Geoffrey Chaucer Biography Quotes 19 Report mistakes

Origins and Early Life
Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1343, very likely in London, into a prosperous family connected with the wine trade. His father, John Chaucer, was a vintner who served the court's needs, and his mother, Agnes de Copton, came from a family with property in the city. This mercantile background placed the young Chaucer close to the social and commercial heart of the realm. From an early age he would have heard French and Latin in use around him, and the multilingual bustle of the capital left clear marks on his later writing. Though no school record survives, his learning and ease with classical and continental sources suggest a solid education for a rising servant of the crown.

As a teenager he entered aristocratic service. He is associated with the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, whose husband Lionel of Antwerp was a son of King Edward III. This placement brought the young Chaucer into the orbit of the royal family and introduced him to the codes of chivalry and courtly etiquette that shaped his poetry. The court of Edward III, and later of Richard II, was a cosmopolitan environment, and this early proximity to power would structure the rest of his career.

Soldier, Messenger, and Crown Servant
During the campaign of 1359, 60 in France, Chaucer served in military capacity with an English army. He was captured and then ransomed, with the king contributing to his release, an early sign that Chaucer was valued in royal circles. Afterward he took up a series of administrative and diplomatic roles. In 1374 he was appointed Controller of the Customs for wool, skins, and hides at the Port of London, a demanding office at the center of England's most important fiscal stream. The appointment coincided with his residence at the city's Aldgate, where the bustle of urban life and the voices of traders, clerks, and travelers were part of his daily experience.

His rise cannot be separated from the powerful figures who supported him. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and one of the most influential princes of the realm, was a principal patron. Chaucer received annuities from Gaunt and from the crown, support that helped sustain him through periods of financial strain. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 swept through London during his customs tenure, and although he is not recorded as a target, the unrest framed his working life in an era when order and justice were openly contested.

Marriage, Family, and Courtly Connections
Chaucer married Philippa Roet, a lady of the royal household who served Queen Philippa of Hainault. Through this marriage he was linked to an even denser web of patronage. Philippa's sister, Katherine Swynford, was the long-time companion and later the wife of John of Gaunt; their alliance further entwined Chaucer with the Lancastrian circle. The couple's children are imperfectly documented, but Thomas Chaucer is traditionally identified as their son and later became an influential political figure. The family's closeness to the court affected Chaucer's livelihood, from annuities to appointments.

Chaucer's literary friendships also mattered. He knew the poet John Gower, who moved in similar professional circles, and he acknowledged Gower and the scholar Ralph Strode in his work. These associations formed a small but vital intellectual community at a time when English letters were finding new prestige.

Diplomacy and Continental Influence
Chaucer traveled on the king's business to Flanders, France, and Italy. A mission in 1372, 73 took him to Genoa and Florence, and later journeys returned him to the Italian states. Whether he met any particular writer is unrecorded, but the effect of Italian literature on his work is unmistakable. He absorbed and refashioned the narratives and techniques of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, introducing to English verse a more flexible line and a broader range of subjects, from tragedy to comic realism. These travels, combined with his London vantage, gave him a rare perspective on the movement of goods, people, and stories across Europe.

Early and Middle Works
Chaucer's earliest substantial poem, The Book of the Duchess, is often associated with the death of Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt, and reveals his gift for elegy, allegory, and courtly feeling. Over the next decade and more he experimented with form and subject: The House of Fame reflects on poetic reputation and the instability of rumor; The Parliament of Fowls interweaves love, sovereignty, and social debate in a comic vision; and his translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy sharpened his interest in fortune and moral choice.

Troilus and Criseyde, his great romance from the 1380s, adapts a narrative known from Boccaccio and classical sources into supple English stanzas. In Troilus Chaucer uses an elevated style, complex psychology, and a carefully patterned stanza (rhyme royal) to explore love and loss. It is also the work in which he explicitly addresses John Gower and Ralph Strode, evidence of the collegial network around him. The Legend of Good Women, with its remarkable prologues, shows him debating poetic duty and the treatment of women in classical tales, a self-conscious examination of his craft and its ethical bearings.

Public Office, Legal Affairs, and Financial Strain
The 1380s were testing years. In 1380 a legal document records that a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from all actions concerning her "raptus", a term with multiple possible meanings in medieval law. The deed survives, but its circumstances remain unclear. In 1386 Chaucer was elected Knight of the Shire for Kent, serving as a member of Parliament during a politically fraught session. Around the same time he left his customs post and faced financial difficulties. Nonetheless, his connections endured. In 1389, under King Richard II, he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works, supervising repairs and building at important royal sites such as Westminster and the Tower of London. Administrative setbacks and losses followed, and by the early 1390s he had shifted to a sinecure as Deputy Forester of North Petherton in Somerset, a post that provided modest income.

The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's most ambitious project, The Canterbury Tales, belongs largely to the final phase of his career. He imagines a band of pilgrims traveling from the Tabard in Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury and frames a contest in which each tells stories. The pilgrims include a knight, a miller, a prioress, a pardoner, a wife from Bath, and others drawn from town, court, and countryside. Through them he plays with style and voice: chivalric romance sits next to fabliau; sermon and exemplum follow raucous comedy; confession, debate, and fable mingle with social satire. The project was left unfinished, but even in its incomplete state it transforms Middle English into a vehicle for high art and everyday speech alike.

Behind the literary achievement lay the support and turbulence of politics. John of Gaunt remained an anchoring presence for much of Chaucer's adult life, and King Richard II granted him pensions that kept him afloat during lean years. The circle around the court, including Queen Anne of Bohemia and other nobles, formed part of the audience for whom he wrote, even as he addressed broader social realities.

Final Years and Death
In the 1390s Chaucer continued to receive royal support, and when Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV in 1399, Chaucer addressed a short verse, often called Complaint to His Purse, to the new king, petitioning for payment. He spent his last years near Westminster. He died in 1400, with tradition placing the date in late October, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His grave later became the seed of what would be called Poets' Corner, a sign of the enduring reverence paid to his name.

Style, Language, and Legacy
Chaucer's achievement rests on range and craft. He drew on French and Italian models but forged an English poetic idiom capable of gravity, wit, and precise social observation. His supple use of the decasyllabic line and couplets, and his mastery of stanzaic forms such as rhyme royal, set durable patterns. His characters speak in differentiated voices that reveal profession, disposition, and moral stance, a technique that allowed him to test ideals of chivalry, clerical integrity, and urban cleverness against lived experience.

Peers and successors recognized his stature. John Gower praised him, and later writers such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate honored him as an exemplar. In the age of print, William Caxton published his works, helping to establish their centrality to English letters. The mixture of courtly patronage through figures like John of Gaunt and the lived realities of London's streets gave his poetry its breadth. He stands at a nexus where royal favor, mercantile energy, and continental culture converged, and from that crossroad he fashioned an English literature that could carry both the music of high style and the rough candor of everyday speech.

Our collection contains 19 quotes who is written by Geoffrey, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Justice - Love - Learning.

Other people realated to Geoffrey: William Morris (Designer), Paul Bettany (Actor)