people who could influence his future career. For Chaucer, one of those was the king's fourth son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who became his patron. Indeed, Chaucer later married Philippa de Roet, the sister of Catherine Swynford who was for many years Gaunt's mistress and eventually became his third wife.

In 1359, Chaucer went to France as a soldier in one of the many battles later known as the Hundred Years War, near the city of Retters. He mentioned his military career later, in 1386, when he was a witness in a trial between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor about who had the right to bear a certain coat of arms. He described how, until he was taken prisoner, he saw Scrope bear these arms throughout the whole expedition. Chaucer was later ransomed by King Edward III for £16.

During his time in France, Chaucer was greatly impressed by the elegance of French poetry and its tales of courtly love, in which lovers yearned for an unattainable mistress, usually a married lady, and did dangerous deeds in her service. This kind of love was supposed to ennoble the lover, and make him a better knight, though in practice it was part of a system which kept women well and truly under control by putting them on a romantic pedestal. Later, the Book of the Duchess, an elegy for the death of John of Gaunt's first wife, used many of these ideas.

Edward III employed Chaucer as one of the eight valets of the king's chamber. This sounds like a menial job, and indeed some of the work involved domestic duties like making beds and carrying torches. However the King valued Chaucer's services and paid him £20 a year – well above the level normally paid for such a post. Later, the King sent him on trade missions abroad. Trips to Italy in 1372 and 1378 sparked Chaucer's interest in Italian literature. He had an excellent memory and a gift for languages, and could read in Latin, French, Anglo-Norman and Italian. He read much of the literature and the scientific and historical works then available, including the classical Roman writers such as Virgil and Ovid, and the Italian writers Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Chaucer died fifty years before printing arrived in Europe, so all these would have been hand-written manuscripts, very valuable. , The style and content of many of these stories influenced his later works The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde.


We know that Chaucer loved to read, because in his House of Fame he writes a somewhat tongue-in-cheek description of the way he prefers to shut himself up with his books rather than talk to his friends and neighbours:

That is, that thou hast no tydynges
Of Loves folk yf they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that God made;
And noght oonly fro fer contree
That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That duellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herist neyther that ne this;
For when thy labour doon al ys,
And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,
In stede of reste and newe thynges
Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.

That is, that you have no news
Of Love's folk, if they are glad,
Nor of nought else that God made
And it is not only from far countries
That no tidings come to you,
But of your very neighbours,
That duel almost at your doors,
You hear neither that nor this;
For when your labour is all done,
And you have made all your reckonings,
Instead of rest and new things
You go home to your house straight away,
And also, dumb as any stone,
You sit at another book
Till you look quite dazed;
And live thus as a hermit,
Although your abstinence is light.

Meanwhile, Chaucer became wealthy through various posts given to him by the King. From 1374-86 he was controller of customs for on furs, skins and hides for the port of London, a Justice of the Peace, a Knight of the Shire. When a military expedition took the King's brother John of Gaunt, Chaucer's brother-in-law, to Spain in 1387, Chaucer's career suffered a setback until Gaunt's return. With more time for writing, it was probably then that he began to create The Canterbury Tales, though his later post of clerk of the king's works from 1389-91 slowed his progress, and he did not write as many tales as he intended.

By this time, Chaucer was an experienced writer. As well as literary works, he had translated and adapted works of history and philosophy. Since 1066, French had been regarded as the language of the court and therefore the best language for literature. Latin was the language of the Church and the classics. However, Chaucer felt that the freshness and flexibility of the emerging English language made it suitable for poetry. He was the first English poet to use iambic pentameter and the heroic couplet. He may have been inspired by the Dante's success in writing in the Tuscan dialect of Italian.

By the 1380s his poetic reputation was widespread, even reaching France. Other poets recognised the value of his work. His friend John Gower praised him as a poet of love, Lydgate as 'the flower of eloquence', Hoccleve as 'my worthy master' and the French poet Eustace Deschamps as 'the great translator'. He died in 1400, only part-way through the great poetic project of his lifetime, The Canterbury Tales.