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GEOFFREY CHAUCER AND THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER AND THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
14 TH CENTURY – THE TUMULTUOUS CENTURY. A TIMELINE.
Fourteenth century saw a number of changes and processes whose influence extended well beyond it. Their echoes
can be found in the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries and they contributed to what was later called the
Renaissance. The main trends include: 1) the moral decline of the Church and attempts at reforming it (in the early
16 th c. this is going to lead to the Reformation movement); 2) the depopulation of Europe due to recurrent attacks of
the plague (the Black Death); 3) among the consequence of the plague were first uprisings of the lower classes against
the social order; 4) series of long conflicts between England and France (the Hundred Years’ War) which contributed
to the upholding of the myth of chivalry, but which also began to show that battles can be won without heavy
knighthood (cavalry). The military role of knighthood will therefore slowly begin to change and wane. The wars with
France also lead to the increase in national awareness of the English: the English language becomes the language of
literature and politics for the first time after the Norman Conquest.
1307-1314 Philip the Fair of France forces Pope Clement V to dissolve of the Order of the Temple (Knights
Templar); connection with the decline of Papacy and increasing influence of French monarchy.
1309-1377 popes in Avignon; later Great Schism (1378-1417), popes in Rome and Avignon (see later
connections with the drive toward reform in Church – John Wycliffe). The Church in crisis: moral and
political decline.
1326 Isabella of France (queen of England and daughter of Philip the Fair of France) deposes her husband
Edward II, king of England in favour of their son, Edward III. Edward II will later be murdered.
1337 the beginning of the so-called Hundred Years War (1337-1453) over the right to the throne of France.
Edward III usurps the French crown claiming his right through his grandfather, Philip the Fair.
c.1340 Chaucer born.
1346 the Battle of Crecy. Edward III’s splendid victory over the French army of Philip VI, English archers defeat
French cavalry. The military role of knighthood slowly begins to decrease although few people realize it
then.
1348 the Order of the Garter (Order Podwiązki) established in England by Edward III as a perfect society of
knights. This was soon followed by the French Order of the Star (1352). The myth of knighthood persists.
1348-49 the bubonic plague (the Black Death) decimates Europe and England (Poland spared), it returns every 10
years, until 1400. Cities and large parts of land dramatically depopulated (see later connections with the
peasant revolts of France and England)
1356 the Battle of Poitiers. Edward III’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, defeats superior French forces and
captures King John of France. King John in English captivity until his death. The Black Prince earns great
fame and is widely praised as an exemplary knight although he will never be crowned king of England,
dying a year before the death of his father, Edward III.
1358 the Jacquerie, the first uprising of peasants against nobility in France, ruthlessly quenched in the same year.
1362 English instead of French used in Parliament and law courts.
1376 Edward the Black Prince dies. Parliamentary crisis (the Good Parliament – the first impeachment of royal
ministers). John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and Edward III’s third son and the most powerful man in
the kingdom is a practical ruler of England. Gaunt was a protector of Chaucer and Wycliffe (see below).
1377 Edward III dies, succeeded by Richard II (aged 10), the son of the Black Prince.
1378 A scholar from Oxford, John Wycliffe (1330-1384) questions papal authority. 1382 – the beginning of the
Lollard heresy. Scripture, not Church, as the source of Christian doctrine (later influence on 16 th c.
Reformation). Wycliffe initially supported by John of Gaunt. Lollards attempt to translate the Bible into
English.
1381 the Peasant’s Revolt in England – the social order threatened although the revolt was crushed.
1387-89 led by the Duke of Gloucester, the Lords Appellant control the government, having accused king’s advisors
of treason. Parliamentary crisis and the rising of the discontented nobles.
1389
Richard II takes control of the government.
1394
the king leads a military expedition to Ireland to conquer the west of the island.
1397
Richard II takes revenge against the Lords Appellant, murdering the Duke of Gloucester. This will later
lead to his fall and ultimately to his deposition.
1399
on the death of John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV of the House of Lancaster (1399-
1413), becomes Duke of Lancaster. Richard seizes his possessions. Bolingbroke returns from exile to claim
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his inheritance and seizes the throne. Richard returns from fighting in Ireland but is deposed and
imprisoned.
1400 Chaucer dies. Richard III dies.
Chaucer lives in the times of other influential writers whose work must have been familiar to him. In England:
William Langland (?1330-?1400), the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman , a visionary poem allegorically
presenting the political and intellectual events of the time; John Gower (?1330-?1408), the author of Confessio
Amantis , a poetic collection of the tales of love; John Lydgate (?1370-?1450). In France: allegorical poem about love
Roman de la Rose by Guillame de Lorris (fl. 13thc.) and later continued by Jean de Meung (?1250-?1305); Guillame
de Machaut (?1300-1377), a poet and a composer of music; Eustache Deschamps (1340-1406), noted for his Miroir de
mariage , a satrical attack on women; and Jean Froissart (1333-1400), a chronicler and a poet. In Italy: Giovanni
Boccaccio (1313-1375), noted for his Decameron ; and Petrarch (1307-1374).
Chaucer's Life
Adapted from Chapter One of Peter G. Beidler’s, Backgrounds to Chaucer , Lehigh University,
Source: The Orb: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies
Depending on one's point of view, we know either a lot or almost
nothing about Chaucer. On the one hand we have nearly 500 "life-records"--
legal documents, court references, financial statements, travel itineraries,
royal dispensations, letters of appointment--relating to a civil servant named
Geoffrey Chaucer who lived in London during the last half of the fourteenth
century. On the other hand we have a body of some of the finest poetry ever
written attributed to a poet named Geoffrey Chaucer who lived in London
during the last half of the fourteenth century. There is no firm documentary
evidence that these are one and the same man. That is, none of these life-
records identifies the Geoffrey Chaucer of London court life as "Geoffrey
Chaucer, poet" or as "Chaucer, author of the tales of Canterbury," and no
references to the poet refer to him as "the author of Troilus and Criseyde ,
just back from a diplomatic trip to Italy." Still, though there is a remote
chance that there were two men with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer who
lived in London in the second half of the fourteenth century, no one
seriously questions that the man we know from the life-records, if only
sketchily and by indirection, is the author of the Canterbury Tales and other
poetic works. After all, the London of Chaucer's time had a population of only around 50,000. If there were two
Geoffrey Chaucers living there, it seems likely that chroniclers and record-keepers would have made some
distinction between them. Besides, the Chaucer of the life-records is in no way incompatible with the Chaucer of
poetic fame. Indeed, the life-records may help to explain some of what we find in the poetry.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born to a prosperous wine merchant named John Chaucer and his wife Agnes de
Copton in the early 1340s. We do not know the exact date of Geoffrey's birth, any more than we can be sure that
Chaucer died in October of 1400--the last date for which there is a life-record. John was not a nobleman, but his
wealth would have given him the ability to purchase for his son a position as page in the household of a certain
Earl of Ulster. Indeed, the earliest of the life-records relating to Chaucer, preserved by accident in the binding of
another book, show him to have received small payments for Easter clothes from the Countess of Ulster in 1357.
As a page in the Ulster household Chaucer would have performed various menial tasks--kitchen work, serving,
whatever--in exchange for learning, mostly by observation, the customs in the aristocracy and the French
language they spoke. Chaucer would have been perhaps fifteen at the time.
In early 1360 Chaucer accompanied Lionel, the Earl of Ulster, on a military campaign to France, where he was
taken captive. He was ransomed by Edward III, king of England. By 1367 the young Chaucer, then around 25,
was a valettus --a sort of squire or yeoman--in the king's court. Chaucer would have had some minor duties such as
serving and running small errands, and he would have had ample opportunity to observe the doings of the court:
the feasts, the hunting, the music, the visits, the flirtations, the manners, the entertainments. During this period
Chaucer tried his hand at poetry, imitating the work of French poets such as Froissart, Machaut, de Meun,
Granson, and Deschamps. Those who like to think of "periods" in a writer's life can think of this time--up through
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the early 1370s--as Chaucer's "French period." Given his French models, it was astonishing that Chaucer
decided to write poetry in his mother-tongue English rather than in French. To be sure, there was some English
poetry in existence, but it tended to be quite different from what Chaucer was learning about in a London court
that aspired to the language and customs of France. What little poetry there was in English tended to be in a
different dialect from his own and to be robustly alliterative rather than delicately end-rhymed, and there is little
evidence that Chaucer knew such poetry or admired it. Although Chaucer wrote in English rather than in French,
it is fair to say that Chaucer's first poetic efforts tended to be tentative and imitative rather than original. They can
best be described as Englished French rather than natively English. Indeed, Chaucer's first long poem was a
faithful translation of the French Roman de la rose .
Chaucer's first important poem that can be called original in any meaningful sense of the word was The Book
of the Duchess , a consoling lament for the death by plague in 1368 of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, wife of John
of Gaunt. Although even this poem derived its techniques from French poetry, its subject is native--the death of
the wife of a member of the English royal family. The Book of the Duchess is important in part because it shows
that Chaucer had developed by then an association of some importance with John of Gaunt, son of Edward III,
brother to the dashing Prince Edward (the Black Prince), and uncle to the baby who would ten years later become
King Richard II. Gaunt became something like Chaucer's "patron." Gaunt probably encouraged the poet and
provided him with the financial and occupational security that would free at least some of his time for the writing
of poetry.
In the 1370s Chaucer made two journeys to Italy on behalf of the king. The journeys were important for
Chaucer's poetic development, if not for English-Italian diplomacy. The first of those journeys took place in 1372-
73, when he went to Genoa as part of a delegation to discuss the use of seaports in England for the Genoese
merchant trade. Because Italy was a market for English wool exports, England was eager to encourage trade.
Chaucer would have been a natural member of such a delegation because he had an unusually good command of
Italian, learned mostly through his father's business associations as an importer of Italian wines.
It appears that on that trip to Genoa, with a side trip to Florence, Chaucer became acquainted with the work of
Dante. The House of Fame , written shortly after his return from Italy, is a Dantesque dream-vision about a
dreamer seized by an eagle and transported to the house where reputations are made and lost. This poem, though
by no means Chaucer's best, initiated a kind of pre-renaissance in England--an early hint of the discoveries that
would breathe so much life into English art and literature a couple of centuries later.
Chaucer's second trip to Italy, in 1378, was apparently brought about in part by one of the more bizarre events
in Christian history: the Great Schism. Most popes had been Italian and lived in Rome, but for much of the
fourteenth century the papacy was based in Avignon, France, and most of the popes were French. In part to make
peace with Italians, Pope Gregory XI moved the papacy back to Rome in 1376. At his death two years later an
Italian pope, Urban VI, was elected. French Cardinals, angered by Urban's apparent neglect of the interests of
France, promptly elected another pope, Clement VII, from Geneva. Suddenly--and then for the next four decades-
-there were two popes in Europe, each claiming to be the one true head of Christianity. During this Great Schism
the reputation of the Christian church became tarnished. What, after all, did it say about Christianity if those who
claimed to speak for God could not themselves agree on who really spoke for God? Official Protestantism was
more than a century away, but the Great Schism helped to pave the way for it by showing, for those inclined to
notice it, that Christianity was at least as much a religion of men as a religion of God. If there could be two popes,
why could there not be two varieties of Christianity?
Furthermore, Christianity became politicized in a way it had not been before: the Christian nations of Europe
had to decide which pope to support. The Great Schism itself was to end in 1417 with the cardinals agreeing to
support a single pope, but meanwhile the Christian nations had to make a choice. France early and strongly
supported Clement VII in Avignon. England, having little reason to side with their French antagonists, seemed
inclined to honor the Italian pope. It is likely that Chaucer's visit to Italy, as part of a small delegation in the
summer of 1378, was designed at least in part to indicate that England, if only quietly and cautiously, was behind
Urban VI.
The influence of that second trip on Chaucer as a poet was profound. If on the first trip to Italy he discovered
the work of Dante, by then long dead, on the second trip he discovered the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, both
still living. Chaucer mentions both Dante and Petrarch by name, but never mentions Boccaccio, the writer to
whom he was most indebted. Boccaccio's prose vernacular narratives particularly inspired Chaucer, whose writing
for the next decade or so shows the influence of this fine writer. Chaucer almost surely carried back with him to
England Boccaccio's Teseida and Filostrato . The Teseida inspired several minor works as well as a narrative
about two Theban princes who fall in love with Emily--a narrative that Chaucer eventually adapted to its place in
the Canterbury collection as the Knight's Tale . The Filostrato was the undisputed source of Chaucer's great love
story--sometimes called the first English novel-- Troilus and Criseyde . With these two poems Chaucer's "Italian
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period" entered full swing. But whereas the French influence had tended to rein Chaucer's natural talent in,
the Italian influence tended more to liberate it. Chaucer never did much more than translate French poems into
English, but no one can call the Knight's Tale or Troilus and Criseyde translations. Chaucer followed the general
outlines of Boccaccio's plots, but he quickly moved outside them and beyond them. Boccaccio can be seen less as
a writer who gave Chaucer some stories to translate, more as a writer who inspired what was most original in
Chaucer.
In any case, Chaucer was soon off and running as a poet. It might be said that Chaucer entered his "English"
phase by combining what he learned from others into something quite distinctively his own. Just as his English is
a liberating combination of the harsh robustness of Old English with the lilting smoothness of French, so his
poetry is a liberating combination of the narrative vividness of Italian story with the gentle grace of French poetic
forms. Above all, though, just as Chaucer did honor to the literature of the Continent by importing it into England,
he also improved it and made it distinctively English and distinctively Chaucerian. Chaucer had "sources" in
Continental literature for almost everything he wrote, yet almost everything he wrote is uniquely his own.
Much of what we know about Chaucer's personal life, even during his later years, is not very exciting. We
know that he was appointed to be a customs official, a member of Parliament from Kent, clerk of the King's
works, and subforester. We know that he formed friendships with many important courtiers and with other
English poets--most notably John Gower, his older contemporary. We know that he was married to a woman
named Philippa and that he fathered two sons, Lewis and Thomas. We know that he translated Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy from the Latin, and that he worked at a series of stories called, appropriately, The
Legend of Good Women . We know that he wrote an extended prose scientific document known as his Treatise on
the Astrolabe --still referred to by scientists who want to know how astronomical reckonings were made in the
Middle Ages. We know that he periodically read his works aloud to a circle of friends in court and possibly at
other occasions away from the court.
And we know that he distributed copies of his works in manuscript--though none of these in his own hand or
copied during his own lifetime seems to have survived. The surviving Chaucer manuscripts all were copied after
his death, most of them in professional workshops employing several scribes. The printed book was not to become
a reality until a century later, but when it did, Chaucer was the first English poet to have his works collected and
printed in book form. We must be careful, incidentally, about what we mean when we refer to "Chaucer's poems."
Presumably he wrote several drafts of his poems, but the poems we read as "his" may be something different from
what he wrote: they were copied, perhaps not accurately, by scribes, edited by workshop hacks, and again by
modern editors.
It is difficult to make from the scanty documentary materials 600 years old anything like an exciting novel
about Chaucer--though some of those materials suggest that his life was not without excitement. We know that at
several times in his life Chaucer was short of money and was sued for debts. We know that in one unfortunate
week in September, 1390, he was robbed at least twice, possibly three times. We know of a report of a legal
record, now lost, that Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in London's Fleet Street. We
would love to know more about the incident, but the record is gone and we are left to speculate on whether there
is any connection between that event and Chaucer's negative depiction of friars in the Canterbury Tales .
More interesting, and more substantial, is a legal record in of 1380, when Chaucer would have been
approaching 40. In this Latin record a certain Cecelia Chaumpaigne agrees to release a certain Geoffrey Chaucer
from all further legal actions concerning " de raptu meo ." There has been much speculation about whether this
was, indeed, sexual rape. Might it have been some sort of "abduction"? Was Chaucer merely standing in for one
of his high-born friends in the royal family? Was Cecilia Chaumpaigne a credible accuser? Anything is possible,
but in fact we simply don't know more than the sparse record shows, and it shows that Chaucer acknowledges, and
eventually pays, a debt of ten pounds--a sum equal to approximately half his yearly wage as a customs official.
Until we get some evidence to the contrary, it seems best not to make excuses for Chaucer. Given the few records
that do relate to this incident, it seems best to assume that Chaucer was probably accused of sexual rape. The fact
that he was willing to pay a substantial sum to settle out of court suggests that he may have acknowledged some
guilt. We can probably never know for sure about Chaucer's famous rape case, however, and we are left to
speculate about who Cecelia Chaumpaigne was and what sort of relationship Chaucer had with her. So little is
known about Chaucer's personal life that we can be sure of almost nothing about his relationship with his wife, let
alone with a woman about whose parentage and situation in life we know nothing.
Indeed, we know, finally, little about Chaucer himself. We cannot even be sure what he looked like. Someone
who measured a bone thought to be his when it was dug up from the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey,
London, in 1889, estimated that he may have been around five-and-a-half feet tall, and a crude drawing in the
Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales , made after his death, shows him to be vaguely distinguished-
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looking. In the end, however, we have no better record of his looks than the words that Chaucer himself puts
into the mouth of the raucous--and presumably portly--innkeeper Harry Bailey in the Canterbury Tales :
He in the waast is shape as wel as I.
This were a popet in an arm t'enbrace
For any womman, smal and fair of face.
He seemeth elvyssh by his contenaunce. (VII, 700-03)
We must, of course, make allowances for the fact that Chaucer was here putting into the mouth of another a
probably-satiric portrait of himself. What matters most, of course, about this small, round-bellied, fair-faced,
elfish doll of a man is his poetry. We would care nothing about his life or looks if he had not written great poetry,
and that poetry tells us all that we really need to know about him.
One of Chaucer's most original early poems was the Parliament of Fowls , a dream vision in which the speaker
visits the Garden of Love on Valentine's Day and observes the various species of birds attempting to select their
mates for the coming year. Although the Parliament gets off to a slow start and is not Chaucer's finest work, the
second half gives early example of what was to be his own, distinctively English, stride. The dramatic interplay of
voices from all classes of society prefigures the work that virtually all scholars recognize as Chaucer's
masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales . Although Boccaccio's wonderful Decameron probably suggested to Chaucer
the idea of a group of travelers entertaining and enlightening each other while on a journey, the scheme of the
Canterbury Tales is distinctively his own. Chaucer gives us not ten noblemen and women traveling away from a
horrible death by bubonic plague, but rather 29 men and women from virtually all English classes traveling
toward a chance to position themselves for a better kind of death. And the links between the tales are made up not
of the author describing, as Boccaccio does, what the ten travelers do, but of the 29 pilgrims themselves showing
through dialogue and interaction who they are.
And if the tales themselves, that wonderful double handful of stories, almost all derive from Continental
sources, every one of them gives evidence of the only indisputably important fact about Chaucer's life: that he was
England's first important poet and, before Shakespeare, its most influential one. If, about Chaucer, the rest is
silence, that is no real matter.
• Primary source: Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1992).
Below: the Canterbury pilgrims, from 15 th c. The Story of Thebes by John Lydgate, and the Canterbury cathedral.
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