Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the first great work of English literature while working as a customs official. He was born about 1343 to a prosperous London wine merchant, which put him just below the gentry and gave him the education and the connections to enter royal service as a teenager. He was captured in France in 1360 and ransomed by the king for sixteen pounds, which is recorded. His career was administrative and diplomatic: missions to Flanders, France and twice to Italy, where he almost certainly encountered Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio; twelve years as controller of the wool custom in the port of London, counting sacks; clerk of the king's works, responsible for the repair of the Tower and Westminster; and a spell as a member of parliament for Kent. He wrote in the evenings. The decision that made him consequential was linguistic. The court still spoke French, the church wrote in Latin, and English was a language of several mutually difficult dialects with no literary standing; Chaucer wrote in the London variety of it and demonstrated that it could do everything the others could. The Canterbury Tales is a frame of some thirty pilgrims — a knight, a miller, a prioress, a pardoner, the Wife of Bath — each telling a story in a manner and a register of their own, which is a formal invention as much as a social panorama. It is unfinished. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, which is how Poets' Corner began. His own reputation was made by the printers. Caxton produced two editions before 1490, which fixed the text and the spelling, and the English that his Tales made literary is close enough to the modern language that a reader can get through it with footnotes.
- Lived: 1343 CE – 1400 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: writer
