Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400)

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London around 1343, the son of John Chaucer, a prosperous wine merchant and royal customs official, and Agnes de Copton. The family name, from the French chaussier, meant a maker of shoes or leggings; the money behind it was trade, not land. No document records his schooling, but the boy who grew up in the Vintry ward was bilingual in the way the English elite had to be, fluent in English and in the French of court and law, and he later read Latin and Italian with ease. His first appearance in the records comes in 1357, when he is listed as a page in the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, a son of Edward III. Service in great households was the school of the English gentry, and it placed a merchant's son within reach of the royal court.

In 1359 he served in the English army in France during the Hundred Years' War, was captured near Reims, and was ransomed the following year, the king himself contributing to the sum. From the late 1360s he was a valet and then esquire of the royal household. About 1366 he married Philippa de Roet, a lady in the service of the queen, whose sister Katherine Swynford would later become the partner and then wife of John of Gaunt, Edward III's powerful son. The connection to Gaunt, Chaucer's longtime patron, shaped his fortunes for decades. Two sons, Thomas and Lewis, are generally credited to the marriage, and a daughter, Elizabeth, is also sometimes named, though the documentation for his children is thin.

Chaucer was a working civil servant, and the geography of his career mattered more to his poetry than any cloister could have. He travelled on royal business to France, Spain and Italy, with journeys to Genoa and Florence in 1372–73 and to Lombardy in 1378. Those years put him in the path of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose work would transform what he thought English verse could do. In 1374 he was made controller of the customs on wool and hides in the port of London, and he lived in rooms above Aldgate, one of the city's gates, for about a dozen years. He sat as a Member of Parliament for Kent in 1386, served as a justice of the peace, and later held the post of clerk of the king's works, responsible for the upkeep of royal buildings. In 1380 a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne released him from a charge of raptus, a term that can mean rape or abduction. The record is ambiguous and the circumstances remain unclear, but it belongs in any honest account of him.

His fortunes depended on the favour of kings. The political turmoil of the 1380s, which saw Richard II's circle of favourites challenged, coincided with the loss of his customs posts and with the death of Philippa, probably in 1387. He had lived through the Black Death in his youth and would have witnessed the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 from his lodgings in London. He was also a contemporary of John Wyclif and of the Lollard controversy, though Chaucer was no theologian and left no record of siding with the reformers. His own religion was that of the late medieval English church, conventionally observant and shot through with a clear-eyed awareness of its clergy's failings.

His later years were financially uneasy, with periods of debt, though Richard II and then Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399, confirmed and renewed his annuities. He is believed to have moved to a house in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and he died there on 25 October 1400. He was buried in the abbey, and the honour was probably owed to his residence rather than to his poetry. Later generations moved his remains and founded what became Poets' Corner around his tomb.

His Writing and Its Influence

Chaucer began writing in the 1360s, and his early work was learned in the French tradition of courtly love vision poetry. The Book of the Duchess, probably composed after the death of Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife, in 1368, is an elegy cast as a dream, leaning on the French poets Machaut and Froissart and on the Roman de la Rose, which he is also credited with partly translating. After the Italian journeys his models changed. The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls bear the marks of Dante and of the Latin philosophical tradition, and Troilus and Criseyde, written in the mid-1380s, reworks Boccaccio's Il Filostrato into a long, tragic poem of love and betrayal set in Troy. Its narrator closes by turning from "worldly vanity" toward the God who alone does not deceive. His version of Boethius, Boece, a prose translation of The Consolation of Philosophy, left a deep mark on his thinking about fortune, providence and free will, themes that run through the Knight's Tale and Troilus alike. He also wrote a prose Treatise on the Astrolabe for his son Lewis.

His great work, The Canterbury Tales, was begun around 1387 and never finished. Its frame is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket, and its pilgrims, from a knight and a prioress to a miller, a pardoner and a wife of Bath, tell stories that range from romance and saint's legend to fabliau and sermon. The poem's attention to the church is neither devout propaganda nor satire for its own sake. The Pardoner preaches against greed while selling false relics, the Summoner and the Friar prey on the people they are meant to serve, and the poor Parson is held up as a model shepherd. The Wife of Bath stages an argument about authority and experience, and most of the Tales stand in a looser relation to the whole than any single reading can capture. The last item, the Retraction, in which Chaucer asks forgiveness for his "worldly vanitees" and commends his translations of devotional works, has been read as sincere penitence, as convention, and as something in between. Scholars have not settled the question.

The tale of how the work reached us is itself a reminder of how fragile it was. Chaucer's own manuscripts are lost. The Tales survive in some eighty-odd manuscripts, none in a final order authorised by the poet, and the arrangement of the tales is still debated. The Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts, copied within a generation of his death, are the most important witnesses. William Caxton printed the Tales in 1476 or 1477, among the first books printed in England.

His immediate influence ran through the poets of the fifteenth century, Lydgate, Hoccleve and the Scottish Chaucerians, who treated him as the founder of an English literary language. Edmund Spenser called him his master, Shakespeare drew on Troilus and the Knight's Tale, and Dryden and Pope translated him. Christian readers have answered him in different ways. Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, hunting for earlier witnesses against clerical corruption, claimed him as a proto-Protestant on the strength of his anticlerical stories, a reading that sits badly with the Retraction and with the Parson's orthodox sermon on penance. Modern critics have returned him to his late medieval Catholic setting, reading him as a writer of the church's own self-examination.

Who should read Chaucer: Readers of this library who want to hear the church of the late fourteenth century in its own voice, with its saints and its swindlers in the same company, and who suspect that some of the spiritual writers here were answering a world he describes more honestly than they do. He repays anyone who wishes to see how ordinary medieval English Christians lived, laughed and failed. He is not a teacher of prayer or a guide for the interior life, and readers looking for either will find the question handed back to them in the last pages of the Tales.