1 - Geoffrey Chaucer

Summary

Geoffrey Chaucer has long held the prime position that he occupies among English poets in this volume. Already, soon after his death in 1400, successors spoke of him as ‘my master Chaucer’, ‘flower of poets’, ‘father and founder of ornate eloquence’, and the like; and in the following century George Puttenham gave Chaucer, along with John Gower, pride of place in his sketch of the English poetic tradition. Puttenham found ‘nothing worth commendation’ before the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, and ‘those of the first age were Chaucer and Gower both of them as I suppose Knightes’. He evidently regarded these two as ‘courtly makers’, like Wyatt and Surrey mentioned later in his sketch, and he had reason to do so. Although Chaucer was born, in the early 1340s, into the family of a London vintner and was certainly never a knight, the earliest documentary evidence shows him already in 1357 serving as page in the household of the wife of Edward III’s second son Lionel, and in the 1360s, following a customary progression for young gentlemen, he is acting as ‘valettus’ and esquire at the court of Edward himself.

This early career introduced the poet into circles whose literary tastes were predominantly French: the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose and also modern poems such as the lyrics and longer narrative ‘dits amoreux’ of Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377). Machaut’s poetic disciple Jean Froissart was Chaucer’s contemporary in the English court, acting as secretary to his countrywoman, Edward’s Queen Philippa of Hainault, from 1361 to 1367; and another continental poet, Oton de Granson, also spent much time in England: it was Granson that Chaucer later, translating three of his ballades, described as ‘flour of hem that make in Fraunce’.