Geoffrey Chaucer
14th century English poet and author (1343-1400) · Writers · Died at 57
Geoffrey Chaucer is read about 1,700 times a day, in 145 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 20 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 395 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He made English a language you could write literature in. Before Chaucer, if you wanted to be taken seriously as a poet in England, you wrote in French or Latin - he proved the vernacular could carry weight, and nearly two thousand English words appear in print for the first time in his manuscripts.
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Photos 12
Arms of Geoffrey Chaucer: Per pale argent and gules, a bend counterchanged
Chaucer as a pilgrim (from the early fifteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales)
The Chaucer crest: A unicorn's head with canting arms of Roet below: Gules, three Catherine Wheels or (French: rouet = 'spinning-wheel'). Ewelme Church, Oxfordshire; possible funeral helm of his son Thomas Chaucer.
A nineteenth-century depiction of Chaucer
Blue plaque at the site of the Tabard inn in Southwark, London, where in 1386 the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales set off to visit Canterbury Cathedral
In their own words 10
, Ful craftier to pley she was / Than Athalus, that made the game / First of the ches: so was his name.
Now purs, that be to me my lyves light, / And saveour, as doun in this worlde here, / Out of this toune help me through your might.
Hard is his herte that loveth nought / In May.
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Born around 1343, Chaucer spent most of his working life as a civil servant: bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, eventually elected to Parliament as shire knight for Kent. But he wrote constantly. The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, Parlement of Foules - then The Canterbury Tales, the work that would make him the first poet buried in what became Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. He also composed A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his ten-year-old son, Lewis, a working scientific text that doubled as philosophy. His contemporary Thomas Hoccleve called him "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" - the first to prove English itself could be the stuff of serious poetry. He died 25 October 1400.
Writers born in the 1340s 6
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