Geoffrey Chaucer ( ; JEF-ree CHAW-sər; c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, writer and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the 'father of English literature', or alternatively, the 'father of English poetry'. He was the first writer to be buried in what has since become Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his ten-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in public service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat and member of the Parliament of England, having been elected shire knight for Kent.
Amongst his other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and Parlement of Foules. A prolific writer, Chaucer has been seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. His contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested in Chaucerian manuscripts.
Life
Origin
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London, most likely in the early 1340s (by some accounts, including his monument, he was born in 1343), though the precise date and location remain unknown. His great-grandfather Andrew de Chaucer was a tavern keeper, his grandfather Robert Malyn le Chaucer worked as a purveyor of wines, and his father, John Chaucer, rose to become an important wine merchant with a royal appointment. Several previous generations of Geoffrey Chaucer's family had been vintners and merchants in Ipswich. His surname is derived from the French chaucier, which could refer in Middle English to a maker of shoes, boots, or chausses (leggings).
In 1324 his future father, John Chaucer, was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the twelve-year-old to her daughter in an attempt to keep the Ipswich property in the family. The aunt was imprisoned and fined £250, now equivalent to about £200,000, suggesting the family was financially secure.
John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, who inherited properties in 1349, including 24 shops in London, from her uncle Hamo de Copton, who is described in a will dated 3 April 1354 and listed in the City Hustings Roll as 'moneyer', apparently employed at the Tower of London. In the City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer, filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie, Latin for: "I, Geoffrey Chaucer, son of the vintner John Chaucer, London".
Career
Although records of the lives of Chaucer's contemporaries William Langland and the Gawain Poet are practically non-existent, Chaucer was a public servant whose official life was very well documented. Nearly 500 written items testify to his career. The first of the 'Chaucer Life Records' appears in 1357 in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, when he became the noblewoman's page through his father's connections, a common medieval form of apprenticeship for boys into knighthood or prestige appointments. De Burgh was married to Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, the second surviving son of Edward III; this position brought the teenage Chaucer into the close court circle, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He was also employed as a courtier, a diplomat and a civil servant, as well as working for the king from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the King's Works.
In 1359, in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward invaded France. Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army. In 1360 he was captured during the siege of Reims. The king paid £16 for his ransom, equivalent to £14,262 in 2025, and Chaucer was released.
Chaucer's life is uncertain following this period. However he seems to have travelled in France, Spain and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps undertaking the Way of Saint James pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
Around 1366 Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet. She was a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (c. 1396) became the third wife of John of Gaunt. It is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are most commonly cited. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had an illustrious career as chief butler to four kings, envoy to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas's daughter Alice married the Duke of Suffolk. Thomas's great-grandson (Geoffrey's great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was heir to the throne as designated by Richard III before his deposition. Geoffrey's other children probably included Elizabeth Chaucy, a nun at Barking Abbey, Agnes, an attendant at Henry IV's coronation; and another son, Lewis Chaucer. Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe" was written for the latter.
According to tradition, Chaucer studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at this time. He became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a valet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment. He travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan. Jean Froissart and Petrarch, also notable literary figures, were also in attendance. Around this time, Chaucer is believed to have written The Book of the Duchess, his first major work, in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt who died from the plague in 1369.
The next year, Chaucer travelled to Picardy as part of a military expedition; in 1373 he visited Genoa and Florence. Scholars such as Walter William Skeat, Piero Boitani and Beryl Rowland have suggested that it was during the latter excursions that he came into contact with Petrarch or Boccaccio. They acquainted him with mediæval Italian poetry, whose forms and stories he would later employ. The purposes of a trip in 1377 are unclear, as it was known as a time of conflict. Later documents suggest it was a mission (alongside Jean Froissart) to arrange marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess, thereby ending the Hundred Years' War. Were this the purpose of their trip, they seem to have been unsuccessful, as no wedding occurred.
In 1378 Richard II sent Chaucer as an envoy (secret dispatch) to the Visconti and Sir John Hawkwood, English condottiere (mercenary leader) in Milan. It has been speculated that it was Hawkwood on whom Chaucer based his character, the Knight, in the Canterbury Tales, for a description matches that of a 14th-century condottiere.
A possible indication that his career as a writer was appreciated came when Edward III granted Chaucer "a gallon of wine daily for the rest of his life" for some unspecified task. This was an unusual grant, but given on a day of celebration, Saint George's Day, 1374, when artistic endeavours were traditionally rewarded, it is assumed to have been for another early poetic work. It is not known which, if any, of Chaucer's extant works prompted the reward, but the suggestion of him as a poet to a king places him as a precursor to later poets laureate. Chaucer continued to collect the liquid stipend until Richard II came to power, after which it was converted to a monetary grant on 18 April 1378.
On 8 June 1374 Chaucer obtained the pivotal appointment as Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London. He was presumably well-received in the occupation: he held the position for twelve years, a lengthy titularship by then. The medievalist David Carlson has described Chaucer's job as "policing the collector ... The operating presumption was that the collector would try to cheat, and the comptroller would try to catch him at it; but at the same time, while the comptroller watched the collector, the Exchequer was watching the comptroller, who was evidently expected to try to cheat too". Chaucer appears to have been close to the Court party in politics; of the 11 men prosecuted for treason by the Lords Appellant in 1388, he was an associate of eight.
His life goes undocumented for much of the next ten years, but it is believed that he wrote (or began) most of his famous works during this period.
On 16 October 1379 Thomas Staundon filed legal action against his former servant Cecily Chaumpaigne and Chaucer, accusing the latter of unlawfully employing Chaumpaigne before her term of service was completed, in violation of the Statute of Labourers. Though eight court documents dated between October 1379 and July 1380 survive the action, the case was never prosecuted. No details survive about Chaumpaigne's service or how she came to leave Staundon's employ for Chaucer's.
While still working as comptroller, Chaucer appears to have moved to Kent, being appointed as one of the commissioners of peace for Kent at a time when French invasion was a possibility. He is thought to have started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s. He also became a member of parliament (a knight of the shire) for Kent in 1386 and attended the 'Wonderful Parliament' that year. He appears to have attended most of the 71 days it sat, for which he was paid 24 pounds and nine shillings. On 15 October that year he gave a deposition in the case of Scrope v. Grosvenor. There is no further reference after this date to Philippa, Chaucer's wife. She is presumed to have died in 1387. He survived the political upheavals caused by the Lords Appellants, despite the fact that Chaucer knew some of the men executed over the affair quite well.
On 12 July 1389 Chaucer was appointed the clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organising most of the king's building projects. No major works were begun during his tenure, but he did conduct repairs on Westminster Palace, St George's Chapel, Windsor, continued building the wharf at the Tower of London and built the stands for a tournament held in 1390. It may have been a difficult job, but it paid two shillings a day, more than three times his salary as a comptroller. Chaucer was also appointed keeper of the lodge at the King's Park in Feckenham Forest in Worcestershire, which was a largely honorary appointment.
Later life
In September 1390, records say that Chaucer was robbed and possibly injured while conducting the business, and he stopped working in this capacity on 17 June 1391. He began as Deputy Forester in the royal forest of Petherton Park in North Petherton, Somerset on 22 June. It involved administering an area which included moorland, cultivated fields, villages and a forest.
Richard II granted him an annual pension of 20 pounds in 1394 (equivalent to £22,238 in 2025), and Chaucer's name fades from the historical record not long after Richard's overthrow in 1399. The last few records of his life show his pension renewed by the new king and his taking a lease on a residence within the close of Westminster Abbey on 24 December 1399. Henry IV renewed the grants assigned by Richard, but The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse hints that the grants might not have been paid. The last mention of Chaucer is on 5 June 1400, when some debts owed to him were repaid.
Chaucer died of unknown causes on 25 October 1400, although the only evidence for this date comes from the engraving on his tomb, which was erected more than 100 years after his death. There is some speculation that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of his successor Henry IV, but the case is entirely circumstantial. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as was his right owing to his status as a tenant of the Abbey's close. In 1556, his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, making him the first writer interred in the area now known as Poets' Corner.
Relationship to John of Gaunt
Chaucer was a close friend of John of Gaunt, the wealthy Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV, and he served under Lancaster's patronage. Near the end of their lives, Lancaster and Chaucer became brothers-in-law when Lancaster married Katherine Swynford (de Roet) in 1396; she was the sister of Philippa (de) Roet, whom Chaucer had married in 1366.
Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess (also known as the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse) was written to commemorate Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife. The poem refers to John and Blanche in allegory as the narrator relates the tale of "A long castel with walles white/Be Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil" (1318–1319) who is mourning grievously after the death of his love, "And goode faire White she het/That was my lady name ryght" (948–949). The phrase "long castel" is a reference to Lancaster (also called "Loncastel" and "Longcastell"), "walles white" is thought to be an oblique reference to Blanche, "Seynt Johan" was John of Gaunt's name-saint, and "ryche hil" is a reference to Richmond. These references reveal the identity of the grieving black knight of the poem as John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Earl of Richmond. "White" is the English translation of the French word "blanche", implying that the white lady was Blanche of Lancaster.
Poem Fortune
Chaucer's short poem Fortune, believed to have been written in the 1390s, is also thought to refer to Lancaster. "Chaucer as narrator" openly defies Fortune, proclaiming that he has learned who his enemies are through her tyranny and deceit, and declares "my suffisaunce" (15) and that "over himself hath the maystrye" (14).
Fortune, in turn, does not understand Chaucer's harsh words to her for she believes that she has been kind to him, claims that he does not know what she has in store for him in the future, but most importantly, "And eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve" (32, 40, 48). Chaucer retorts, "My frend maystow nat reven, blind goddesse" (50) and orders her to take away those who merely pretend to be his friends.
Fortune turns her attention to three princes whom she implores to relieve Chaucer of his pain and "Preyeth his beste frend of his noblesse/That to som beter estat he may atteyne" (78–79). The three princes are believed to represent the dukes of Lancaster, York, and Gloucester, and a portion of line 76 ("as three of you or tweyne") is thought to refer to the ordinance of 1390 which specified that no royal gift could be authorised without the consent of at least two of the three dukes.
Most conspicuous in this short poem is the number of references to Chaucer's "beste frend". Fortune states three times in her response to the plaintiff, "And also, you still have your best friend alive" (32, 40, 48); she also refers to his "beste frend" in the envoy when appealing to his "noblesse" to help Chaucer to a higher estate. The narrator makes a fifth reference when he rails at Fortune that she shall not take his friend from him.
Religious beliefs
Chaucer's works engage heavily with the theme of Christian faith. The figure of the Parson portrays Christianity positively. However, Chaucer also ruthlessly satirises religious professionals whom he dislikes, depicting friars and summoners squabbling and telling scandalous tales about each other, and a shameless conman in the form of the Pardoner.
The Canterbury Tales ends with a section that has come to be known as Chaucer's "Retraction". In full and in translation:
Now pray I to them all that listen to this little treatise or read it, that if there be any thing in it that pleases them, that thereof they thank our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom proceeds all wit and all goodness. And if there be any thing that displeases them, I pray them also that they blame it on the fault of my lack of wit and not to my will, that would much prefer to have said better if I had had cunning. For our book says, "All that is written is written for our doctrine," and that is my intent. Wherefore I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my sins; and namely of my translations and compositions of worldly vanities, as is the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the XXV. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse; the book of Saint Valentines day of the Parliament of Birds; the tales of Canterbury, those that tend toward sin; the book of the Lion; and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and many a song and many a lecherous lyric, that Christ for his great mercy forgive me the sin. But of the translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and other books of legends of saints, and homilies, and morality, and devotion, that thank I our Lord Jesus Christ and his blissful Mother, and all the saints of heaven, beseeching them that they from henceforth unto my life's end send me grace to bewail my sins and to study to the salvation of my soul, and grant me grace of true penitence, confession and satisfaction to do in this present life, through the benign grace of him that is king of kings and priest over all priests, that bought us with the precious blood of his heart, so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved. Qui cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto vivit et regnat Deus per omnia secula. [He who lives and reigns with the Father and Holy Spirit, God, world without end.] Amen.
Both the sincerity and the authenticity of the "Retraction"
have been questioned. One recent edition concludes that "the Retraction ends the Canterbury Tales with a final complexity; repentant or not, Chaucer, as usual, slyly leaves the resolution to the reader".
Literary works
Chaucer's first major work was The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster, who died in 1368. Two other early poems were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. He wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he worked as customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. It is believed that he began The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s.
Chaucer also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). Eustache Deschamps called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385 Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower also lauded him.
His Treatise on the Astrolabe, dedicated to his ten-year-old son Lewis Chaucer, describes the form and use of the astrolabe in detail and is sometimes cited as the first example of technical writing in the English language. It indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. The equatorie of the planetis is a scientific work similar to the Treatise and sometimes ascribed to Chaucer because of its language and handwriting, an identification which scholars no longer deem tenable.
Influence
Linguistic
Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation: he invented the rhyme royal, and was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line—a decasyllabic cousin to iambic pentametre—in his work. Only a few anonymous short works employ it before he did. The arrangements of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, as first observed in The Legend of Good Women, were much used in his later work, from thereon becoming one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early pioneering in satire is also of importance: the common humorous mechanism, the quaint accent of regional dialect, appears in The Reeve's Tale. Regarded by historians as the first use of dialect as comedic device in English literature, J. R. R. Tolkien regarded it as "dramatic realism".
Along with those of other contemporaneous writers, Chaucer's body of poetry is credited with helping to standardise the London dialect of Middle English from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probable overstatement; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains more salient to the development of Standard English.
Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems, owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift sometime after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, often encumbers modern audiences reading his work.
The status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing, the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. This may have been a vestige of the Old English dative singular suffix -e attached to most nouns. Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be vocalised and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. Most scholars pronounce it as a schwa when it is vocalised.
Besides the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time, but Chaucer was the earliest extant manuscript source with his ear for common speech. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of almost two thousand English words first attested by Chaucer.
Literary
Widespread knowledge of Chaucer's works is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write continuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales. At the same time Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid completes the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these poets, and later appreciations by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from the original Chaucer.
Writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a result of Walter William Skeat's work. Roughly seventy-five years after Chaucer's death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton as one of the first books to be printed in England.
English
Chaucer is often considered the source of the English vernacular tradition; he championed the English language over the then-dominant use of Latin or French in England in art and the judiciary. His achievement for the language can be seen as part of a general historical trend towards the creation of vernacular literature, after the example of Dante Alighieri, in many parts of Europe. A parallel trend in Chaucer's lifetime was underway in Lowland Scotland through the work of his contemporary John Barbour.
Although Chaucer's language is much closer to the modern vernacular than the text of Beowulf, such that (unlike that of Beowulf) a Modern English speaker well-versed in archaisms may generally understand it, it differs enough that most publications modernise his idiom.
The following excerpt from the prologue of The Summoner's Tale compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation:
Valentine's Day and romance
The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is believed to be in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules (1382), a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates. This verse honours the first anniversary of the engagement of the fifteen-year-old Richard II of England to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia: