Geoffrey Chaucer
In 1556, workers in Westminster Abbey moved a poet's bones into a new and more ornate tomb. The man had died over 150 years earlier, on the 25th of October 1400 by the engraving on that very monument. With that transfer, Geoffrey Chaucer became the first writer laid to rest in the part of the Abbey now called Poets' Corner. He was an English poet, writer, and civil servant, born in London in the early 1340s. Yet the only evidence for his death date is carving added a century too late. How does a wine merchant's son become the man some call the father of English literature? Nearly 500 written records survive of his official life, and almost two thousand English words are first attested in manuscripts of his work. The puzzle is that the poetry and the paperwork belong to the same person, and the records rarely mention the poems at all.
Andrew de Chaucer kept a tavern, and his descendant would carry a name built from trade. The surname comes from the French chaucier, which in Middle English could mean a maker of shoes, boots, or chausses, meaning leggings. Robert Malyn le Chaucer purveyed wines, and several generations of the family had been vintners and merchants in Ipswich. John Chaucer, Geoffrey's father, rose to become an important wine merchant with a royal appointment. In 1324, before he was even a father, John Chaucer was kidnapped by an aunt who hoped to marry the twelve-year-old boy to her daughter and keep Ipswich property in the family. The aunt was imprisoned and fined 250 pounds, a sum that suggests the family had money. John later married Agnes Copton, who in 1349 inherited 24 shops in London from her uncle Hamo de Copton. In a record dated June 1380, Chaucer named himself in Latin as Geoffrey Chaucer, son of the vintner John Chaucer of London. The poet never let go of where the money came from.
In 1357, a teenage boy appears in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, hired as her page. This is the first of the Chaucer Life Records, and his father's connections opened the door. De Burgh was married to Lionel of Antwerp, the second surviving son of Edward III, which placed Chaucer inside the close court circle for the rest of his life. In 1359, during the Hundred Years' War, he marched into France with the English army and was captured the next year at the siege of Reims. The king paid 16 pounds to ransom him. On Saint George's Day in 1374, Edward III granted Chaucer a gallon of wine daily for life, an unusual reward thought to mark some early poem. That same year, on the 8th of June, he took the post of Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London and held it for twelve years. The medievalist David Carlson described the role bluntly. The collector would try to cheat, the comptroller would try to catch him, and the Exchequer watched the comptroller, who was expected to cheat too. Of the 11 men prosecuted for treason by the Lords Appellant in 1388, Chaucer was an associate of eight, and he survived them all.
Around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa de Roet, a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault. Her sister Katherine Swynford would later, around 1396, become the third wife of John of Gaunt, making the duke and the poet brothers-in-law near the end of their lives. Three or four children are most commonly cited for Geoffrey and Philippa. His son Thomas Chaucer rose to be chief butler to four kings, an envoy to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas's daughter Alice married the Duke of Suffolk, and a descendant, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was named heir to the throne by Richard III before his deposition. Another son, Lewis Chaucer, received a gift no royal heir did. His father wrote him A Treatise on the Astrolabe, dedicated to the ten-year-old boy, describing the form and use of the instrument in such detail that it is sometimes called the first technical writing in the English language.
John of Gaunt, the wealthy Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV, was Chaucer's close friend and patron. When Gaunt's first wife Blanche of Lancaster died of the plague in 1369, Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess to commemorate her, his first major work. The poem hides its subjects in allegory. The lines speak of a long castel with walles white, by Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil, and a grieving black knight mourning a lady named White. Long castel points to Lancaster, Seynt Johan was Gaunt's name-saint, ryche hil means Richmond, and White is the English of the French blanche. The short poem Fortune, believed written in the 1390s, plays a stranger game. The goddess Fortune reminds the narrator three times, And eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve. She begs three princes, thought to be the dukes of Lancaster, York, and Gloucester, to lift Chaucer to a better estate. A line referring to three of you or tweyne is read as a nod to the ordinance of 1390, which required at least two of the three dukes to approve any royal gift.
A friar boasts that he knows hell, and the joke is that he should. In the prologue to The Summoner's Tale, Chaucer sends a friar on a vision-tour of the underworld, only for twenty thousand friars to come swarming out of the devil's body. Chaucer wrote with real Christian faith, drawing the Parson as a positive figure, yet he savaged the religious professionals he disliked. Friars and summoners squabble and spread scandal about each other, and the Pardoner is a shameless conman. The Canterbury Tales closes with a passage known as Chaucer's Retraction. In it he asks readers to thank Jesus Christ for anything that pleases them and to blame his lack of wit for anything that does not. He names works he repents as worldly vanities, including Troilus, the book of Fame, the book of the Duchesse, and the tales of Canterbury that tend toward sin. He thanks God only for his translation of Boethius and his books of saints and morality. Scholars have doubted both the sincerity and the authenticity of the passage. One recent edition decided that, repentant or not, Chaucer slyly leaves the resolution to the reader.
Thomas Hoccleve, a poet who may have met Chaucer, called him the firste fyndere of our fair langage, meaning the first capable of finding poetic matter in English. At a time when Anglo-Norman French and Latin dominated English letters, Chaucer wrote in Middle English and helped make it respectable. He invented the rhyme royal and was among the first English poets to use the five-stress line, arranging it into rhyming couplets first seen in The Legend of Good Women. He turned regional dialect into comedy in The Reeve's Tale, which J. R. R. Tolkien praised as dramatic realism. His Parlement of Foules from 1382 holds the first recorded link between Valentine's Day and romantic love, written to honor the engagement of the fifteen-year-old Richard II to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia. The Oxford English Dictionary records him as the first author to use many common words. Acceptable, alkali, army, arrogant, arsenic, and artillery are among nearly two thousand English words first attested in his writing. Eustache Deschamps paid a backhanded tribute, calling himself a nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry.
In 1464, a tenant farmer named John Baron was brought before the Bishop of Lincoln on charges of being a Lollard heretic. Among his suspect volumes he confessed to owning a boke of the Tales of Caunterburie. Lollards were drawn to Chaucer's satire of friars and priests, and they had begun reading him as one of their own before his death. The early printers carried that reinvention further. William Caxton printed The Canterbury Tales in 1478 and again in 1483, the second time because a customer complained the text differed from his manuscript. William Thynne's The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532, was the first edition of the collected works, but it folded in writings that were not Chaucer's at all. The Plowman's Tale and Thomas Usk's Testament of Love recast Chaucer as a proto-Protestant Lollard. John Foxe seized on Usk's account of imprisonment and recantation, calling Chaucer a right Wicklevian and wrongly naming him a schoolmate of John Wycliffe at Merton College, Oxford. Thomas Speght built a largely fictional Life of Chaucer from the same borrowed material, even inventing a tale of the poet beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. Only in the late 19th century, largely through the work of Walter William Skeat, did the canon accepted today take shape, and the ghost works finally fall away.
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Common questions
Who was Geoffrey Chaucer and why is he called the father of English literature?
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, writer, and civil servant born in London in the early 1340s and best known for The Canterbury Tales. He is called the father of English literature, or the father of English poetry, for helping legitimise the literary use of Middle English when French and Latin still dominated.
When did Geoffrey Chaucer die and where is he buried?
Geoffrey Chaucer died of unknown causes on the 25th of October 1400, according to the engraving on his tomb, which was erected more than 100 years after his death. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and in 1556 his remains were moved to a more ornate tomb, making him the first writer interred in Poets' Corner.
What did Geoffrey Chaucer write besides The Canterbury Tales?
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, Parlement of Foules, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Legend of Good Women. He also wrote A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his ten-year-old son Lewis and translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.
What jobs did Geoffrey Chaucer hold as a civil servant?
Geoffrey Chaucer served as a page, courtier, diplomat, and member of the Parliament of England, elected shire knight for Kent. He was Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London for twelve years from the 8th of June 1374, and Clerk of the King's Works from 1389 to 1391.
How is Geoffrey Chaucer connected to Valentine's Day?
Geoffrey Chaucer's Parlement of Foules from 1382 holds the first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love. The dream-vision poem portrays a parliament of birds choosing their mates and honored the engagement of the fifteen-year-old Richard II to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia.
How many English words did Geoffrey Chaucer introduce?
Almost two thousand English words are first attested in Chaucerian manuscripts, with Chaucer recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use them. Examples include acceptable, alkali, army, arrogant, arsenic, and artillery.
What is Geoffrey Chaucer's connection to John of Gaunt?
Geoffrey Chaucer was a close friend of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and served under his patronage. They became brothers-in-law around 1396 when Gaunt married Katherine Swynford, the sister of Chaucer's wife Philippa de Roet, and Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess to commemorate Gaunt's first wife, Blanche of Lancaster.
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66 references cited across the entry
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- 2newsChaucerCambridge University Press — 2011
- 3newsChaucer and the idea of EnglishnessArdis Butterfield
- 4bookThe Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 3. Medieval Poetry: 1400–1500James Simpson — Oxford University Press — 27 April 2023
- 5bookThe Yale Companion to ChaucerSeth Lerer — Yale University Press — 1 January 2006
- 6bookThe Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume SetSian Echard et al. — John Wiley & Sons — 2017
- 7bookChaucer and His WorldDerek Brewer — Boydell & Brewer Ltd — 1992
- 8bookChaucer: A European LifeMarion Turner — Princeton University Press — 9 April 2019
- 9journalThe Ipswich ancestors of Geoffrey ChaucerKeith Briggs — 2024
- 10journalThe Malins in Chaucer's Ipswich AncestryKeith Briggs — June 2019
- 11bookThe Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and IrelandOxford UP — 2016
- 12bookThe Riverside ChaucerLarry Dean Benson — Oxford University Press — 2008
- 13bookThe Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: Romaunt of the rose. Minor poemsClarendon Press — 1894
- 14bookCritical Companion to Chaucer: A Literary Reference to His Life and WorkRosalyn Rossignol — Facts on File — 2006
- 15bookMedieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535Eileen Power — Biblo & Tannen Publishers — 1988
- 16bookChaucer and His EnglandG. G. Coulton — Kessinger Publishing — 2006
- 17bookHolt Literature and Language ArtsHolt, Rinehart, and Winston — 2003
- 18journalThe Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and StatiusLeah Schwebel — 2014
- 19bookJohn Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century ItalyWilliam Caferro — Johns Hopkins University Press — 2006
- 20webGeoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: Rethinking the recordEuan Roger et al. — 2022b
- 21journalThe Archival Iceberg: New Sources for Literary Life-RecordsEuan Roger et al. — 1 October 2022
- 22journalChaucer and the Parliament of 1386F. R. Scott — 1943
- 23bookThe controversy between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, in the Court of ChivalrySir N. Harris Nicolas — 1832
- 24journalChaucer the Forester: The Friar's Tale, Forest History, and OfficialdomEric Weiskott — 1 January 2013
- 25bookThe Palgrave Literary Dictionary of ChaucerM. Andrew — Palgrave Macmillan UK — 2016
- 26bookChaucer Life-recordsJohn Matthews Manly — Clarendon Press — 1966
- 27bookWho Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval MysteryJones, Terry et al. — Methuen — 2003
- 28newsPoets' Corner History
- 29journalChaucer's Other Wyf: Philippa Chaucer, the Critics, and the English CanonSeal, Samantha Katz — 2019
- 30bookKatherine Swynford: The story of John of Gaunt and his Scandalous DuchessAlison Weir — Vintage Books — 2007
- 31bookThe Riverside ChaucerGeoffrey Chaucer — Houghton Mifflin Company — 1984
- 32bookThe Riverside ChaucerColin Wilcockson — Houghton Mifflin Company — 1987
- 33bookThe Riverside ChaucerZaila Gross — Houghton Mifflin Company — 1987
- 34bookA New View of ChaucerGeorge Williams — Duke University Press — 1965
- 37bookThe Riverside ChaucerLarry D. Benson — Oxford UP — 1988
- 38bookThe Canterbury Tales of ChaucerW. Pickering and R. and S. Prowett — 1822
- 39journalReviewed Work(s): The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis by Kari Anne Rand SchmidtJeremy J. Smith — 1995
- 40journalReviewed Work(s): The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis by Kari Anne Rand SchmidtN. F. Blake — 1996
- 41journalReviewed Work(s): The Authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis by Kari Anne Rand SchmidtLinne R. Mooney — 1996
- 42journalChaucer's Uncanny Regionalism: Rereading the North in The Reeve's TaleJoseph Taylor — University of Illinois Press — October 2010
- 43citationAccents of English: Volume 1John C. Wells — Cambridge University Press — 1982
- 44bookChaucer's Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and ManuscriptSingh Devani — Cambridge University Press — 2023
- 47newsChaucer 5 - The Language of ChaucerUniversity of Oxford podcasts
- 48newsThe Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's 'plein speke' is a raucous readSam Jordison — 11 September 2018
- 49newsA New App Guides Readers Through Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'Brigit Katz — 5 February 2020
- 51journalSt. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in FebruaryJack B. Oruch — The University of Chicago Press — July 1981
- 52journalChaucer et les origines de la Saint ValentinJonathan Fruoco — 2018
- 53webHenry Ansgar Kelly, Valentine's DayMeg Sullivan — February 1, 2001
- 54journalThe Myth of Origin and the Making of Chaucer's EnglishChristopher Cannon — University of Chicago Press — 1996
- 57bookThe Chaucer ReviewLawrence Besserman — Penn State University Press — 2006
- 58webA Leaf from The Canterbury TalesWilliam Caxton — 1473
- 59webUWM.edu
- 61bookThe Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: With a Life of the Martyrologist, and Vindication of the Work, Volume 4Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley — 1846
- 62odnbUrry, John (1666–1715)E. I. Carlyle — 2004
- 63bookChaucer: The Critical Heritage. Volume 1: 1385–1837Routledge & Kegan Paul — 1978
- 65bookThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the AgesHarold Bloom — Harcourt Brace — 1994
- 66bookThe Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and AdditionsMedieval Institute Publications — 1992
- 67bookChaucerian Dream Visions and ComplaintsMedieval Institute Publications — 2004