Erik Visits a Non-American Grave, Part 1,957

This is the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Born sometime around 1343 in London, Chaucer grew up in a very upwardly mobile family. His great-grandfather was a tavern owner, his grandfather sold wines, and his father was a major wine merchant who sold to the royal family. This was unusual mobility in medieval England. He survived the Black Death. Chaucer, whose life is unusually well documented for this time and place, was sent out as a page to the Countess of Ulster. He was with her husband, Lionel of Antwerp, in 1359 when he went to France as part of the Hundred Years War. He was then captured and King Edward III paid his ransom. Chaucer seems to have travelled around Europe some for the next few years, including possibly doing the famed pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. At the very least, he got to know people involved in pilgrimages, which would of course inform his later writing.

By 1366, Chaucer was back in England, continuing the family’s upward mobility by marrying a lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa of Hainault, Edward III’s wife. He studied law for a bit and became a valet de chambre in Edward III’s court in 1367. He visited Genoa and Florence in the early 1370s and these trips put him in touch with the new tradition of Italian vernacular poetry. By 1378, he was close enough to the king that he was granted an unusual gift–a gallon of wine a day for the rest of his life. Is that all? He was named customs comptroller for London in 1374 and continued in that job until 1386, which gave him a lot of money and a lot of time to write.

Chaucer began writing in the 1360s. He wrote something called The Book of the Duchess in 1368, an elegy for the Blanche of Lancaster.

But let’s get to the point here–The Canterbury Tales. It’s probably whether this is actually a finished book. But in any case, Chaucer wrote 24 stories between 1387 and his death in 1400 based around the common theme of pilgrimage travelers trying to outdo each other in storytelling while walking from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine to St. Thomas Becket. It seems that he hoped to get to 120 stories and it’s too bad that exceedingly ambitious project didn’t come to fruition, but what he did write changed the world. Interestingly, Chaucer did not write all the characters to be the same at all. The classes of the characters really do matter here and they are written differently. All of the stories contain wit but the way that is drawn out of the wealthier characters is different than the poorer ones. This makes sense of course, but we are talking inventing English literature here, so anything was possible.

The impact of Chaucer on English literature can’t be overstated because he went so far in establishing its existence. Like the great Italians he read on his travels, he made it clear that one could write in the vernacular. I happen to be reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them right now, one of my favorite British novels. This follows a group of nuns and their fake priest over several decades in the 14th century. There’s a chapter in there where the priest goes to a declining house of rich people to get some falcons for hunting and the woman there reads the vernacular poem her dead husband was writing. The priest is somewhat outraged that this isn’t in Latin and in rhyme but comes to realize that maybe this is sorta good and entertaining. It’s a good way to get at how writing in the vernacular began to be accepted by the learned classes in the second half of the 14th century. Of course, Chaucer did not invent writing in the vernacular in Europe. That had gone on for a long time. But this was different–a national defining literature along the lines of Dante and Boccaccio. One way you can tell is that so many copies of it exist. None of them are in Chaucer’s hand, but it was widely copied very early. Also, his contemporaries lauded him constantly.

One reason people liked Chaucer is that he was generally kind of funny. For example, he certainly was a religious man and his work portrays Christianity itself well. But everyone knew that religious hypocrites roamed the land, as they do today. And he would make fun of them. The end of Canterbury Tales has what is known as the “Retraction,” where he supposedly tried to distance himself from some of these things he said. But it’s also questionable whether he actually wrote this or it was added later by someone trying to salvage Chaucer’s reputation from those who would slander him. Again, it’s hard to know. And if he did write it, was it also sarcasm?

Chaucer did a bit of translation work as well. He translated Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523, a key work of late antiquity (some have argued it’s the last meaningful work of that period in the West), and the French poem Roman de la Rose, written partly by Guillaume de Lorris in 1230 and then added to by Jean de Meun in about 1275. He also holds the honor of the first bit of surviving scientific writing in the English language, which was Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in 1391 and dedicated to his son.

Chaucer’s later years weren’t as great as he would have liked. He was still an important person, but with all the factions in England, that wasn’t always a life of luxury. He became a member of Parliament for Kent in 1386. His wife probably died in 1387. He became close to King Richard II and was around the Lords Appellants upheavals to reduce the king’s power, which led a bunch of people he knew quite well to be executed, though he was not caught up in it at all. In fact, in 1389, he was appointed clerk of the king’s works, which basically means he supervised major construction. Mostly he was in charges of repairs, including to Westminster Palace and the continued progress on the Tower of London. But in 1390, Chaucer, who would have had money on him, was robbed and probably beaten to a pulp and he may never have fully recovered from that. He left that job in 1391 and became a forester of a royal estate, which probably meant not doing much at all. Richard II also gave him a sizable pension in 1394.

The last thing we know about Chaucer is that after Richard was overthrown and King Henry IV came to power, throwing Richard in prison until he starved to death (yikes!), his pension was renewed. But there’s evidence that it was not actually paid out. Chaucer died in 1400 of unknown causes. People have speculated that perhaps he was murdered because he had been so close to Richard. This seems dubious; of course it’s always possible, but there’s no actual evidence for the case. He was also somewhere around 57 years old, which is plenty ancient for the fourteenth century.

Geoffrey Chaucer is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England. This tomb dates from 1556 and began the tradition of the “Poets’ Corner” at Westminster, where a lot of writers are buried, as this series will detail in coming months.

If you would like this series to visit American writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I mean, you can also send me to see more European writers if you have a few thousand laying around with nothing better to do with it….Anyway, Jack London is buried in Glen Ellen, California and Stephen Crane is in Hillside, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.