Geoffrey Chaucer (Radio Edit)

Summary

You’re Dead to Me: Geoffrey Chaucer (Radio Edit)

BBC Radio 4 | Host: Greg Jenner | Guests: Professor Marion Turner & Mike Wozniak | Air date: May 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This lively episode explores the life and legacy of Geoffrey Chaucer, famed author of The Canterbury Tales and often dubbed the “father of English literature.” Historian Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Marion Turner (Tolkien Professor of English, University of Oxford and Chaucer biographer) and comedian Mike Wozniak to uncover the man behind the poetry, tracing his journey from merchant’s son to royal servant, diplomat, and poetic revolutionary. The panel tackles his tumultuous times, colorful career, literary significance, and why his work (and leggings) are still worth talking about.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Chaucer’s Origins and Family Background

• Chaucer’s Upbringing

  • Born c. 1342 in Vintry Ward, London, to John Chaucer (a wine merchant, aka vintner) and Agnes (05:15).
  • Grew up in a bustling, multicultural area by the Thames, exposed to global goods and languages (05:34).
  • Marion Turner:

    “People often think of the Middle Ages as people are kind of grubbing about... But life in London was really international.” (05:34)

• The Impact of the Black Death

  • Survived the Black Death (1348), which wiped out a third to half of the population, leading to social mobility and economic opportunity for survivors (06:27).
  • “If you survived… materially things were quite good for you." (07:00 - Turner)

Early Career: Courtly Hustle and Snazzy Leggings

• Career Leap: From Merchant’s Son to Royal Household

  • Became a page boy for Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster (daughter-in-law to King Edward III), through his father’s royal connections (08:20).
  • Likely met his wife, Philippa de Roet, in this role—importantly, she was of slightly higher social status (“She’s got a de in the middle of her name, doesn’t she?” - Wozniak, 09:38).

• First Historical Record: Fashion-Forward

  • Chaucer first appears in records due to a lavish purchase: a distinctive short tunic with flash two-tone leggings (“hose”), considered risqué at the time (10:10).
  • “Chroniclers… thought that the plague had returned to England because God was punishing people for wearing these outrageous clothes.” (11:10 - Turner)

Chaucer the Courtier: War, Letters, and Diplomatic Duty

• Soldier & Ransom

  • Served in the Hundred Years’ War (1359–60), captured at Reims and ransomed for £16—paid by the king (11:49).
  • Afterwards, mainly noted for delivering diplomatic letters, not fighting:

    “Soldier? What do you excel at? I’m really quite good at delivering letters.” (12:18 - Jenner)

• Varied Royal Roles

  • Held a remarkable range of posts: inspector of walls and ditches, deputy forester, Clerk of the King’s Works, customs officer, MP (for Kent, not Suffolk), and international negotiator (14:17).
  • Paid an annuity in actual wine—eventually a ton per year (252 gallons):

    “He probably didn’t drink all that... he was probably giving it out to people.” (13:21 - Turner)

• Language Skills and International Outlook

  • Multilingual: trilingual education was standard, but his fluency in Italian (picked up in mercantile circles) made him uniquely valuable for diplomatic missions (13:45).
  • Italian missions exposed him to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, which transformed his approach to English poetry (13:45).

Patronage and Personal Connections

• John of Gaunt’s Influence
  • John of Gaunt, influential son of Edward III, was Chaucer’s steady patron—partly due to family ties (Chaucer’s wife’s sister was Gaunt’s partner) (18:07).
  • Chaucer’s first major poem, The Book of the Duchess, was written for the death of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche (18:07).

Literary Achievements and Innovations

• Beyond the Tales

  • Chaucer created a vast body of work: courtly dream visions (The House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls), translations (Boethius, Romance of the Rose), and many short poems—most predate The Canterbury Tales (18:57).

• Deciding to Write in English

  • While elite poets usually wrote in French, Chaucer chose English, helping to set new literary standards for the language (19:48).
  • He introduced and popularized the 10-syllable line and early iambic pentameter—the foundation of English verse (25:16).

  “He was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.” (25:15 - Turner)

• The Structure of The Canterbury Tales

  • Pilgrimage frame: a cross-section of English society, each telling their own tale in a competitive storytelling contest, from knights to tradespeople (22:52).
  • Chaucer’s big innovation: giving equal storytelling authority (and voice) to commoners alongside the elite.

  • “The idea that a miller has just as much a right to tell a tale as a knight…” (23:48 - Turner)

  • Mike Wozniak humorously compares the contest to comedians swapping stories of disastrous gigs, arguing those are the best tales (24:10).

Chaucer’s Era: Turbulence and Controversy

• Witness to History

  • Lived through epic events: Black Death, Hundred Years’ War, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt—Greg calls him “the Forrest Gump” of the 14th century (20:49).

• The “Raptus” Lawsuit Debate

  • Chaucer faced a historical accusation of “raptus” (once translated as abduction or rape), but new research revealed it was actually a labor dispute—so he’s “uncanceled” (21:13).

  • “Cecily had been [the plaintiff’s] servant and...left before the end of her contract to go and be Chaucer’s servant. So this was a labour dispute.” (22:08 - Turner)

Later Life and Death

• Continuous Creativity
  • Wrote prolifically into his last years: most of The Canterbury Tales completed in the 1390s (25:45).
  • Lived in Westminster Abbey precincts at the end—buried there due to local residency, long before Poets’ Corner existed (26:20).
  • His last known work? A playful “invoice poem” called “Complaint to His Purse” petitioning the king for payment (26:48).

  • “So his final literary work is titled Cash, Please.” (26:41 - Jenner) “[He] basically saw the whole 14th century and went, ‘that’s enough of that, thank you.’” (26:58 - Jenner)

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The Nuance Window: Chaucer’s Characters and Literary Legacy

(27:31–29:46)

• Double Breakthrough: The Unreliable Narrator & 3D Characterization
  • Chaucer pioneered the literary “unreliable narrator”—his storytellers are subjective, not objective truth-tellers, setting a precedent for later novelists (27:31).
  • Applied artistic ideas of visual perspective to narrative—“what we see is dependent on where we are standing.”
  • Gave exceptional psychological depth to women in his poetry, especially The Wife of Bath and Criseyde, making them more complex and human than their one-dimensional literary sources (28:10–29:46).
  • Later writers often dialed this back (e.g., in 15th-century sequels and Pasolini’s film), making Chaucer’s approach unusually modern and progressive for his time.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Chaucer’s Social Mobility:

  “There’s a lot of social mobility after the plague… materially things were quite good for you.”
  —Professor Marion Turner (07:00)

• On Risqué Fashion:

  “Chroniclers said… the plague had returned to England because God was punishing people for wearing these outrageous clothes.”
  —Professor Marion Turner (11:10)

• On Chaucer’s Wine Allowance:

  “He gets a pitcher of wine a day, which later on becomes a ton of wine a year… probably giving it out to people.”
  —Professor Marion Turner (13:21)

• On Literary Innovation:

  “He was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.”
  —Professor Marion Turner (25:15)

• On Perspective and Character:

  “Chaucer shows us that what we see is dependent on where we are standing… he’s really interested in using literary character to explore subjectivity and ambiguity.”
  —Professor Marion Turner (Nuance Window, 27:31–28:30)

• Podcast Banter:

  “His final literary work is titled Cash, Please.”
  —Greg Jenner (26:41)
  “We often say Shakespeare writes great female characters, but Chaucer was doing it 200 years earlier.”
  —Greg Jenner (29:51)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Chaucer’s Background & Early Life: 03:05–07:38
• Rise at Court & Fashionable Leggings: 08:18–11:10
• Hundred Years’ War & Beyond: 11:14–13:34
• Multilingualism & Italian Influence: 13:37–14:17
• Career Quiz and Odd Jobs: 14:17–15:13
• John of Gaunt and Early Poetry: 17:56–18:49
• Literary Output Pre-Canterbury Tales: 18:57–20:03
• Canterbury Tales Overview and Significance: 22:52–25:31
• Later Life and Last Works: 25:45–27:04
• Nuance Window: Chaucer’s Literary Impact: 27:31–29:46

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Tone & Style

As always, the episode balances scholarly depth (thanks to Professor Turner) with casual wit and warm, self-deprecating humor from both Greg Jenner and Mike Wozniak. The discussion is brisk, playful, and deeply informative, ensuring that Chaucer’s multi-layered legacy is both grounded in history and alive with modern relevance.

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Summary Takeaway

Far more than the dry father of English literature in dusty textbooks, Geoffrey Chaucer emerges from this episode as a product and innovator of a vibrant, changing world: a survivor, a networker, a fashion victim, an intrepid diplomat, and a master of psychological and linguistic invention. His work not only shaped the English language but also pioneered modern storytelling, giving voice (and agency) to characters of all backgrounds and setting a new course for literature as we know it.

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For more entertaining deep-dives, check out You’re Dead to Me’s episodes on Arthurian literature, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, and other historic trailblazers!

Transcript

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[Greg Jenner]

Hello and welcome to youo're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are preparing our pens and parchment and and peregrinating back to the 14th century to learn all about Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the famous Canterbury Tales and to inform and entertain us on our journey. We're joined by two very special traveling companions in History Corner. She's the JRR Tolkien professor of English Literature and Languages at the University of Oxford and an expert on Chaucer and late medieval literature. Maybe you've read her award winning biography A European Life or her new book, the Wife of Bath A Biography. It's Professor Marion Turner. Welcome Marion.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

[Greg Jenner]

We're very happy to have you here. And in Comedy Corner he's a comedian, actor and podcaster. You'd have seen him in Taskmaster man down and as Rose Mattefeo's assistant on the wonderful Junior Taskmaster. Plus you may have heard his dulcet tones on my favorite podcast, Three Bean Salad, or seen his new live tour show, the Bench. But you'll definitely know him from our previous episodes of youf're Dead to Me, most recently, Charles Dickens at Christmas and Arthurian Literature. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome back, Mike.

[Mike Wozniak]

Thank you. Hello. Thanks for having me back, Mike.

[Greg Jenner]

We went medieval with you last time out, all King Arthur y. I had

[Mike Wozniak]

a lovely old time.

[Greg Jenner]

You knew a lot.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was grist to my mill. It was. Yeah. I felt like I hadn't wasted my childhood.

[Greg Jenner]

You were in your element.

[Mike Wozniak]

But this. This is a different kettle of food.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, is it?

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. This is utter bleak. Ignorance. A new level of ignorance. It's beyond the unknown. Unknowns.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, well, we'll have a lovely time talking about one of the great poets of English literature. So. So what do you know? So let's start with the first segment of the podcast. It's the so what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And if we're using Mike as the benchmark, maybe not much, but you've possibly heard Chaucer described as the father of English literature. Perhaps you read his Canterbury Tales at school and you modelled your way through the Middle English while looking for the rude bits. Maybe you saw the BBC's 2003 adaptation which transferred the famous Canterbury Tales to a 21st century setting. And if you're a noughties kid like me, you will remember Paul Bettany's turn as Geoffrey Chaucer in the brilliant movie A Knight's tale that all medieval historians love. But what about the life behind the literature? What did Chaucer get up to when he wasn't scribbling his poems? And where do snazzy leggings fit into our story? Let's find out. You excited about the leggings?

[Mike Wozniak]

I'm excited about the leggings.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, Mike.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

From your high level of knowledge you've already promised us, what sort of family do you think Geoffrey Chaucer was born into? What kind of class do you think he arrived into?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, he's literate.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

And not just literate. I don't know. The son of some sort of merchant or trader or ship's captain or someone who's got some qualifications, possibly a member of a guild, that kind of thing. But not nobility. I'm saying that neck of the woods.

[Greg Jenner]

Are you hustling us? Are you pretending to not know anything and then suddenly rolling out knowledge, marion, I think Mike got it first time. Son of a merchant.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, brilliant.

[Mike Wozniak]

Merchant, is it?

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So a wine merchant. So his father was a vintner. That's what we call them.

[Mike Wozniak]

So that's what we. We call them in Devon as well. Well, we do, we do. When we're trying to be a little bit classy and a bit pretentious. I have a local vintner near us called Ian, and he's absolutely. He's magnificent.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, Ian, which is a version of the name John, which is Chaucer's dad.

[Mike Wozniak]

Good heaven.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So John Chaucer, vintner. And Chaucer's mother was called Agnes. Chaucer was born early 1340s. We don't know the exact year, but about 1342 in London in Vintry ward. So the ward which had lots of vintners in. So it was one of the areas of London that is right next to the Thames.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So he's born in a place where he can see the ships coming in loaded with products from all over the world, bringing spices from as far away as Indonesia, and then going out again laden with English wool, which was England only real export product. Chaucer was living in this very multilingual, cosmopolitan kind of area. You know, people often think of the Middle Ages as people are kind of grubbing about. And of course, you know, some people were. But life in London was really international. You know, he was rubbing shoulders with people who spoke lots of different languages, were bringing in lots of luxury products.

[Greg Jenner]

But then one very big thing happened. Do you know the very big thing that happened to little Jeff when he was five years old? Think mid 14th century, big things.

[Mike Wozniak]

A plague upon the vintners.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, well, not just. Not just the vintners, I'm afraid. Yes, the great plague of all plagues, the Black Death.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay. Hit hard.

[Greg Jenner]

It hit pretty hard.

[Mike Wozniak]

Family wise and family and friends.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, and to everyone. So the Black Death came to England about 1348, and, you know, it completely dwarfs the pandemic that we've been through. If you imagine a pandemic that wiped out maybe a third, maybe a half of the population really quickly of Europe.

[Greg Jenner]

You know, we're not just talking at Britain here.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It's, you know, and the near east, so hugely dramatic. And yes, Chaucer lost several relatives, but not his parents, not his immediate family. And what then happened to Chaucer's family is typical of what happened to the country as a whole. Because if you survived, although probably psychologically, you might be in a bad way, but materially Things were quite good for you. So both his parents inherited property and land and money from their relatives who had died in the plague. So there's a lot of. Of social mobility after the plague. It's actually the late 14th century is an amazing time for social mobility. People can move jobs if their employer isn't paying a decent wage, they can go to another employer or they can move to the city. The government passed lots of laws to try and stop employees from asking for higher wages, but it didn't work. None of those, you know, these statutes of laborers did not work.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's very clear which side they were on.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes. Yeah. So we've got massive inflation and wage inflation. If you were alive, you were then doing well.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Mike, if you were a teenage Geoffrey Chaucer.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

You're living in cosmopolitan London, what sort of profession are you aiming to go into next?

[Mike Wozniak]

Me personally?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

What would you. I don't think I'd have made the most of this. I think. I think Chaucer, I think, has got a bit better work ethic than me.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure.

[Mike Wozniak]

I think. I think Chaucer. I mean, I'm assuming he would have gone into the family trade.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so you think wine, you think he's going following Dad?

[Mike Wozniak]

I think wine, you know, if he's having a lovely life. And wine's. It's got a bit of glamour, hasn't it? And, you know, if he's into his reading and his. He can do that on the weekends.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a very sensible answer. I assume he sort of goes.

[Professor Marion Turner]

He doesn't. No, he does something quite different. He kind of starts to leap classes in a way.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Up or down?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Up. He becomes a page boy in a great household. So. And this is a very desirable thing to get. So usually, you know, higher class boys would get this kind of job. So his father probably got him this job because his father had been a royal tax collector, so he had connections in the royal court. So Chaucer's first job, when he's just a teenager, about 14 or 15, he pops up in the accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, who is the daughter in law of the king. So the daughter in law of Edward iii, she was married to Prince Lionel. So a page boy is. I mean, he would have done a bit of kind of errand running and things like that. But you're also simply a member of this lavish aristocratic household. But you're mainly just kind of sitting about, learning some poetry. You're there partly to make the heads of the household look Good. Because they can have a retinue.

[Greg Jenner]

Right, so he's working for Elizabeth de Burgh. He does meet his wife doing this gig, we think.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Probably, yes. Philippa de Roet. There's a reference in the records to her being connected with the same group, so we're not certain, but he probably meets his wife at this point and she was a little bit higher class than him.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, she's got a de in the middle of her name, doesn't she?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Philippa Duroe. He's not Geoffrey Duchaucer, is he? No, no. It's from this period that we have our first documentary evidence for Chaucer's life.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, absolutely.

[Greg Jenner]

What do you think it is, Mike?

[Mike Wozniak]

Presumably from the annals of the de Burgh family in some way. So I'm wondering what they would document. Has he got involved in a wedding or has there been a sort of a disaster and a hunt somewhere? Have they gone to Ulster and they've killed the wrong stag and stirred up some local drama?

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, I do think this is very impressive researcher type thinking, thinking about the accounts, because it is from the accounts and people often expect that the first record is going to be. Might refer to something to do with his poetry, for example, but in fact, it's a really frivolous reference. It's a reference to his fashion choices, to his clothes. This is where the snazzy leggings that Greg mentioned earlier come in. So the record is simply that Elizabeth de Bird bought him these clothes. She buys him a Poltok with the. These two colored hose, like these leggings and some shoes. And chroniclers in the third, in the early 1360s, start to write about the fact that young men are going about wearing these clothes and that they are very tight and short and are exposing their genitals and buttocks inappropriately. And indeed, some chroniclers said that they thought that the plague had returned to England because God was punishing people for wearing these outrageous clothes.

[Greg Jenner]

He also ticked off another major event from the 14th century, having survived the Black Death.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

He then rides straight into another one. Do you know what this one would be, Mike?

[Mike Wozniak]

Mega event.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hundred Years War.

[Greg Jenner]

Absolutely. Well done. Yeah, Very good.

[Mike Wozniak]

Was he a soldier?

[Professor Marion Turner]

So essentially the whole household went to war. So by this point, he seems to be working for Lionel, Elizabeth's husband. And so the princes are all going to war. They take their retinues, of course, with them. And so the Hundred Years War, which, you know, actually was longer than 100 years.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it's 116 years.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. Okay, so it's supposed to start 1337, finish 1453. Chaucer's over there 1359, 1360.

[Greg Jenner]

He does get captured, does he?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Mike Wozniak]

So he was suggesting he was in a sort of zone of jeopardy, at least.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he was captured outside Reams, and then he was ransomed for £16.

[Greg Jenner]

So £16 gets Geoffrey Chaucer back. Who's paying that ransom? Is it the king?

[Professor Marion Turner]

The king? Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

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Is it.

[Greg Jenner]

Does Geoffrey Chaucer bounce back from his ransom fiasco?

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, so we see him just afterwards carrying letters, and I think that was what he was better at, you know, across his life.

[Greg Jenner]

Soldier, what do you excel at? I'm really quite good at delivering letters. Exactly.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, across his life, we do see him occasionally in these fighting situations, but much more commonly, we see him doing things like diplomacy, secret business of the king, carrying letters, peace treaties. That's more his thing. But then we actually don't see him in the records for several years. So between 1360 and 1366, we're not sure what he's doing. He was doing something to do with other royal households, as he had been for Elizabeth and Lionel. That's the kind of.

[Mike Wozniak]

Has he left Elizabeth and Lionel's gaff then. He's plowing his own furrow at this point.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Okay, so he's married to Philippa de Roet. They were married till the late 80s. When she dies, they had at least three children. And when he's in royal service, he's getting an annuity from the King, also from other people at various times. He's also paid in wine. So he gets a pitcher of wine a day, which later on becomes a ton of wine a year, which is something like 252 gallons. He probably didn't drink all that. He was probably giving it out to people.

[Greg Jenner]

But, you know, wine is an ongoing pitcher a day. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

How much is a pitcher?

[Professor Marion Turner]

It was probably about a gallon.

[Mike Wozniak]

Blimey.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, It's a lot of wine. That's a lot to get through, as you say. It's probably for his household, right? Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Pretty sharing it.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

And so he's an international diplomat.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Geoffrey Chaucer, diplomat, man overseas. He's in Italy. He's in France. He's been to Spain, Navarre. He's picking up languages, or. He knows languages.

[Professor Marion Turner]

He knows languages. So every educated man is trilingual at this time. But he also knew Italian, which he'd probably picked up from all the bankers and traders in Vintrey Ward because he had a mercantile background. So aristocrats much less likely to come across Italian. He had Italian, which is probably why he was picked to go on the Italian missions.

[Greg Jenner]

He's the only bloke at court who knows any Italian.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And that's then going on those Italian missions is where he then picks up and reads Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. And his reading of those poets enables him utterly to change English literature.

[Greg Jenner]

So he had a staggering number of jobs. We've already heard several already. But I've got a mini quiz for you. Which of these was not a position that Geoffrey Chaucer held during his service? So, inspector of walls and ditches, Deputy forester, Clerk of the King's works, overseeing the renovations of the Tower of London. The Member of Parliament for Suffolk, the controller of the wool custom trade, negotiator of the marriage of King Richard II of England to the daughter of the Lord of Milan. Which of those six things was not on Chaucer's cv?

[Mike Wozniak]

He seems like an amenable fellow so far. Yeah, he feels like he's quite capable. I can see him being pressured into doing the ditches gig, maybe early doors.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

But I can see him putting his foot down at the old forestry thing. That doesn't. It doesn't seem like forest is going to be his mealy.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so you're saying Deputy Forrester is one we've made up?

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I'm afraid MP for Suffolk was wrong.

[Mike Wozniak]

Curses.

[Greg Jenner]

Because he was actually MP for Kent.

[Mike Wozniak]

Was he really?

[Greg Jenner]

So he did all six of those jobs in terms of being an mp, but he was representing Kent, not Suffolk.

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[Greg Jenner]

Have you ever heard of John of Gaunt, Mike?

[Mike Wozniak]

I don't think I have, no.

[Greg Jenner]

He's one of those big names in medieval history that no one really knows who he is, but they know he's famous. Who is John of Gaunt and why is he important to Chaucer?

[Professor Marion Turner]

John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward iii. Chaucer probably met him when he was working for Elizabeth. We know they were at the same place then. John of Gaunt had also married Blanche of Lancaster. Blanche's death was the occasion of Chaucer's first poem that we know about. The Book of the Duchess was about Blanche's death. John of Gaunt then made another important marriage to someone called Constance of Castile, the daughter of the King of Castile. But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swynford was Chaucer's sister in law and that probably encouraged John of Gaunt to help Chaucer. He helped him get lots of jobs. He was the one in charge. When Chaucer got his apartment in London, his job at the customs office, he kept on favouring him.

[Greg Jenner]

You said the Book of the Duchess is Chaucer's first poem. This is fairly middle aged Geoffrey Chaucer. You know, he's kind of quite far along in his career.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, I mean, the Book of the Duchess is the first poem that has survived. So he may have written earlier poems. He may have written poems in French when he was younger. That's what, you know, most people were writing in French. But the Earlies poem that has survived. Yeah, he's around 30, early 1370s and then he was just prolific, you know, he wrote so much and today people have often only heard of the Canterbury Tales, but he wrote so much else. So from the early 1370s to mid-1380s he writes several dream poems. So the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women. He translates Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy from Latin into English. He translates parts of the Romance of the Rose. He writes lots of short poems and lyrics. He writes some of the Canterbury Tales as standalone texts that then later he put into the Canterbury Tales.

[Greg Jenner]

The Knight's Tale, for example.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, exactly. Most famously the Knight's Tale. So he's writing in English, whereas it would. Although some people were writing in English, it would have been more normal, especially for a court poet, someone writing kind of courtly forms, you know, love visions, dreams. It would have been more normal to write in French.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

He's also very influenced by the world around him. There's this idea that you need both, you know, you need to read the books. He's steeped in literary influences from all kinds of places, but he's also interested in contemporary society. And I think he does take a lot of inspiration from the things that are going on around him. So we can link things like his great interest in different voices in the common voice. We might link that to things like the development of the speaker in Parliament at the time. And then, you know, this is also the time when we see insurgent voices, which can be productive but can also be really problematic. So the Great Revolt, usually known as the Peasants Revolt, though it wasn't really mainly peasants, it was lots of different people. But that also happens during Chaucer's lifetime.

[Greg Jenner]

This is a man who has survived the Black Death, fought in the Hundred Years War and then is literally next door when the Peasants Revolt happens. He's basically Forrest Gump. He's seen the entire 14th century. Just keeps happening to him. And he also ends up in a courtroom battle in 1379. Marion, this is quite interesting. There was a time few years ago where Geoffrey Chaucer was quite controversial because of this case.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

And now we can remove the sort of sting of cancellation because he's innocent, Right? Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, it's a really interesting case. It's also really interesting in terms of letting us know what's still out there to find in the records. So this is a case in which Chaucer was essentially accused of something called raptus in Latin, which in different cases is sometimes abduction, is sometimes rape. A woman called Cecily Champagne released him from further actions relating to her raptus. But there was a lot of debate about what the word in the document meant, because in some documents it means abduction. But a couple of years ago, and this is how exciting the world of Chaucer studies is. So two scholars, Bassian Specky and Ewan Roger, found some new documents. And what they found was that Cecily Champagne campaign and Chaucer were on the same side of this law case, and they were both defendants together and they employed the same lawyer.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And then they found the writ, which was that someone called Thomas Starden was making a lawsuit against the two of them. What had happened, according to Staunden, was that Cecily had been his servant and she had left before the end of her contract to go and be Chaucer's servant. So this was a labour dispute.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure.

[Professor Marion Turner]

The reason then, that Cecily would release him from any actions relating to Araptus would be that she was saying, no, I was not forcibly removed from my

[Greg Jenner]

former employer, so we can un. Cancel Geoffrey Chaw. So that's good. I think it's time for us to move on to his most famous poem. It's time for us to get to the Canterbury Tales. Marian, can you give us an actual synopsis of what is the Canterbury Tales Tales?

[Professor Marion Turner]

A group of people meet. They meet in the Tabard Inn, which was a real pub just south of the river in Southwark. They're all going off on pilgrimage to Canterbury and they decide that, you know, to make it less boring so they don't just have to think about pilgrimage and God all the time. They're going to tell stories on the way there and on the way back, and they're going to compete for a free meal. And the host, the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, is going to kind of run this tale telling competition. So you get this kind of group of people together who are all going to tell stories. But it's really different from Boccaccio's. And the big difference is the nature of the tale tellers. So Boccaccio's tale tellers are all of the same class, which is high class. Chauces are not. So the highest class person is the knight, who's not that high. And there is a ploughman at the bottom. The vast majority are in between. So, you know, we have a summoner, a friar, a merchant, a man of law, a lawyer, a sailor, a cook. All of these.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

The miller, the reed, all of these kinds of. That's really, really important. The idea that a miller has just as much a right to tell a tale as a knight and might tell a better tale. So it allows Chaucer to tell lots of different kinds of tales and lots of different genres, lots of different forms. So you really do get this kind of sense that there's something for everyone.

[Greg Jenner]

What would the comedian's tale be in the storytelling competition, Mike?

[Mike Wozniak]

Well, it would be of the worst gig. Those were.

[Greg Jenner]

That's when you.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's when the.

[Greg Jenner]

The heckler might send in the green room or whatever.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's when everyone shushes and everyone leans in when there's a really nut. A gig that went really, really badly.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's not the storming gigs. It's not the ones where you've absolutely killed.

[Mike Wozniak]

No one wants to hear that at all. No, no. That comic is being booted out of the car immediately. It's the real stinker.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so the. Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's the one where the audience.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

People were following you out to do violence upon you.

[Greg Jenner]

Running to the car park.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Locking the doors. Marian, why is the Canterbury Tales so important both as a literary work and also in terms of our sense of the English lang.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I suppose, in terms of language. Chaucer borrows and coins a lot of new, new words. Now, of course, sometimes that's simply been recorded because his work is so well known. But he certainly was expanding the English language a lot in the Country Tales and in his other works as well. You know, my favorite example is that he was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, lovely.

[Professor Marion Turner]

He also changed what poetic forms were available in English. So he was the first person to use the 10 syllable line and to use an early form of the iambic pentameter. So the five stress line. That became the fundamental building block of English poetry.

[Greg Jenner]

So Chaucer's writing in English, and that is why he is the father of the English language in many ways. And obviously you said iambic pentameter. That's Shakespeare later on. But we need to move on with Chaucer's later life. Is he just constantly writing until the end of his life, or is it a phase?

[Professor Marion Turner]

No, he writes all of his life. Yes. So most of the Canterbury Tales are written in the 1390s, which is also when he writes his treatise, the Astrolabe. He rewrites the prologue, Legend of Good Women. He writes lots of short poems. And he's working, you know, so we see him working throughout the 90s. Towards the end of his life, he's living in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which was not necessarily a religious thing. I mean, there were lots of shops and brothels and things like that in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. But he's living there. That's why he gets buried there. Because he lives there, not because Poets Corner existed there. Yeah, there was no Poets Corner at the time.

[Greg Jenner]

It's just his local church.

[BILT Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, it would have been more normal for him to have been buried in St Margaret's Westminster. He must have had a good relationship with the monks for them to bury him there. But it's because he lives there and it's later his tomb gets moved and Poets Corner gets started. But yes, certainly in the last year of his life, we see him writing a poem to the new king, asking for his money, essentially.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, great.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So his final literary work is titled Cash, Please. In fact, it's called. What's the name of the poem?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. Complaint to His Purse.

[Greg Jenner]

A complaint to his Purse.

[Mike Wozniak]

Good. I think all invoices should be titled Complaint to the Purse from now on.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So he dies in 1400 by the end of October.

[Greg Jenner]

A nice round number, though. Well done, Geoffrey. For, you know, he basically saw the whole 14th century and went, that's enough of that, thank you.

[Mike Wozniak]

Done it. Yeah, done that.

[Greg Jenner]

Mission accomplished.

[Mike Wozniak]

Saw all the highlights.

[Greg Jenner]

So that's the life of Geoffrey Chaucer.

[Mike Wozniak]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

Quite the life. Quite the sort of literary history, really. The nuance Window. Time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Mike and I spend two minutes silently inspecting ditches while Marion turns a new page and tells us something we need to know about Geoffrey Chaucer. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Marian.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I'm going to talk about Chaucer and character. So when people think of Chaucer, they often think about his characters. The wife of Bath, the Miller, the knight, the host. And Chaucer did two really significant things with literary character. First of all, he developed the idea of the unreliable narrator. In many of his poems, the person telling the story is biased and withholds part of the story or lets their prejudices come through in the telling so they're not objective. The idea of unreliable narration was to become a really key part of the novel. We see it especially in modern novels such as Lolita, for example. Chaucer shows us that what we see is dependent on where we are standing. And I think this interest in perspective can be linked to the rise of artistic perspective at exactly this time. Chaucer would have seen Giotto's art, for instance, when he travelled in Italy. So he's really interested in using literary character to explore subjectivity and ambiguity. Secondly, he made his characters much more 3D than previous characters in literature, especially his female characters. The Wife of Bath is based on characters from Latin and French texts who were stereotypes, cynical old prostitutes. Chaucer's version is far more nuanced. She's much funnier and more appealing. She has a memory and a sense of the future. She talks about domestic violence and she talks explicitly about the lack of female voices in literature. In Troilus and Crusade 2, Chaucer changes the character of the heroine. In Boccaccio's Ilostreto, Chaucer's source, Crusade, is a fickle, promiscuous betrayer. Chaucer, though, shows us the powerlessness and vulnerability of Crusade's situation, reveals the patterns of her thought and her constrained options, makes her a much more rounded and sympathetic character. He's interested in depicting characters complexity and interiority, especially women's. Other authors sometimes disapproved of this. In the 15th century, Henriksen wrote a sequel to Troilus and Crusade, in which Crusade is punished by becoming a prostitute with a venereal disease. Later, artists such as Pier Paolo Pasolini turned the Wife of Bath into a monstrous stereotype. Chaucer's concern with depicting complex female characters is one of his great achievements and makes him stand out both from his contemporaries and from many of his successors.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing. Thank you so much.

[Mike Wozniak]

Lovely.

[Greg Jenner]

There we go. Geoffrey Chaucer.

[Mike Wozniak]

Amazing.

[Greg Jenner]

We often say Shakespeare writes great female characters, but Chaucer was doing it 200 years earlier.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, yeah. I love the. Yeah, the unreliable narrator thing. That's. That's. Yeah, I'm gonna have to deep dive.

[Greg Jenner]

I love all that stuff. Well, we talked about that in our Agatha Christie episode. You know, another great literary sort of of giant and. And her sort of, you know, notion of the narrator who's actually leading you down, you know, but he's already doing it in the 1380s.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It's. Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting. And that whole sense of perspective, of shifting, you know, how do you see things really fundamental to Chaucer's poetry.

[Greg Jenner]

Pretty good Geoffrey Chaucer, isn't he?

[Mike Wozniak]

He sounds good. I'm gonna have to have a bit of a read, doesn't it? Yeah, I think. Yeah. Thank you.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you so much. Marion as well.

[Mike Wozniak]

Thank you.

[Greg Jenner]

Really enlightening and very interesting. And listener, if you want more literary history, you can check out Mike's earlier episodes on Arthurian literature, which is an absolute hoot. Or Charles Dickens at Christmas. Of course, our Agatha Christie episode too. We've also got the episode, the live episode done at Hay Festival about printing in medieval England, where we mentioned Chaucer. And for more 14th century lives, we have our travel episode about Ibn Battuta. He's a very interesting guy. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to your Dead to me on BBC Sounds to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can [e-mail] or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner we had the marvellous Professor Marion Turner from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Marion.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Oh, I've loved it. Thank you for having me.

[Greg Jenner]

And in Comedy Corner, we had the magnificent Middle English poet himself, Mike Wozniak. Thank you, Mike.

[Mike Wozniak]

Thanks for having me back. I've had a joyous time. Brilliant.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, we learned a lot, didn't we? And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we read another chapter from the big you're dead to me book of history. But for now, I'm off to go and drag people out of the pub and force them to walk to Canterbury while I regale them with the podcaster's tale. It's very long and very rude.

[Mike Wozniak]

Bye.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I'm Shari Val and I've been investigating fraud for decades. Now I'm shining light on the secret techniques criminals use to steal your money with insight from guest experts and the real people involved in these scams. So you can see the fraudsters coming before it's too late. That's the new series of scam Secrets. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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[Professor Marion Turner]

Mom, can you tell me a story?

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[Professor Marion Turner]

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[Professor Marion Turner]

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