Slide 3

In the Middle Ages, a man called Geoffrey Chaucer was revolutionising the literary
scene of the day, becoming one of the greatest poets and fathers of literature in
England. His use of English in his poetry helped to establish Middle English
vernacular as the mainstream language of the day, replacing Latin and French.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1343 to John and Agnes de Copton Chaucer.
Chaucer was descended from two generations of wealthy vintners who had
everything but a title and in 1357 Chaucer began pursuing a position at court. As a
squire in the court of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, the wife of Lionel, Earl of Ulster
(later Duke of Clarence), Chaucer would have served as a gentleman’s gentleman –
essentially a butler. A young man in this position would be in service to the
aristocrats of the court who required diversions as well as domestic help
(entertainment function could both tell stories and compose songs). The countess was
French, so French poets such as Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps
provided an early inspiration, and Chaucer’s earliest poems, The Book of the
Duchess and The Parliament of Birds, rest on a heavy French base.
Slide 4
At this time, Chaucer made the acquaintance of the man who would most deeply
influence his political career: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer and Gaunt
married the daughters of the French Knight Sir Paon de Roet – Gaunt in order to
legitimize his sons by the Roet’s daughter, and Chaucer to enter the world of the
aristocracy. Of all the Canterbury pilgrims (and there is a “Chaucer”), the one who
most closely approximates his situation is the social-climbing Franklin, a man
heartily concerned with the gentility of his son.
Slide 5
Known as the first English author, Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin
was considered the grammatica, or language which would not change, and most of
the upper-class English spoke French. Chaucer himself often used French translations
of Latin texts; that he chose the language of the lower-class Saxons rather than
Norman nobility has perplexed readers and scholars for centuries. As Sir Walter Scott
pointed out, the Saxon language can name only barnyard animals on the hoof. If one
fed a domestic animal, they used its Saxon name, sheep; but if one ate it, they likely
called it by its French name, mouton, which soon became mutton. This linguistic
distinction was a class distinction in Chaucer’s England: if one raised a farm animal,
one was a Saxon and called it by its English name; if one were rich enough to eat it,
one named it in French: calf/veau (veal); chicken/poulet (pullet); pig/porc (pork).
Slide 6
Chaucer wrote many works, some of which like The Canterbury Tales (1375-1400)
he never finished. He pioneered many recognizably “modern” novelistic techniques,
including psychologically complex characters: many claim that Troilus and Criseyde
is the first English novel because of the way its main characters are always operating
at two levels of response, verbal and intellectual. All of Chaucer’s works are
sophisticated meditations on language and artifice. Moving out of a medieval world
view in which allegory reigned, Chaucer developed a model of language and fiction
premised on concealment rather than communication or theological interpretation.
Slide 7
Chaucer’s first major work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy on the death of
Blanche, John of Gaunt’s first wife, written around 1368. In the poem there are
various references to the word “white”, referring to the name Blanche and it ends
with the phrase ‘long castel’, a link to the House of Lancaster. The poem, though
filled with traditional French flourishes, develops its originality around the
relationship between the narrator, a fictionalized version of the poet, and the mourner,
the Man in Black. Chaucer uses a naive narrator in both The Book of the Duchess and
The House of Fame, which employs a comic version of the guide-narrator
relationship of Dante and Virgil in the Commedia.
Slide 8
Meanwhile, Chaucer was serving as a member of the royal court of Edward III,
undertaking various roles which involved diplomatic missions across Europe. His
travels took him to France, Genoa and Florence. These experiences allowed him to
familiarise himself with the work of esteemed authors such as Boccaccio and Dante,
all of whom had an enriching impact on his work. His poem ‘Troilus and Criseyde’,
influenced by Italian language and literature, tells a story of medieval romance
doomed to fail, against a backdrop of the historic scene of the Battle of Troy. In the
poem, Chaucer is presenting a case for ennobling passion which fits with the French
romances he had read in his youth; only in Troilus and Criseyde this romance takes a
particularly Italian turn. Besides his obvious passion and skill for poetry, Chaucer
also excelled in the context of politics and the civil service. In the decade of the
1370’s he played an important role in domestic politics. In 1374 he began work as a
financial controller of custom taxes, a role he held for twelve years.
Slide 9
‘The Canterbury Tales’ was a compilation of twenty-four stories written in Middle
English verses. The stories are about a group of pilgrims as they travel from London
to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury
Cathedral. Chaucer most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, also has similarities
with Italian literature: the unfinished poem draws on the technique of the frame tale
as practiced by Boccaccio in The Decameron.
The context of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is also important for understanding some of
the wider themes and structures. During this time, the Catholic Church was
experiencing a Western Schism and became shrouded in controversy. Lollardy was
an English religious movement pioneered by John Wycliffe which is actually
mentioned in the Tales. The stories also include references to paper, which was a
very recent invention, allowing the dissemination of literature to become much more
widespread.
Slide 10
Far from being noble, Chaucer’s tale-tellers run the spectrum of the middle class,
from the Knight to the Pardoner and the Summoner. And the tales are not told in the
order that might be expected—from highest-ranking pilgrim to lowest. Instead, each
character uses his tale as a weapon or tool to get back at or even with the previous
tale-teller. Once the Miller has established the principle of “quiting,” each tale
generates the next.
As in many of the tales, subtle distinctions of class become the focal point of the
story.
At work in many of these tales is an important Chaucerian device: a false syllogism
based on the movement from the specific to the general back to the specific again,
although the specific now occupies a new moral ground. Almost every time Chaucer
offers a list of examples, he is playing with this disparity between the general and the
specific. As Chaucer worked against the impossibility of finishing The Canterbury
Tales according to the original plan—120 tales, four told by each of thirty pilgrims
(in the Middle Ages, which had many systems based on twelve, 120 was as round a
number as the 100 of The Decameron)—he began to consider the nature of finishing
an act of storytelling.
There is much speculation as to why Chaucer left The Canterbury Tales unfinished.
One theory is that he left off writing them in the mid 1390s, some five or six years
before his death. It is possible that the enormousness of the task overwhelmed him.
Chaucer himself offers an explanation in the “Retraction” which follows “The
Parson’s Tale,” the last of The Canterbury Tales. In it Chaucer disclaims
apologetically all of his impious works.
Slide 11
The last thirteen years of Chaucer’s life appeared to have been financially trying
times for him. It appears that in 1390 or 1391 he was eased out of his clerk’s job; he
eventually got into financial trouble. In 1398 he borrowed against his annuity and
was sued for debt. His last poem, “The Complaint to his Purse,” is a letter asking
King Henry for money. Chaucer moved to a house in the Westminster Abbey Close
because a house on church grounds granted him sanctuary from creditors. And so,
from the fact of Chaucer’s debts comes the tradition of burying poets, or erecting
memorials to them, in Westminster Abbey.
In his lifetime he was able to achieve many accomplishments in a variety of fields
including most famously as an author and poet but also as a philosopher, astronomer,
diplomat and civil servant. Geoffrey Chaucer passed away on 25th October 1400 but
his literary legacy continues to live on to this day.