chaucer biography in english

Geoffrey Chaucer

(1343-1400)

Who Was Geoffrey Chaucer?

In 1357, Geoffrey Chaucer became a public servant to Countess Elizabeth of Ulster and continued in that capacity with the British court throughout his lifetime. The Canterbury Tales became his best known and most acclaimed work. He died October 25, 1400, in London, England, and was the first to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

Poet Geoffrey Chaucer was born circa 1340, most likely at his parents’ house on Thames Street in London, England. Chaucer’s family was of the bourgeois class, descended from an affluent family who made their money in the London wine trade. According to some sources, Chaucer’s father, John, carried on the family wine business.

Geoffrey Chaucer is believed to have attended the St. Paul’s Cathedral School, where he probably first became acquainted with the influential writing of Virgil and Ovid.

In 1357, Chaucer became a public servant to Countess Elizabeth of Ulster, the Duke of Clarence’s wife, for which he was paid a small stipend—enough to pay for his food and clothing. In 1359, the teenage Chaucer went off to fight in the Hundred Years’ War in France, and at Rethel he was captured for ransom. Thanks to Chaucer’s royal connections, King Edward III helped pay his ransom. After Chaucer’s release, he joined the Royal Service, traveling throughout France, Spain and Italy on diplomatic missions throughout the early to mid-1360s. For his services, King Edward granted Chaucer a pension of 20 marks.

In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa Roet, the daughter of Sir Payne Roet, and the marriage conveniently helped further Chaucer’s career in the English court.

Public Service

By 1368, King Edward III had made Chaucer one of his esquires. When the queen died in 1369, it served to strengthen Philippa’s position and subsequently Chaucer’s as well. From 1370 to 1373, he went abroad again and fulfilled diplomatic missions in Florence and Genoa, helping establish an English port in Genoa. He also spent time familiarizing himself with the work of Italian poets Dante and Petrarch along the way. By the time he returned, he and Philippa were prospering, and he was rewarded for his diplomatic activities with an appointment as Comptroller of Customs, a lucrative position. Meanwhile, Philippa and Chaucer were also granted generous pensions by John of Gaunt, the first duke of Lancaster.

In 1377 and 1388, Chaucer engaged in yet more diplomatic missions, with the objectives of finding a French wife for Richard II and securing military aid in Italy. Busy with his duties, Chaucer had little time to devote to writing poetry, his true passion. In 1385 he petitioned for temporary leave. For the next four years he lived in Kent but worked as a justice of the peace and later a Parliament member, rather than focusing on his writing.

When Philippa passed away in 1387, Chaucer stopped sharing in her royal annuities and suffered financial hardship. He needed to keep working in public service to earn a living and pay off his growing accumulation of debt.

Major Works: 'The Canterbury Tales'

The precise dates of many of Chaucer’s written works are difficult to pin down with certainty, but one thing is clear: His major works have retained their relevancy even in the college classroom of today.

Chaucer’s body of best-known works includes the Parliament of Fouls , otherwise known as the Parlement of Foules , in the Middle English spelling. Some historians of Chaucer’s work assert that it was written in 1380, during marriage negotiations between Richard and Anne of Bohemia. Critic J.A.W. Bennet interpreted the Parliament of Fouls as a study of Christian love. It had been identified as peppered with Neo-Platonic ideas inspired by the likes of poets Cicero and Jean De Meun, among others. The poem uses allegory, and incorporates elements of irony and satire as it points to the inauthentic quality of courtly love. Chaucer was well acquainted with the theme firsthand—during his service to the court and his marriage of convenience to a woman whose social standing served to elevate his own.

Chaucer is believed to have written the poem Troilus and Criseyde sometime in the mid-1380s. Troilus and Criseyde is a narrative poem that retells the tragic love story of Troilus and Criseyde in the context of the Trojan War. Chaucer wrote the poem using rime royal, a technique he originated. Rime royal involves rhyming stanzas consisting of seven lines apiece.

Troilus and Criseyde is broadly considered one of Chaucer’s greatest works, and has a reputation for being more complete and self-contained than most of Chaucer’s writing, his famed The Canterbury Tales being no exception.

The period of time over which Chaucer penned The Legend of Good Women is uncertain, although most scholars do agree that Chaucer seems to have abandoned it before its completion. The queen mentioned in the work is believed to be Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia. Chaucer’s mention of the real-life royal palaces Eltham and Sheen serve to support this theory. In writing The Legend of Good Women , Chaucer played with another new and innovative format: The poem comprises a series of shorter narratives, along with the use of iambic pentameter couplets (seen for the first time in English).

The Canterbury Tales is by far Chaucer’s best known and most acclaimed work. Initially Chaucer had planned for each of his characters to tell four stories a piece. The first two stories would be set as the character was on his/her way to Canterbury, and the second two were to take place as the character was heading home. Apparently, Chaucer’s goal of writing 120 stories was an overly ambitious one. In actuality, The Canterbury Tales is made up of only 24 tales and rather abruptly ends before its characters even make it to Canterbury. The tales are fragmented and varied in order, and scholars continue to debate whether the tales were published in their correct order. Despite its erratic qualities, The Canterbury Tales continues to be acknowledged for the beautiful rhythm of Chaucer’s language and his characteristic use of clever, satirical wit.

A Treatise on the Astrolabe is one of Chaucer’s nonfiction works. It is an essay about the astrolabe, a tool used by astronomers and explorers to locate the positions of the sun, moon and planets. Chaucer planned to write the essay in five parts but ultimately only completed the first two. Today it is one of the oldest surviving works that explain how to use a complex scientific tool, and is thought to do so with admirable clarity.

From 1389 to 1391, after Richard II had ascended to the throne, Chaucer held a draining and dangerous position as Clerk of the Works. He was robbed by highwaymen twice while on the job, which only served to further compound his financial worries. To make matters even worse, Chaucer had stopped receiving his pension. Chaucer eventually resigned the position for a lower but less stressful appointment as sub-forester, or gardener, at the King’s park in Somersetshire.

When Richard II was deposed in 1399, his cousin and successor, Henry IV, took pity on Chaucer and reinstated Chaucer’s former pension. With the money, Chaucer was able to lease an apartment in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel in Westminster, where he lived modestly for the rest of his days.

The legendary 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer died October 25, 1400 in London, England. He died of unknown causes and was 60 years old at the time. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey. His gravestone became the center of what was to be called Poet’s Corner, a spot where such famous British writers as Robert Browning and Charles Dickens were later honored and interred.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Geoffrey Chaucer
• Birth Year: 1343
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the unfinished work, 'The Canterbury Tales.' It is considered one of the greatest poetic works in English.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Death Year: 1400
• Death date: October 25, 1400
• Death City: London
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Geoffrey Chaucer Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/geoffrey-chaucer
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 26, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London sometime between 1340 and 1344 to John Chaucer and Agnes Copton. John Chaucer was an affluent wine merchant and deputy to the king's butler. Through his father’s connections, Geoffrey held several positions early in his life, serving as a noblewoman’s page, a courtier, a diplomat, a civil servant, and a collector of scrap metal. His early life and education were not strictly documented although it can be surmised from his works that he could read French, Latin, and Italian.

In 1359, Chaucer joined the English army’s invasion of France during the Hundred Years’ War and was taken prisoner; King Edward III of England paid his ransom in 1360. In 1366, Chaucer married Philipa de Roet, who was a lady-in-waiting to Edward III’s wife. In 1367, Chaucer was given a life pension by the king, and began traveling abroad on diplomatic missions. During trips to Italy in 1372 and 1378, he discovered the works of Dante , Giovanni Boccaccio , and Petrarch —each of which greatly influenced Chaucer’s own literary endeavors.

Chaucer’s early work is heavily influenced by love poetry of the French tradition, including the Romaunt of the Rose (c. 1370) and Saint Cecilia (c. 1373), later used as the “Second Nun’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales .

Chaucer was named Controller of Customs on wools, skins, and hides for the port of London in 1374, and continued in this post for twelve years. Around that time, Chaucer's period of Italian influence began, which includes transitional works such as Anelida and Arcite (c. 1379), Parlement of Foules (c. 1382), and Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Chaucer established residence in Kent, where he was elected a justice of the peace and a member of Parliament in 1386. His wife died the following year.

His period of artistic maturity is considered to begin at this time, marked by the writing of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales , which Chaucer continued to work on for many years—most likely until his death in 1400. Considered a cultural touchstone, if not the very wellspring of literature in the English language, Chaucer’s tales gather twenty-nine archetypes of late-medieval English society and present them with insight and humor.

Now considered the “Father of English literature,” Chaucer wrote in the English vernacular while court poetry was still being written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. The decasyllabic couplet Chaucer used for most of the Canterbury Tales later evolved into the heroic couplet, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry in English. Chaucer is also credited with pioneering the regular use of iambic pentameter .

As the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “ The Poet ” in 1844: “...the rich poets, such as Homer , Chaucer, Shakespeare , and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.”

Until less than a year before his death, Chaucer remained Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster. He leased a tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. After his death, he was buried at the entrance to the chapel of St. Benedict, in the South Transept. In 1556, a monument was erected in Chaucer’s honor. When the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser died in 1599 and was buried nearby, the tradition of the “Poets’ Corner” in the Abbey began. Since then, more than thirty poets and writers are buried there—including Robert  Browning , John Dryden , Thomas  Hardy , Ben  Jonson , and Rudyard  Kipling —and more than fifty others are memorialized.

Chaucer died on October 25, 1400.

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Home / Poetry / Geoffrey Chaucer Biography | The Father of English Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography | The Father of English Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer is known as the “Father of English Literature”. He was a medieval English poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, and diplomat. He was born around 1343 in London. Chaucer’s life coincided with a period of significant social, political, and cultural upheaval in England. His literary contributions, particularly “The Canterbury Tales”, have left an unforgettable mark on English literature. He is among those writers who shaped the English language.

Table of Contents

Early Life and Education.

Chaucer’s early life is not documented. We know about him from legal records, contemporary writings, and his own works. He was born to John Chaucer, a vintner and deputy to the King’s butler, and Agnes Copton. Little is known about his childhood, but it is believed that he received a decent education, likely at the St Paul’s Cathedral School.

Career and Bureaucratic Service.

Chaucer’s career began in the service of the royal court. He entered into the service of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster. Later he became a page in the household of Prince Lionel. His diplomatic career took him to various European countries. He experienced diverse cultures that later influenced his writing.

Chaucer’s diplomatic missions included trips to Italy. He encountered the works of Italian poets like Dante and Petrarch. These encounters significantly impacted his writing style and contributed to the richness of his literary works.

Literary Works.

Chaucer’s literary work shows his ability to master various genres and styles. Some of his notable works include:

The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400).

Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” is a collection of stories narrated by a diverse group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. This work is a social commentary on medieval society. The book explores themes such as love, morality, and human nature.

Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382).

A narrative poem based on the tragic love story of Troilus.

The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382).

A dream vision poem that explores themes of love, nature, and the power of destiny.

The Book of the Duchess (c. 1369-1372).

A poem written in the elegiac tradition, possibly dedicated to the memory of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster.

Legacy and Influence.

Chaucer’s influence on English literature is immeasurable. For writing, he used Middle English, which is a blend of French and Old English. He shaped the evolving English language. His narrative techniques, characterizations, and keen observations of human behaviour set a precedent for future writers.

“The Canterbury Tales” is worth mentioning in this regard. The book is known for depicting realism, humour, and portrayal of a cross-section of medieval society. The work has inspired countless adaptations, translations and scholarly discussions.

Death and Recognition.

Geoffrey Chaucer passed away on October 25, 1400. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His tomb became a symbol of literary recognition. He was the first poet to be interred in what later became known as the “Poet’s Corner”.

Chaucer’s impact extends beyond his lifetime. His contributions to English literature continue to be celebrated. His ability to capture the nuances of human experience and society has ensured his enduring legacy as a pioneer in the world of literature.

• The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

• Literature Notes
• Geoffrey Chaucer Biography
• About The Canterbury Tales
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• The Prologue
• The Knight's Tale
• The Miller's Prologue and Tale
• The Reeve's Prologue and Tale
• The Cook's Prologue and Tale
• The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale
• The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
• The Friar's Prologue and Tale
• The Summoner's Prologue and Tale
• The Clerk's Prologue and Tale
• The Merchant's Prologue and Tale
• The Squire's Prologue and Tale
• The Franklin's Prologue and Tale
• The Physician's Tale
• The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
• The Shipman's Tale
• The Prioress' Prologue And Tale
• Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas
• The Tale of Melibee
• The Monk's Tale
• The Nun's Priest's Tale
• The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale
• The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale
• The Manciple's Prologue and Tale
• The Parson's Prologue and Tale
• Chaucer's Retraction
• Character Analysis
• Harry Bailey, the Host
• The Wife of Bath
• The Pardoner
• Character Map
• Critical Essays
• The Sovereignty of Marriage versus the Wife's Obedience
• The Old Man and the Young Wife
• The Trickster Tricked
• Full Glossary for The Canterbury Tales
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Personal Background

Geoffrey Chaucer occupies a unique position in the Middle Ages. He was born a commoner, but through his intellect and astute judgments of human character, he moved freely among the aristocracy. Although very little is definitely known about the details of his life, Chaucer was probably born shortly after 1340. Although the family name (from French "Chaussier") suggests that the family originally made shoes, Chaucer's father, John, was a prosperous wine merchant.

Both Chaucer's father and grandfather had minor standing at court, and Geoffrey Chaucer's own name appears in the household accounts of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and wife to Prince Lionel. As a household servant, Chaucer probably accompanied Elizabeth on her many journeys, and he may have attended her at such dazzling entertainment as the Feast of St. George given by King Edward in 1358 for the king of France, the queen of Scotland, the king of Cyprus, and a large array of other important people. Chaucer's acquaintance with John of Gaunt (fourth son of Edward III and ancestor of Henry IV, V, and VI), who greatly influenced the poet, may date from Christmas 1357, when John was a guest of Elizabeth in Yorkshire.

Chaucer had a high-born wife, Philippa, whom he probably married as early as 1366. Chaucer may also have had a daughter, Elizabeth, and two sons, "little Lewis" (for whom he composed the Astrolabe, a prose work on the use of that instrument of an astronomer) and Thomas.

Chaucer was one of the most learned men of his time. He made numerous translations of prose and verse, including Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy , saints' legends, sermons, French poetry by Machaut and Deschamps, and Latin and Italian poetry by Ovid, Virgil, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. He also shows a wide knowledge of medicine and physiognomy, astronomy and astrology, jurisprudence, alchemy, and early physics. His knowledge of alchemy was so thorough that, even into the seventeenth century, some alchemists themselves considered him a "master" of the science — not a pseudo-science in Chaucer's time.

According to the legend on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, the poet died on October 25, 1400.

Public Positions and Service

During 1359 to 1360, Chaucer served with the English army in France and was taken prisoner near Reims. He was released for ransom — toward which Edward himself contributed sixteen pounds — and returned to England. Later that same year, Chaucer traveled back to France, carrying royal letters, apparently entering the service of Edward as the king's servant and sometimes emissary.

Although he again served with the English army in France in 1369, by 1370 Chaucer was traveling abroad on a diplomatic mission for the king. Having been commissioned to negotiate with the Genoese on the choice of an English commercial port, Chaucer took his first known journey to Italy in December of 1372 and remained there until May 1373. He probably gained his knowledge of Italian poetry and painting during his visits to Genoa and Florence.

Chaucer's high standing continued during the reign of Richard, who became king in 1377. Throughout most of 1377 and 1378, his public services were performed chiefly in England. Chaucer received various appointments, including justice of the peace in Kent (1385), Clerk of the King's Works (1389), and, after his term as Clerk of the King's Works (sometime after 1390), deputy forester of the royal forest of North Petherton in Somerset. During this time, he was also was elected Knight of the Shire (1386) and served in Parliament.

Chaucer continued to receive royal gifts, including a new annuity of twenty pounds, a scarlet robe trimmed with fur, and, after 1397, an annual butt of wine (104 gallons). When Henry IV was crowned, he renewed Richard's grants and gave Chaucer an additional annuity of forty marks. Throughout his public career, Chaucer came into contact with most of the important men of London as well as with many of the great men of the Continent. We have records of his frequent dealings with the chief merchants of the city, with the so-called Lollard knights (followers of Wyclif, to whom John of Gaunt gave protection), and with the king's most important ambassadors and officials.

Payments to the poet during the last years of his life were apparently irregular, and his various "begging poems" — "Complaint to his Purse," for instance — together with records of advances which he drew from the royal Exchequer, have sometimes been taken as evidence that Chaucer died poor; but this is by no means certain. At any event, Geoffrey Chaucer's son Thomas took over Geoffrey Chaucer's new house in the garden of Westminster Abbey and remained in high court favor after Chaucer's death.

Chaucer's Work

Chaucer has presented caricatures of himself again and again — in such early poems as The Book of the Duchess, The Parliment of Fowles, Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, and The Legend of Good Women, and also in his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's narrators are, of course, not the "real" Chaucer — except in certain physical respects — but the various caricatures have much in common with one another and certainly reveal, either directly or indirectly, what Chaucer valued in a man.

With the exception of the Troilus narrator, a very complicated and special case, all Chaucer's narrators are bookish, fat, nearsighted, comically pretentious, slightly self-righteous, and apparently — because of a fundamental lack of sensitivity and refinement — thoroughly unsuccessful in the chief art of medieval heroes: love. We may be fairly sure that the spiritual and psychological qualities in these caricatures are not exactly Chaucer's. Chaucer's actual lack of pretentiousness, self-righteousness, and vulgarity lies at the heart of our response to the comic self-portraits in which he claims for himself these defects.

The ultimate effect of Chaucer's poetry is moral, but it is inadequate to describe Chaucer as a moralist, much less as a satirist. He is a genial observer of mankind, a storyteller, as well as a satirist, one whose satire is usually without real bite. He is also a reformer, but he is foremost a celebrator of life who comments shrewdly on human absurdities while being, at the same time, a lover of mankind.

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English History

Geoffrey Chaucer

• Born: c. 1340s, London, England
• Died: October 25, 1400 (aged 56-57), London, England
• Notable Works: The Canterbury Tales, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English author and poet, most known for his The Canterbury Tales. He is widely considered one of the greatest English poets of the Middle Ages and has been called the “father of English literature”.

Chaucer had a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament, as well as writing well-known works such as The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde.

He is credited as legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant languages in England were still French and Latin, and his poetry went on to shape future of English literature. Chaucer was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London, between the years 1340-1345. The precise date and location remain unknown. He was born to John and Agnes (de Copton) Chaucer and both his father and his grandfather were London vintners. The family name is derived from the French chausseur, meaning “shoemaker”.

In 1324, when John Chaucer was twelve years old, he was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying him to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and fined £250, now equivalent to about £200,000, which suggests that the family was financially secure. Agnes had also inherited properties in 1349, including 24 shops in London from her uncle Hamo de Copton.

Chaucer’s official life is well-documented, thanks to the fact he was a public servant. There are nearly five hundred written items testifying to his career, with the first being dated from 1357. The document shows that Chaucer was squire in the court of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, the wife of Lionel, Earl of Ulster (later Duke of Clarence), most likely through his father’s connections. Here, he would have served as a gentleman’s gentleman; essentially a butler.

A young man in this position would be in service to the aristocrats of the court who required diversions as well as domestic help. This was a common medieval form of apprenticeship for boys into knighthood or prestige appointments. The countess was married to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the second surviving son of the king, Edward III, and the position brought Chaucer into the close court circle.

He also worked as a courtier, a diplomat and a civil servant, as well as, in his later years, working for the King from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the King’s Works.

In 1359, Chaucer travelled with Lionel as part of the English army when Edward III invaded France in the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War . A year later, in 1360, he was captured during the siege of Rheims. Edward paid £16 for his ransom, which was a considerable sum equivalent to £11,610 in 2019, and Chaucer was released.

Travel and Study

After this, it is not completely clear what Chaucer did. It is thought that he travelled in France, Spain, and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps even going on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It was during this time, around 1366, that Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet.

Chaucer studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at this time, according to tradition. On 20 June 1367, he became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a valet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire, which was a position which could entail a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment.

He travelled abroad many times, possibly even to the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan in 1368. There were two other famous authors in attendance there — Jean Froissart and Petrarch. It is thought that during this time he wrote The Book of the Duchess in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died of the plague in 1369.

In 1370, Chaucer travelled to Picardy as part of a military expedition and, in 1373, he visited Genoa and Florence. According to scholars such as Skeat, Boitani and Rowland, this could have been the trip to Italy where Chaucer met Petrarch or Boccaccio, who introduced him to medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later.

Another voyage occurred in 1377, although the purposes for this voyage are unclear and there are conflicting historical records. Some documents suggest it was a mission, along with Jean Froissart, to arrange a marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess, which would end the Hundred Years War. However, if this was the purpose of their trip, it would have been unsuccessful, as no wedding occurred.

Comptroller

Back in London, Chaucer obtained the very substantial job of comptroller of the customs for the port of London on 8 June 1374. This job lasted for twelve years, which was unusual for the time and shows he must have been suited to the role.

For the following ten years, there are no documents that indicate what Chaucer was up to. However, it is believed that he wrote, or began writing, most of his famous works during this period.

In law papers of 4 May 1380 Chaucer’s name was mentioned, indicating he was involved in the raptus (rape or seizure) of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. However, what took place was unclear and the incident seems to have been resolved quickly with an exchange of money in June 1380. It did not tarnish Chaucer’s name or reputation.

Chaucer moved to Kent while he was still working as comptroller. He was appointed as one of the commissioners of peace for Kent, at a time when French invasion was a possibility. It is during this time that he started work on The Canterbury Tales.

In 1836, he lost his job as controller, but became a member of parliament for Kent, and attended the ‘Wonderful Parliament’ that year. On October 15, he gave a deposition in the case of Scrope v. Grosvenor. He also survived the political upheavals that were caused by the Lords Appellants, despite the fact that he knew some of the men executed over the affair.

In 1387, Chaucer’s wife received the last payment of her annuity, which suggests she died in the following year. Two years later, following the coming to power of Richard, Chaucer was named clerk of public works, which was a sort of foreman organising most of the King’s building projects.

Although no major works were begun during his tenure, he did conduct repairs on Westminster Palace, St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, continue building the wharf at the Tower of London, and build the stands for a tournament held in 1390. This job was difficult for Chaucer, but it paid well — 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 during this time, which was a largely honorary appointment.

However, one of the duties of being clerk of public works required him to carry large sums of money, and, in 1390, he was robbed of both his and the King’s money three times in the space of four days. Although there was no direct punishment, he was appointed subforester of North Pemberton in Somerset, which was a difficult job. Around this time, 1390 or 1391, he was eased out of his clerk’s job and he eventually got into financial trouble. In 1398, he borrowed against his annuity and was sued for debt.

Richard II granted him an annual pension of 20 pounds in 1394 (roughly £25,000/US$33,000 in 2018 money), however Chaucer’s name fades from the historical record not long after Richard’s overthrow in 1399. It is thought that his last poem, “The Complaint to his Purse,” is a letter asking King Henry for money. The last mention of Chaucer is on 5 June 1400, when some money was paid which was owed to him.

Chaucer died on 25 October 1400, of unknown causes. The evidence of the 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 this hasn’t been proven.

Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as his residence was on the abbey grounds. In 1556, his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, and the space around this tomb became the area now known as Poets’ Corner.

John of Gaunt

Chaucer was the close friend of John of Gaunt (6 March 1340 – 3 February 1399), the wealthy Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV. Chaucer served under Lancaster’s patronage. Lancaster and Chaucer also became brothers-in-law when Chaucer married Philippa (Pan) de Roet in 1366, and Lancaster married Phillippa’s sister Katherine Swynford (de Roet) in 1396.

Chaucer references Gaunt in many of his works, including Book of the Duchess and his short poem Fortune. Gaunt heavily influenced his political career, too, although Chaucer was always on the fringes of the world of courtly political intrigue.

Marriage and Family

In around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet, who was lady-in-waiting to Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (around 1396) became the third wife of John of Gaunt.

It is not known how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are most commonly cited. Chaucer’s son, Thomas Chaucer, had a distinguished 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, and his great-grandson (Geoffrey’s great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed.

It is thought that Chaucer’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 Lewis.

• The Canterbury Tales

It is thought that Chaucer started The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s, but he never finished them. They are a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English, mostly in verse, although some are in prose.

They are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.

The tales paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church. While Chaucer seems to have respected and admired Christians and to have been one himself, he also recognised that many people in the church were venal and corrupt.

He writes in Canterbury Tales, “now I beg all those that listen to this little treatise, or read it, that if there be anything in it that pleases them, they thank our Lord Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness.”

The Canterbury Tales are also sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer’s time.

There is much speculation as to why Chaucer left The Canterbury Tales unfinished. One theory is that he left off writing them in the mid 1390s, some five or six years before his death. It is possible that the enormousness of the task had overwhelmed him, as he had been working on The Canterbury Tales for ten years or more, and he was not one quarter through his original plan.

Other Works

Chaucer’s first major work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy on the death of Blanche, John of Gaunt’s first wife, in 1368. His other two early works were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame, while some of his most known works — Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde — came from the period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386).

Chaucer indicated he was versed in science in addition to his literary talents when he wrote Treatise on the Astrolabe, which describes the form and use of the astrolabe in detail. It is sometimes cited as the first example of technical writing in the English language

Chaucer didn’t just write; he also translated. He translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun).

Chaucer’s original audience was a courtly one, and would have included women as well as men of the upper social classes. Yet even before his death, Chaucer’s audience had begun to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes.

A possible indication that Chaucer’s 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 it was given on a day of celebration, St George’s Day , 1374, when artistic endeavours were traditionally rewarded. It is not known which, if any, of Chaucer’s works prompted the reward, but the suggestion of him as poet to a king places him as a precursor to later poets laureate. Chaucer continued to collect the wine until Richard II came to power, after which it was converted to a monetary grant on 18 April 1378.

The poet Thomas Hoccleve, who may have met Chaucer, considered him his role model and hailed Chaucer as “the firste fyndere of our fair langage”. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Chaucer came to be viewed as a symbol of the nation’s poetic heritage.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Chaucer was printed more than any other English author, and he was the first author to have his works collected in comprehensive single-volume editions.

Although Chaucer’s works had long been admired, serious scholarly work on his legacy did not begin until the late 18th century, when Thomas Tyrwhitt edited The Canterbury Tales, and it did not become an established academic discipline until the 19th century.

Writing Style

Chaucer’s writing style was one that stood out from the crowd. He wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre.

He is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre.

Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. He is also considered the source of the English vernacular tradition, particularly thanks to The Canterbury Tales, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin.

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. Words such as acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of the many English words first used by Chaucer.

What’s more, the first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is believed to be in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (1382), a poem which in the form of a dream, portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates.

Historical Significance

Chaucer holds huge historical significance in the literary world thanks to his innovative style and accurate historical picture of English society at his time. By writing in English instead of French, which was the language spoken by those in power, Chaucer shifted the norm of British literature. He also managed to create realistic characters and replicate a natural conversational tone within the constraints of formal poetry, and, although his poems often address serious topics, he does so with humour.

Chaucer is said to have influenced William Shakespeare , who drew inspiration both from his stories and his writing style. Chaucer’s writing has shaped generations of poets, authors, and playwrights who followed.

Major works

• Translation of Roman de la Rose, possibly extant as The Romaunt of the Rose
• The Book of the Duchess
• The House of Fame
• Anelida and Arcite
• Parlement of Foules
• Translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy as Boece
• Troilus and Criseyde
• The Legend of Good Women
• A Treatise on the Astrolabe

Short poems

• Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn (disputed)
• The Complaint unto Pity
• The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse
• The Complaint of Mars
• The Complaint of Venus
• A Complaint to His Lady
• The Former Age
• Lak of Stedfastnesse
• Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan
• Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton
• Balade to Rosemounde
• Womanly Noblesse

Poems of doubtful authorship

• Against Women Unconstant
• A Balade of Complaint
• Complaynt D’Amours
• Merciles Beaute
• The Equatorie of the Planets

Works thought to be lost/presumed lost

• Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, possible translation of Innocent III’s De miseria conditionis humanae
• Origenes upon the Maudeleyne
• The Book of the Leoun

False works

• The Pilgrim’s Tale – written in the 16th century with many Chaucerian allusions
• The Plowman’s Tale or The Complaint of the Ploughman — its body is largely a version of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Item de Beata Virgine”
• Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede
• The Ploughman’s Tale
• “ La Belle Dame Sans Merci ” – frequently attributed to Chaucer, but actually a translation by Richard Roos of Alain Chartier’s poem
• The Testament of Love – actually by Thomas Usk
• Jack Upland – a Lollard satire
• The Floure and the Leafe – a 15th century allegory

Derived works

• God Spede the Plough – Borrows twelve stanzas of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale

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Geoffrey Chaucer: A Biography

Geoffrey chaucer 1343-1400.

Geoffrey Chaucer stands as the great giant of English poetry. His verse is still read and enjoyed today and often adapted for theatre performances. It is full of characters, still recognisable as types we encounter in daily life in spite of having been inspired by people Chaucer observed more than seven hundred years ago.

There is a freshness in Chaucer’s poetry. His characters act their lives out in every conceivable human situation from the deeply serious to the crude, belly laughing comical. His stories are both funny and thought-provoking: people caught in sexual mix-ups; two young knights fighting to the death for the love of a beautiful young woman; a badly behaved young knight travelling the country on a desperate quest to find the answer to a question that will save his life and learning a great lesson; the tragic love story of Tristan the son of the Trojan king, and the beautiful young Isolde; young wives giving their old husbands the slip to sleep with handsome young suitors. The list of human tales goes on indefinitely, and all of them still appealing to the modern reader. If a writer can connect with a readership seven centuries after his death he is most certainly a great writer.

Geoffrey Chaucer led an eventful, exciting life, by any standards. He is known to us as a poet and, indeed, he has the distinction of being the first poet to be buried in poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey , but that was, to him, not much more than an interest. He was an immensely, multi, talented man with a long and very successful full-time career as a diplomat. He was also a philosopher, astronomer and alchemist.

In his own time Chaucer would have been far better known as a diplomat than a poet. He was greatly valued by Edward III. During the Hundred Years War, Chaucer was on a mission to Rhiems in 1360, when he was captured. The King paid a £16 ransom, which was worth a few hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency, to get him back.

Geoffrey Chaucer portrait

Chaucer was deeply immersed in public life and he established a family tradition of that, his son, Thomas rising to distinguished heights, including the position of Speaker of the House of Commons.

While pursuing his career, Chaucer was writing his poems and reading them aloud at court, no doubt amid great laughter. His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales , a series of fictional tales related by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, and part of its fame and importance is that it was revolutionary as an English literary work. It is not only written in vernacular English but its characters talk in a naturalistic way, according to their class and background – something unknown in English literature until this moment. The narrators of the stories talk in a way fitted to their characters and states of life rather than in stylised conventional language. Readings of such verse would have been immensely engaging and the language offered opportunities for humour. Chaucer had many jobs during his life – soldier, messenger, valet, administrator, clerk etc. – and had observed colleagues in all of these areas, allowing him to portray them convincingly in his tales.

Chaucer’s influence on English literature is one thing; he also had an enormous influence on the development of the English language. This is clear when one looks at other English texts of his time, which are almost unrecognisable as English while his are fairly easily comprehensible to the modern reader. In using language the way he did he pointed the way forward.

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• World Biography

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography

Born: c. 1345 London, England Died: October 1400 London, England English poet, author, and courtier

Called the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer is ranked as one of the greatest poets of the late Middle Ages (C. E. 476 c.–1500). He was admired for his philosophy as well as for his poetic talents. His best-known works are The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.

Early years and marriage

The exact date and place of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth are not known. The evidence suggests, however, that he was born about 1345, or a year or two earlier, in his father's house located on Thames Street, London, England. It is likely that young Geoffrey attended school at St. Paul's Cathedral, and that he was introduced to great writing and the poetry of Virgil (70–19 B.C.E. ) and Ovid (43 B.C.E. –? C. E.).

The first historical record of Chaucer reveals that in 1357 he was a page (a young boy in the service of a knight) in the household of the Countess of Ulster, the wife of Prince Lionel. During 1359–1360 Chaucer was in France with Prince Lionel (1338–1368). This was during the period of the Hundred Years' War (1137–1453) between England and France. Chaucer was taken prisoner. The English King Edward III (1312–1377) paid a ransom for his release.

Early poetry and continued diplomatic missions

The year 1369 marked a turning point both in the fortunes of England and in the career of young Chaucer. John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, asked Chaucer to compose a memorial poem, written in English, to be recited at the Mass for his deceased wife. Prior to 1369 poetry in the English court had been written in French. French was the natural language of both the king and his queen. It is possible that he had written his English devotional poem, "An A B C," which is a translation from a French source, for the queen at some time before her death. The theme of his poem, The Book of the Duchess, which was written for intellectual and sophisticated people, was a fitting memorial to one of the highest-ranking ladies of the English royal household.

Chaucer was sent abroad on diplomatic missions in 1370 and again in 1372–1373. The latter mission took him to Florence and Genoa, Italy. There he may have deepened his acquaintance with the poetic traditions established by Dante (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374).

Times were good for Chaucer and Philippa because they were economically secure. John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, gave Chaucer a yearly salary of ten pounds, the normal income for a squire in an aristocratic or distinguished household. The king appointed Chaucer a position as controller (chief accounting officer) of taxes on wools, skins, and hides in the port of London. This position brought ten pounds annually and a bonus of ten marks. The City of London granted Chaucer a free residence above Aldgate. He remained at Aldgate until 1386, though he went abroad several times on diplomatic missions for King Edward, who died in 1377, and for King Richard II (1367–1400). In 1382 Chaucer was made controller of taxes on wine and other goods with the right to employ a deputy.

Troilus and Criseyde

While he was living above Aldgate, Chaucer completed his translation of Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480–524), a Roman philosopher, whose phrases and ideas repeat throughout Chaucer's poetry. He also probably composed some short poems and Troilus and Criseyde, a tragedy. This long poem is set against the background of the Trojan War and is based on an earlier poem by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), an Italian poet.

Chaucer lost his positions at the custom house in 1386 and moved to a residence in Kent, England. He served as a Member of Parliament from Kent. It is likely that Philippa died in 1387. Chaucer received his highest position, the clerkship of the royal works, in 1389. He served as clerk until he resigned in 1391. For a time thereafter he served as deputy forester for the royal forest at North Petherton, England. The king granted him a pension of twenty pounds in 1394, and in 1397 an annual cask of wine was added to this grant. King Henry IV (1553–1610) renewed and increased these grants in 1399.

The Canterbury Tales

Between 1387 and 1400 Chaucer must have devoted much time to the writing of his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer gives his tale of pilgrimage, or journey to a sacred site, national suggestions by directing it toward the shrine of St. Thomas Becket (c. 1118–1170), a citizen of London and a national hero. The humor is sometimes very subtle, but it is also often broad and out-spoken.

His original plan for The Canterbury Tales called for two tales each from over twenty pilgrims (people who travel to a holy site) making a journey from Southwark, England, to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, England, and back. He later modified the plan to write only one tale from each pilgrim on the road to Canterbury, but even this plan was never completed. The tales survive in groups connected by prologues (introductions) and epilogues (conclusions), but the proper arrangement of these groups is not altogether clear. The series is introduced in a "General Prologue" that describes the pilgrimage and the pilgrims taking part in it.

Life after Canterbury Tales

In addition to the translation and major works mentioned, Chaucer wrote a number of shorter poems and translated at least part of Roman de la rose, a late medieval French poem by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Chaucer's interests also included science. He prepared a translation of a Latin article on the use of the astrolabe, an instrument for finding the latitude of the sun and planets. He may also have been the translator of a work concerning the use of an equatorium, an instrument for calculating the positions of the planets.

In December 1399 Chaucer retired and leased a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey, London. In October 1400 Chaucer died.

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Chelsea House, 1999.

Childress, Diana. Chaucer's England. North Haven, CT: Linnet Books, 2000.

Chute, Marchette G. Geoffrey Chaucer of England. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946.

Wagenknecht, Edward. The Personality of Chaucer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

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Geoffrey Chaucer

Early life and education.

Geoffrey Chaucer, a literary genius, was born in London in the year 1340, and is remembered for his legendary contributions to literature. His father was a prosperous wine merchant, while his mother, Agnes Compton, was a homemaker. He attained formal education at the popular St. Paul’s Cathedral School where he learned Latin and fell in love with the writings of great masters, Ovid and Virgil. He continued to have a passion for writing, as he not only loved their diverse style but also made an effort to emulate it.

Political Career

Geoffrey dedicated a significant amount of time to practicing writing and improving his skills before he delved into the world of literature, which had a major influence on his life. He also worked as a government employee after joining in 1357, serving Countess Elizabeth of Ulster until he passed away. In 1359, he took part in the Hundred Years’ War in France and was held captive for ransom. His connection with the royal family brought wealth, as King Edward-III set a good salary for his service. He journeyed through France during this time. After retiring, the king granted him a pension of twenty marks to honor his remarkable career.

Personal Life and Death

Geoffrey Chaucer married Philippa Roet, daughter of Sir Payne Roet, in 1366. Their union helped him accelerate his political career in London; he became one of King Edward III’s esquires. Also, the couple produced four children named Elizabeth, Thomas, Agnes, and Lewis. Unfortunately, the lady’s death in 1387 brought financial hardships to Chaucer; it was Philippa’s interests that kept him living and he lost those after her death. Afterward, he devoted himself to writing and produced magnificent pieces. After providing a literary treasure to the world, this iconic figure left for his eternal abode at sixty on the 25 th of October in 1400 in London. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Some important Facts about Him

• He is considered one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages and is regarded as the father of English literature.
• He is best known for his work, The Canterbury Tales .
• Geoffrey Chaucer was the first writer buried in the Poet’s Corner.

Literary Career

Geoffrey Chaucer’s association with politics and visits to various places provided him materials for his writings. His literary career formally began when the Duke of Lancaster asked him to pen down a memorial poem for his deceased wife. To honor his wish, Chaucer composed a poem, The Book for Duchess that was regarded as a fitting memorial to the highest-ranking women of English royalties. His other long poem, Troilus and Criseyde , a tragedy , was written in the background of the Trojan War. However, his best known and acclaimed work, The Canterbury Tales , appeared in 1476. The book presents the journey of certain characters to the holy shrine of St. Thomas Becket, where each pilgrim is supposed to tell a tale that links it to the prologue and epilogue . Besides producing these literary wonders, Geoffrey also wrote nonfiction.

Geoffrey Chaucer continues to mesmerize generations with his unique, elegant, and fascinating writing approach. His work displays the influences of French literature, Biblical History, and Old English Literature. He demonstrates his powerful imagination and creative approach through simple yet effective and persuasive language. For example, Parliament of Fouls shows the use of literary elements like satire , irony , and allegory when he presents courtly love. In his narrative poem, Troilus and Criseyde , he has used rime royal, a technique that involves rhyming stanzas consisting of seven lines each. Similarly, in The Legend of Good Woman , he introduces another innovative format: the text comprising iambic pentameter couplets and a series of short narratives. Some of his major thematic strands include Christianity, corruption in the Church, good versus evil, lies and deception, justice and judgment, courtly love, sexual desire, religion, and rivalry. And, for literary devices , he resorts to irony and satire.

Some Important Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

• Major Works: He was an outstanding literary figure, some of his major writings include Roman de la Rose, The Book of Duchess, The House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, Parliament of Fouls, Boece, The Legend of Good Woman, The Canterbury Tales and A treatise on the Astrolabe.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Impact on Future Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the father of English literature, stands out in the world of literature because he was really smart and clever. His special writings give us a peek into how people talked, lived, and wrote in his time. Even today, his works connect with our world. He wrote stories in poems, with his big masterpiece being The Canterbury Tales. This changed how people wrote about religion and old stories. Chaucer’s use of English helped make Middle English popular, replacing French and Latin. He’s among the top writers of his time because of his good choice of words.

Famous Quotes

• “Then you compared a woman’s love to Hell, To barren land where water will not dwell, And you compared it to a quenchless fire, The more it burns the more is its desire To burn up everything that burnt can be. You say that just as worms destroy a tree A wife destroys her husband and contrives, As husbands know, the ruin of their lives. “ ( The Canterbury Tales)
• “And high above, depicted in a tower, Sat Conquest, robed in majesty and power , Under a sword that swung above his head, Sharp-edged and hanging by a subtle thread.” ( The Canterbury Tales)
• “By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.” (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue & Tale)
• “Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke.” ( House of Fame)

Related posts:

• The Canterbury Tales Themes
• The Canterbury Tales Characters
• The Canterbury Tales

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Who was Chaucer?

From the foul-mouthed Miller to the prim Prioress, only Chaucer could have dreamed up a group as diverse as the Canterbury pilgrims. But how much do we know about the founding father of English letters?

Chaucer’s Canterbury Road

In 1386 Geoffrey Chaucer endured the worst year of his life, but he also made his best decision, or at least the decision for which we’re most grateful today. This was when, after experiencing every kind of worldly and professional reversal, he set out to write his Canterbury Tales .

That mysterious thing we now sometimes call the “creative process” eludes most attempts at explanation. The ambitious biographer can summon all kinds of life-details without coming much closer to the work itself, and how it came to be written. In Chaucer’s case, the division between life and art is especially glaring: 494 different “records” of his life survive, including matters such as courtly and civic posts he held, awards he received, and at least one place he lived … but not one of them mentions that he was a poet. Why, then, bother to look at these records? What had Chaucer’s busy London life and world of work to do with his poems, other than preventing their completion? Or with his decision to embark on his immortal collection of tales?

Poetry and wool

Although Chaucer spent most of his mature working life as a fully engaged and rather politically compromised customs inspector on the London wool wharf, we wouldn’t know it from his poems. Unlike his more “topical” contemporary John Gower, who routinely writes about matters such as the wool trade, Chaucer excludes the mundane details of his working life from his poetry altogether. The worlds of his poems are frankly fictionalised, ranging from an interstellar journey in The House of Fame to ancient Troy in Troilus and Criseyde , and even the more realistic Canterbury pilgrimage is converted in the end to a metaphoric quest for the heavenly Jerusalem.

Yet knowledge of Chaucer’s daily life can contribute to the interpretation of his poems. One crucial nudge came 100 years ago from a scholar named GL Kittredge. Until then, most people read Chaucer as a happy innocent, taking his self-portrayal at face value. Kittredge set the matter straight, observing that a naive controller of customs would be an impossible contradiction, “a monster indeed”. Others would have figured the same thing out, but this was the turning point; since then, prompted by an awareness of the worldly wisdom his life would have required, readers of Chaucer have gained a new appreciation of him as a wised-up, frequently ironical commentator on the people and events he describes.

For my Chaucer biography, I’ve peered further into the life records, seeking an understanding of the conditions under which he wrote. He was a prodigiously busy man, first as an esquire in service to Edward III, responsible for a variety of practical and ceremonial duties as well as for diplomatic travel. Then, at what appears the whim of his royal sponsors and their City counterparts, he was abruptly shifted to a nakedly partisan post in customs that entailed his daily presence on the waterfront, constant record-keeping and regular involvement with some of the shrewdest and most despised moneymen of the land.

The demanding character of his work meant that he accomplished most of his writing in his scant private time. If there’s any moment when the first-person protagonist of his poems might possess biographical content, it occurs in The House of Fame when his guide, a sceptical eagle, describes him completing his “reckonings” and returning to the solitude of his quarters to read (and presumably write) late into the night, in estrangement from his more sociable neighbours. During his 12 years in the customs office, and writing only in odd hours, Chaucer completed an amazing body of work: ambitious poems modelled on French love-visions, his heartrending tale of love gone awry in Troilus and Criseyde , a translation with interlinear commentary of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy , and more. It’s hard to imagine a taxing and time-consuming day job overseeing the Wool Custom as a foundation for the composition of the finest body of English writing before Shakespeare, but evidently it was. It provided him with important prerequisites for literary work: a stable (and rent-free) place of residence, an income-stream from his political allies in court and City, and – most importantly – a loyal audience for his poems.

Chaucer’s London job was always a precarious one. The king’s own advisers and allies in the City of London colluded to put him there, as their fall guy in a major profiteering scheme. His job as controller of customs was to certify honesty of the powerful and influential customs collectors – including the wealthy and imperious Nicholas Brembre, long-term mayor of London – and to ensure the proper collection of duties on all outgoing wool shipments. This sounds routine enough, until we realise how much was at stake: in the 14th century, wool duties contributed one-third of the total revenues of the realm. What’s more, the collectors of customs whose activities Chaucer was expected to regulate were themselves wool shippers and wool profiteers on a grand scale, taking advantage of their positions to accumulate immense fortunes at public expense. Their wealth enabled them to become donors and lenders to the king, and to multiply their privileges and profits. As lone watchdog of customs revenues, Chaucer was hardly likely to bring them to heel. His job was, essentially, to look the other way.

Chaucer does not seem to have personally enriched himself in this post, even though fortunes were being amassed all around him, but passivity was not enough to save him. As 1386 came to an end, sentiment against his patron and ally Brembre swelled (leading to Brembre’s own execution two years later), and Chaucer appears to have been an early casualty of his king’s unpopularity and his associate’s impending fall. In October-November 1386 he was deprived of his City apartment, denounced – in his capacity, though not by name – in the parliament in which he was a sitting member, and pressed to resign his controllership. He chose several years of voluntary self-exile in Kent. In a short space of time, he found himself without a job, a city, a circle of friends, and a loyal audience for his poems.

The most wrenching adjustment of all would have been his separation from his customary audience. For a medieval poet, this matter of readers was far more important than it might now seem. In the middle ages, only a handful of highly ambitious and successful writers expected to circulate their works in manuscript form to absent readers. Most writers, including Chaucer, composed poetry privately, using wax tablets or such parchment as was available, and then read it aloud to a small and responsive and (above all) personally selected group. When, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde , he realised that he had completed a masterwork that might eventually be circulated to unknown readers in manuscript form, the idea occasioned considerable unease. In his leave-taking to his own poem, he prays that it not be miscopied or mis-metered, and that:

Whether thou be read, or else sung, That thou be understood, God I beseech!

The Canterbury Tales would be the first of his works aimed deliberately at an absent audience, circulation in manuscript form and eventual literary fame. Yet he would never consider an absent audience a sufficient substitute for the intimate and interactive presence of the smallish group of literature-loving friends and associates who had shared the experience of his early poems. This loss required remedy, although, in what must have seemed the rather desolate circumstances of Kentish exile, no satisfactory remedy was easily at hand.

No audience? Invent one. And a poem as well

There in Kent, in the closing days of 1386, Chaucer seized on – or was seized by – a brilliant idea. He would keep on writing, but for an audience of his own invention. This would be his audience of Canterbury pilgrims, and it would live within the boundaries of his work. It would be a diverse group of hearers and tellers, to whom he could assign all kinds of tales: religious and secular, serious and unserious, instructive and frivolous, devout and lewd. Its members would care, and care passionately, for tales and tale-telling, and would prove ready to embrace and reject, applaud and defame, and quarrel about literature and its effects. Above all else, it would be a portable and perennially available audience, immune to disruption and alteration of circumstance. Now his poetry could circulate in manuscript form, to an unknown readership, but always channelled through the words and varied perspectives of its own band of vociferous interpreters.

So Chaucer, with his bold conception of a vivid and socially diverse band of part-time literati, overcame the deprivations of his own uprooted circumstances. He had already written other great poetry. But it’s for the Canterbury pilgrims, in all their heady diversity, that he is mainly remembered today. It is thanks to them that he is regarded as a founding father of English letters.

Chaucer today

Only Chaucer (or only Chaucer or Shakespeare) could have dreamed up a group as socially diverse as Chaucer’s pilgrims – ranging from the virtuous Knight and the austerely devout Parson, to the hypocritical genteel Prioress, to a sharply-viewed collection of bureaucrats and vocationally ambitious bourgeoisie, down to outright scoundrels such as the false relic-selling Pardoner and the foul-mouthed Miller and the garlic-chomping Summoner.

What Chaucer could hardly have guessed is the affinity that readers today would feel with this wildly mixed band of tale-tellers; their stylistically varied stories seem tailor-made for the 21st century, given our impatience with literary formality and penchant for crossing boundaries between “high” and “low” cultures. Medieval readers were familiar with tale collections, but expected a certain consistency within any given collection: saints’ lives here, comic fables there. Even Boccaccio’s brilliant tales in The Decameron are pretty much of a piece, stylistically. But when Chaucer’s Miller comes barging into the order of tellers to follow the Knight’s sober romance with a bawdy tale of cuckoldry and riotous sexuality, the poet put English literature on a path that it still follows today.

No quiet hierarchies or false reverence for Chaucer. He knows, as we do, that societies are inherently contentious, and he finds a way to live with that knowledge. The pilgrims revel in their own constant quarrels. Not only does the pugnacious Miller mock the gentle Knight, but the Man of Law ridicules Chaucer, the Friar finds the Wife of Bath verbose, the Clerk satirises her assertiveness, the Merchant scoffs at his fellow pilgrims’ idealistic ignorance of marriage, Harry Bailly threatens the jeering Pardoner with castration, the austere Parson doesn’t like rhyme or made-up plots or tale-telling at all. Disputes roil up, with what seems like uncontrollable vehemence … and then they are always somehow controlled. The judicious Knight, the amiable Franklin and others serve as temporary peace-keepers, accomplish different provisional but serviceable responses to aggression and strong talk.

This might be Chaucer’s special relevance today. He discovers and experiments with a poetically open form, within which competition and disputation are fully acknowledged, but always with the promise that disputes can be conciliated and resolution can be achieved. He lived a fraught life, one overshadowed by the possibility of humiliation, but he also possessed crucial gifts of self-renewal. His favourite poetic sentiment involved making virtue of necessity – confronting difficult circumstances and making the best of them or even turning them to good. In keeping with this sentiment, even as he portrays a society given over to constant quarrels, personal insults and reckless social wounds, he endows it with gifts of regeneration and self-repair.

This is knowledge achieved in an atmosphere of social contention, not cloistered knowledge but the hard-won knowledge of a man in difficult and harrowing life-circumstances. Knowledge for which we honour him today.

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Chaucer: A European Life

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets

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More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde , the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales . By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales .

Ideas Podcast: The life of Geoffrey Chaucer

Q&a with marion turner, awards and recognition.

• Winner of the Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University
• Winner of the Beatrice White Prize, The English Association, University of Leicester
• Winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, The British Academy
• Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, The Wolfson Foundation
• Longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown, Historical Writers’ Association
• Finalist for the PROSE Award in Biography and Autobiography, Association of American Publishers
• One of The Times' Best Literary Non-Fiction Books of 2019
• One of the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2019
• One of the Sunday Times' Best Literary Books of 2019
• A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
• One of New Statesman's Books of the Year 2020

"[Turner has] read his work so intelligently, that even those who thought they knew it all already will find themselves looking at Chaucer with completely fresh eyes. She evokes the times, the politics, the personalities of his contemporaries and, above all, she gets inside this most ironical and brilliant of poets. . . . The book was so richly enjoyable that, once I had finished, I started to read all over again. It is an absolute triumph."—A. N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement

"A quite exceptional biography that with imaginative insight and stylish wit, sets one of the most significant figures in English literary history firmly in a European context."— Wolfson History Prize judges

""It’s very wide-ranging scholarship, but it’s written in a witty, engaging style and it’s very, very accessible. . . . [A] deeply researched and highly readable life.""—Richard J. Evans, Five Books

"[Chaucer’s] life in its European context. Fresh glimpses of the great man are everywhere: perhaps most strikingly an account of the instagrammable teenaged Chaucer posing as aristocratic eye candy in a skimpy outfit called a 'paltok', which failed to cover his backside. Oddsbodkins!"—James Marriott, The Times

" A European Life feels to me like a radical new take on a man we thought we knew, but whose sophisticated business, military and political career took him criss-crossing the continent."—Andrew Marr, Start the Week, BBC Radio 4

"A hugely illuminating book. This is one of those studies that academics like to call 'magisterial', but non-specialists will find much to enjoy here too. Turner's writing is never less than perspicacious, and often slyly humorous. . . . What A European Life does particularly well is to situate Chaucer in the largeness and complexity of his world."—Tim Smith-Laing, The Telegraph (five star review)

"Turner charts an uncannily tangible route through Chaucer’s life, binding his ideas and poems to precise locations, often enlivening it with consummate detail. . . . Chaucer: A European Life serves as a compass that allows readers to traverse Chaucer’s London and Europe. At the same time, reading Turner’s book makes us aware of how much our own lives are shaped by the rooms we inhabit and the places we visit. . . . Chaucer: A European Life introduces the 21st century to Chaucer and Chaucer to the 21st century"—Sebastian Sobecki, Literary Review

"In this fine biography, Marion Turner gives us new images of the poet. Turner’s biography takes us from birth to death, but focuses on the spaces through which Chaucer moved, in reality and in poetic imagination. This is a clever move, and Turner’s technique means that the poet’s works can be woven organically into an account of his life. The book is elegantly written, accessible to the general reader as well as the scholarly specialist. In suggesting further questions and presenting an array of new images, Turner’s book gives us back an image of Chaucer more melancholy and mercurial than the cosy figure we thought we knew."—Mark Williams, The Times

"[A] wholly beguiling, original, vividly written appreciation of the hugely innovative author and his rich cultural and political European background. A parable for our time?"—Robert Fox, Evening Standard

"Magnificently scholarly."—Sam Leith, The Spectator

"Marion Turner’s exciting new biography explores in breathtaking detail the spaces and places that shaped the imaginative world of this great Anglo-European poet . . . . this momentous biography gives readers a new perspective on the personal authorial journey that culminated in The Canterbury Tales . Turner has produced a stylishly written and carefully crafted book, at times humorous and always lucid, lively, and engaging."—Clare Egan, BBC History Magazine

"[Turner pays] carefully nuanced attention to the significance of the places visited, to the mixture of cultures they accommodated, and to the range of experiences they offered to a traveller from London. . . . [Turner’s] processes of expansion, and of interweaving the life with the works, make for enjoyable and consistently informative reading. . . . Although the book’s European emphasis and concluding gestures to the here and now insist on its timeliness, its real focus is on understanding Chaucer’s world through the variety of that world’s records and its remains, and through the imaginative reflection of it in Chaucer’s works."—Julia Boffey, Times Literary Supplement

"Marion Turner has had the inspired idea of organising her biography by the places [Chaucer] occupied . . . . So many places, so many points of view. Chaucer's modernity consists in his adoption of many perspectives. This biography provides a wonderful illumination of his art."— Country Life Magazine

"It feels as though new light is genuinely being shed on Chaucer’s life, combining documentary material with sure-footed interpretations of his works, what we know of the people and places he encountered, and social and economic history . . . . The result is a three-dimensional picture of Chaucer from the outside in."—Laura Ashe, History Today

"Marion Turner has done a magnificent job. . . . I do not expect to see this biography superseded."—Paul Dean, New Criterion

"A meticulously researched, well-styled academic study showing Chaucer as the ‘consummate networker.’"— Kirkus

"This meaty new biography is likely to be the best book on the subject for decades to come."—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

"In Marion Turner’s capacious biography – the first since Derek Pearsall’s in 1992 and the first ever by a woman – Chaucer is Bakhtinian and plural, a man of many voices. Much like his Canterbury pilgrims, he is always en route but never arriving. . . . Fittingly, she ends by rejecting the image of Chaucer as the ‘father of English poetry’ and finds his legacy instead in the suppressed and marginalised voices that he licensed to speak."—Barbara Newman, London Review of Books

"A rich, thought-provoking and readable work of scholarship. . . . [Turner] has forged a new kind of biography. . . . Her work promises to be definitive for some time to come."—Mary Wellesley, Times Higher Education

"[A] great swirl of a biography, one more capacious and more ranging than any of its predecessors. . . . [ Chaucer: A European Life ] proclaims a hope to bring this canonical medieval poet to life before a broad, modern audience."—Joe Stadolnik, Los Angeles Review of Books

"What wonders Turner can work with a word! . . . . I find it difficult to stop quoting Turner, since she puts the life she is following into such intricate yet accessible prose. You need to stick with this long biography to fully absorb the point toward which she is headed. In other words, it becomes a journey just like the many trips Chaucer took for himself and others."—Carl Rollyson, University Bookman

"Chaucer has not lacked for biographies, but Marion Turner’s is of a rare ambition and competence . . . [A] very substantial book . . . sustained by a confident erudition and a powerful and controlled narrative flow."—John V. Fleming, First Things

"[I]n Marion Turner's brilliant ' Chaucer: A European Life ,' you will learn not only about the life of the man behind ' The Canterbury Tales ,' you will learn about the bustling, fast-changing world in which he lived and traveled . . . if you are interested in history, poetry or the man who invented iambic pentameter, it's fascinating."—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Turner's study is itself like a medieval book. It loves exhaustive detail; it loves a careful architectural design; and it is not afraid of exhausting its readers. It's a biography full of rich detail . . . securely grounded in the material and cultural world, instead of the conventional focus on the singular voice of a solitary poetic genius."—Stephanie Trigg, Sydney Morning Herald

"Marion Turner's splendid new biography of the poet . . . is wonderfully evocative. [A] magisterial intellectual biography."—Bruce Whiteman, Hudson Review

"[Turner's] expansive book is written with an unusual mix of erudition, clarity, and wit: it will be required reading for specialists, an invaluable resource for students, and a rich introduction to Chaucer’s world for the general reader. . . .[Turner's] generous and humane vision is deeply appealing, and offered with a warmth that is hard to resist—a welcome invitation to all of us to broaden our horizons."—Philip Knox, Review of English Studies

"Chaucer’s first female biographer provides a fresh, modern perspective, memorably showing us the great poet as a young man dressed by his employer in a skimpy garment designed to emphasise the genitals and buttocks. A richly textured account and an essential addition to Chaucerian scholarship."—Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

"Marion Turner carves out a space for another biography by locating the facts of Chaucer’s professional and writing life within the context of English and European history and material culture…This is a strong biography, well suited to the needs and interests of our own Chaucerian moment."—Lynn Staley, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"[Turner] enchantingly weaves Chaucer’s life and poetry between the local spaces of households, gardens, and inns, as well as the international spaces of French castles under siege, Italian libraries, and Mediterranean marketplaces. . . .[this book] is crucial and rewarding for any current or future student of medieval literature—and luckily for us, Turner’s style both educates and delights."—Leah Pope Parker, Journal of British Studies

"[Turner’s] enormous contribution to our comprehension of Chaucer's moves and maneuvers within his culture will alter scholarly contexts."—John L. Murphy, PopMatters

"[A] new and brilliant biography. . . . This is a book of the first importance not only for students of Chaucer but for anyone seriously interested in the ways in which history, poetry, life and art generally came about and developed in late medieval Europe."— Heythrop Journal

"Chaucer scholarship has always been awaiting a biography this rich…Among the very many contributions Turner’s biography makes to Chaucer scholarship is to reverse the general presumption that has always animated studies of this kind; rather than write about Chaucer because he was a historically significant poet, Turner shows us what, in history, made this poet matter."—Christopher Canno, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

"A vivid reconstruction of Chaucer’s 14th-century world and a revelatory exploration of his poems."—Thomas Penn, History Today

" Chaucer: A European Life is a masterful appreciation of the first great poet of the living English language—a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer wrapped around a thoughtful study of what Chaucer wrote and what he read . . . A strength of this book is that Turner looks beyond the portraits that Chaucer so emphatically sketched to emphasize the vitality with which he imbued his characters. . . . The genius of the book lies in its valuing of difference qua difference, and its refusal either to collapse those differences or to prioritize saint’s life over folktale, man over woman, knight over miller, marquis over peasant girl, moral truth over poetic line, idea over rhetoric."—The Key Reporter, Allen D. Boyer

"A masterpiece."—Simon Winder, New Statesman

"This is an invigorating and refreshing book that is by no means a standard biography. . . . this book is an extraordinary achievement. Its erudition and enthusiasm are matched by an enviable eloquence, and it will remain a focus of admiration, reference and discussion for many years to come."—Peter Brown, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

"Marion Turner does a spectacular job."—Baroness Bennet, The House Magazine

“Marion Turner’s ambitious biography is significantly different from others of Chaucer. Its focus on place enables Turner to explore Chaucer’s national and international political and cultural background in more detail than ever before.”—Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge

"Marion Turner, in this splendid biography, shows us that Chaucer was, to be sure, powerfully inflected by the extraordinary range of places, both English and continental, through which he travelled and in which he lived. She also demonstrates, in lucid and lively prose, that Chaucer was what he read and imagined. Turner enlarges the genre, without for a moment losing her eagle-eyed command of the fascinating empirical detail."—James Simpson, Harvard University

"A hugely enjoyable, accessible, cradle-to-grave biography, bringing us from the baby Chaucer among merchants in Thames Street to the civil servant dying among monks at Westminster. In between we encounter the life, vividly detailed, not just of a brilliant artist, but of the streets and sea-lanes that shaped him. An admirably full life of England's first great Anglo-European poet."—David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

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Harvard's geoffrey chaucer website, how to read chaucer.

The best way to learn to read Chaucer's Middle English is to enroll in a course with a good and enthusiastic teacher (as most teachers of Chaucer are). Though students enrolled in Chaucer courses may find some parts of this page useful, it is intended primarily for those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot take such a course but nevertheless want to increase their enjoyment of Chaucer's works.

The aim of this page is to provide the user with the means to learn to pronounce Chaucer's English and to acquire an elementary knowledge of Chaucer's grammar and vocabulary. It does not offer much on matters of style and versification and has almost nothing on the literary qualities of Chaucer's work. The users who work conscientiously through these materials should be ready to study such matters on their own (beginning with the materials on the Geoffrey Chaucer Website, and exploring other sources both on and off the Web).

It is assumed that the user of the page has a printed text of The Canterbury Tales. There are texts on line, but none with the quality one finds in print (a printed edition, with a good glossary and notes, remains the most effective form of hypertext). The exercises on this page assume that the user has a copy of either the Riverside Chaucer or The Canterbury Tales Complete , based on the Riverside. Other well glossed editions may be used, though problems will arise in the self-tests provided, since they are co-ordinated with the glosses and Explanatory Notes in the recommended texts.

The lessons begin with Chaucer's pronunciation, often illustrated with sound.In the early sections on Chaucer's language links are frequently provided to more detailed discussions of particular matters; it is not necessary to follow up every link. The user should be guided by his or her own interests.

Beginning with The Shipman's Tale, the texts used are interlinear translations, provided with quizzes -- self-tests for the users to check on their progress in learning Chaucer's language. The assumption is that the quizzes will encourage very close attention to the language; the goal is not to encourage the users to translate literally but rather to enable them to make Chaucer's language part of their own. For example, the word "hende," used so frequently in The Miller's Tale, has a great variety of meanings -- clever, tricky, courteous, handy -- all of which are implied in any single usage, lending these usages a richness in reference that is lost in any translation. The reader who has carefully considered the word in its various contexts can enjoy some of that richness.

The lessons take up the tales in this order: The Shipman's Tale, The General Prologue, The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, and The Cook's Tale. This is the recommended order, but users are of course free to study the tales in whatever order they wish. Other tales are provided with interlinear translations and quizzes on their vocabularies, and users may, if they wish, construct their own course of instruction -- though they are strongly urged to follow the course as it is set out on these pages.

• Lesson Index
• The Status of Middle English
• Middle English Dialects
• The Great Vowel Shift
• Chaucer's Romance Borrowings
• The Loss of the Final -e

• English Literature
• Short Stories
• Literary Terms
• Web Stories

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works (Career, Themes and Politics)

Table of Contents

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works (Career, Themes and Politics) Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400) is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the Middle Ages. His works, including The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Book of the Duchess, are considered seminal works of English literature. Chaucer’s influence on the development of the English language and literature is significant, and his works continue to be studied and appreciated today.

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London around 1343, the son of a prosperous wine merchant. Little is known about his early life, but he likely received an education and was fluent in several languages. In 1359, Chaucer served as a page in the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, and later joined the military campaign in France. Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works 

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Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works :- In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa of Hainault, and began a career in government service. He held various positions in the royal court, including Clerk of the King’s Works and Comptroller of the Customs for the Port of London. He also served as a Member of Parliament for Kent.

Chaucer’s literary career began in the 1360s with translations of French and Italian literature. His first major work, The Book of the Duchess, was written in 1369 in memory of Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer continued to write poetry throughout his life, and his best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, was written in the late 14th century.

Chaucer died in London in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Early Career :

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works  Chaucer’s works are known for their vivid characters, intricate plots, and use of language. He was a master of different literary genres, including poetry, prose, and satire.

The Canterbury Tales written in the late 14th century, is perhaps Chaucer’s most famous work. It tells the story of a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury and the tales they tell along the way. The tales cover a wide range of genres including romance, satire, and religious allegory, and offer a rich portrayal of medieval life and society. Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works 

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works :- Another notable work by Chaucer is Troilus and Criseyde, a long narrative poem that tells the story of the Trojan prince Troilus and his love for Criseyde, a woman of Greek descent. The poem is considered one of the finest works of English literature of the Middle Ages and is admired for its psychological depth and nuanced character portrayal.

The Book of the Duchess, written in memory of Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, is another notable work by Chaucer. The poem is a elegiac work that mourns the loss of a loved one and is admired for its vivid language and use of imagery.

Chaucer also wrote several other works, including The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women, all of which showcase his mastery of different literary genres.

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works 

#1 the canterbury tales :.

• Publish Date: Late 14th century (unfinished)
• Summary: “The Canterbury Tales” is Chaucer’s most renowned work, consisting of a collection of stories framed as a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The tales are narrated by a diverse group of pilgrims from different social backgrounds, offering a rich portrayal of medieval English society. The stories cover a wide range of genres, including romance, comedy, and tragedy, and explore various themes such as love, morality, and human nature.

#2 Troilus and Criseyde :

• Publish Date: 1380s
• Summary: “Troilus and Criseyde” is a long narrative poem based on the Trojan War. It follows the tragic love affair between Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Criseyde, a Trojan woman. The poem explores themes of love, honor, and the fickleness of fortune. Chaucer’s work presents a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of human emotions and the consequences of one’s choices.

#3 The Book of the Duchess :

• Publish Date: 1369-1372
• Summary: “The Book of the Duchess” is an elegy written in the form of a dream vision. The poem mourns the death of Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt’s first wife. It showcases Chaucer’s poetic skill and explores themes of grief, love, and the passage of time. The dream-like narrative incorporates elements of allegory and classical mythology.

#4 The Parliament of Fowls :

• Publish Date: Late 14th century
• Summary: “The Parliament of Fowls” is a poetic work that uses a dream framework to depict a parliament of birds gathering to choose their mates on Valentine’s Day. The poem explores themes of love, desire, and the complexities of romantic relationships. It also contains subtle social commentary and satirical elements.

#5 The Legend of Good Women :

• Summary: “The Legend of Good Women” is a collection of narratives in verse that celebrate the virtues and stories of various legendary women from history and mythology. Chaucer originally planned to include several more tales, but the work remains unfinished. The poem engages with themes of love, fidelity, and the representation of women in literature.

These works, along with Chaucer’s other poems and shorter compositions, contribute to his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s innovative use of vernacular English and his insightful characterization continue to captivate readers and scholars, making him a significant figure in the development of English literature.

Social class: Chaucer’s works often examine the social hierarchy of medieval society and the relationships between people of different social classes.

Love and romance: Chaucer’s works frequently explore the theme of love, including romantic love, courtly love, and love of God.

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works :- Religion and morality: Chaucer’s works often address religious and moral issues, such as the role of the church in society, the importance of living a virtuous life, and the consequences of sin.

Gender roles: Chaucer’s works often challenge traditional gender roles and expectations, particularly in his portrayal of female characters.

Chaucer’s writing style is characterized by its use of vivid characterization, intricate plots, and use of language. He was a master of different literary genres, including poetry, prose, and satire, and his works reflect his deep knowledge of classical literature and his love of language.

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works :- Chaucer’s poetry is known for its use of Middle English, which was the language spoken in England in the Middle Ages. His use of language is often rich and ornate, and he uses metaphor and symbolism to convey his ideas. Chaucer was also skilled in using humor and satire to critique contemporary society

Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works (Career, Themes and Politics) Geoffrey Chaucer was a prolific writer and one of the most important figures in English literature. His works, including The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Book of the Duchess, are considered seminal works of English literature, and his influence on the development of the English language and literature is significant. Chaucer’s writing style is characterized by its use of vivid characterization, intricate plots, and use of language. He was a master of different literary genres, including poetry, prose, and satire, and his works continue to be studied and appreciated today for their psychological depth and nuanced character portrayal, and for their portrayal of medieval life and society.

FAQ. Geoffrey Chaucer Biography and Works  

Q: what is geoffrey chaucer most famous for.

A: Geoffrey Chaucer is most famous for his work The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

Q: What language did Geoffrey Chaucer write in?

A: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which was the language spoken in England in the Middle Ages.

Q: What was Geoffrey Chaucer’s most important contribution to English literature?

A: Geoffrey Chaucer’s most important contribution to English literature was his use of the vernacular English language in his works, which helped to establish English as a literary language in its own right.

Q: When was Geoffrey Chaucer born?

A: Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1343, although the exact date is not known.

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