Who Was Geoffrey Chaucer? The Civil Servant Who Made English Literary
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
In the fourteenth century the language of the English court was French, the language of the church and of learning was Latin, and English was what most people spoke and almost nobody wrote anything serious in. A customs official in the port of London, a man who spent his career counting wool sacks and running royal errands, wrote a long poem in the London dialect about a group of pilgrims telling stories on the road to Canterbury, and in doing so demonstrated that the language could carry anything. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and the corner that grew around his tomb is now called Poets Corner.
A working life
He was born around 1343, the son of a prosperous London wine merchant, and spent his life in royal service rather than literature. He served as a page in a noble household, was captured on campaign in France and ransomed by the king, worked as a diplomat on missions to Flanders, France and twice to Italy, held the post of Controller of the Customs for wool in the port of London for twelve years, sat briefly in Parliament as a knight of the shire for Kent, and finished as Clerk of the King's Works, responsible for maintaining royal buildings, a job that included being robbed twice in one day. He married Philippa de Roet, whose sister became the mistress and eventually the third wife of John of Gaunt, which placed him near the centre of power through three reigns and the deposition of one king. None of the surviving documents about him mentions that he wrote poetry.
The pilgrims
His best-known work, begun around 1387 and unfinished at his death, uses a frame that was conventional and does something new inside it. Thirty or so pilgrims meet at an inn in Southwark, agree to tell stories on the way to Canterbury and back, and are described one by one in a prologue that is the first great gallery of English character writing. The novelty is the range, both social and literary. The company runs from a knight to a ploughman and takes in a miller, a cook, a lawyer, a physician, a merchant, a nun, a pardoner selling fake relics and a five-times-married cloth-maker from Bath, and their tales run from a courtly romance to a beast fable, a sermon, a saint's life, a chivalric parody Chaucer gives to himself and is interrupted in, and several obscene comedies of a kind that made Victorian editors reach for the scissors. The stories characterise their tellers, argue with each other, and are interrupted by quarrels between the pilgrims, which is a structure with no real precedent.
Why the language matters
Writing in English was a choice, and it was not the obvious one:
- •The court had spoken French since the Conquest three centuries earlier, and serious poetry in England was written in French or Latin
- •English had no standard form, and a text in one region's dialect could be hard going in another, a problem Chaucer complains about directly
- •He wrote in the London dialect, which was the variety that later became standard written English, so his usage sits near the root of the modern language
- •He imported and naturalised a great many words from French and Latin, with several hundred first recorded in his work, and he is the earliest known user of a great deal of ordinary modern vocabulary
- •He established a flexible five-stress line and the rhyming couplet as English verse forms, which run from him through Shakespeare to Pope and beyond
The other works and the sources
The pilgrimage is not the whole output. Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem of love and betrayal set during the siege of Troy, is regarded by many scholars as his most finished achievement and reads in places like a novel three centuries early. There are dream poems, an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, translations from Boethius, and a practical treatise on the astrolabe written for a ten-year-old boy, probably his son, which is one of the earliest technical manuals in English. He borrowed constantly and openly, from Boccaccio, from Petrarch, from French romance and from Ovid, which was normal practice and not concealed; the two Italian journeys of the 1370s appear to have been decisive, since the Italian writers showed him what vernacular literature could be. What he added was tone: an ironic, watchful narrator who reports what people say about themselves and lets the reader notice the gap.
Reading him now
His English is Middle English, and it sits at an awkward distance: close enough that a modern reader recognises most words, far enough that the meaning slips. Final e was pronounced, so the metre only works if the lines are read aloud with it; the vowels had not yet gone through the shift that separated spelling from sound, so his word for name rhymes with the modern calm rather than with game; and familiar words carry different senses, so that nice means foolish and sely means blessed as well as pitiable. A glossed edition makes most of it accessible within a few pages, and reading it aloud makes the rest work, since the verse was written for an audience listening rather than a reader. His reputation was secure within a generation of his death in 1400, and it is a reputation for two separate things, being a great poet and having proved that English was a language a great poet could use.
The takeaway
A London wine merchant's son who spent his career as a diplomat, customs official and clerk of the king's works wrote, in the London dialect, at a time when serious English writing was done in French or Latin. His unfinished pilgrimage poem gathers thirty travellers from across the social range and gives each a story that characterises the teller, a structure without precedent. He naturalised hundreds of words, established the five-stress line and the couplet in English, and his Middle English rewards being read aloud with the final e sounded.