50 Facts About Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry".

Chaucer was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

Chaucer gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis.

Chaucer maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.

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Chaucer is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin.

Chaucer was born in London most likely in the early 1340s, though the precise date and location remain unknown.

The Chaucer family offers an extraordinary example of upward mobility.

Chaucer's great-grandfather was a tavern keeper, his grandfather worked as a purveyor of wines, and his father John Chaucer rose to become an important wine merchant with a royal appointment.

In 1324, his father John Chaucer was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the 12-year-old to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich.

Chaucer worked as a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the King's Works.

In 1359, the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army.

Chaucer travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet.

Around this time, Chaucer is believed to have written The Book of the Duchess in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1369 of the plague.

Chaucer travelled to Picardy the next year as part of a military expedition; in 1373 he visited Genoa and Florence.

Chaucer must have been suited for the role as he continued in it for twelve years, a long time in such a post at that time.

Chaucer's life goes undocumented for much of the next ten years, but it is believed that he wrote most of his famous works during this period.

Chaucer is thought to have started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s.

Chaucer became a member of parliament for Kent in 1386, and attended the 'Wonderful Parliament' that year.

Chaucer appears to have been present at most of the 71 days it sat, for which he was paid £24 9s.

Chaucer survived the political upheavals caused by the Lords Appellants, despite the fact that Chaucer knew some of the men executed over the affair quite well.

Chaucer was appointed keeper of the lodge at the King's park in Feckenham Forest in Worcestershire, which was a largely honorary appointment.

Richard II granted him an annual pension of 20 pounds in 1394, and Chaucer's name fades from the historical record not long after Richard's overthrow in 1399.

Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as was his right owing to his status as a tenant of the Abbey's close.

Chaucer was a close friend of John of Gaunt, the wealthy Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV, and he served under Lancaster's patronage.

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Chaucer seems to have respected and admired Christians and to have been one himself, though he recognised that many people in the church were venal and corrupt.

Chaucer wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London .

Chaucer translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris .

Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre.

Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him.

Status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular.

Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement.

Chaucer is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings.

Widespread knowledge of Chaucer's works is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing.

Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these poets and later appreciations by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer.

Chaucer is sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition.

Large number of surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's works is testimony to the enduring interest in his poetry prior to the arrival of the printing press.

Chaucer's original audience was a courtly one, and would have included women as well as men of the upper social classes.

Yet even before his death in 1400, Chaucer's audience had begun to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes.

Chaucer spent years comparing various versions of Chaucer's works, and selected 41 pieces for publication.

The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532, was the first edition of Chaucer's collected works.

Some scholars contend that 16th-century editions of Chaucer's Works set the precedent for all other English authors in terms of presentation, prestige and success in print.

Probably the most significant aspect of the growing apocrypha is that, beginning with Thynne's editions, it began to include medieval texts that made Chaucer appear as a proto-Protestant Lollard, primarily the Testament of Love and The Plowman's Tale.

The compilation and printing of Chaucer's works was, from its beginning, a political enterprise, since it was intended to establish an English national identity and history that grounded and authorised the Tudor monarchy and church.

Speght is the source of the famous tale of Chaucer being fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, as well as a fictitious coat of arms and family tree.

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Francis Thynne noted some of these inconsistencies in his Animadversions, insisting that Chaucer was not a commoner, and he objected to the friar-beating story.

Foxe's Chaucer both derived from and contributed to the printed editions of Chaucer's Works, particularly the pseudepigrapha.

The life of Chaucer prefixed to the volume was the work of the Reverend John Dart, corrected and revised by Timothy Thomas.

Chaucer's is the first edition of Chaucer for nearly a hundred and fifty years to consult any manuscripts and is the first since that of William Thynne in 1534 to seek systematically to assemble a substantial number of manuscripts to establish his text.

The Chaucer Review was founded in 1966 and has maintained its position as the pre-eminent journal of Chaucer studies.