Wages for laborers increase, as there are more jobs available than workers to perform them. The use of English in courts of law is formalized.

1366 Chaucer marries Philippa Roet. His father dies.
1367 Chaucer is given a lifetime annuity of £20 per year by Ed ward III. Chaucer will serve the royal household in various capacities until his death. His son, Thomas, is born. Richard II, the son of the Black Prince, is born.
c.1367 - 1370 William Langland’s Piers Plowman appears.
1368 Chaucer travels overseas on royal missions, perhaps to France or Italy.
1369- 1372 Chaucer writes The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster, who died in 1368. Edward III’s wife, Queen Philippa, dies. A third major plague spreads throughout England.
1370 John Lydgate, a writer remembered as an imitator of Chaucer, is born.
1371 John of Gaunt, another son of Edward III and Blanche of Lancaster’s widower, marries Constance of Castile. Philippa Chaucer serves in their household.
1372 Chaucer makes his first known journey to Italy on a diplo matic mission.
1374 Chaucer moves to Aldgate and is appointed the port of Lon don’s controller of customs for wool, skins, and hides. King Edward awards Chaucer a gallon pitcher of wine daily for life for loyal service. Petrarch dies.
1375 Boccaccio dies.
1376 The Black Prince dies.
1377 Edward III dies, and Richard II becomes king. Chaucer makes several top-secret journeys to France on behalf of Richard II to negotiate for peace. The first poll tax is insti tuted.
1378 Chaucer travels to Milan on a diplomatic mission to see the Lord of Milan, Bernabo Visconti. Their meeting inspires Chaucer to include Visconti as a tragic figure in “The Monk’s Tale.”
1378- 1381 Chaucer’s comic poem The House of Fame appears. He also writes Palamon and Arcita, a poem based on Boccac’s Teseida that is later adapted to become “The Knight’s Tale.”
1380 Cecily Champain accuses Chaucer of rape, then settles with him out of court. Chaucer begins writing Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the Trojan War.
1381 In honor of the King’s upcoming marriage, Chaucer writes The Parliament of Fowls, a dream-vision poem in which a group of birds choose their mates. He begins to write Boece, a translation of Roman philosopher Boethius’ The
Consolation of Philosophy. Workers of various economic and social strata gather in London to protest the poll tax; this civilian rebellion, known as the Great Rising or the Peasants’ Revolution, causes extensive damage and upheaval.
1382 Richard II marries Anne of Bohemia. John Wycliffe trans lates the Bible into English.
1385 French poet Eustache Deschamps praises Chaucer for his skill as a translator. Chaucer becomes justice of the peace for the county of Kent.
1386 He resigns from his customs duties and serves as a member of Parliament for Kent. He begins writing The Legend of Good Women, a collection of stories that will remain unfin ished.
1387 Around this time, Chaucer begins writing The Canterbury Tales. Opponents of Richard II, known as the Lords Appel lant, curtail the King’s authority. Several of the King’s sup porters, including poet Thomas Usk, are executed.
1389 Richard II appoints Chaucer clerk of the King’s Works.
1390 Chaucer supervises the building of the scaffolding to be used for the Smithfield jousts.
1394 Richard II awards Chaucer an annuity of £20 per year.
1396 John of Gaunt marries his longtime mistress, Katherine Swynford, Philippa Chaucer’s sister.
139999 Richard II is deposed, and Henry Bolingbroke accedes to the throne as Henry IV. John of Gaunt dies.
1400 Geoffrey Chaucer dies, leaving The Canterbury Tales unfin ished, and is buried at Westminster Abbey.

Introduction

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is undeniably one of the English language’s greatest literary achievements. However, despite the apparent accessibility of many of its unforgettable characters, and the continued relevance of some of its main themes and concerns, this collection of tales, ostensibly told to each other by a group of late-fourteenth-century English pilgrims while on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury, offers the twenty-first-century reader many problems of interpretation and understanding ; among these, its (to us) archaic language is perhaps the least formidable. The following pages, after a brief rehearsal of information about Chaucer’s life, times, social placement, and other works, will consider some of the major critical questions that have swirled around the form and content of The Canterbury Tales during the last century or so and propose, however hesitantly, answers to some of them.

Life and Times

Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the son of a prosperous vintner (wine merchant). With its population of 50,000 (the largest in England but small compared to Paris, Florence, or Venice), London had recently established itself as the commercial, intellectual, and cultural capital of the English kingdom; its port was a major center of wool exports (England’s most important product) and wine imports, and its close relations with the nearby city of Westminster (the seat of the royal government and its national legal and financial bureaucracy) gave it additional prominence because of its political and economic importance to the monarchy.

Men such as Chaucer’s father were entrepreneurs who tended to trade in any commodities that offered profits; in London, as in the other major cities of the realm, they formed an oligarchy exercising, through their associations, or guilds, predominant authority in the political life of the city. One of the consequences (and sources) of London merchants’ power was their often close relations with the king, to whose court they were purveyors of victuals and luxury goods (including spices from the East), and to whom they sometimes lent money for use in his prosecution of the war with France (the so-called Hundred Years’ War) over his supposed right to the French throne as well as his own.

It is presumably as a result of such contacts that John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, obtained for his son around 1356 a place, probably as a page (a quite menial servant), in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, second surviving son of King Edward III (1327-1377). Before this, Chaucer was presumably educated in one of London’s many “grammar schools” attached to parish churches or other religious establishments; and perhaps at the Al monry School attached to Saint Paul’s Cathedral (near Chaucer’s presumed home on Thames Street). He did not attend university, al though several of his works make it clear that he knew the town and schools of Oxford and Cambridge well. He also knew Latin, French (both the continental variety and the “insular,” Anglo-French variety, the latter used for legal purposes), and presumably some Italian, which he could have learned from the many Italian merchants with whom his father probably had business dealings.

In 1359 Chaucer became a valettus (yeoman) in Prince Lionel’s service; in that capacity he fought in the latter’s army in France, where he was captured in battle and ransomed in March 1360. Sometime after the end of 1360 he passed into the King’s household, first as a yeoman but later in the decade attaining the higher rank of esquire, along with a life annuity (a standard reward for services rendered).