A poet with a day job
Geoffrey Chaucer is remembered for the Canterbury Tales, but during his lifetime he was known at least as much as a royal servant. Many of the surviving records about him are not literary at all: payments, appointments, safe-conducts and legal documents. That is lucky for historians, since it gives a more detailed outline of his working life than exists for almost any other English writer of the period.
His exact birth year is not known. It is usually placed in the early 1340s, which means he grew up in London around the time of the Black Death and the first decades of the Hundred Years War.
Beginnings
Chaucer came from a family of London wine merchants, with a father who held a position connected with the wine trade. The family was prosperous and had useful connections but was not noble. As a young man he served as a page in the household of a noblewoman connected to the royal family, which is where he first appears in the records. That kind of service was a common route into court circles for talented boys from merchant families.
In 1359 he took part in an English military expedition to France, was captured, and was ransomed in the following year, with the king helping to pay. It is one of the few times he is recorded as a soldier. After this he became a member of the royal household, rising to the rank of esquire.
Diplomat
In the 1370s Chaucer was sent abroad on royal business several times. Records show missions to France and to Italy, including trips to Genoa and Florence in 1372-73, where he probably dealt with trade and financial matters, and a later journey to Lombardy in 1378. These trips are often credited with exposing him to Italian literature, and critics see traces of Italian poetry in works written afterward. The extent of that influence, and exactly which Italian books he read, is a matter of scholarly argument, but the contact was real.
His career also benefited from ties to John of Gaunt, the powerful son of Edward III. Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, had a connection with Gaunt’s household, and Chaucer’s early poem, the Book of the Duchess, is usually read as a tribute to Gaunt’s first wife after her death.
Customs official and administrator
In 1374 Chaucer was appointed controller of the customs on wool and related goods at the Port of London. The job involved keeping records of taxable exports, and it placed him at the center of the wool trade, which was one of England’s most important sources of royal income. He also lived for a time in rooms above the Aldgate in the city wall.
Later he moved toward Kent. He served as a justice of the peace there and was elected to Parliament as a representative of the county in 1386. In 1389, after Richard II had taken more direct control of government, Chaucer was named clerk of the king’s works, responsible for managing and paying for royal building projects such as repairs at Westminster and the Tower of London. This was a demanding administrative post, and he held it for only a couple of years. In the 1390s he held smaller offices and continued to rely on annuities from the crown.
Where the poetry fits
His major poems were written alongside this work, probably in spare time and for audiences at court and in London. They include Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls and the unfinished Canterbury Tales, which he seems to have begun in the later 1380s. He also translated Boethius and wrote a prose treatise on the astrolabe for his young son.
Readers sometimes notice that the Tales are full of working people: a reeve, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, a guildsman. This variety probably owed something to the wide range of people he met in his offices. His experience of accounts, customs and bureaucracy also fits the way he writes about money, lawsuits and social ambition. Even so, it is safest not to read the characters as portraits of real people.
The end of his life
Chaucer’s fortunes depended on royal favor, and the change of king in 1399, which historians sometimes call the Lancastrian usurpation, did not harm him: the new king, Henry IV, confirmed his annuities. Late that year he took a lease on a house within the grounds of Westminster Abbey. He died in 1400, traditionally on 25 October, and was buried in the abbey. His tomb was later moved and became the nucleus of what is now called Poets’ Corner.
A note on evidence
Because the documents about Chaucer mostly concern his offices, almost none of them mention his writing. We know little about how he saw himself as a poet. What the records show is a capable and trusted servant of three kings who also wrote some of the most admired poetry in English, and who seems to have treated the two roles as separate parts of one life.