Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales between royal payrolls
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 to 1400), often called the father of English literature, is best known for The Canterbury Tales. He also served the crown as soldier, diplomat, bureaucrat and member of Parliament, and wrote a guide to the astrolabe for his ten-year-old son Lewis.
Chaucer mattered because of the language he chose. In his day England's prestige literary tongues were still Latin and Anglo-Norman French, and his prolific output helped make Middle English respectable for serious writing. The poet Thomas Hoccleve, a contemporary, praised him as the first to find poetic material in English, and close to two thousand English words make their earliest known appearance in manuscripts of his work. Besides the Tales he wrote Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Parlement of Foules and The Legend of Good Women.
He came from a line of wine traders. His great-grandfather kept a tavern, his grandfather sold wine, and his father John became a prominent vintner with a royal appointment; earlier generations had been merchants in Ipswich. The surname derives from the French chaucier, a maker of shoes or leggings. Family life had its drama: in 1324 the twelve-year-old John was abducted by an aunt hoping to marry him to her daughter and keep Ipswich property in the family, and she was jailed and fined £250. John later married Agnes Copton, who in 1349 inherited property including 24 London shops.
Unlike Langland or the Gawain poet, whose lives are almost blank, Chaucer left nearly 500 official records. The first, from 1357, shows him as a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, wife of Edward III's son Lionel of Antwerp, which placed him inside court circles for good. In 1359 he joined the English invasion of France early in the Hundred Years' War, was captured at the siege of Reims in 1360, and was freed after the king paid a £16 ransom.
His public career ran alongside the poetry. He served as courtier, diplomat and civil servant, sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire for Kent, and from 1389 to 1391 was Clerk of the King's Works. He was also respected as a philosopher and amateur astronomer. When he died in October 1400 he became the first writer buried in the part of Westminster Abbey now known as Poets' Corner.
Source: Geoffrey Chaucer
