Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer is the first great poet of the English language and one of the great storytellers of the world. Writing in the London dialect of the late fourteenth century — when the English court still read French and the Church still wrote Latin — he showed that English could carry philosophy, tragedy, comedy and the whole range of human character. His two masterpieces are Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), a tragic love story set in the Trojan War, and the unfinished Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), in which a company of pilgrims from every rank of society tell stories on the road to Canterbury — the work through which most readers meet him. Dryden called him “the father of English poetry” and said of his pilgrims, “here is God’s plenty.”

Chaucer was not a professional poet in the modern sense. He earned his living as a courtier, soldier, diplomat and civil servant, moving among kings and merchants, and his poetry is the work of a man who knew every class of English society from the inside. That breadth of experience, and an ironic, sympathetic, endlessly curious intelligence, is what makes him still alive.

Life

A merchant’s son at court

Chaucer was born in London around 1343, the son of John Chaucer, a prosperous wine merchant (vintner) in Thames Street, whose family had grown rich in the trade with Gascony. The name comes from French chaussier, a maker of shoes or hose. We know nothing of his schooling, but he became fluent in French, Latin and Italian and read widely in philosophy, astronomy and science.

In 1357 he appears in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, wife of King Edward III’s son Lionel, as a page — the usual entry to a career at court. In 1359–60 he served in the English army in France during the Hundred Years’ War, was captured near Reims, and was ransomed in part by the king himself.

Around 1366 he married Philippa de Roet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, whose sister Katherine Swynford became the mistress and later the third wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the most powerful man in England — linking Chaucer by marriage to the royal family. They had at least two sons, Thomas (who became a rich and important man) and Lewis.

Diplomat and civil servant

From 1367 Chaucer was a member of the royal household of Edward III, and later served Richard II. He was sent on diplomatic missions to France, Flanders and, decisively, Italy — to Genoa and Florence in 1372–73 and to Milan in 1378. In Italy he discovered the three great poets of the Trecento: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Their work transformed his. From Boccaccio’s Filostrato he made Troilus and Criseyde; from Boccaccio’s Teseida the Knight’s Tale; from Petrarch a sonnet (the first in English, embedded in Troilus); from Dante the ambition to make a vernacular as noble as Latin.

In 1374 he was appointed Controller of Customs for wool, skins and hides in the Port of London — the most important source of royal revenue — and given a rent-free house above Aldgate, one of the gates in the City wall, where he lived for twelve years and where much of his early poetry was written. He records in The House of Fame that after his day’s “reckonings” he would go home and read “as domb as any stoon” until his eyes were dazed.

In 1386 he became a Justice of the Peace and Member of Parliament for Kent. Then political crisis struck: Richard II’s opponents seized power and Chaucer lost his posts. In the following years he was Clerk of the King’s Works (1389–91), responsible for the upkeep of royal buildings including Westminster and the Tower — he was robbed twice in one day by highwaymen while carrying wages — and deputy forester of a royal forest in Somerset. It was in these middle and later years, living in Kent and Somerset, that he worked on The Canterbury Tales.

Last years

In 1399 Richard II was deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son, who became Henry IV. Chaucer’s poem “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse” — a witty plea to his empty purse, “be heavy again, or else must I die!” — was addressed to the new king, who promptly renewed his pension. Chaucer took a lease on a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey, and died, according to his tombstone, on 25 October 1400. He was buried in the Abbey — the first of the writers in what became Poets’ Corner.

The early poems

Chaucer’s early poetry is courtly and largely French in manner — dream visions in which the poet falls asleep over a book and has an instructive dream.

The Book of the Duchess (c. 1369) is an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s first wife, who died of plague. The dreamer meets a knight in black in a forest who tells him of his love for “goode faire White”; with tactful obtuseness the dreamer keeps misunderstanding, until the knight says plainly, “She is ded!”

The House of Fame (c. 1379), unfinished, is a comic dream in which a talkative golden eagle carries the terrified poet up to the palace of the goddess Fame, where reputations are distributed arbitrarily — a satire on rumour and literary glory, full of Dantean echoes.

The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1380) is a Valentine’s Day dream in which birds of every kind gather before Nature to choose their mates; three noble eagles court one female, while the lower birds — duck, goose, cuckoo — mock the courtly rhetoric. It is the earliest record of St Valentine’s Day associated with love.

Chaucer also translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy into English prose (Boece) — a book that shaped his thinking about Fortune, free will and providence — and wrote a scientific Treatise on the Astrolabe for his son.

Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382–86), in five books of rhyme royal (seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc, which Chaucer introduced), is often called the first English novel in verse. During the siege of Troy, Troilus, a son of King Priam, falls desperately in love with Criseyde, a beautiful young widow whose father, the prophet Calchas, has defected to the Greeks. Her uncle Pandarus — a garrulous, worldly, comic go-between (whose name gave us “pander”) — engineers their meeting and, after elaborate manoeuvres, brings them together one rainy night in his house. They are blissfully happy. Then Criseyde is exchanged for a Trojan prisoner and sent to her father in the Greek camp. She promises to return within ten days; she does not. Alone and afraid among enemies, she yields to the Greek warrior Diomede. Troilus, learning the truth, seeks death in battle and is killed by Achilles. His spirit rises to the eighth sphere, looks down on “this litel spot of erthe” and laughs at the grief of those who mourn him, seeing how vain is all love but the love of God.

The poem’s greatness lies in its psychology and its sympathy. Criseyde is no simple faithless woman of the old story but a complex person, cautious, frightened, tender, practical; the narrator, who loves her, refuses to condemn her: “Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde / Forther than the storye wol devyse” (“I don’t wish to chide this poor woman further than the story requires”). It is also a philosophical poem, threaded with Boethian reflections on Fortune and predestination. Shakespeare retold the story bitterly in Troilus and Cressida.

The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer’s last great work, and the one by which he is known, is The Canterbury Tales. Its frame is simple and brilliant: on an April day, about twenty-nine pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, across the Thames from London, to ride to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The innkeeper, Harry Bailly, proposes that each should tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back, with a free supper for the best. Chaucer himself is among the pilgrims.

The General Prologue describes the pilgrims one by one: the Knight, “a verray, parfit gentil knyght”; his son the Squire; the Prioress, with her dainty table manners and her brooch inscribed Amor vincit omnia; the worldly Monk who loves hunting; the Friar who sells absolution; the Merchant, the Clerk of Oxford, the Man of Law, the Franklin, the Shipman, the Doctor of Physic; the Wife of Bath, gap-toothed, deaf, married five times “at chirche dore”; the poor Parson and his brother the Ploughman, both ideal Christians; the Miller, the Reeve, the Summoner and the Pardoner, who sells fake relics. The tales they tell cover nearly every genre of medieval literature and are fitted to their tellers, who quarrel, interrupt and answer each other.

The work was never finished: only twenty-four tales survive (several incomplete), and the pilgrims never reach Canterbury. It ends with the Parson’s long sermon on penitence and Chaucer’s Retraction, in which he asks forgiveness for his “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees”, including “the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne” — a gesture whose sincerity critics still debate.

Chaucer’s art

Language. Chaucer wrote in the dialect of London and the East Midlands, which, partly because of its use in government and partly because of his prestige, became the basis of standard English. He enriched it with French and Latin vocabulary and showed that it could sustain every style, from high rhetoric to tavern slang.

Verse. He brought into English the five-stress iambic pentameter line, rhymed in couplets (the “heroic couplet”) or in rhyme royal stanzas — the measures of English poetry until the twentieth century. His verse moves with an ease and naturalness that hides its art.

Irony. Chaucer’s most characteristic device is the naive narrator. “Chaucer the pilgrim” presents himself as a genial, slightly dim man who admires everyone — of the corrupt Monk he says “And I seyde his opinion was good” — leaving the reader to see what he pretends not to. The irony is never cruel; even his rogues are alive with energy.

Character. Before Chaucer, medieval literature dealt largely in types — the knight, the friar, the virtuous wife. Chaucer starts from the types (the “estates” of society) and makes them individuals by small, vivid details: the Wife of Bath’s red stockings and gap teeth, the Miller’s wart with a tuft of hairs “reed as the brustles of a sowes erys”, the Prioress’s French “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe”. Above all, characters reveal themselves through their own voices.

Sympathy and comedy. Chaucer’s world is full of folly and vice, but it is held together by humour and humanity. G. K. Chesterton called him “the father of English poetry and perhaps the father of English fiction”.

Legacy

Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers — Lydgate, Hoccleve, the Scottish poets Henryson and Dunbar — revered him as their master. William Caxton printed The Canterbury Tales around 1476, among the first books printed in England. Spenser called him the “well of English undefiled”. Dryden modernised his tales and wrote the first great critical appreciation of him. Wordsworth, Keats and Blake (who engraved the pilgrims) admired him; William Morris printed the magnificent Kelmscott Chaucer (1896). In the twentieth century Pasolini filmed The Canterbury Tales (1972); the Wife of Bath has been reimagined by Zadie Smith (The Wife of Willesden, 2021).

In conversation

• “God’s plenty” — Dryden on the Canterbury pilgrims; any rich abundance of human variety.
• “Pander” — from Pandarus in Troilus, the go-between who brings lovers together.
• A “Chaucerian” narrator — a deceptively naive teller whose innocence exposes everyone he describes.