Geoffrey Chaucer (c.

1343-1400)
Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English poetry, and without question he was the
greatest English poet of the Middle Ages.

The language spoken by ordinary people in Chaucer’s England was the Anglo-Norman
composite now called Middle English, which became the ancestor of modern English. But the
languages of literature, science, diplomacy, and religion were still Latin and French. Before
Chaucer, it was not fashionable for serious poets to compose in English. There were, it is true,
the works in a north-western dialect by the Gawain poet, and there were the poems attributed
to Chaucer's older contemporary William Langland, of which the most important is The Vision
of Piers Plowman. And, of course, there were the popular ballads.

But the poets who wrote these works lacked the social stature of Chaucer, who was well-
known government official who served under three kings -Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV.
By composing in the vernacular -the emerging standard English of London and the East
Midlands- Chaucer lent respectability to the language that would develop into the medium for
one of the world's greatest bodies of literature. In this sense, he was indeed the father of
English poetry.

Not a great deal is known of Chaucer's life. He was born into a middle-class family in London in
the early 1340's, not long after the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War. We are told that his
father was a merchant with sufficient means to provide his son with some education. The
young Chaucer read a great deal and had some legal training. He became a page to an eminent
family and received the finest training in good manners. As he advanced in his career, he
became attached to several noble patrons, especially to Edward IV's fourth son, the powerful
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was made famous by Shakespeare in his play Richard II.

We know, too, that Chaucer was captured in France during the Hundred Years’ War and was
important enough to have the king contribute to his ransom; that he married and had several
children, and that he was on several occasions sent to Europe as the king's ambassador. In
1367, he was awarded the first of several pensions for his services to the Crown. On April 23,
1374, he was granted the promise of a daily pitcher of wine. In 1385, he was appointed Justice
of Peace in the county of Kent, later becoming a member of Parliament. He continued to serve
and to enjoy the king's protection even after the death of his great patron, John of Gaunt.

It seems clear that Chaucer was a relatively important government servant and that his work
took precedence over his writing. Yet he wrote a great deal, and sometimes for personal
advancement. In 1369, for example, he composed his first important poem, The Book of the
Duchess, in memory of the wife of John of Gaunt, who had just died of the plague. But
Chaucer’s writing is just as clearly more than a passing fancy or an attempt at political
advancement. Between 1374 and 1386, he managed, despite his responsibilities to his patron
and his king, to create several great poems, including the House of Fame, the Parliament of
Fowls, and his great love story, Troylus and Criseyde.

In 1373 and 1378 he travelled in Italy and was very likely influenced by the poems of Dante
and Petrarch, and by the stories of Boccaccio. The connection between Boccaccio's Decameron
(1348-1353) and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) is evident both in the framing
device within which the characters tell their tales and in the plots of some of the tales
themselves.
Most important, in 1387 Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales, a work he never completed but
which must be considered one of the very greatest works in the English language. The
Canterbury Tales alone -perhaps even only the Prologue to the Tales- would be sufficient to
place Character in the company of Shakespeare and Milton.

What is so great about The Canterbury Tales? In part, their greatness must lie in Chaucer's
language. But in another part, their greatness comes from the picture they have left us of an
age that is now long past. “In all literature,” writes Nevill Coghill, one of Chaucer's skilled
translators, “there is nothing that touches or resembles the Prologue. It is the concise portrait
of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and
ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country, but without extremes. Apart
from the stunning clarity, touched with nuance, of the characters presented, the most
noticeable thing about them is the normality. They are the perennial progeny of men and
women. Sharply individual, together they make a party.”

We even have a portrait of Chaucer himself in The Canterbury Tales. After the Prioress tales
her tale, the Host of the inn where the pilgrims had met calls upon Chaucer to tell his story,
and then the Host comments on his appearance. The Host, a fat man himself, uses irony to
make fun of Chancer's own plumpness. (His words are left here in the original Middle English.)

He in the waast' is shape as wel as I!

This were a popet in an arm t’enbrace
For any wommwn, smal and fair of face.
He semeth elvyssh by his countenance,
For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce.
Lines 700-704

Chaucer used several metrical forms and some prose in The Canterbury Tales, but the
dominant meter is based on ten syllables, with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
syllable, which we call iambic pentameter.

When we read a line such as that, we experience a version of the meter that was to become
the most popular metrical line in English. At a stroke, we have abandoned the old alliterative
world of the Anglo-Saxons and have covered the modern world of Shakespeare, Dryden, and
Wordsworth.

Chaucer's favourite rhyme scheme in The Canterbury Tales was the couplet. The rhymed
couplet in iambic pentameter would later be called the "heroic” or "closed" couplet, and
would be refined by such neoclassical poets of the eighteenth century as Jonathan Swift and
Alexander Pope. Another of Chaucer's favourite verse forms was the rime royal or Chaucerian
stanza, a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc.

Chaucer died on October 25, 1400, if we are to believe the date on his tombstone (which was
erected in 1556 in Westminster Abbey by an admirer). Chaucer was the very first of those
English writers who would be gathered into what we know today as the Poets? Corner. "The
Father of English poetry,” notes Nevill Coghill, “lies in his family vault.”
 The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales themselves are told during a pilgrimage journey from London to the
shrine of the martyr St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, approximately seventy miles
to the southeast. The tales begin with a General Prologue, the first lines of which establish the
fact that this pilgrimage takes place in the spring, the archetypal time of new life and
awakening. Seventy miles is a long journey by horseback along muddy tracks that would hardly
pass as roads today. An inn was always a welcome oasis, even if it provided few luxuries. Our
poet-pilgrim starts out at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a borough in the south of London.
There he meets twenty-nine other pilgrims also bound for Canterbury. It is the Host of the
Tabard who suggests to the pilgrims, as they sit around the fire after dinner, that they
exchange tales to while away the time along the way to Canterbury and back to London. As the
Prologue progresses, we are introduced to the pilgrims, who represent many stations in life
and who, taken together, form a brilliant picture of life in late medieval England.

As you read, pay attention to the ways Chaucer fits the substance of his tales to the nature of
the characters who tell them.

Responding to the Prologue

Analysing the Prologue
Identifying Details
1. When, where, and for what purpose do the pilgrims gather?
2. What plan does the Host propose to the pilgrims?
3. Chaucer’s pilgrims come from a cross-section of medieval society and they include three
important groups. Categorise the pilgrims into those from the feudal system (related to
the land), those from the Church, and those from the city merchants and professionals).
4. What plea does Chaucer make to his readers concerning his own report about the
pilgrimage?

Interpreting Meanings
5. Chaucer is a master at using physical details -eyes, hair, complexion, body type, clothing- to
reveal character. Find at least three pilgrims whose inner natures are revealed by their outer
appearances.
6. Clearly, Chaucer satirizes the Church of his time in the Prologue. Show how this is true by
analysing two characters connected with the Church. Where does Chaucer balance his satire
by presenting a "good" churchman or woman?
7. Where does Chaucer satirize other aspects of his own society?
8. Which characters do you think Chaucer idealizes?
9. In describing the pilgrims, what has Chaucer revealed about his own personality, biases, and
values?
10. Which of the pilgrims’ professions or trades have survived in society today? Which of the
character “types” presented here have contemporary equivalents?
11. What events in contemporary life could be compared to the pilgrimage to Canterbury?
That is, when would people from all walks of life today travel together in large groups for a
common purpose, whether that purpose is religious or not? How are these "journeys" similar
to, and different from, the journey that Chaucer's pilgrims undertake?