Geoffrey Chaucer — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Chaucer was born in London around 1343 to a prosperous wine merchant family, and spent his working life not as a professional writer but as a courtier, diplomat, and civil servant. He served as a page in a royal household, was captured and ransomed during the Hundred Years' War, travelled on diplomatic missions to France and Italy — where he encountered Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio — and held posts including Controller of Customs for the port of London and Clerk of the King's Works. He wrote in Middle English at a time when serious literature in England was still written in Latin or French, and that choice shaped the language permanently. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in what later became Poets' Corner.

The Canterbury Tales

c. 1387–1400

Plot summary

A group of around thirty pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark and set out for the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the journey — two tales each way, with a free supper for the winner. The General Prologue introduces the pilgrims one by one: the Knight, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller, the Parson, and others drawn from across the social order. Each then tells a tale suited to their character, and the tales argue with one another — the Miller answers the Knight, the Wife of Bath provokes the Clerk. Chaucer left the scheme unfinished; twenty-four tales survive, some incomplete.

Literary analysis

The frame narrative allows Chaucer to hold an entire society in a single work without pretending to a single point of view. Its central device is the gap between what a pilgrim says about themselves and what the narrator's mild, seemingly admiring description reveals — irony that lets the reader see through the Monk's hunting dogs and the Pardoner's fake relics without a word of open condemnation. The tales range across genres — chivalric romance, fabliau, beast fable, sermon, saint's life — so that form itself becomes characterisation. The Wife of Bath's Prologue, longer than her tale, is one of the earliest sustained first-person female voices in English, arguing from experience against clerical authority.

Why Chaucer Matters

Chaucer settled the question of whether English could be a literary language. Writing in the London dialect at a moment when the court still favoured French, he gave later writers a usable vernacular tradition and a supply of forms, particularly rhyme royal and the decasyllabic line that becomes the pentameter. His influence runs directly through Spenser, Shakespeare, and Dryden, and the Canterbury pilgrims remain the model for every English work that tries to portray a whole society through a gallery of types. For examinations he is the anchor of the medieval paper: the General Prologue, the estates satire tradition, and his relationship to Boccaccio's Decameron are standard territory.

Key Facts

Written in Middle English

Chaucer wrote in the London dialect of Middle English rather than Latin or French, a decision that helped establish English as a language for serious literature.

Unfinished by design or death

The original scheme called for around 120 tales; only 24 survive, several of them fragments, and the pilgrims never reach Canterbury.

Poets' Corner

He was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1400 because of his role as a royal servant, not as a poet — later writers were buried near him, creating Poets' Corner.

Italian influence

Diplomatic travel to Italy exposed him to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Troilus and Criseyde reworks Boccaccio's Il Filostrato.

All Major Works

The Book of the Duchessc. 1368
The House of Famec. 1379
The Parliament of Fowlsc. 1382
Troilus and Criseydec. 1385
The Legend of Good Womenc. 1386
The Canterbury Talesc. 1387–1400