GEOFFREY CHAUCER, English poet. The name Chaucer, a French form of the
Latin
calcearius, a shoemaker, is found in London and the eastern
counties as early as the second half of the 13th century. Some of the London
Chaucers lived in Cordwainer Street, in the shoemakers' quarter; several of
them, however, were vintners, and among others the poet's father John, and
probably also his grandfather Robert. Legal pleadings inform us that in December
1324 John Chaucer was not much over twelve years old, and that he was still
unmarried in 1328, the year which used to be considered that of Geoffrey's
birth. The poet was probably born from eight to twelve years later, since in
1386, when giving evidence in Sir Richard le Scrope's suit against Sir Robert
Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms, he was set down as "del age de
xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans." His father lived in Thames Street, and had to wife a
certain Agnes, niece of Hamo de Compton, whom we may regard as Geoffrey
Chaucer's mother.
Geoffrey Chaucer led a busy official life, as an esquire of the royal court, as the comptroller of the customs for the port of London, as a participant in important diplomatic missions, and in a variety of other official duties. All this is richly recorded in literally hundreds of documents. He is a lively presence in his works, and every reader comes to feel that he knows Chaucer very well. Perhaps we do. There is a certain consistency in the character of Chaucer as he appears in his works, and occasional biographical passages.
In 1357 Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the
service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, Duke of
Clarence, entries in two leaves of her household accounts, accidentally
preserved, showing that she paid in April, May and December various small sums
for his clothing and expenses. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the
Scrope suit, Chaucer went to the war in France. At
some period of the campaign he was at "Retters," i.e. Rethel, near Reims, and
subsequently had the ill luck to be taken prisoner. On the 1st of March 1360 the
King [Edward
III] contributed £16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must
have entered the royal service, since on the 10th of June 1367 Edward granted
him a pension of twenty marks for his past and future services. A pension of ten
marks had been granted by the king the previous September to a Philippa Chaucer
for services to the queen as one of her "domicellae" or "damoiselles," and it
seems probable that at this date Chaucer was already married and this Philippa
his wife, a conclusion which used to be resisted on the ground of allusions in
his early poems to a hopeless love-affair, now reckoned part of his poetical
outfit. Philippa is usually said to have been one of two daughters of a Sir
Payne Roet, the other being Katherine, who after the death of her first husband,
Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of Gaunt's
children, and subsequently his mistress and (in 1396) his wife. It is possible
that Philippa was sister to Sir Hugh and sister-in-law to Katherine. In either
case the marriage helps to account for the favour subsequently shown to Chaucer
by John of Gaunt.
In the second quarter of 1374 Chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. On the
23rd of April the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, subsequently
commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt, who in August 1372 had
granted Philippa Chaucer £10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like
annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was
appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells
and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this
appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease
for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of
Aldgate, and here he lived for the next twelve years. His own and his wife's
income now amounted to over £60, the equivalent of upwards of £l000 in modern
money. In the next two years large windfalls came to him in the form of two
wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him £104, and a grant of £71,4s,6p;
the value of some confiscated wool. In December 1376 he was sent abroad on the
king's service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in February 1377 he was sent
to Paris and Montreuil in connexion probably with the peace negotiations between
England and France, and at the end of April (after a reward of £20 for his good
services) he was again despatched to France.
On the accession of Richard II
Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In January 1378 he seems to
have been in France in connexion with a proposed marriage between Richard and
the daughter of the French king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was
sent with Sir Edward de Berkeley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to
treat for help in the king's wars, returning on the 19th of September. This was
his last diplomatic journey, and the close of a period of his life generally
considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little beyond the Clerk's
"Tale of Grisilde," one or two other of the stories afterwards included in the
Canterbury Tales, and a few short poems, are attributed to it, though the
poet's actual absences from England during the eight years amount to little more
than eighteen months.
During the next twelve or fifteen years there is
no question that Chaucer was constantly engaged in literary work, though for the
first half of them he had no lack of official employment. Abundant favour was
shown him by the new king. He was paid £22 as a reward for his later missions in
Edward III's reign, and was allowed an annual gratuity of 10 marks in addition
to his pay of £10 as comptroller of the customs of wool. In April 1382 a new
comptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him,
and shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence
being given him in February 1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as
regards the comptrollership of wool.
In October 1385 Chaucer was made a
justice of the peace for Kent. In February 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife
Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of
Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV), Sir
Thomas de Swynford and other distinguished persons. In August 1386 he was
elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity,
though it was one not much appreciated in those days, his good fortune reached
its climax. In December of the same year he was superseded in both his
comptrollerships, almost certainly as a result of the absence of his patron,
John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the Duke of
Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Philippa's pension
suggests that she died between Midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388 Chaucer
surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and they were
re-granted at his request to one John Scalby. The transaction was unusual and
probably points to a pressing need for ready money, nor for the next fourteen
months do we know of any source of income possessed by Chaucer beyond his
annuity of £10 from John of Gaunt.
In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had
returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands,
Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of
two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. To
this post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St George's
Chapel, Windsor. He was
also made a commissioner to maintain the banks of the Thames between Woolwich
and Greenwich, and was given by the Earl of
March (grandson of Lionel, Duke of
Clarence, his old patron) a sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon,
obviously a sinecure. While on the king's business, in September 1390, Chaucer
was twice robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king's money. In June 1391 he
was superseded in his office of clerk of the works, and seems to have suffered
another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in January 1393
when the king made him a present of £10.
In February 1394 he was granted
a new pension of £20. It is possible, also, that about this time, or a little
later, he was in the service of the Earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King
Richard a grant of a butt of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in
terms that suggest poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection
against his creditors, a step perhaps rendered necessary by an action for debt
taken against him earlier in the year. On the accession of Henry IV a new
pension of 40 marks was conferred on Chaucer (13th of October 1399) and Richard
II's grants were formally confirmed. Henry himself, however, was probably
straitened for ready money, and no instalment of the new pension was paid during
the few months of his reign that the poet lived. Nevertheless, on the strength
of his expectations, on the 24th of December 1399 he leased a tenement in the
garden of St Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died,
on the 25th of the following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and
his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets' Corner.
The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in
three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a rough approximation to
the truth in this formula, since his earliest poems are translated from the
French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period
are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and
direct originals and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically
English temper of Henry Fielding. But Chaucer's indebtedness to French poetry
was no passing phase. For various reasons — a not very remote French origin of
his own family may be one of them — he was in no way interested in older English
literature or in the work of his English contemporaries, save possibly that of
"the moral Gower." On the other hand he knew the
Roman de la rose as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full
extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but in 1385
and in 1393 (the dates are approximate), is only gradually being discovered.
To be in touch throughout his life with the best French poets of the day
was much for Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he might have developed no
small part of his genius. But it was his great good fortune to add to this
continuing French influence, lessons in plot and construction derived from
Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseide, as well as some glimpses of
the higher art of the Divina Commedia. He shows acquaintance also with
one of Petrarch's sonnets, and though, when all is said, the Italian books with
which he can be proved to have been intimate are but few, they sufficed. His
study of them was but an episode in his literary life, but it was an episode of
unique importance. Before it began he had already been making his own artistic
experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt so much from Boccaccio he
improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless his busy life in the
service of the crown had taught him self-confidence, and he uses his Italian
models in his own way and with the most triumphant and assured success. When he
had no more Italian poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. The art of weaving
a plot out of his own imagination was never his, but he could take what might be
little more than an anecdote and lend it body and life and colour with a skill
which has never been surpassed.
Chaucer was a man that rather his work effecting his life, it seemed that his life effected his worked.
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