Chaucer, GEOFFREY. The date 1328 for Chaucer's birth is now justly rejected as having no authority and being quite incompatible with some ascertained facts of his later life. There can be little doubt he was born in or about 1340. He was the son of John Chaucer by his second wife Agnes, of unknown surname, a niece of one Hamo de Copton. (His first wife, Joan de Esthalle, was certainly living as late as 1331.) This John Chaucer was son of Robert Chaucer, of Ipswich and London, so that the poet's family can be traced to the eastern counties. John Chaucer was a vintner and a tavern-keeper, and may perhaps be identified with the John Chaucer who was deputy to the king's butler in the port of Southampton in 1348, and 'seems afterwards to have held the same situation in the port of London.' John's house was in Thames Street by Walbrook, at or near the foot of Dowgate Hill; and there we may well suppose the future poet was born.
Of his boyhood we know nothing. There were good schools in London then as now—e.g. Paul's Cathedral School and Anthony's, and Chaucer probably was sent to one of them. At a later period the variety and the minuteness of his knowledge are remarkable, and we know that he was an assiduous student. Likely enough his studious habits were more or less formed and the basis of his knowledge laid in his early days. It is possible he may have gone to Oxford or to Cambridge, but there is no evidence of value on this point. In his works he shows some acquaintance with both universities; but this may have been picked up incidentally. What is certain is that in 1357 and 1358 he was a page in the service of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. From that service he would seem to have been presently transferred to the king's household. In 1359 he first 'bore arms.' He served in the campaign in France in that year—a campaign famous for the bitter sufferings which the English army had to endure. Chaucer was taken prisoner at Retiers in Brittany, but was presently ransomed, the king contributing £16 towards the required amount.
And now we lose sight of Chaucer for some eight years. His father died in 1366, and his mother soon after married one Bartholomew Attechapel; but of Geoffrey no mention has yet been found till 1367, when the king grants him a pension for life, 'or until we shall think it right to make some other order to suit his condition.' He is described as 'dilectus valetus noster' ('our beloved yeoman'), and in an Issue Roll as 'unus valetorum cameræ regis' ('one of the yeomen of the king's chamber'). It seems fairly certain that by this time Chaucer was married. In 1366 one Philippa Chaucer appears amongst the ladies of the queen's bed-chamber, and there is no good reason for doubting that this was the poet's wife. Her maiden name was in all probability Roet. It is commonly supposed that she was the daughter of Sir Payne Roet of Hainault and king-at-arms of Guienne, and so the sister of Katherine who married Sir Hugh Swinford, and afterwards became the mistress and eventually the wife of John of Gaunt. After the queen's death in 1369 she passed into the household in which her sister was such an important figure, and very likely remained there till her death in 1387. She gave birth, it would seem about 1362 or 1363, to Thomas, a noticeable personage in the House of Commons in the following century; probably to Elizabeth (circa 1365), for whose novitiate at the Abbey of Barking John of Gaunt paid some £50 in 1381, and to Lewis, born in the same year in which his sister was admitted at Barking, for whom his father wrote some ten years later a treatise on the Astrolabe. But the whole matter of Chaucer's married life is involved in much obscurity. It is in evidence that when he was certainly married he speaks of himself several times as one unblessed with love's favour; nor can these expressions be explained away as being dramatic and not autobiographical. The picture he draws of himself in the House of Fame, a poem undoubtedly written after his marriage, is assuredly that of a forlorn bachelor. On the whole, we believe him to have married about 1360, and that for some reason or other not at present discovered, if ever to be, his married life was disturbed and unhappy.
In the year 1369 Chaucer comes certainly before us as a poet, with his Death of Blanche the Duchess. This is not probably his first writing; but it is highly important, because the date of it is exactly fixed by the subject. It laments the death of the Lady Blanche, the first wife of John of Gaunt, which took place in September 1369. It is in many ways a crude composition, and a sufficient proof that Chaucer's art was, like that of many of the greatest masters, not precocious but of slow growth. But even so it illustrates his great gift of style, and gives satisfactory promise of his future excellence.
The following years of Chaucer's life exhibit him to us both as a much-employed man of business and as a rapidly developing man of letters. In 1370 he went abroad on the king's service; in 1372-73 on a royal mission to Italy—to Genoa, Pisa, Florence; in 1376, abroad, it is not known where; in 1377, to Flanders and to France; in 1378, to Italy again. Thus he seems to have been highly valued as a commissioner and a diplomatist. Meanwhile in 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the port of London; in 1382, Comptroller of the Petty Customs; and in 1385 he was allowed to nominate a permanent deputy—a most important concession, as by the terms of his appointment he was, like his predecessors, to write the rolls of his office with his own hand and to be continually present. Nor were other marks of royal and of ducal favour wanting. In 1374, on St George's day, the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, to be received in the port of London from the hands of the king's butler. In the same year John of Gaunt conferred on him a pension of £10 for life for the good service rendered by him and his wife Philippa to the duke, to his consort (the duke's second wife, Constance, daughter of Peter the Cruel, married in 1371), and to his mother the queen. In 1375 he received from the crown the custody of the lands and person of Edmond Staplegate of Kent, which brought him in £104 (well over £1000 of our money), and the custody of some property at Soles, also in Kent. In 1386 he was elected a knight of the shire for Kent. These were Chaucer's most prosperous years in an income-making sense.
To turn to his literary work during these years, the following writings certainly belong to the period between 1369 and 1387—i.e. between the composition of The Book of the Duchess, and that of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—and were probably produced in the order in which they are here named: The Assembly of Fowls, The House of Fame, Troilus and Cressida, and The Legend of Good Women; and besides these in unascertained order the Tale of Griselda (afterwards assigned to one of the Canterbury pilgrims—the Clerk), the Tale of Constance (afterwards assigned to the Man of Law), the Legend of the Martyred Christian Boy (afterwards assigned to the Prioress), the Legend of Saint Cecilia (afterwards assigned to the Second Nun), and the Story of Palamon and Arcite in its first shape (afterwards rewritten and assigned to the
Knight). None of these pieces represents the poet's genius in all its fullness or its maturity; they exhibit its gradual expansion and growth. As we see Chaucer in these he is not yet completely master of himself, or wholly satisfied with the instruments at his command—e.g. with the metrical forms then current around him. By far the most important influence acting upon him during this middle period of his literary life was the influence of Italy; and in this respect his going to Genoa in 1372, as already mentioned, had an importance other than commercial or political. That was a journey that made an epoch in his artistic development. It introduced him to poetry in its noblest medieval shape, and in one of the noblest shapes it has ever assumed in any age. Chaucer seems to have felt deeply the greatness of Dante. He appreciated worthily the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio; but to the credit of his judgment, it was Dante that most profoundly impressed him. The Assembly of Fowls and The House of Fame largely reflect this impression, the latter so closely that Lydgate, as Professor Skeat points out, speaks of it as 'Daunt in English.' Much of his subject-matter he derived from his great Italian contemporaries, especially from Boccaccio. Thus the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's, and the Shipman's are all to be found in the Decameron; Troilus and Cressida is to a considerable extent a translation of Boccaccio's Filostrato; and the story of Palamon and Arcite is based upon that poet's Teseide. The tale of Griselda is taken from a Latin letter of Petrarch's, to whom Chaucer acknowledges his obligation in the Clerk's Prologue. Oddly enough, he never mentions Boccaccio. In one passage in Troilus and Cressida he would seem to denote him by the name of Lollius; but certainly in another, when he speaks of 'mine author called Lollius,' he denotes Petrarch, for he proceeds to give a version of one of Petrarch's sonnets. Dante he mentions by name several times. With both Petrarch and Boccaccio it is probable that he was personally acquainted. Boccaccio was living at or near Florence when Chaucer was there in 1372, and Petrarch near Padua, only some 120 miles away. Certainly what is said in the Clerk's Prologue points to an actual meeting with Petrarch.
However this may be, the influence of the Italian poets on Chaucer is beyond question. Nor is it to be measured by what he borrowed in the way of plot or incident or expression. It was far profounder than such debts might suggest. It recreated him as an artist, giving him a new and loftier conception of artistic form and beauty. This regeneration is soon visible in the improvement of his style—in its growing dignity and shapeliness. It is strikingly indicated by his metrical progress. The old four-accented couplet seems to him 'light and lewd;' he needs something weightier and statelier. He does not satisfy this need by importing the favourite Italian metres. The sonnet form does not appear in any extant work of his, though conceivably he may have attempted it. The terza rima he does seem to have essayed, as Professor Skeat has been the first to notice; but he did not take to it, or it to him. What he did was to imitate not the letter but the spirit of the Italian masters. And in the heroic leptastich, and presently in the heroic couplet, he found metrical forms that satisfied the highest ideal. The crowning work of the middle period of his life is certainly Troilus and Cressida—a work in which the abundant wealth of his genius is lavishly displayed. Probably about the year 1384, when his official duties were so considerably lightened, Chaucer, now a complete master of the poetic craft, began to seek for some great subject. The first selection he made proved unsatisfactory; it was the Legend of Good Women. The Prologue to this famous fragment is an admirable piece of writing; but the theme was soon felt to be wearisomely monotonous, and was abandoned. His second choice was happier, as it provided full scope for his various powers—for his humour and his dramatic faculty, as well as for his pathos and more purely poetical gift. This was the Canterbury Pilgrimage.
But before that final choice was made, having been suggested probably by an actual journey to St Thomas's shrine, some strange reverses of fortune had befallen Chaucer. About the close of the year 1386 he was deprived of both his places in the civil service; and from this time to very nearly the end of his life, with slight intermissions, things went ill with him. The cause of his dismissal is obscure; possibly he was involved in the intrigues that disturbed and disordered the court in the reign of King Richard II.; possibly also there was some genuine dissatisfaction with the way in which his official work had been or was being performed. In 1389 he received a new appointment—he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works at the palace of Westminster, Tower of London, castle of Berkhamstead, the king's manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Sheen, Byfleet, Langley, and Feckenham, and elsewhere, in this case, too, being allowed to nominate a deputy; but his previous fate seems to have pursued him. Two years afterwards we find him superseded by one John Gedney. It was during this term of office that he went through the odd experience of being robbed twice in one day. What glimpses we have of him in the succeeding years show him in perpetual impecuniosity and distress. It seems fairly clear that thrift was not one of his virtues. No sort of provision seems to have been made against a 'rainy day;' and now came many rainy days. For some two years he had to subsist as best he might on John of Gaunt's pension of £10, his salary as one of the foresters of North Petherton Park, Somersetshire, and whatever wages, if any, were paid him as a king's esquire. In 1394 King Richard granted him a pension of £20 for life; but the advances of payment he applies for in the following year, and again and again later on, and other signs, such as the issue on his behalf of letters of protection from arrest for debt, sufficiently indicate his unprosperous condition. An improvement came with the accession to the throne of the son of his old friend and patron John of Gaunt. In October 1399, King Henry IV. granted him a pension of 40 marks (£26, 13s. 4d.). This would raise his income to at least £500 a year of our money. And we may believe his few remaining months were spent in comfort. The following Christmas he took a lease for 53 years, at an annual rent of £2, 13s. 4d., of a house situated in the garden of the Lady Chapel, Westminster, the site now of what is commonly known as Henry VII.'s Chapel. But the end was near. Our last trace of him is the payment of a pension instalment in June 1400, made not to him personally, but to one Henry Somers in his behalf. Before the close of the century, of which he was in England the supreme literary glory, he was laid in that part of the abbey which through his burial there came afterwards to be called the Poet's Corner. His tombstone says he died October 25, 1400; and though the present tomb dates only from the 16th century, it probably perpetuates some older inscription.
In spite of all his reverses and troubles, it was during this last period of his life that Chaucer's genius shone brightest.
A merry heart goes all the day;
Your sad tires in a mile-a.
Having formed a design that permitted the full expression of his abundant and many-sided genius, he vigorously pursued it amidst the darkness that overclouded him. The design was indeed too huge for completion; and no doubt for all his vigour and buoyancy his troubles interfered with his progress. Moreover he was approaching or had reached what amidst the unhealthy ways and conditions of medieval life was accounted old age. Hence his work remains but a fragment; but it is a fragment of large and splendid dimensions, consisting of parts that are admirably finished wholes, each one of which illustrates some special feature of the poet's versatile mind and art, and justifies and insures his fame. His greatest achievement is the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, which for its variety, humour, grace, reality, and comprehensiveness is, as a piece of descriptive writing, unique in English literature—unique in all literature indeed. It portrays for us the society of the later middle ages in unfading colours, and historically as well as artistically is of inestimable excellence and value. Chaucer is in order of time the first great poet of the English race, if the term English may be used as distinguished from Anglo-Saxon; and in order of merit he is amongst the first of all our poets. It might indeed be disputed whether he does not deserve the place next to Shakespeare. In the middle ages in England he stands supreme.
See Skeat's edition of Chaucer's works (Oxford, 6 vols. 1894-95, vol. vii. the doubtful works), and his one-volume edition (1895); Pollard's Canterbury Tales (1894); his 'Globe' Edition of Chaucer's Works (1899); Lounsbury's Studies on Chaucer (1892); Tyrwhitt's Introductory Discourse to the Canterbury Tales (1775-78); Nicolas' Life of Chaucer in the Aldine Edition; the magnificent Kelmscott Edition (ed. Ellis, folio, 1896); Ten Brink's Chaucer-Studien (1870); Child On Chaucer's Language (in Ellis's Early English Pronunciation). As to Chaucer's language—the East Midland variety of Middle English—much will be found in the Clarendon Press volumes of Dr Morris and of Professor Skeat; editions of the Prologue and three of the tales, issued by W. & R. Chambers; Sweet's Middle English Primers; and in Ten Brink's Chaucer's Sprache und Vorskunst (1884). Invaluable to the Chaucer student is Dr Furnivall's Six-text Print of the Canterbury Tales, and the other issues of the Chaucer Society. A Concordance has been prepared by members of the same society. It must be noted that many works have been ascribed to Chaucer, and are still printed in popular editions, that are certainly not his—e.g. The Court of Love, Chaucer's Dream, The Complaint of the Black Knight, The Cuckoo and Nightingale, The Flower and the Leaf, and in all probability the extant Romaunt of the Rose.
For criticism of the poetry, see Ward's Chaucer in the 'English Men of Letters' series; Morley's English Writers (vol. iv. in new ed.); Warton's History of English Poetry; and a fine essay by J. R. Lowell in My Study Windows.