Geoffrey Chaucer: The Father of English Poetry and the Maker of the Canterbury Tales

At the head of the long and crowded tradition of English poetry stands a single figure to whom every poet who has written in the language since is, in some measure, an heir. Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived through the second half of the fourteenth century and died in the first year of the fifteenth, was not the first person to compose verse in English, nor even the first to do so with skill; but he was the first to write English poetry of such ambition, range, and assured artistry that it could stand without apology beside the great literatures of France, of Italy, and of the ancient world, and the first whose work has been read continuously, and with admiration, from his own lifetime to the present day. He is the author of The Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated poem in the English language before the age of Shakespeare and Milton, and of Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic romance that many careful readers have judged the finest sustained narrative poem of the English Middle Ages. He was the first writer to be buried in the corner of Westminster Abbey that afterward, because of him, came to be known as Poets' Corner. For more than six centuries he has been honored, in a phrase that the poet and critic John Dryden made famous in the year 1700, as the father of English poetry.

There is a curious paradox at the center of any attempt to write the life of Chaucer. He is, in one sense, among the best-documented Englishmen of the fourteenth century: close to five hundred separate records survive that name him or bear directly upon his affairs, for he spent his working life in the service of the crown and of the city of London, and the offices he held generated accounts, warrants, writs, and receipts that the careful bureaucracy of the age preserved. From these documents it is possible to follow him with remarkable precision through a busy public career as a courtier, a soldier, a diplomat, a customs official, a member of Parliament, and an administrator of royal building works. And yet not one of these papers so much as mentions that the man they concern was a poet, or names a single one of his writings, or records a single opinion or feeling of his own. The result is a strange double portrait. Of Chaucer the public servant we know a great deal; of Chaucer the poet, the inward man who created the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner and the sorrowing Criseyde, the official record tells us nothing whatever. We do not know with certainty the year of his birth, we cannot fix the date of composition of most of his poems, and not one line survives in his own hand. The poet must be reconstructed almost entirely from the poems themselves.

Chaucer's central and most consequential achievement was a decision that can be stated very simply: he wrote in English. To a modern reader that choice may seem unremarkable, even inevitable, but in the England of Chaucer's youth it was neither. Three centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English language still carried the stamp of conquest and subordination. French, in its English and continental forms, was the language of the royal court, of the law, of the higher nobility, and of polite and fashionable society; Latin was the language of the Church, of learning, of philosophy and science and the keeping of records; English was the speech of the common people, of the unlettered majority, a language fractured into regional dialects, little written, and held by many educated people to be too rude and impoverished a medium for serious literature. Chaucer, who read and wrote French and Latin with ease and who knew Italian as well, could have made his reputation in any of the prestige languages. Instead he chose to compose his major works in the English of London and the East Midlands, and by the sustained brilliance of what he made in it he demonstrated, once and for all, that English was capable of poetry of the very highest order. In doing so he did much to raise the dialect of the capital toward the status of a standard literary language, and he gave English-speaking poets a native ancestor and a native tradition to inherit.

The poems themselves reveal a writer of extraordinary range and an even more extraordinary humanity. Chaucer could compose the formal, dreamlike, philosophically searching verse of the courtly dream-vision; he could sustain across thousands of lines the psychological tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde, with its tenderness, its irony, and its grave meditation on love and fortune and the will of God; and he could, in The Canterbury Tales, assemble a whole society of English men and women, from the courteous Knight to the drunken Miller, from the worldly and much-married Wife of Bath to the corrupt and uncanny Pardoner, and give each of them a living voice and a tale to tell. What unites this great variety is a quality of mind that has no real precedent in earlier English writing: a warm, amused, sharp-eyed, endlessly curious attention to human beings as they actually are, observed without illusion and yet, for the most part, without cruelty. Chaucer is the first writer in English whose characters step off the page as recognizable individuals, and the first whose pervasive, gentle, double-edged irony invites the reader to share the author's own delighted understanding of human folly and human worth. It is this, as much as his technical mastery, that has kept his poetry alive.

Chaucer's life was lived in one of the most turbulent and consequential periods of English history. He was born in the early 1340s and died in 1400, and in those six decades he saw the reigns of three kings, Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, the last of whom seized the throne by force in the year before the poet's death. He lived through the long agony of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, in which he himself fought and was taken prisoner; through the catastrophe of the Black Death, the plague that first struck England when he was a small child and returned again and again across his lifetime; through the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, whose rebels poured into London through the very gate above which Chaucer was then living; and through the bitter political feuds of Richard the Second's reign, the Great Schism that divided the Western Church between rival popes, and the rise of the religious dissent associated with John Wycliffe and the Lollards. Through all of this Chaucer was a working public servant with a living to earn, and his poetry was composed in the margins of a crowded official life, in the hours he could steal from the customs house, the diplomatic mission, and the building accounts. That so original and so abundant a body of work was produced under such conditions is itself a measure of his genius.

The pages that follow trace that life and that work together: the England into which Chaucer was born and the trilingual literary world he would transform; his origins in a prosperous family of London wine merchants; his youth as a page in a great aristocratic household and his service as a soldier and prisoner of war in France; his marriage and his lifelong connection to the powerful house of Lancaster; his decades of labor as a diplomat and customs official; the journeys to Italy that brought him into contact with the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; the long sequence of his writings, from the early dream-visions through the masterpiece of Troilus and Criseyde to the vast unfinished design of The Canterbury Tales; his shaping of the English language as a literary instrument; his later years of office, hardship, and final security; and the immense and unbroken history of his reputation and influence, from the poets who called him master within a generation of his death to the readers and scholars who study and enjoy him still.

England in the Age of Chaucer

The fourteenth century into which Geoffrey Chaucer was born was, by any reckoning, one of the most violent, disordered, and transformative periods in the history of England and of Europe as a whole. It was an age of war, of plague, of social upheaval, and of crisis in the Church, and yet it was also an age of vigorous commerce, of brilliant courtly culture, and, in its closing decades, of a sudden and remarkable flowering of English literature. To understand Chaucer it is necessary first to understand the world that produced him, for he was in many respects a representative man of his century, touched at almost every point of his life by its great public events, and his poetry, for all its serene artistry, grew directly out of its conditions.

England in the 1340s was ruled by Edward the Third, a king who had come to the throne as a boy in 1327, after the deposition and murder of his father, and who would reign until 1377, longer than any English king before him. Edward was a sovereign of the old chivalric type, ambitious, magnificent, and warlike, and the dominant fact of his reign, and of Chaucer's youth, was the long conflict with France that later historians would name the Hundred Years' War. The war had begun in 1337, when Edward, asserting through his mother a claim to the French crown itself, formally challenged the king of France; it would drag on, through periods of open campaigning and uneasy truce, for more than a century. In Chaucer's childhood the English armies won two of the most celebrated victories in the nation's military history, the great battle of Crecy in 1346 and the battle of Poitiers in 1356, where the English captured the king of France himself and held him for an enormous ransom. These triumphs filled England with martial pride, with plunder, and with a glittering, self-conscious cult of chivalry, expressed in tournaments, in heraldry, and in the founding of Edward's Order of the Garter. It was a culture that prized prowess in arms, courtesy, and noble birth, and Chaucer would portray its ideal, affectionately and with a faint shading of irony, in the figure of the Knight who opens The Canterbury Tales.

But the age had a darker face, and it showed itself with terrible suddenness in 1348. In that year there reached England, by way of the ports, the pandemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague that history calls the Black Death. It was the most lethal catastrophe ever to strike the country. Within little more than a year it killed, by the most credible modern estimates, somewhere between a third and a half of the entire population, and it returned, in further waves, in 1361, in 1369, and at intervals throughout Chaucer's life. The demographic and social consequences of this mortality were profound and lasting. With so many dead, labor became suddenly scarce and therefore valuable; surviving peasants and workers found that they could demand higher wages and better terms, and many sought to leave the manors to which custom and law had bound them. The landowning classes responded with legislation, the Statute of Labourers and its successors, that attempted to freeze wages and to compel laborers to serve at the old rates, and the resulting friction between an aspiring laboring population and a frightened, coercive ruling order built up, across a generation, the pressures that would explode in the great rising of 1381.

At the center of this England stood London, the largest and richest city in the kingdom and the place of Chaucer's birth. By the standards of the age it was a substantial city, with a population that may have approached fifty thousand before the plague, though no medieval city was large by modern measure. It was above all a city of trade. Ships came up the Thames from Gascony, from Flanders, from the Baltic and the Mediterranean, bringing wine, wool, cloth, spices, and timber, and the wealth of the city was concentrated in the hands of its merchants and the great craft guilds that governed its commercial and political life. London was crowded, noisy, and unsanitary, a warren of timber houses and narrow lanes within its old walls, dominated by the spire of old St Paul's Cathedral and by the Tower at its eastern edge; the river was its highway, and London Bridge, lined with houses and shops, its single great crossing. It was a place of constant movement, of many tongues and trades, of sharp dealing and civic pride, and the boy who grew up in its riverside wine quarter would carry its sounds and its human variety in his ear for the rest of his life.

Over all of this presided the Church, the universal institution of medieval Christendom, which touched every life from baptism to burial and claimed authority over belief, morals, learning, and a great part of the law. The Church of Chaucer's century was immensely wealthy and powerful, but it was also, increasingly, an object of criticism and unease. For much of the century the popes resided not at Rome but at Avignon, under the shadow of French influence, a situation many in England resented; and in 1378, when Chaucer was a man in middle life, the Church fell into the long scandal of the Great Schism, with two rival popes, one at Rome and one at Avignon, each claiming to be the true successor of Saint Peter and each anathematizing the other. At home, the wealth of bishops and abbeys, the worldliness of many clergy, the sale of indulgences, and the conduct of friars and pardoners drew sharp and widespread complaint. In the 1370s and after, the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe gave this discontent a radical voice, attacking the wealth and the doctrines of the Church and inspiring the movement of dissenters whom their enemies called Lollards. Chaucer's poetry reflects this religious world at every turn, with reverence for genuine holiness, as in his portrait of the poor Parson, and with unsparing satire of its corruptions, as in his portraits of the Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner.

Finally, there was the literary and linguistic culture of England, and here the situation was peculiar and, for a future poet, full of both difficulty and opportunity. England in the fourteenth century was a country of three languages. Latin remained the international language of the Church, of scholarship, and of formal record. French, both the continental French of Paris and the distinct insular variety long spoken by the English upper classes, was the language of the court, of fashionable society, of much law and administration, and of a great body of admired poetry and romance. English, the mother tongue of the overwhelming majority, was only slowly recovering the prestige it had lost after the Norman Conquest; it existed in a patchwork of regional dialects that differed so widely that speakers from the north and the south could struggle to understand one another, and although verse had long been composed in it, English was still widely regarded as a homely, unliterary speech. In the second half of the century English was visibly gaining ground, and a generation of writers was beginning to use it for serious work: in the alliterative tradition of the west and north, the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William Langland, the visionary poet of Piers Plowman; and, closer to Chaucer's own world, his friend John Gower, who wrote substantial poems in all three of the languages of England. It was into this shifting, trilingual literary world that Chaucer was born, and it was this world that, more than any other single writer, he would change.

Family Origins and Early Life

Geoffrey Chaucer belonged, by birth, not to the nobility and not to the peasantry but to the prosperous and rising commercial class of London, and this middling station, poised between the great and the lowly and with a clear view of both, was to prove of the greatest importance for his poetry. The family name itself preserved the memory of a humbler origin. Chaucer derives from the Old French chaucier, a maker of chausses, that is, of hose, leggings, or footwear, and it indicates that some ancestor of the poet had followed that trade. By Geoffrey's own generation, however, the Chaucers had long since left shoemaking behind and had established themselves, over several generations, in the lucrative business of importing and selling wine. They were vintners, members of one of the wealthier mercantile communities of the capital, and they were people of substance, property, and useful connections.

The poet's grandfather, Robert Chaucer, was a London vintner, and so, on a larger scale, was his father, John Chaucer, who is the first member of the family about whom a fair amount is known. John Chaucer dealt in wine, owned property in London and elsewhere, and rose to a position of modest public trust, serving for a time as a deputy to the king's butler, the official responsible for the royal supply of wine, in the port of Southampton. One striking episode from John Chaucer's own youth survives in the legal records and throws a vivid light on the hard-edged world of medieval family and property. In 1324, when John was still a child of about twelve, he was abducted by an aunt, Agnes de Westhale, who hoped to marry the boy to her own daughter and so keep within her branch of the family a valuable inheritance of property in Ipswich. The plot was undone, the matter came before the courts, and the aunt and her accomplices were heavily fined; but the affair is a reminder that the comfortable merchant world into which Chaucer the poet would be born was also a world in which children could be treated as instruments of property and in which the law was a familiar weapon.

Chaucer's mother was Agnes Copton, a Londoner who brought to the marriage property of her own, including an inheritance from her uncle Hamo de Copton, who is described in the records as a moneyer, a maker of coin, at the royal mint in the Tower of London. Through both his parents, then, the young Geoffrey was connected to the world of London commerce and royal service, and the family possessed the means and the standing to launch a promising son on a career. The family home, and in all probability the poet's birthplace, was a house on Thames Street, in the Vintry, the riverside ward of London where the wine trade was carried on. It was here, where the ships from Bordeaux and Gascony unloaded their casks at the wharves, amid the cellars and counting-houses and the constant traffic of the river, that Chaucer almost certainly spent his earliest years.

The exact date of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth is not recorded and cannot now be established with certainty, a frustration that attends almost every personal fact of his early life. The best evidence is indirect. In 1386 Chaucer was called as a witness in a celebrated heraldic lawsuit, the dispute between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor over the right to bear a particular coat of arms, and the clerk who recorded his deposition noted that the witness was of the age of forty years and more, and that he had borne arms for twenty-seven years. Reckoning backward from these statements, and weighing them against the other scattered facts of his career, scholars have generally concluded that Chaucer was born at some point in the first half of the 1340s, most probably around 1342 or 1343, in London. He was thus a small child, no more than five or six years old, when the Black Death first swept through the city in 1348 and 1349, carrying off a great part of its population; that he survived that terrible visitation at all was, in a sense, the first piece of good fortune in a life that would have its share of both.

Of Chaucer's schooling no direct record survives, but the evidence of his writings leaves no doubt that he received a thorough education. His mature work displays an easy command of Latin, a complete fluency in French, a working knowledge of Italian, and a wide and affectionate familiarity with a great range of authors, ancient and medieval, in grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, and poetry. Such an education would, in the London of his boyhood, have begun at a grammar school, where a boy learned to read, write, and construe Latin, the indispensable foundation of all further learning, working through the standard grammatical texts and a body of approved authors. It is possible, though it cannot be proved, that the young Chaucer attended one of the schools attached to the city's churches, perhaps the almonry school of St Paul's Cathedral, which is known to have possessed a collection of schoolbooks. French he would have absorbed both at school and in the polite society to which his family's standing gave him access, for French was the second language of every well-bred Londoner. However it was acquired, the education served him well, and the boy from the Vintry grew into one of the most widely read men of his age.

What can be said with confidence about Chaucer's early life is that it placed him at an exceptionally advantageous vantage point. He was not born to the aristocracy, and so he observed the courtly and chivalric world from a slight, clarifying distance, as an interested and admiring but not uncritical participant; he was not born to poverty, and so he never knew the laborer's life from the inside, but the wine quarter of London brought him into daily contact with people of every rank and trade, with merchants and craftsmen and shipmen and servants and the floating population of a great port. The merchant's son who would one day create the company of the Canterbury pilgrims, drawn from almost every level of English society and observed with an equal and impartial delight, was being prepared for that work, all unknowing, in the streets and cellars and along the crowded waterfront of the city of his birth.

Page, Soldier, and Prisoner of War

The first documentary trace of Geoffrey Chaucer as an individual, the earliest record in which he steps out of the general obscurity of his family and appears in his own person, dates from the year 1357, when he was a boy in his teens. It is a modest and almost accidental survival: an account book kept for the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, in which are noted, among many other small expenditures, sums of money spent on clothing for the young Geoffrey Chaucer, including a short cloak or jacket of the kind called a paltock, a pair of shoes, and hose. The entries are trivial in themselves, but their implication is large. They show that by 1357 Chaucer had been placed as a page in the service of a great noble household, and not merely any household, for the Countess of Ulster was the wife of Lionel of Antwerp, one of the sons of King Edward the Third. The merchant's son had been launched, while still a youth, into the orbit of the royal family itself.

To be placed as a page or a young servant in an aristocratic household was, for a boy of Chaucer's class, the recognized first step on the ladder of advancement, and it was a kind of education in its own right, complementary to the Latin of the schoolroom. In such a household a youth learned the manners and the bearing of the courtly world: how to wait at table and serve his betters, how to dress and to carry himself, how to ride and to begin the long discipline of arms, how to speak and behave in polished society. He was surrounded by the French language in its fashionable insular form, and by the music, the games, the ceremony, and very likely the courtly poetry, French and English, that were the ornaments of noble life. For a boy of unusual intelligence and a quick ear, such a setting was a school of observation, and the experience of these years left a permanent deposit in Chaucer's poetry, which is everywhere marked by an insider's easy knowledge of how the great world conducted itself, and by a poet's amused, attentive eye for its ceremonies and its vanities.

Service in a royal household carried with it, in that age of war, the near certainty of soldiering, and in 1359 Chaucer went to France as a member of the English army. The expedition of 1359 and 1360 was one of the largest and most ambitious of the entire war: King Edward the Third himself led a great host across the Channel, and his immediate object was the city of Reims, the traditional place of the coronation of the kings of France, where Edward intended, in pursuit of his claim to the French crown, to have himself crowned. Chaucer, then a young man of perhaps sixteen or seventeen, served in the retinue of Lionel of Antwerp, in whose family's service he had already been placed. The campaign, however, did not prosper. The city of Reims, well fortified and resolutely defended, held out against the English through the cold winter weeks of the siege, and Edward was at last compelled to abandon the attempt and to lead his army away in search of easier prey and, eventually, toward a negotiated peace.

It was in the course of this campaign that Chaucer met with the most dramatic recorded adventure of his life. Somewhere in the fighting around Reims, in the district near the town of Rethel, the young soldier was taken prisoner by the French. Capture was a normal hazard of medieval warfare, and for a man of any standing it was less a peril to life than a matter of business, for prisoners were held for ransom and then exchanged for money. Chaucer was held for some months and then ransomed, and the transaction has left its mark in the records in a way that is both touching and revealing: in March 1360 King Edward the Third contributed the sum of sixteen pounds toward the ransom of his young servant. Sixteen pounds was a considerable sum in the money of the time, and the king's willingness to pay it is a clear sign that the youthful Chaucer was already regarded as a person of value, a promising member of the royal affinity worth the cost of recovery. The episode also gave the future poet a direct, unromantic, personal acquaintance with war, with its discomforts and its reverses, an acquaintance that may help to explain why the warfare in his poetry, for all his evident admiration of true chivalry, is so often shadowed by a sense of its waste and its sorrow.

With the failure of the campaign before Reims, the long first phase of the Hundred Years' War moved toward its close. In May 1360 the two crowns concluded the Treaty of Bretigny, a peace that, for a time, ended the open fighting and confirmed Edward in possession of large territories in France in exchange for his setting aside, for the moment, his claim to the French throne. Chaucer, now released from captivity, was employed in the diplomatic traffic that accompanied the peace: the records show that he was paid for carrying letters from Calais, the English-held port on the French coast, to England, an early instance of the kind of confidential errand that would later become a regular part of his working life. The young man who returned from France in 1360 had already, before the age of twenty, been a page in a royal household, a soldier on a great campaign, a prisoner of war, and a messenger in the service of the crown.

After 1360 the documentary record falls silent for several years, and the period from roughly 1360 to 1366 is one of the genuine blanks in Chaucer's biography. Where he was, and what he was doing, in these years of his early twenties cannot be established. He may have remained in the service of Lionel of Antwerp or passed into some other noble or royal household; he may have traveled abroad again on the king's business; there is a much later and quite unreliable tradition that he spent time studying law at the Inns of Court in London, which, if it were true, would help to account for the detailed knowledge of legal affairs that appears here and there in his poetry, but no contemporary evidence supports it. What is certain is that these were the years in which Chaucer passed from youth into manhood, and in which, in all likelihood, he began in earnest the reading and the apprentice writing of verse that would bear fruit in the first of his surviving poems. When the records take him up again, in 1366, it is to show him established, married, and securely settled in the service of the royal court, and the obscure young soldier of the French wars has become a recognizable figure of the English establishment.

Marriage and the House of Lancaster

When the records resume their account of Chaucer's life in 1366, they show him a married man. His wife was Philippa, generally known to history by her maiden name as Philippa Roet or de Roet. She was the daughter of Sir Gilles de Roet, a knight of the county of Hainault, in the Low Countries, who is often called by the name Paon de Roet and who had come to England, like a number of his countrymen, in the train of Queen Philippa of Hainault, the wife of Edward the Third. Philippa de Roet, in other words, came of a family already attached to the English royal court, and she herself was a woman of that world: she served as a damsel, or lady-in-waiting, in the household of the queen, and after the queen's death she was attached to the household of Constance of Castile, the second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The marriage of Geoffrey and Philippa thus bound Chaucer still more firmly into the service of the crown, and both husband and wife in due course received royal annuities, the regular pensions that were the reward of court service.

The most consequential feature of this marriage, however, lay in the person of Philippa's sister. Philippa de Roet had a sister named Katherine, who first married a Lincolnshire knight, Sir Hugh Swynford, and is therefore known to history as Katherine Swynford. After her husband's death Katherine entered the household of John of Gaunt as governess to his daughters, and in time she became the duke's mistress, the mother of a family of his children, and at last, in 1396, his third and final wife. The children she bore him, known from her former home as the Beauforts, were afterward declared legitimate, and from them descended a great part of the later English nobility and, in time, the royal line of the Tudors. Through his wife's sister, therefore, Geoffrey Chaucer was connected, by the intimate ties of family, to John of Gaunt, the wealthiest, the most powerful, and for long stretches of these years the most influential nobleman in the kingdom, a son of one king, the father of another, and the effective master of England in the closing years of Edward the Third and through much of the minority of Richard the Second. This connection to the house of Lancaster was the single most important relationship of Chaucer's public life. Gaunt was his patron, the protector of his interests, and a steady source of favor and annuities across three decades, and it is no accident that Chaucer's first major poem was an elegy for Gaunt's first wife.

Of the inward character of the marriage between Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer very little can be known, and the temptation to read the rueful and comic things that Chaucer's poetry says about wedlock as direct evidence of his own domestic life should be resisted, for those passages are spoken by invented characters and belong to a long literary tradition of writing about marriage. What the records do show is that Philippa had a court career of her own, often pursued in households and places apart from her husband's, which was not unusual in an age when the service of great persons could separate husbands and wives for long periods. The couple appear to have had children. A son, Thomas Chaucer, who rose to great wealth and prominence and served repeatedly as Speaker of the House of Commons, is generally taken to have been their son; another son, Lewis, was a boy of about ten in 1391, when Chaucer wrote for him, with evident paternal tenderness, a scientific treatise on the astrolabe, addressing him as little Lewis my son; and a daughter, Elizabeth Chaucer, became a nun. Philippa Chaucer's name disappears from the records of annuity payments after the middle of 1387, and it is generally concluded that she died in that year, so that Chaucer passed the last thirteen years of his life a widower.

The King's Servant: Diplomat and Controller of Customs

From the later 1360s onward Geoffrey Chaucer was a settled and trusted servant of the crown, and for the better part of the next twenty years his life was the life of a busy public official. In 1367 he was granted a royal annuity and is described in the records as a yeoman, and soon afterward as an esquire, of the king's household, a recognized member of the permanent royal establishment. His duties in these years were varied, and they repeatedly took him abroad. The crown found in Chaucer a useful and discreet agent for missions of a diplomatic and commercial kind, and the records show him crossing to the continent on the king's business in 1368, in 1370, and on several later occasions, traveling in France, in the Low Countries, and, most importantly, in Italy. To be entrusted with such errands was a mark of confidence, for they required tact, languages, a head for negotiation, and a reliable loyalty, and Chaucer evidently possessed all of these.

The year 1374 was, in the worldly sense, the most important of Chaucer's life, for in the space of a few months he was granted a cluster of favors that together gave him, for the first time, a substantial and settled position. In that year he was appointed Controller of the Customs and Subsidy on wool, sheepskins, and hides in the port of London, one of the principal sources of royal revenue, since the export of English wool was the great commercial artery of the kingdom. The controller's task was to keep an independent check upon the accounts of the collectors, and Chaucer was required, by the terms of his appointment, to keep the rolls of his office with his own hand, a demanding and exacting responsibility. In the same year the city of London granted him the lease, free of rent, of a dwelling above Aldgate, one of the gates in the city wall; the king granted him a daily pitcher of wine; and he received, in addition, an annuity from John of Gaunt. From a man making his way, Chaucer had become a man arrived: he had a responsible office, a steady and various income, and a house of his own.

For a dozen years, from 1374 to 1386, Chaucer lived above the gate of Aldgate and worked at the customs house on the wool wharf by the Thames, and these were the years of his richest poetic production. The combination is itself remarkable, and Chaucer himself, in one of the most charming and revealing passages he ever wrote, gave a humorous account of the double life it imposed upon him. In his poem The House of Fame the talkative eagle who carries the dreamer aloft chides him for his bookish and reclusive habits, describing how, when the poet has finished his labor and made his reckonings, instead of seeking rest or company he goes home to his house and sits down at once before another book, as dumb as any stone, and reads until his look is dazed. The picture, half rueful and half proud, of a working official who hurried from his accounts to his books and his verses is one of the few glimpses Chaucer allows us of his own daily existence, and it suggests how the poetry was made, in the stolen margins of a crowded official life.

The diplomatic missions continued through these years, and two of them, the journeys to Italy, were of an importance for English literature that can hardly be overstated and that will be considered in their place. There were other errands too. In 1378 Chaucer was sent to Lombardy, in northern Italy, on a mission touching the affairs of war, to treat with Bernabo Visconti, the lord of Milan, and with the celebrated English mercenary captain Sir John Hawkwood, then in Italian service. Before setting out on this journey Chaucer granted powers of attorney to two friends to manage his affairs in his absence, and one of the two was the poet John Gower, a small documentary fact that is precious as the only hard evidence of the friendship between the two greatest English poets of the age. In 1385 Chaucer was given leave to discharge the duties of the customs controllership through a permanent deputy, a relaxation that must have freed a good deal of his time.

The year 1386 brought a sharp change of fortune. In that year Chaucer, who by this time had removed his residence from London to the county of Kent, was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, that is, a member of Parliament, and he sat in the assembly that met in the autumn of 1386, the gathering that later ages would call the Wonderful Parliament. It was a moment of grave political crisis. The young King Richard the Second was at odds with a powerful faction of magnates; his ministers and favorites were under attack; and John of Gaunt, Chaucer's great protector, was absent from England, away in Spain pursuing by arms a claim to the throne of Castile. In the political reckoning that followed, Chaucer lost, or surrendered, both of his controllerships in the customs before the year was out. The loss of office was almost certainly bound up with the turbulence of the time and the temporary eclipse of his patrons' influence, and it was followed, in the next year, by what appears to have been the death of his wife. The middle and later 1380s were thus, for Chaucer, a period of reduced income and uncertain prospects; but they were also, by a paradox common in the lives of writers, the years in which, released from the daily grind of the customs house, he seems to have conceived and begun his greatest and most ambitious work, The Canterbury Tales.

The Journeys to Italy and the Discovery of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio

Among all the journeys of Chaucer's official career, two stand apart in their consequences, and these are the two missions that took him to Italy. The first and the more important was undertaken in the winter of 1372 and the spring of 1373. Chaucer left England in December 1372, charged with a diplomatic and commercial errand: he was one of a small party sent to the great maritime republic of Genoa to negotiate with its merchants, who wished to be granted the use of an English port for their trade, and the mission also carried him to the city of Florence. He was abroad for about half a year, returning home in the late spring of 1373. A second Italian journey followed in 1378, the mission to Milan already mentioned. The diplomatic results of these errands belong to the minor history of medieval commerce and war; their importance for literature lies entirely in what Chaucer found there.

Italy in the 1370s was the most advanced region of Europe, the wealthiest in its commerce, the most sophisticated in its banking and its civic life, and, above all, the most brilliant in its culture. The intellectual and artistic movement that would later be called the Renaissance was already well begun. And Italy had produced, in the three generations before Chaucer's visit, the three writers who together had raised the Italian vernacular to the dignity of a great literary language: Dante Alighieri, whose vast poem of the afterlife, the Divine Comedy, had been completed half a century before and was already a classic; and Francis Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, the two famous men of letters of the immediately preceding generation, both of whom were in fact still living, though elderly, at the time of Chaucer's first journey, and both of whom would die within two years of it. Chaucer, arriving in Italy as a cultivated man in his early thirties who had already written verse of his own, encountered there a body of vernacular poetry of a range, a seriousness, and an artistic ambition altogether beyond anything being produced in England, or, for that matter, in France.

It is one of the tantalizing questions of literary history whether Chaucer, during his months in Italy, ever met Petrarch or Boccaccio in person. There is no evidence that he did, and the silence of the records on the point is probably decisive. It is true that in The Canterbury Tales the Clerk of Oxford introduces his tale of the patient Griselda by saying that he learned the story from the worthy clerk Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet, at Padua, and many readers have been tempted to hear in this a veiled memory of a real meeting. But the Clerk is a fictional character, and his words are part of the dramatic fiction of the Tales; they cannot safely be taken as Chaucer's own testimony. What is beyond doubt is that Chaucer encountered the works of these writers, whether he brought manuscripts home with him or found them later, and that the encounter altered the whole course of his development as a poet.

The change can be measured in the poetry itself. Before Italy, Chaucer's models and his materials had been overwhelmingly French: the courtly love allegory, the dream-vision, the elegant and melodious tradition that descended from the Roman de la Rose and the poets of the French court. After Italy, the Italian masters take their place beside the French as the great shaping presences of his art. Boccaccio in particular became, though Chaucer never once names him, the most important single source of his mature narrative poetry. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a free and profound reworking of Boccaccio's poem Il Filostrato; the Knight's Tale, the first of the Canterbury Tales, is drawn from Boccaccio's epic the Teseida; and Boccaccio's Latin compilations supplied material for the Monk's Tale and elsewhere. From Dante, Chaucer took the soaring eagle and much of the cosmic machinery of The House of Fame, and echoes of the Divine Comedy sound at solemn moments throughout his work. Beyond particular borrowings, Italy gave Chaucer something larger and less definable: a demonstration, by living example, that a modern spoken language could be made to carry poetry of the very highest seriousness and beauty, that the vernacular was not condemned to triviality. It was a lesson he would apply, with incomparable results, to the English of London.

The Early Poems and the Book of the Duchess

The poetic career of Geoffrey Chaucer is conventionally divided by scholars into three broad and overlapping phases: an early period in which French models predominate; a middle period marked by the powerful influence of Italian poetry; and a final period given over almost wholly to the great English design of The Canterbury Tales. The division is a convenience rather than an exact chronology, for the phases shade into one another and the French influence never wholly departs, but it usefully describes the general movement of his art, from apprenticeship in an inherited courtly tradition toward the full originality of his maturity.

Like most poets of his age, Chaucer began as a translator and an imitator, for translation was the recognized school of the medieval writer, the discipline through which a young poet learned his craft by re-creating in his own tongue the admired works of others. The most important of these early labors was Chaucer's rendering into English of the Roman de la Rose, the enormously long and enormously influential French allegorical poem of love, begun by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean de Meun, which was the single most widely read secular work of the later Middle Ages. A Middle English translation of part of the poem, known as the Romaunt of the Rose, survives, and at least the opening portion of it is generally accepted as Chaucer's own work. The Roman de la Rose, with its dream framework, its garden of love, its allegorical personifications, and its blend of idealism and worldly wisdom, was a formative influence on Chaucer, and its conventions lie behind all of his early original poetry.

That early original poetry begins, so far as surviving major work is concerned, with The Book of the Duchess, a poem that can be dated with unusual confidence because its occasion is known. It is an elegy, written to commemorate the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt, who died, probably of plague, in September 1368. The poem was composed in or shortly after that year, while Chaucer was still a young poet, and it is at once a graceful work of consolation and a careful act of homage to his great patron. In form it is a dream-vision in the French manner, written in the light, swift, four-stress couplets that Chaucer used in his earlier work. The poem's narrator, unable to sleep and oppressed by a sorrow of his own, passes the night reading the old story of Ceyx and Alcyone, a tale of a wife's grief for a drowned husband; at last he sleeps, and dreams that he rises on a bright May morning and follows a hunting party into a wood, where he comes upon a knight dressed all in black, sitting alone and making a quiet lament for a lost lady.

The heart of the poem is the long, delicate conversation between the dreamer and the Man in Black. The dreamer, with a tact that masquerades as a gentle obtuseness, draws the mourning knight out, leads him to speak of his lady, to describe her beauty and her goodness and the happiness of their love, and so to ease, in the telling, the burden of his grief; and only at the very end does the knight say plainly the words the dreamer has, in kindness, refused to anticipate, that she is dead. The bell tolls, the dreamer wakes, and resolves to set his dream down in verse. The Book of the Duchess is the work of a young poet, and it wears its French models openly, but it already displays the qualities that would mark Chaucer's poetry to the end: a perfect command of tone, an instinct for indirection and understatement, a deep human sympathy, and the device, which he never afterward abandoned, of the modest, slightly bewildered narrator who sees less than the reader does and so allows the reader the pleasure of seeing more. The poem also sealed, in the most personal way, the bond between Chaucer and the house of Lancaster.

The House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls

The two principal poems of Chaucer's middle years, the years of the Italian influence, are The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, and both are dream-visions, but they show a poet who has grown enormously in range, in learning, and in confidence since the gentle elegy of The Book of the Duchess. The House of Fame, written probably in the later 1370s, is the longer and the stranger of the two, an ambitious, exuberant, and finally unfinished poem in the old four-stress couplet. Its narrator falls asleep and dreams first that he is in a temple of glass adorned with the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, and then that he is seized and borne up into the heavens by a great golden eagle. The eagle is one of Chaucer's finest comic creations, a garrulous, self-satisfied, relentlessly instructive bird, plainly descended from the eagle of Dante's Divine Comedy but transformed by Chaucer's humor into a figure of delightful absurdity, who lectures the frightened and unwilling poet, all the way up through the sky, on the science of sound and the workings of fame.

The eagle carries the dreamer to the House of Fame itself, the palace of the goddess Fame, where the poet watches as Fame, capricious and unjust, deals out reputation and oblivion to the petitioners who come before her with no regard whatever for their deserts, granting lasting glory to some and undeserved obscurity or slander to others purely at her whim. From there the dreamer passes to a second, whirling structure, the House of Rumour, a vast spinning house of twigs full of the ceaseless noise of the world's gossip, where true reports and false are jumbled inseparably together and fly out to become the news and the fame of mankind. The poem is, among other things, a profound and witty meditation on the unreliability of report, on the gulf between truth and reputation, and on the very materials, the old stories and the hearsay of the world, out of which poetry itself is made. It breaks off, unfinished, at the very moment when a man who seems of great authority is about to speak, and what he would have said is one of the small permanent mysteries of English literature.

The Parliament of Fowls is shorter, more perfectly finished, and one of the most purely delightful of all Chaucer's works. It is written in rhyme royal, the seven-line stanza that Chaucer introduced into English and that takes its name from its later use by a royal poet, and its handling of the form is assured and graceful. The poem opens with the narrator reading an old book, the famous Dream of Scipio, in which the spirit of the great Roman is shown the smallness of the earth and the destiny of the soul; and when the narrator himself falls asleep, he is led into a beautiful garden and brought at last to the goddess Nature, before whom, on Saint Valentine's Day, all the birds of the world are assembled to choose their mates for the coming year.

The central action is the courtship of a single beautiful formel, or female, eagle by three noble tercel eagles, who plead their suits before Nature in the high, formal language of courtly love, each claiming to love her best and longest and most truly. While the aristocratic birds debate with elaborate courtesy, the great crowd of the lower birds, the ducks and geese and cuckoos, grow first restless and then loudly impatient, and they break in with blunt, practical, and extremely funny objections to the whole refined proceeding, until the poem becomes a comic debate between the ideal and the earthy, between the exquisite self-denials of courtly love and the common sense of ordinary nature. In the end Nature, with good humor, grants the formel eagle a year's delay before she need choose, and the other birds pair off joyfully and sing a roundel in praise of the returning summer. The poem has often been associated with the marriage negotiations for the young King Richard the Second, and it is one of the earliest works in English to link Saint Valentine's Day with the choosing of lovers; but its lasting charm lies in its perfect balance of tones, its learning worn lightly, and its affectionate, clear-eyed comedy of love in all its forms.

Troilus and Criseyde

With Troilus and Criseyde, composed in the first half of the 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer produced the longest poem he ever brought to completion and, in the judgment of a great many readers across six centuries, the most perfect. If The Canterbury Tales is his most famous and most beloved work, Troilus and Criseyde is his most flawless, a single sustained narrative of more than eight thousand lines, complete, shapely, and finished in every part, and it has a fair claim to be considered the first true masterpiece of English narrative poetry and, in its searching attention to the inner lives of its characters, the remote ancestor of the English novel. It is written, like the Parliament of Fowls, in rhyme royal, and it is divided into five books.

The poem's immediate source was Il Filostrato, a poem by Boccaccio, but Chaucer's relation to his source is the relation of a great original artist to his raw material: he expanded it, deepened it, complicated it, and transformed its meaning, until the finished English poem stood at a height the Italian had never reached. The story is set in the city of Troy during the long years of its siege by the Greek army. Troilus, a young prince of Troy, a son of King Priam and a valiant warrior, is at the outset of the poem proud and scornful of love and of lovers; and he is punished for that scorn when, catching sight of the beautiful young widow Criseyde in a temple, he is struck through with a love so sudden and so overwhelming that he can think of nothing else and falls into a wasting secret misery. Criseyde is the daughter of Calchas, a Trojan soothsayer who, foreseeing the city's doom, has already deserted to the Greeks, leaving his daughter behind in a position of some danger and isolation.

The agent who brings the lovers together is one of the great characters of medieval literature, Criseyde's uncle Pandarus, the friend of Troilus, a worldly, talkative, endlessly resourceful and morally ambiguous man who throws himself into the management of his friend's love affair with an energy that is by turns comic, touching, and faintly disquieting. Through Pandarus's patient, cunning, and tireless contrivance, the first three books of the poem carry the love of Troilus and Criseyde from its hopeless beginning, through a long and exquisitely detailed courtship, to its consummation and to a season of perfect, private happiness, the central and radiant point of the whole design. But the poem has been steeped from its first lines in the knowledge of what must come, for Chaucer's narrator has told the reader at the outset how the story must end, and the happiness of the lovers is shadowed throughout by the turning of the wheel of Fortune.

The turn comes when the fortunes of war require an exchange of prisoners, and the Trojan parliament agrees to send Criseyde out of the city to the Greek camp, to her father Calchas, in exchange for a captured Trojan warrior. The lovers, in an agony of grief, are forced to part, and Criseyde swears that she will find a means to return to Troy and to Troilus within ten days. But in the Greek camp Criseyde is frightened, alone, and without protection, surrounded by enemies and pressed by the attentions of the Greek warrior Diomede; and slowly, against her own intentions, out of fear and loneliness and a yielding weakness rather than any wish to betray, she fails to return, and at last gives her love to Diomede. When the truth of her unfaithfulness is at last forced upon Troilus, by the evidence of a brooch he had given her found upon a captured coat of Diomede's, he is destroyed by grief; he seeks his own death in the fighting, dealing great slaughter among the Greeks in search of Diomede, and is at last killed in battle by the mighty Achilles.

What raises the poem far above a mere tale of love betrayed is the depth, the fairness, and the humanity of Chaucer's treatment of his characters, and above all of Criseyde. She is not a simple traitress, and Chaucer refuses, pointedly and repeatedly, to condemn her; his narrator, who has come to love her in the course of telling her story, pleads her case, dwells on the cruelty of her situation, and declares that he would excuse her still further for pity if only he could. She is one of the most subtly and sympathetically drawn women in all medieval poetry, intelligent, charming, tender, and fatally timid, a woman destroyed less by wickedness than by fear and circumstance and the helplessness of her position. And around the love story Chaucer builds a grave and beautiful meditation, drawn in large part from the philosophy of Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy he himself translated into English prose, on the great questions of Fortune and her turning wheel, of destiny and the freedom of the will, and of the difference between the love that is set on the changeable things of this world and the love that is set on God.

That meditation is brought to its resolution in the poem's famous epilogue. After the death of Troilus, Chaucer lifts the whole story onto a higher plane: the soul of the dead prince rises up through the spheres of the heavens, and looking down from that height upon the little spot of earth where men fight and grieve and love, he laughs at the vanity of all that is mourned below. The narrator then turns directly to his readers, to the young and fresh folk in whom love is new, and bids them turn their hearts from the worldly love that fails and betrays to the love of Christ, who never proves false; and the poem closes with a prayer and with its dedication to the poet's friends, the moral Gower and the philosophical Strode. Troilus and Criseyde was the most admired of all Chaucer's works for the better part of three centuries, until the broader appeal of The Canterbury Tales at last overtook it in fame, and its story passed into the common stock of English literature, to be taken up, two hundred years later, by Shakespeare himself.

The Legend of Good Women and the Other Writings

Between the completion of Troilus and Criseyde and the great enterprise of his last years, Chaucer undertook another long poem, The Legend of Good Women, which he never finished but which has an importance out of proportion to its modest reputation among readers. The poem grew, by Chaucer's own playful account, out of his earlier work. Its Prologue, which survives in two distinct versions and is by common consent the most delightful part of the whole, presents the poet as a worshipper of the daisy, who falls asleep in a meadow and dreams that the God of Love appears to him in anger. The god rebukes Chaucer as a heretic against the law of love, charging that in writing the story of the faithless Criseyde, and in translating the Roman de la Rose with its hard sayings against women, he has slandered the female sex and discouraged men from loving. The poet is defended by the gracious queen Alceste, the very pattern of a good and faithful wife, and she imposes upon him a penance: he must write, in expiation, a series of stories, a legend in the old sense of a collection of saints' lives, celebrating women who were true and faithful in love and who were betrayed or wronged by false men.

The body of the poem accordingly consists of a sequence of tales of the good women of classical antiquity, among them Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Lucretia, Ariadne, and Philomela, each a story of a woman's constancy set against a man's treachery. The Legend of Good Women was never completed; Chaucer seems to have wearied of the deliberate sameness of his self-imposed task, the very monotony of virtue rewarded with betrayal, and to have laid the work aside, perhaps when the far richer possibilities of The Canterbury Tales opened before him. Yet the poem has a real historical significance beyond its charm, for in it Chaucer made his first sustained use of a verse form that he had been moving toward for some time and that he would carry to perfection in the Tales: the decasyllabic, or ten-syllable, rhyming couplet, the measured five-stress line in pairs that, under the later name of the heroic couplet, would become one of the central instruments of English poetry for the next four hundred years. It was Chaucer who first showed what that line could do in English.

Alongside the great narrative poems, Chaucer produced a body of other writing that fills out the portrait of his mind. He was, throughout his life, a translator, and his most ambitious prose translation was the Boece, his English rendering of the Consolation of Philosophy by the late Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius, a work written in prison under sentence of death and one of the most influential books of the entire Middle Ages. Its meditation on Fortune, on the fragility of worldly happiness, and on the providence of God sank deep into Chaucer's imagination and colors all of his mature poetry, Troilus and Criseyde above all. He also composed, in 1391, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, a clear and patient prose manual explaining the use of that astronomical instrument, written expressly for his son, the ten-year-old Lewis; it is one of the earliest technical and scientific works in the English language, and its plain, kindly, instructive prose, addressed to little Lewis my son, is among the most personally appealing things Chaucer ever wrote. To these may be added a number of shorter poems, lyrics, complaints, and verse epistles, such as Truth, Gentilesse, and Lak of Stedfastnesse, in which Chaucer speaks, more directly than anywhere else, in the voice of a wise and humane moralist.

The Canterbury Tales: a New Design

The work on which Chaucer's fame chiefly rests, and which occupied the last twelve or thirteen years of his life, is The Canterbury Tales. He appears to have conceived and begun it around 1387, in the period after the loss of his customs offices, and he was still adding to it, and still leaving it unfinished, at his death in 1400. It is, even incomplete, the most ambitious and the most original literary work produced in England in the Middle Ages, and it rests upon an idea of beautiful simplicity and inexhaustible richness.

The idea is a pilgrimage. In the late fourteenth century the journey to a holy shrine was one of the great common experiences of English life, an act of devotion that was also, frankly, a holiday, an occasion for travel, company, and entertainment, and the most famous destination of all was the shrine of the martyred archbishop Saint Thomas Becket in the cathedral at Canterbury. Chaucer's poem opens in April, the season of pilgrimage, at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames just outside London, where the poet, presenting himself as one of the pilgrims, finds gathered a company of some thirty travelers, men and women of the most various conditions, all bound for Canterbury. The genial and masterful host of the inn, Harry Bailly, a man of large appetite and large authority, proposes a scheme to make the long ride pass pleasantly: each of the pilgrims shall tell tales as they travel, and whoever tells the tale of best instruction and delight shall be given a fine supper, at the cost of all the rest, when the company returns; and the Host himself will ride along as their guide, their master of ceremonies, and the judge of the contest.

This frame, the gathering of a company of storytellers and the setting of them to tell their stories in turn, was not in itself a wholly new invention. Collections of tales bound within a containing fiction existed already; Chaucer's own friend Gower had built one, and Boccaccio, in Italy, had assembled a hundred tales within the frame of a company fled from the plague. But no earlier writer had realized the device with anything approaching the social and dramatic richness that Chaucer brought to it. His stroke of genius was to make the pilgrimage gather, plausibly and naturally, a true cross-section of English society. On the road to Canterbury, and only there, a knight and a miller, a prioress and a cook, an Oxford scholar and a tradesman's wife, a poor parson and a corrupt pardoner could be thrown together as equals in a single company, each as good as another for the length of the journey. The pilgrimage gave Chaucer a frame within which the whole of his nation could be represented; and by making the telling of tales a contest, presided over by the Host and punctuated by the quarrels, the interruptions, the apologies, and the rivalries of the pilgrims, he turned the spaces between the tales into a continuous comic drama, so that the tellers reveal themselves not only in their stories but in their reactions to one another's.

The full design that Chaucer sketched through the mouth of the Host was enormous: each of the pilgrims was to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back, which would have meant a collection of something like a hundred and twenty stories. Of that vast plan Chaucer completed only a fraction. Twenty-four tales survive, several of them unfinished, and the return journey is never reached; the work breaks off, in effect, still on the road. Moreover Chaucer never assembled what he had written into a single settled order. The Tales have come down to us in a series of groups or fragments, internally consistent but not firmly linked to one another, and the sequence in which they should be read has been debated by editors for centuries. Yet the incompleteness, strangely, does little harm. Enough was finished, and finished at so high a level, that The Canterbury Tales stands as one of the supreme achievements of English literature, and its very open-endedness, the sense of a journey still in progress and a company still talking, has a charm of its own.

The Pilgrims of the General Prologue

The Canterbury Tales opens with the General Prologue, and the General Prologue is, by general consent, one of the greatest things Chaucer ever did. After the famous opening lines, in which the soft rains and the new life of April are made the natural occasion of the pilgrim instinct, the poet sets about introducing, one by one, the members of the company assembled at the Tabard. The result is a gallery of portraits unmatched in medieval literature, some thirty sharply individualized men and women, each caught in a few dozen lines of verse with a vividness that has never faded.

There is the Knight, who heads the company and tells the first tale, a true and perfect gentle knight, a veteran of crusading campaigns in many lands, brave, experienced, courteous, and modest, his coarse tunic still stained from his armor, the very ideal of chivalry as Chaucer's age conceived it. With him rides his son, the Squire, a young man of twenty, a lover and a lively soldier, curled and fashionable and accomplished, who can sing and dance and write verse and ride, embroidered like a meadow full of flowers, the springtime to his father's autumn. There is the Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, a nun who ought to be unworldly and is instead a study in genteel affectation, careful of her table manners, speaking French in the accent of a London suburb rather than of Paris, weeping over a trapped mouse and feeding her little dogs on roast meat and the finest bread, her brooch inscribed with a motto that hovers ambiguously between sacred and worldly love. There is the Monk, who loves hunting and good horses and fat swans far better than the silence of the cloister, and the Friar, the smooth and charming Hubert, the most damning of all the portraits, a man who knows the taverns and the barmaids of every town better than the lepers and the beggars he ought to serve, and who has made of his holy office a flourishing private business.

And so the procession continues, down through every rank and occupation of the English laity. There is the Merchant, solemn and self-important, talking always of his profits and concealing his debts; the Clerk of Oxford, a poor and threadbare student, lean as his own overworked horse, who would rather have twenty books of Aristotle at his bed's head than rich robes or a fiddle, of whom Chaucer wrote the immortal line that gladly would he learn and gladly teach. There is the Sergeant of the Law, busy and discreet; the Franklin, a prosperous country gentleman whose house rains food and drink, a very patron of hospitality; a cluster of solid Guildsmen with their Cook, who can boil and roast and fry but carries an ulcer on his shin that the reader is invited not to dwell on. There is the Shipman, a hard and capable seaman of doubtful honesty; the Physician, learned in his astrological medicine and notably fond of the gold his profession brought him.

Above all there is the Wife of Bath, the most famous of the pilgrims, a clothmaker from near the city of Bath, a woman bold, handsome, deaf in one ear, gap-toothed, splendidly dressed, who has had five husbands at the church door and is frankly ready for a sixth, a triumphant embodiment of female experience, appetite, and self-assertion who needs only her own long life to refute the whole library of clerical writing against women. And in deliberate contrast there are the two figures whom Chaucer presents without a breath of irony, the only wholly good people in the company: the poor Parson, a learned and devout country priest who actually lives the gospel he preaches, who will not leave his parish to seek an easy post in London, and who teaches Christ's lore but first follows it himself; and his brother the Plowman, an honest, charitable, hardworking laborer who loves God and his neighbor and pays his tithes. The procession ends with the rougher sort: the brawny, brawling, thieving Miller, who plays the bagpipes and leads the company out of town; the thin and crafty Reeve; the foul-faced and corrupt Summoner, an officer of the church courts who terrifies the poor; and, strangest of all, the Pardoner, with his long yellow hair and his bagful of false relics and forged pardons, a figure at once comic, repellent, and disturbingly uncanny.

Chaucer's method in these portraits is itself a quiet marvel of art. He presents himself, the pilgrim-narrator, as a wide-eyed and good-natured observer who admires nearly everyone and reports each pilgrim's own view of himself with cheerful, uncritical approval, so that the corruption of the Monk or the Friar or the Pardoner seems to expose itself, almost without the narrator's noticing, through the very details offered in their praise. The reader is thus made the poet's accomplice, set above the genial narrator and invited to see what he appears to miss. It is the technique of Chaucerian irony in its most refined form, and through it the General Prologue becomes not merely a collection of portraits but a comprehensive, affectionate, and unsparing anatomy of an entire society.

The Tales and Their Variety

The tales that the pilgrims tell are as various as the pilgrims themselves, and the variety is the whole point, for Chaucer designed The Canterbury Tales as a deliberate and dazzling display of the full range of medieval storytelling, high and low, sacred and profane, comic and grave. Each tale, moreover, is fitted to its teller, so that the story becomes a further act of characterization, and the tales are set against one another, answering, parodying, and quarreling with their neighbors, so that the whole acquires the movement of a drama.

The Knight, fittingly, tells the first and one of the longest of the tales, a stately philosophical romance of ancient Greece in which two noble kinsmen, Palamon and Arcite, fall in love with the same lady, Emily, and contend for her through years of imprisonment, exile, and at last a great formal tournament, while above them the gods and the working of destiny shape an end that neither can foresee. No sooner is this grave and elevated tale concluded than the drunken Miller insists, against the Host's wish, on telling the next, and tells a fabliau, a short comic tale of low life and trickery, the brilliant and outrageously bawdy story of a foolish old carpenter, his pretty young wife, the cunning scholar who lodges with them, and the squeamish parish clerk, a story of misdirected love and misdirected kisses that ends in uproar and humiliation. The Miller's Tale answers the Knight's, deliberately dragging its high romance down into the kitchen and the bedroom, and the offended Reeve at once retaliates with a coarse fabliau of his own at the expense of a thieving miller. In this clash of tale against tale, refinement against ribaldry, the comic drama of the pilgrimage is fully launched.

From this point the collection unfolds its astonishing range. There is the great confessional Prologue of the Wife of Bath, longer than her tale, in which she defends marriage, recounts the management of her five husbands, and argues, out of her own abundant experience, that what women most desire is sovereignty, the mastery, over their husbands; and her tale, a story of King Arthur's court, in which a knight's life depends on his finding the true answer to that very question and is saved by an old and ugly woman whom he must then marry and learn to love. There is the Pardoner, who first, in a startling burst of cynicism, openly confesses to the company that he is a fraud who preaches against greed only in order to feed his own, and who then tells what may be the finest short tale in the whole book, the terrifying moral fable of three young revelers who set out to kill Death and find instead a heap of gold, which leads each of them, through treachery, to kill the others. There is the Nun's Priest's Tale, a mock-heroic masterpiece in which the whole grand apparatus of epic and learning and rhetoric is brought to bear, with perfect comic gravity, upon the story of a proud rooster, Chauntecleer, a flattering fox, and a barnyard escape.

There is the Clerk's Tale of the patient Griselda, who endures monstrous trials of her obedience; the Merchant's bitter and brilliant tale of old January, who marries young May and is repaid as such marriages in fabliau are always repaid; the Franklin's gracious tale of a marriage founded on mutual forbearance and of a chain of generous and self-denying acts; the Prioress's short, sweet, and, to a modern reader, painfully troubling miracle of the Virgin, a tale whose tender piety is built upon the ugly anti-Jewish prejudice that disfigured the Christianity of Chaucer's age and which an honest account of the Tales cannot pass over in silence. There is even a tale told by Chaucer himself, in his guise as a pilgrim: invited by the Host to contribute, he begins the Tale of Sir Thopas, a deliberately and uproariously inept parody of the cheap popular romances of the day, so bad that the Host cannot endure it and breaks in to stop him, after which the chastened poet tells instead the long, sober prose Tale of Melibee.

The collection moves, in its closing stretch, from game toward earnest. The last of the tales is given to the good Parson, who declines to tell a fable or a romance at all and offers instead a long, plain, prose treatise on penitence, on the sins and their remedies, a fitting sermon as the pilgrims at last draw near their holy destination. And after the Parson's Tale comes the strangest and most personal passage in the whole work, the so-called Retraction, in which Chaucer, speaking now apparently in his own voice, takes leave of his readers and asks forgiveness for those of his writings that tend toward worldly vanity and sin, the tales of Canterbury that sound toward sin among them, while giving thanks for his translations of moral and devout works. Whether the Retraction is a sincere deathbed repentance, a conventional pious gesture, or a last subtle turn of Chaucerian irony, readers have never agreed; but it is a quietly moving close to the unfinished journey, the poet himself stepping forward, at the end, among the company of his pilgrims.

Chaucer and the Making of Literary English

Behind every particular achievement of Chaucer's poetry lies the single great decision that governed his whole career, the decision to write in English, and the consequences of that decision for the English language itself were so large that they must be considered on their own. When Chaucer began to write, English was a language without prestige and without a settled literary form. Three hundred years of subordination to French, in the world of the court and the law, and to Latin, in the world of the Church and learning, had left it the unhonored speech of the unlettered, fractured into regional dialects, and widely thought unfit for serious art. By the end of Chaucer's life this was no longer quite true, and Chaucer, more than any other single person, was the reason. He did not argue the case for English; he simply, across thirty years, produced in it a body of poetry so evidently great that the question of whether English could carry great poetry was answered, permanently, by the fact of the poems.

The English that Chaucer wrote was the English of London and the surrounding East Midland counties, the dialect of the capital, the court, the law courts, and the busiest trade routes of the kingdom. For reasons partly of Chaucer's own making and partly of geography, commerce, and government, it was this dialect, rather than the very different speech of the north or the southwest, that was on its way to becoming the standard written English of the future. The growing use of English in royal administration, the centralizing pull of London, and, within a century of Chaucer's death, the establishment of the printing press in the capital all worked toward the same end; and the immense and lasting prestige of Chaucer's poetry lent the London dialect a literary authority that no other form of English could claim. To read Chaucer was, increasingly, to accept his English as the English that mattered, and the modern standard language is, in a real and traceable sense, descended from the speech that Chaucer chose.

Within that language Chaucer worked as an enricher and an enlarger. He read and wrote French, Latin, and Italian, and he drew on all of them freely, naturalizing into English a great number of words, especially words of French and Latin origin, for which the native vocabulary had no equivalent or no equivalent of the right weight and color. The dictionaries that record the history of English words credit Chaucer with the earliest known use of many hundreds of them, and although first recorded use is not the same as first invention, the sheer number is a measure of how far he extended the expressive range of the language, giving English poets a vocabulary ample enough for philosophy, for science, for courtly refinement, and for comedy alike. He found English a serviceable tongue and left it a literary instrument.

Equally important was what Chaucer did for the music of English verse. Before him, English poetry had moved chiefly to two measures: the old native alliterative line, still vigorously alive in the work of Langland and the Gawain-poet, and a variety of rougher rhymed verse. Chaucer, schooled in the smooth syllabic measures of French and Italian, naturalized into English the iambic line, the line built on a regular alternation of lighter and heavier stresses, and above all the ten-syllable, five-stress line, which he deployed both in the seven-line stanza of rhyme royal and in the rhyming couplet. This decasyllabic line became, after him, the central measure of English poetry, the line of Shakespeare's blank verse and of the heroic couplet of Dryden and Pope, and its establishment in English was Chaucer's doing. He gave English poetry not only a language but a rhythm.

One curious consequence of the history of the language deserves notice, because it long distorted the appreciation of Chaucer's art. The English Chaucer wrote was Middle English, and after his death the language passed through a profound transformation of its sounds, the long process known as the Great Vowel Shift, which altered the pronunciation of the vowels and silenced many sounds, among them the lightly pronounced final syllable, the sounded final e, on which much of the delicate regularity of Chaucer's metre depends. Within a few generations readers could no longer hear how his verse was meant to move; they found it irregular and rough, and while they continued to honor Chaucer as the venerable father of their poetry, they did so with a faint condescension, supposing him a great but primitive and unpolished artist. Only with the patient philological scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beginning notably with the edition prepared by Thomas Tyrwhitt in the 1770s, was the true nature of Chaucer's language recovered, and with it the recognition that his verse, read as he wrote it, is not rough at all but among the most fluent, supple, and exquisitely controlled in the language.

The Last Years: Office, Hardship, and Death

The lean and uncertain years that followed the loss of Chaucer's customs offices in 1386 did not last. In 1389 the young King Richard the Second, having reached his majority and reasserted his personal control of the government, set about rewarding men he trusted, and among the appointments he made was the naming of Geoffrey Chaucer to the office of Clerk of the King's Works. It was a substantial and demanding post. The Clerk of the Works was responsible for the upkeep, repair, and management of a long list of royal properties, the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London, and a number of castles, manors, and lodges, and the office carried with it the supervision of workmen, the purchase of materials, the handling of considerable sums of money, and a great burden of accounting. Among Chaucer's particular charges in these years was the construction of the scaffolds and lists for the great royal tournaments held at Smithfield. After the relative quiet of the late 1380s, Chaucer was once again a busy and responsible servant of the crown.

The clerkship also brought him the most alarming, and in retrospect the most darkly comic, misadventure of his later life. In the autumn of 1390 Chaucer, carrying money belonging to the king's works, was set upon by robbers and relieved of a sum of around twenty pounds. The records suggest that he had the singular ill fortune to be robbed more than once within a very few days, on the king's business and the king's roads, in one instance at a place remembered as the foul oak in Surrey. The matter went to law, the thieves were pursued, and Chaucer was in the end formally excused from making good the stolen money out of his own pocket. It was, no doubt, a frightening and humiliating experience for a man near fifty, but it has the further interest of reminding us how exposed and physical the life of even a respected royal official could be in fourteenth-century England.

Chaucer held the clerkship for about two years, relinquishing it in 1391, and was then appointed to a quieter and less onerous post, the deputy forestership of the royal forest of North Petherton, in the county of Somerset, an office he seems to have retained, in one form or another, for the rest of his life. The 1390s were, on the whole, years of reduced public activity, in which the aging poet, freed from the heaviest official burdens, could give more of his time to The Canterbury Tales, the great work that he was still expanding and still leaving unfinished. His financial position in this last decade fluctuated, as the position of a man dependent on royal annuities was bound to do; the payments did not always come promptly, and money was sometimes short. In 1394 King Richard granted him a fresh annuity, and from this period of intermittent want comes one of the most engaging of Chaucer's short poems, The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse, a witty and graceful petition in which the poet addresses his empty purse as a man might address a cold mistress, begging her to be heavy again, and which closes with a direct and frankly practical appeal, in an envoy, to the king himself.

The closing scene of Chaucer's life was set against one of the great upheavals of English history. In 1399 Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and therefore the heir of the house of Lancaster to which Chaucer had been bound by ties of marriage and service for thirty years, returned from exile, deposed his cousin King Richard the Second, and took the throne as King Henry the Fourth. The change of dynasty might have been perilous for a poet so closely identified with the old regime, but Chaucer's Lancastrian connections now told entirely in his favor. The new king promptly confirmed the annuities Chaucer had been granted by Richard and added a generous further grant of his own, so that the poet's last months were passed in greater financial security than he had known for some time; the envoy of the Complaint to his Purse, addressed to the conqueror of Britain, is generally read as Chaucer's deft and timely salute to the new sovereign who held his fortunes in hand.

In December 1399 Chaucer took a long lease on a house, a tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, and there, within the precincts of the great abbey, he passed the last year of his life. He died, according to the date long afterward inscribed upon his tomb, on the twenty-fifth of October in the year 1400, in his late fifties or perhaps a little past sixty. He was buried within Westminster Abbey itself, a notable honor, owed partly to his standing as a servant of three kings and a tenant of the abbey and partly, no doubt, to a recognition of what he had been as a poet. His grave in the south transept of the abbey was, in time, to acquire an extraordinary significance, for it became the seed of what is now called Poets' Corner: a century and a half after his death a finer tomb was raised over his remains, and in the centuries that followed one English poet after another was laid to rest around him, until the corner of the abbey where Chaucer lay had become the symbolic burial place of the nation's literature. He was the first to be buried there, and the others came, in a sense, to join him.

Personal Life, Character, and Friendships

To write of Chaucer's personal character is to work almost entirely from inference, for the documentary record, so full on the matter of his offices and his income, says nothing at all of the man within. What we have instead is the persona that Chaucer created for himself in his poetry, the figure of the narrator who appears, in poem after poem, as a modest, bookish, good-natured, slightly absurd observer of the human scene, a man more at home with his books than with the world, abstracted, unlucky in love, and quietly amused by everything, himself included. In The Canterbury Tales this self-portraiture becomes openly comic: when the Host turns to the pilgrim called Chaucer and demands a tale, he describes him as a man who stares perpetually at the ground as though searching for a hare, who keeps himself apart from the company, and who, despite an elvish and inward look, is as plump about the waist as the Host himself. This is, of course, a literary creation and a comic exaggeration, and the real Chaucer, the shrewd diplomat and capable administrator, was plainly not the helpless dreamer of the poems; but the persona is sustained so consistently, and with such evident relish, that it is hard not to believe it drawn, however freely, from life.

Of Chaucer's friendships a few precious traces survive. The clearest is his connection with the poet John Gower, the other great English man of letters of the age: when Chaucer went abroad in 1378 he entrusted his affairs in part to Gower, and at the end of Troilus and Criseyde he sent the finished poem out into the world with a dedication to the moral Gower and to the philosophical Strode, that is, to Ralph Strode, a logician and lawyer of the day. Among Chaucer's shorter poems are verse letters addressed with affectionate, teasing intimacy to friends named Scogan and Bukton, the easy banter of which lets us glimpse, for a moment, the social man among his equals. And there survives a brief, sharp, half-humorous poem addressed to Adam, the scribe who copied out Chaucer's work, complaining of the errors the careless copyist introduced and wishing him an itch beneath his hair if he did not write more truly, a small masterpiece of exasperation that any author who has been imperfectly transcribed will recognize.

The poetry reveals, too, the range and the temper of Chaucer's mind. He was, for a layman of his century, a remarkably learned man, though his learning was that of the wide and curious reader rather than of the university. He knew the Latin classics and the standard authors of the medieval schoolroom; he had absorbed the philosophy of Boethius so thoroughly that it became part of the structure of his thought; he was keenly interested in astronomy and in the astrology that was inseparable from it in his age, knowledgeable enough to write a technical treatise on the astrolabe; and he turned a sharp, amused, and skeptical eye on the pretensions of alchemy, the false science of gold-making, which he exposed with devastating particularity in the tale of the Canon's Yeoman. What is most striking, across the whole body of his work, is the breadth and the evenness of his human sympathy, his apparently inexhaustible interest in people of every kind and condition, and his almost complete freedom from cruelty, fanaticism, and contempt.

One episode of Chaucer's private life has drawn particular and uncomfortable attention, and an honest biography must address it directly. In 1380 a London woman named Cecily Champaigne formally executed a legal document releasing Chaucer from all actions she might bring against him concerning what the Latin record calls her raptus. The word raptus is the difficulty. In the legal Latin of the period it could carry more than one meaning: it could denote rape in the modern sense, but it could also denote abduction, the carrying off of a person, and in certain contexts it was used of other wrongful takings. For a long time the document was read, by those who noticed it, as a disturbing shadow across Chaucer's reputation, and scholars debated, without reaching agreement, what exactly it implied. More recently, in 2022, the discovery of further documents by the scholars Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki has substantially changed the picture: the new evidence indicates that the case very probably arose not from a sexual offense at all but from a dispute over labor and service, in which Cecily Champaigne had left a previous employer to enter Chaucer's service, and the word raptus referred, in the language of the labor laws of the time, to that wrongful departure. The matter cannot perhaps be declared closed beyond every doubt, but the most informed recent scholarship reads the episode as a quarrel about employment rather than a crime against a woman, and a fair account must report it as such while acknowledging the long uncertainty that surrounded it.

What emerges, in the end, from the poems and from the scattered records, is a coherent and an attractive impression: a man of wide reading and wider sympathy, humorous, observant, ironical, and humane; a man of evident prudence and discretion, who served three kings and survived political convulsions that destroyed harder and more conspicuous men; a man without apparent malice, fanaticism, or self-importance, who looked at his fellow human beings, in all their folly and all their worth, with an attention that was unillusioned and yet, on the whole, forgiving. It is the character that the poetry would lead us to expect, and there is no good reason to doubt it.

The Text: Manuscripts and the Early Printed Editions

Chaucer died in 1400 leaving The Canterbury Tales unfinished, and, what has proved almost as consequential for posterity, unassembled: he never gathered the completed portions into a single fixed and ordered whole, and no manuscript of the poem in his own hand survives, nor indeed does any scrap of his writing in his own hand survive at all. Everything we have of Chaucer has reached us through the labor of copyists, and the transmission of his text is therefore a story in its own right, and one that has occupied scholars for generations. The first and most eloquent fact of that story is one of sheer popularity: The Canterbury Tales survives in more than eighty manuscripts and fragments, an enormous number for a medieval vernacular work, and the survival of so many copies, made in the decades after the poet's death, is the plainest possible evidence of how eagerly and how widely Chaucer's last poem was read.

Two of these manuscripts stand far above the rest in importance, and both were produced in the years not long after Chaucer's death. They are known, from the families that later owned them, as the Hengwrt manuscript and the Ellesmere manuscript, and scholars have argued, on the evidence of the handwriting, that both were copied by the same highly skilled professional London scribe. The Hengwrt manuscript, though damaged, is textually of the first authority. The Ellesmere manuscript is one of the most beautiful books of the English Middle Ages, carefully and richly produced, and famous above all for the series of small painted portraits in its margins, one for each pilgrim, shown on horseback as if riding to Canterbury; the order in which the Ellesmere manuscript arranges the tales became, in effect, the standard order in which the work has been read ever since. In 2004 the scholar Linne Mooney proposed that the scribe of these two great manuscripts could be identified by name as one Adam Pinkhurst, and connected him with the very Adam whom Chaucer scolded in his short poem to his scribe, an attractive suggestion that has been widely discussed, though, like much in Chaucer studies, it has not gone unchallenged.

Because Chaucer left the work unfinished and its parts unlinked, the editing of The Canterbury Tales has always involved difficult choices. The completed stretches of the poem survive as a number of internally coherent groups, but the connections between those groups are in places uncertain, and editors have had to decide, on the best evidence available, in what sequence the fragments should be presented; the modern reader's experience of the poem is thus, in part, the creation of its editors. The same labor of reconstruction, the careful comparison of many imperfect copies in order to recover what the poet most probably wrote, has had to be carried out for the whole of Chaucer's work, and it continues in the great scholarly editions of the present day.

The transmission of Chaucer entered a new phase with the coming of the printing press. William Caxton, the merchant and translator who set up the first printing press in England, at Westminster, in the 1470s, recognized Chaucer's commercial and cultural value at once: he printed an edition of The Canterbury Tales around 1476, among the earliest books printed in England, and followed it about 1483 with a second, revised and illustrated edition, having, as he explained, obtained a better manuscript. Caxton also printed Troilus and Criseyde and other of Chaucer's works, and the printers who came after him, Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde and the rest, kept Chaucer steadily in print. In 1532 the first collected edition of Chaucer's Works, edited by William Thynne, gathered the poet's writings, together with a good deal that was not in fact his, into a single substantial volume. Print multiplied Chaucer's readers beyond anything the age of manuscript could have allowed, carried his poetry into the libraries of a whole nation, and fixed his standing, for every century to come, as a classic of the English tongue.

England's Poetic Flowering: Chaucer Among His Contemporaries

It is one of the most remarkable facts of English literary history that Geoffrey Chaucer was not a solitary genius rising out of a barren age, but the greatest figure in a sudden and unexpected flowering of English poetry that filled the very decades of his own working life. For three centuries after the Norman Conquest, England had produced, in English, much pious and useful verse but little of the first rank; and then, in the span of a single generation, in the years roughly between 1360 and 1400, there appeared, almost together, a cluster of English poems of permanent greatness. So concentrated was this burst of achievement, and so much of it falls within the reign of Richard the Second, that modern scholars have given the period a name of its own and speak of the Ricardian age of English poetry. Chaucer was its central figure, but he was not its only one, and his stature is best measured when he is seen among the company of his contemporaries.

The greatest of those contemporaries, and in some ways the furthest from Chaucer in temper and in art, was William Langland, the author of the long visionary poem known as Piers Plowman. Langland's poem, which he revised and expanded across much of his life so that it survives in several distinct versions, is a dream-allegory of the spiritual and social condition of England, an urgent, searching, and at times prophetic work, passionately religious, fiercely concerned with the corruption of the Church and the injustices suffered by the poor, and animated by a restless search for the way of a Christian life. Where Chaucer is ironic, worldly, and serene, Langland is earnest, troubled, and burning; where Chaucer wrote for the court and the cultivated reader, Langland seems to have written for a wider and humbler audience; and where Chaucer adopted the smooth syllabic measures of France and Italy, Langland wrote in the old native alliterative long line, the ancient measure of English verse. The two poets, exact contemporaries and both Londoners, represent two wholly different possibilities for English poetry.

A third great poem of these years, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, came from a poet whose very name is unknown. Preserved in a single manuscript alongside three other poems, among them the grief-haunted dream-vision Pearl, all apparently by the same hand, Sir Gawain is a courtly romance of extraordinary subtlety and craftsmanship, a tale of a beheading game, a temptation, and a test of honor, told in an intricate alliterative verse rounded off by short rhyming lines. Its anonymous author, often called simply the Gawain-poet or the Pearl-poet, wrote in the dialect of the northwest of England, a regional and sophisticated literary language quite distinct from Chaucer's London speech, and he belonged, like Langland, to the alliterative tradition. That so accomplished a poet should have left not even his name is a reminder of how easily the literature of the age could vanish, and of how much the survival of Chaucer's own work owed to his place at the center of national life.

Closest of all to Chaucer, in friendship and in literary kind, was John Gower. The two men knew each other, Chaucer entrusted Gower with his affairs when he traveled abroad, and Chaucer sent Troilus and Criseyde into the world dedicated to the moral Gower. Gower was a poet of formidable industry who wrote major works in all three of the languages of England, a long poem in French, another in Latin, and, in English, the Confessio Amantis, a vast frame-collection in which a lover confesses to a priest of Venus and is instructed by a long series of illustrative tales. The comparison with Chaucer is instructive precisely because the two poets attempted such similar things. Gower is lucid, measured, orderly, and conscientiously moral; he tells his stories well and means them to teach. Chaucer, working with the same materials of frame and tale, is dramatic where Gower is expository, ironic where Gower is plain, and endlessly multiple in his voices where Gower keeps a single steady tone. Gower wrote good poetry; Chaucer wrote great poetry, and the difference lies in the dramatic imagination and the human sympathy that Chaucer brought to everything he touched.

Seen against this company, the particular nature of Chaucer's historical importance comes clearly into focus. The Ricardian flowering was brilliant but, as it proved, fragile. The alliterative tradition of Langland and the Gawain-poet, magnificent as it was, was rooted in regional dialects and in an old measure that did not long survive the fifteenth century as a living force; it was, in the event, a glorious end rather than a beginning. It was Chaucer's choices that pointed to the future. By writing in the dialect of London, the dialect that government, commerce, and, soon, the printing press would carry to dominance, and by adopting the syllabic line that would become the staple measure of English verse, Chaucer aligned his art with the very forces that would shape the English language and English poetry for the next five hundred years. Among the gifted poets of his remarkable generation, he was the one whose work the future could most directly inherit, and that, as much as the genius of the poems themselves, is why the tradition begins with him.

Chaucer's Reputation and Influence Through the Centuries

Few writers have been so promptly or so lastingly honored by their own countrymen as Geoffrey Chaucer. Even in his lifetime he was recognized as a poet of the first rank, and in the years immediately after his death the recognition swelled into something like reverence. Thomas Hoccleve, a poet of the next generation who claimed to have known Chaucer personally, mourned him in moving terms as his master and his guide, called him the first finder of our fair language, and was at pains to have a portrait of Chaucer set into the margin of one of his own manuscripts, so that readers who had never seen the great poet might at least know his face. John Lydgate, the monk of Bury who became the most prolific English poet of the early fifteenth century, returned again and again, throughout his enormous output, to the praise of Chaucer as his master and the chief glory of English poetry. For the poets of the fifteenth century, Chaucer was not merely an admired predecessor; he was the founder, the source, the model from whom the art itself descended.

That sense of Chaucer as the fountainhead shaped English, and especially Scottish, poetry for a century and more. In England his immediate successors, Hoccleve and Lydgate among them, worked frankly in his shadow, and if none of them approached his genius, their constant invocation of his name kept his authority central. North of the border, a remarkable group of poets, the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, proved in some ways his most gifted heirs: Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and the royal poet King James the First of Scotland all learned from Chaucer, and Henryson paid him the extraordinary compliment of composing, in the Testament of Cresseid, a sequel to Troilus and Criseyde so fine that it can be set beside its model without disgrace. Through the whole of the fifteenth century, Chaucer was the indispensable presence, the poet against whom poetry was measured.

In the sixteenth century, the age of printed books and of the new learning, Chaucer's reputation as the father of English poetry was firmly established and never afterward seriously shaken. Edmund Spenser, the greatest non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan age, revered him openly, named him in his pastoral poetry under the affectionate disguise of an old shepherd, praised him as the pure well of English undefiled, and so admired the unfinished Squire's Tale that he undertook, in The Faerie Queene, to carry it forward himself. Yet this period also saw the beginning of a long misunderstanding. The sound of English had changed since Chaucer's day, and readers could no longer hear the metre of his verse; they honored him as the ancient and venerable origin of their literature, but they increasingly read him as a great primitive, sweet and copious but rude and unpolished, a noble ruin rather than a finished building.

That mixture of deep respect and faint condescension persisted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was in this period, too, that Chaucer found one of his most influential and most generous champions. In 1700 the poet John Dryden published his Fables Ancient and Modern, a collection that included free modernized versions of several of the Canterbury tales, rendered into the polished English of Dryden's own day; and in the long and famous preface to that volume Dryden set down a warm and discerning appreciation of Chaucer, saluted him in so many words as the father of English poetry, and, surveying the crowded human variety of the General Prologue, pronounced the verdict that has been quoted ever since: here, he wrote, is God's plenty. Dryden's enthusiasm carried Chaucer to a new generation of readers, even as it accepted the current belief that the old poet's verse needed smoothing. The recovery of the true Chaucer, the understanding that his verse had its own exact and beautiful music, awaited the patient scholarship of later years, and it began in earnest with the carefully edited text that Thomas Tyrwhitt produced in the 1770s, the first edition to restore both the words and the metrical principles of the poet.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries completed Chaucer's restoration and confirmed his place. The rise of rigorous historical and linguistic scholarship, the founding in 1868 of the Chaucer Society by the energetic Frederick Furnivall for the express purpose of printing reliable texts, the labor of generations of editors and philologists, and the establishment of Chaucer as a fixed and central part of the study of English literature in schools and universities together secured both an accurate text and an informed appreciation of his art. The Canterbury Tales, meanwhile, never lost its hold on the general reader, and it has gone on living, beyond the world of scholarship, in countless editions, in modern translations and retellings, and in adaptations for the stage and the screen. Six hundred years after his death, Chaucer is read more widely than ever, by scholars who study every line of him and by ordinary readers who simply enjoy, as his first audiences enjoyed, the inexhaustible human comedy of the road to Canterbury.

The Legacy of Geoffrey Chaucer: Historical Assessment and Conclusion

To assess the place of Geoffrey Chaucer in the history of English literature is, in one sense, an easy task, for the verdict was reached early, has been confirmed by every later age, and is unlikely ever to be overturned: he stands at the head of the tradition, the first of the great English poets, the father, in the exact and unsentimental meaning of the word, of English poetry. The difficulty lies not in pronouncing the verdict but in measuring all that it contains, for Chaucer's achievement was not of one kind but of several, and each of them, by itself, would have earned him a lasting name.

His first and most fundamental achievement was to make the English language a fit instrument for great poetry, and by doing so to found a tradition. He was not the first to write verse in English, but he was the first to write English verse that the rest of Europe's literature need not condescend to, and his success settled, once and for all and by simple demonstration, the question of whether the despised vernacular could carry the highest art. From him a continuous line descends, unbroken, to the present day; every poet who has since written in English writes in a language and a tradition that Chaucer, more than any other single person, made available. To call him the father of English poetry is not a compliment but a plain description of a historical fact.

His second achievement was the creation, in The Canterbury Tales and in Troilus and Criseyde, of a gallery of human beings so fully and so vividly imagined that they have stepped permanently out of their poems and into the common imagination of the English-speaking world. The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Knight, the poor Parson, the Miller, Pandarus, the sorrowing and pitiable Criseyde, these are among the first wholly living characters in English literature, and the company of the Canterbury pilgrims together forms a portrait of a whole society, an entire civilization caught at a moment of its history, observed from top to bottom with a curiosity, a precision, and a breadth of sympathy that had no precedent and have rarely been equaled since. Chaucer gave English literature its first great demonstration that the proper and inexhaustible subject of art is humanity itself, in all its variety, observed with clear eyes and an open heart.

His third achievement was one of pure craft, and its consequences have been felt in every generation of English poetry after him. He gave the language a vastly enlarged poetic vocabulary; he naturalized the verse forms, the rhyme royal stanza and above all the five-stress line and the rhyming couplet, that would carry the central tradition of English poetry for centuries; and he established the rhythmic foundations on which Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and their countless successors would build. The poets who came after him inherited not only his example and his prestige but the very instruments of their art, tuned and ready, from his hand.

And beyond all of these particular achievements there is the pervading quality that has kept Chaucer not merely respected but loved, the quality that the records of his offices and his annuities can never explain and that only the poems convey: the irony that is never bitter, the comedy that is never cruel, the unillusioned but forgiving gaze, the sense of a mind at once supremely intelligent and deeply kind. Chaucer left The Canterbury Tales unfinished, his pilgrims forever on the road and never quite arrived at Canterbury, and there is a fittingness in that incompleteness, for the journey he set going has, in another sense, never ended: the company still rides, the tales are still told, and readers in every generation still join the pilgrimage. He was the first English poet to be buried in Westminster Abbey, and the others, one after another across six hundred years, came to be laid around him, so that the corner of the abbey where he lies became the burial place of English literature itself. It is the right image with which to close. Geoffrey Chaucer is the poet from whom the others descend and around whom, in the end, they gathered; he is, in the abbey and in the language alike, the founder, the father, and the first.

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