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Unit 8: Geoffrey Chaucer

hides for the Port of London, his first position away from the British court. Chaucer’s only major Notes
work during this period was House of Fame, a poem of around 2,000 lines in dream-vision form,
which ends so abruptly that some scholars consider it unfinished.

According to Derek Pearsall, “the one biographical fact everyone remembers about
Chaucer” is his brush with the law, when, in a deed of May 1st 1380.

Derek Pearsall is released from culpability in the raptus or rape of Cecily Chaumpaigne. No-one
knows exactly what the accusation-despite attempts to mistranslate “raptus” as “abduction” -
precisely amounted to, still less whether it was rooted in truth. But it casts an ominous shadow over
an otherwise pure-white biography, and, rather like the presence of the Pardoner and the Manciple
in the Tales, gives a discordant dark wash to our image of Chaucer.
In October 1385, Chaucer was appointed a justice of the peace for Kent, and in August 1386 he
became knight of the shire for Kent. Around the time of his wife’s death in 1387, Chaucer moved to
Greenwich and later to Kent. Changing political circumstances eventually led to Chaucer falling
out of favor with the royal court and leaving Parliament, but when Richard II became King of
England, Chaucer regained royal favor.
During this period Chaucer used writing primarily as an escape from public life. His works included
Parlement of Foules, a poem of 699 lines. This work is a dream-vision for St. Valentine’s Day that
makes use of the myth that each year on that day the birds gathers before the goddess Nature to
choose their mates. This work was heavily influenced by Boccaccio and Dante.
Chaucer’s next work was Troilus and Criseyde, which was influenced by The Consolation of
Philosophy, which Chaucer himself translated into English. Chaucer took some the plot of Troilus
from Boccaccio’s Filostrato. This 8,000-line rime-royal poem recounts the love story of Troilus, son
of the Trojan king Priam, and Criseyde, widowed daughter of the deserter priest Calkas, against the
background of the Trojan War.
The Canterbury Tales secured Chaucer’s literary reputation. It is his great literary accomplishment,
a compendium of stories by pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury.
Chaucer introduces each of these pilgrims in vivid, brief sketches in the General Prologue and
intersperses the twenty-four tales with short dramatic scenes with lively exchanges. Chaucer did
not complete the full plan for the tales, and surviving manuscripts leave some doubt as to the exact
order of the tales that remain. However, the work is sufficiently complete to be considered a unified
book rather than a collection of unfinished fragments. The Canterbury Tales is a lively mix of a
variety of genres told by travelers from all aspects of society. Among the genres included are courtly
romance, fabliaux, saint’s biography, allegorical tale, beast fable, and medieval sermon.
Information concerning Chaucer’s descendants is not fully clear. It is likely that he and Philippa
had two sons and two daughters. Thomas Chaucer died in 1400; he was a large landowner and
political officeholder, and his daughter, Alice, became Duchess of Suffolk. Little is known about
Lewis Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer’s youngest son. Of Chaucer’s two daughters, Elizabeth became a
nun, while Agnes was a lady-in-waiting for the coronation of Henry IV in 1399. Public records
indicate that Chaucer had no descendants living after the fifteenth century.

8.3 Summary

• The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer
at the end of the 14th century.
• The Canterbury Tales is at once one of the most famous and most frustrating works of litera-
ture ever written.
• The text of the Tales itself does not survive complete, but in ten fragments.

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