Chaucer ought to be too well known to be included in this series. However, while most people know that he wrote The Canterbury Tales, his wider influence and significance are often overlooked.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s life is not easy to reconstruct. Even the decade of his birth has been disputed, although the earlier date of 1328 is now discredited. It is thought he was born around 1342/3, on the basis that he was said to be over forty in the famous Scrope vs Grosvenor case in October 1386.
Chaucer was born to a respectable merchant family. His father, John, was an important vintner, and his mother Agnes was also from a wealthy family and inherited several properties. John Chaucer was in attendance upon the King and Queen in 1338 when they went to Flanders, and may have been deputy to the King’s Butler. Thus, there is an early link to the royal family in the reign of Edward III.
Unfortunately, little else is known of Geoffrey’s early life other than his parentage, and the first documentary evidence comes from 1357. In that year, he was a page in the household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III, after the Black Prince and John of Gaunt. This is known from the record of payments made by Lionel’s wife, Elizabeth, to Chaucer “for necessaries”, which also record his presence at the Garter Feast on 23rd April 1358, and other grand events.
The daily life of Chaucer at this point is not specifically known, but the duties of a page were to serve the food and wine and, at the end of dinner, kneel before his master with a bowl of water for him to wash his fingers. They attended to their master’s clothes as a valet would, and waited around endlessly in case their master wanted something. They also had to learn court etiquette, dancing, the needs of the horses and the hounds, so it was an education for preferment as much as a job.
Eventually, Chaucer was promoted to valet, where his duties, according to the slightly later household book of Edward IV, would have been “to make beddis, to beare or holde torches, to sett boardis, to apparel all chambers and such other services as the chamberlain or ushers of chamber commaunde or assign to attend the chamber, to watch the king by course, to goe in messages, et cetera”. It is reasonably likely that the tasks had not changed between the reigns of Edward III and IV, as Edward IV’s book was based on the household book of Edward II.
