By 1366 he was married to Philippa, a member of the Queen’s household, and in the following year a son, Thomas, was born. In royal service—to the King, to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and perhaps to Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince—Chaucer made repeated trips abroad in the coming years, on public and secret diplomatic missions, to France, Spain, and Italy, while also participating in court life and entertainments in England. He was dispatched to Genoa and Florence on royal business at the end of 1372, and spent several months in Italy, where he is often thought by modern scholars to have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, or at least become familiar with many of their works.

In 1374 Chaucer was appointed controller of wool customs for the port of London, a civil service position that he held for the next twelve years; at the same time he received a rent-free lifetime lease on spacious quarters above Aldgate, one of London’s seven city gates, and a further annuity from John of Gaunt, in honor of whose dead wife, Blanche, he had written The Book of the Duchess (see below). At the time Chaucer’s wife was a member of the household of John’s new wife, Constance of Castille, a situation in which she continued until her death in 1387.

Chaucer’s job as controller was to keep an accurate record of wool and other goods being exported, in order to ensure that that accurate duties on them might be charged by the collectors of customs. These worthies tended to be rich and powerful London merchants (many became lord mayors) who obtained their positions as favors from the king, and did not hesitate to use them for personal profit, a situation that put the much less powerful controller in an awkward position. Halfway through his term as controller Chaucer became involved in a court case that has created controversy among modern Chaucerians: In May 1380 Cecily Champain released Chaucer from all legal reprisals concerning her raptus. Other court documents and debts called in by Chaucer at this time suggest an expensive settlement, but the actual details of the rape (for that, not abduction, is what the Latin term means in this legal context) are lost.

From time to time, Chaucer was temporarily excused from the obligations of his controller’s position to make further trips abroad on royal business, some in connection with peace negotiations with France and Richard’s search for a suitable wife. On a second (at least) trip to Italy in 1378, he may have spent time in the Visconti library in Milan, and there obtained copies of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

The 1380s were a decade of major political tensions and upheavals in London and in England as a whole. The merchant oligarchy that controlled London politics was challenged (successfully for a time) by an alliance of lesser guilds led by John of Northampton. In 1381 there was the Great Rising (formerly known as the Peasants’ Revolution), a mass and often violent protest by peasants, urban artisans, and minor gentry against the radically unequal distribution of power and resources in English society. In the latter part of the decade, frequent threats of French invasion agitated Londoners. Above all, young King Richard II (Edward III’s grandson, who had inherited the throne at age eleven) was caught up in power struggles with Parliament and with several of the great barons of the realm. The climax came in 1387 and 1388, when Richard was almost deposed by an alliance of his opponents, the so-called Lords Appellant (that is, accusers), who, acting in conjunction with Parliament, managed to have several of the King’s friends and confidants (some of whom were also Chaucer’s friends or associates) executed, and others exiled and stripped of their lands.

Chaucer’s reputation as a poet grew during the 1380s, both at court and in the London literary circles in which he doubtless also moved (more about this shortly). The French poet Eustache Deschamps praised him as a “grand translateur,” and his London contemporary Thomas Usk called him a “noble philosophical poet.” Concurrently, in what might be seen as the height of his public career, Chaucer was elected to the Commons in the so-called Wonderful Parliament of October—November 1386. In a session that initiated some of the anti-Ricardian legislation mentioned above, Parliament also requested (without success) that controllers of customs appointed for life be removed from office and no further life appointments made; shortly after the session ended, Chaucer resigned his position as controller of customs and vacated his Aldgate residence. It is hard not to see this as a precautionary move, though some scholars regard the timing as coincidental and see the decision as no more than a sign that Chaucer was tired of a time-consuming job and wanted to live in the country. Since 1385 he had been serving as a justice on the commission of the peace for the county of Kent, which investigated and prosecuted minor crimes and offenses.

In 1388 Chaucer sold the rights to his annuities, perhaps to repay debts (he was sued for debt more than once in this period) or simply because the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 attacked the practice of granting life annuities as part of its campaign against Richard’s supposed malfeasance. Chaucer’s return to royal service, and a regular stipend, came in May 1389, when he was appointed clerk of the King’s Works, responsible for the building and repair of royal properties, an important and demanding job that involved obtaining building materials and paying contractors, supervisory craftsmen, and laborers. Relieved of this position in June 1391, he retired to Kent, presumably to continue work on The Canterbury Tales, which most scholars believe he had begun in the late 1380s. From 1394 onward his financial situation improved due to grants from the crown (presumably rewards for past service), and in 1398 he may have moved back to London; it is certain that late in 1399, not long after Richard’s deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV), he leased a house on the grounds of Westminster Abbey and had his latest annuity from Richard renewed by Henry (who also gave Chaucer a substantial gift, perhaps, as has been suggested, because he recognized the potential usefulness of a well-known poet to his new and shaky reign). Chaucer died the following year—probably on October 25, 1400—and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1556 his remains were moved to their present tomb, and the area surrounding his burial spot became known as Poets’ Corner.

Audience and Sources

Chaucer moved in several milieux during his adult life, among them the royal court at Westminster; the mercantile world of the London docks and customs houses; and the literate cohort of court functionaries (household knights and squires, many of whom Chaucer knew well), government clerks (of chancery, the exchequer, and the law courts), scribes, notaries, lawyers, and men of letters that probably formed his most challenging, and preferred, audience. To many such listeners or readers of Chaucer’s poetry, themselves placed peripherally or ambiguously with respect to major centers of power or patronage, the ironies, obliquities, and downright silences that distinguish the Chaucerian narrative voice might strike a familiar, self-preserving, and deferential chord.

The poetry that Chaucer created for his varied audiences reveals wide knowledge and keenly honed appropriative skills. He was thoroughly conversant in the lyric and narrative forms of French court poetry; he is the earliest known English poet to have been familiar with, and to adapt, texts written by the three great Tuscan authors, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He translated or paraphrased several Latin texts of classical antiquity, and was also familiar with influential medieval-Latin philosophical poetry. His knowledge of insular literature in English (his own natal tongue) was expectably great if not always respectful: The jogging meters of Middle English popular romances are the butt of the poetic joke in the tedious tale of Sir Thopas,a told by Chaucer’s alter ego, the narrator of The Canterbury Tales. Whatever he borrowed from another language or culture he stamped in his poetry with the unmistakable marks of Chaucerian style: wit, complexity, and what the late E. Talbot Donaldson characterized as a habitual “elusion of clarity.”

Canon

That Chaucer wrote almost entirely in English for the audiences I have enumerated above suggests the headway that English (marginalized socially, intellectually, and politically after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066) had made by the later fourteenth century in being accepted as a medium for serious expression in a wide range of cultural situations. French had been considered the language of genteel society for almost three centuries after the Conquest, although even the upper nobility was English-speaking within a few generations of that event, and French (in its insular form, commonly known as Anglo-Norman) was increasingly a language that had to be learned, as opposed to spoken from birth. In Chaucer’s day French continued to be the language of legal and Parliamentary written records, and Latin the language of the Church and higher education, but both tongues were increasingly invaded by the vocabulary and syntax of the language native to everyone born in England.

Chaucer’s first substantial poetic efforts are innovative versions of an established French literary form, the dream vision, in which a narrator, while dreaming, observes or takes part in discussions or debates about love among characters who may be allegorical abstractions (Youth, Age, Beauty, Pride, etc.) or who may represent, in idealized form, powerful noble folk who are the poet’s patrons and members of their court. The Book of the Duchess, written around 1369 to honor Blanche, the recently deceased duchess of Lancaster, offers stylized sympathy and consolation to her husband, John of Gaunt (who later granted Chaucer a life annuity, possibly in thanks for the poem). The House of Fame, written in the late 1370s, inspired by the poet’s reading of Virgil, Ovid, and Dante, stresses comedy rather than pathos in depicting the arbitrary and amoral judgments handed down by the goddess Fame; it is a cynical commentary on the untrustworthiness of all communication—especially by poets.