Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet and royal official of the 14th century, best known for The Canterbury Tales. Writing in the Kingdom of England at a time when French and Latin were still the main literary languages there, he showed that English could carry serious and sophisticated poetry, and he is often called the father of English literature. Unusually for a medieval poet, his career as courtier, soldier, diplomat and customs officer is documented in nearly 500 records.

Chaucer was born in London, probably in the early 1340s; his later monument gives 1343, but the exact date is unknown. His father, John Chaucer, was a prosperous wine merchant with a royal appointment.

The first record of him dates from 1357, when he served as a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel of Antwerp, a son of Edward III. This placed him in court circles for the rest of his life. During the Hundred Years' War he went to France with Lionel's army in 1359 and was captured near Reims in 1360; the king contributed £16 to his ransom.

Around 1366 he married Philippa de Roet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, whose sister Katherine Swynford later married John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Chaucer's patron. By 1367 Chaucer was a member of the royal household, and he travelled abroad on the king's business many times. In 1373 he visited Genoa and Florence, and some scholars believe he met Petrarch or Boccaccio on these Italian journeys. Italian poetry supplied many of his later forms and stories.

In June 1374 he became comptroller of customs for the port of London, a post he kept for twelve years, and in the same year Edward III granted him a gallon of wine a day, possibly as a reward for a poem. His first major work, The Book of the Duchess, mourned John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. The London years produced The House of Fame, the Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women and the long tragic love poem Troilus and Criseyde. He also translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his young son Lewis.

In the 1380s he moved to Kent, became a commissioner of the peace there and in 1386 sat in Parliament as one of the county's knights of the shire. From 1389 to 1391 he was clerk of the king's works.

Chaucer probably began The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s and was still working on it at his death. The frame story gathers some thirty pilgrims travelling from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, who agree to tell stories along the way. Only 24 tales were completed, far short of the plan set out in the General Prologue, but their cast, from a knight and a good parson to squabbling friars and summoners and a shameless pardoner, gives an unrivalled picture of late medieval society. He was one of the earliest English poets to write in rhyming couplets of five-stress lines, later a standard English form.

Richard II granted him a pension in 1394, and after Richard's overthrow in 1399 the new king, Henry IV, renewed it. On 24 December 1399 Chaucer leased a house in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. According to his tomb, erected over a century later, he died on 25 October 1400. He was buried in the abbey, and the move of his remains to a grander tomb in 1556 made him the first writer in what is now Poets' Corner.

In 1476 William Caxton made The Canterbury Tales one of the first books printed in England. The Oxford English Dictionary records almost two thousand English words first found in his writings, and later poets from John Lydgate to John Dryden imitated him.

Our 1300 and 1400 maps show the Kingdom of England in the age of the Hundred Years' War, when Chaucer served its kings in France and Italy.