Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London around 1340, the son of a prosperous wine merchant with connections to the royal household. The documentary record picks him up in 1357 as a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster; in 1359 he was on campaign in France with Edward III's army, was captured near Reims, and ransomed — the king himself contributed sixteen pounds toward the payment. He served three successive kings (Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV), held a string of administrative posts that would have been any ambitious civil servant's career on its own, and somehow produced the most important body of English poetry written before Shakespeare.

The posts shaped the work. Comptroller of the Customs for the Port of London (1374–1386), supervising the tax on wool that funded English foreign policy. Justice of the Peace for Kent. Member of Parliament in 1386. Clerk of the King's Works (1389–1391), responsible for the upkeep of the Tower of London and Westminster Palace. Diplomatic missions took him to Flanders, France, and Italy; the Italian trips in 1372–1373 and 1378 almost certainly brought him into contact with Boccaccio's and Petrarch's writings, which transformed what he thought English poetry could do.

The choice to write in English was not neutral. The court of Edward III spoke Anglo-Norman French; serious literature was written in French or Latin. English was the language of common speech, of unlettered work, of a country still recovering from the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death (1348–1350). Chaucer wrote in it anyway — in the East Midland dialect of London — and helped establish the literary prestige that would make his vernacular the basis of standard English. Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), his completed masterwork, reworks Boccaccio's Il Filostrato into a 8,200-line tragic romance set during the Trojan War; it is the most accomplished long poem in Middle English.

The Canterbury Tales, begun around 1387 and left unfinished at his death, frames twenty-four stories as told by pilgrims riding from Southwark to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The original plan called for four tales per pilgrim, perhaps 120 stories; what survives is roughly a fifth of that. The achievement is the company itself — Knight, Miller, Reeve, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, Prioress — a cross-section of late-fourteenth-century English society whose voices are individuated with a specificity no English writer had previously attempted. The General Prologue introduces them; their tales reveal them; the frame is a study in how class, occupation, and self-image shape what a person finds it natural to say.

The complication is a 1380 legal release in which one Cecily Chaumpaigne quitclaimed Chaucer "de raptu meo." The Latin can mean abduction, sexual assault, or both; the meaning has been argued over for more than a century, with a 2022 archival discovery suggesting the case may have concerned a labor dispute. The evidence is incomplete in both directions. Chaucer died in October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first poet in what became Poets' Corner. The tales remained unfinished.