Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (London, c. 1343 - London, 25 October 1400) was an English poet, writer, civil servant and diplomat. He is best known for The Canterbury Tales and is widely regarded as the most important English poet of the Middle Ages. He was the first writer to be buried in what has since become Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. His work did much to establish Middle English as a respectable literary language, at a time when French and Latin still dominated written culture in England.

Chaucer came from a family of London wine merchants, and his surname probably came from a French word for shoemaker. In 1324, his future father, John Chaucer, was kidnapped by an aunt who hoped to marry him to her daughter and keep a property in Ipswich in the family. The aunt was jailed and fined £250, a sum suggesting the family was comfortably off. Later, in 1349, John's wife Agnes Copton inherited property from her uncle, including 24 shops in London, which added to the family's wealth.

Chaucer's public life is unusually well recorded. In 1357 he appears in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, as her page, a position his father's connections helped him secure and a common route into court life. During the early stages of the Hundred Years' War he joined the English army in France, and in 1360 he was captured during the siege of Reims. King Edward III paid £16 for his ransom. Around 1366 he married Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and in 1367 he became a member of the royal household. He travelled abroad many times. He may have met Petrarch or Boccaccio in Italy around 1372-1373, and their poetry shaped his style and some of his stories.

His early major work, The Book of the Duchess, was probably written in memory of Blanche of Lancaster. In 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of Customs for the port of London, a post he held for twelve years. During these years he wrote or began much of his best-known work, including Troilus and Criseyde and, from the early 1380s, The Canterbury Tales. In 1386 he sat in Parliament as a member for Kent, and in 1389 he became Clerk of the King's Works, overseeing many of the Crown's building projects.

Chaucer's thought appears mainly in his poetry. His works consider love, fate and human freedom with irony and sympathy, and they draw on medieval philosophy, including Boethius, whom he translated. In The Canterbury Tales he brings together people of many trades and ranks on a single pilgrimage, and his narrators often seem naive or detached, leaving readers to judge for themselves. His scientific interest shows in the Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for his son Lewis.

His influence was profound. He is often called the father of English poetry, and the poet Thomas Hoccleve praised him as the first to find poetic material in English. Almost two thousand English words are first recorded in Chaucerian manuscripts. For centuries his writing served as a model for poets and prose writers, and his defence of English as a literary language helped open the way for a tradition that continues today.