Geoffrey Chaucer: the medieval father of English literature

Summary

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You're Dead to Me: Geoffrey Chaucer – The Medieval Father of English Literature

Date: February 27, 2026
Host: Greg Jenner
Guests: Professor Marion Turner (University of Oxford), Mike Wozniak (Comedian)

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Overview

In this lively, comedic, and insightful episode, Greg Jenner is joined by Chaucer expert Professor Marion Turner and comedian Mike Wozniak to explore the vibrant life and enduring legacy of Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales and often hailed as the "father of English literature." The episode traces Chaucer’s humble beginnings, his eventful career, his contribution to English poetry, and the social fabric of medieval England, balancing academic rigor with wit and accessible fun.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Chaucer’s Origins and Family Background

• Chaucer’s Social Standing

  • Born circa 1342 in London’s Vintry Ward, son of the wine merchant John Chaucer and Agnes. Immersed in a bustling, cosmopolitan trading hub near the Thames.
  • "Life in London was really international... rubbing shoulders with people who spoke lots of different languages..." — Professor Marion Turner [05:30]

• Impact of the Black Death

  • The plague hit when Chaucer was around five, resulting in massive population loss but increased wealth and opportunities for survivors like Chaucer's family.
  • “It was quite good to be a plague survivor…” — Professor Marion Turner [07:17]

2. Education and Early Career

• Education

  • Attended a grammar school in London, receiving a trilingual education (English, French, Latin).
  • Medieval education emphasized rhetoric, debate, and performance.
  • "It was a kind of theatre." — Professor Marion Turner [09:42]

• First Steps Up the Social Ladder

  • Became a page boy in the aristocratic household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, connecting him to royal circles.

• First Documentary Evidence

  • Chaucer’s earliest documented appearance is a record of Elizabeth de Burgh buying him trendy clothes — the infamous "Poltok" and two-colored hose.
  • “The record is simply that... Elizabeth de Burt bought him these clothes.” — Professor Marion Turner [14:19]

3. The Tumultuous 14th Century Life

• The Hundred Years’ War

  • Served as a member of royal retinues, fought in France, and was captured and ransomed for £16 (substantial at the time, but not aristocratic ransom-level).
  • "When you were a prisoner of war in those days, it didn’t tend to be that bad..." — Professor Marion Turner [18:32]

• Diplomacy and Travel

  • After wartime, Chaucer emerged as a trusted royal functionary, traveling on diplomatic missions across Europe — including to Navarre (now part of northern Spain), where he encountered multicultural societies.
  • "He was doing something diplomatic. ...He was in royal service." — Professor Marion Turner [21:00]

• Family Life

  • Married Philippa de Roet, herself a royal servant, with whom he had at least three children: Thomas (later Speaker of Parliament), Elizabeth (a nun at elite Barking Abbey), and Lewis.

4. Chaucer’s Many Careers

• Held an extraordinary range of jobs, evidencing both versatility and royal favor:
  • Page, diplomat, Controller of the Wool Custom, Clerk of the King's Works (including renovation of the Tower of London), Deputy Forester, negotiator for royal marriage alliances, and Member of Parliament (for Kent).
  • "He did all six of those jobs..." — Greg Jenner [26:19]

5. Major Patronage and Social Connections

• John of Gaunt
  • Lifelong patron, key powerbroker of the age, and personal connection (Chaucer’s wife’s sister was Gaunt’s long-term mistress and later wife).
  • This link elevated Chaucer and his descendants within the political elite.
  • "They stayed closely connected because of this sexual relationship..." — Professor Marion Turner [30:10]

6. Literary Contributions and The Canterbury Tales

• Writing in English

  • Unusual for his status; most court poets wrote in French.
  • Prolific: wrote dream poems, philosophical translations, allegories, lyrics, and Canterbury Tales.

• The Structure of The Canterbury Tales

  • Framed as a storytelling contest among a cross-section of pilgrims—knights, millers, merchants, nuns—traveling to Canterbury.
  • "A group of people meet... They're all going off on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and they decide... they're gonna tell stories..." — Professor Marion Turner [38:34]
  • Notably unfinished: we never learn who wins the contest or see the pilgrims reach Canterbury. Later scribes sometimes tried to “finish” the tales.

• Variety and Social Satire

  • Incorporates a rich mix of genres and voices; combines humor, bawdy tales, and serious topics for all social classes.
  • "That’s really, really important—the idea that a miller has just as much right to tell a tale as a knight might tell a better tale." — Professor Marion Turner [39:29]

• Language and Versification

  • Pioneer of the 10-syllable, iambic pentameter line—key to later English poetry.
  • Invented and popularized words, including "newfangled."
  • "Chaucer borrows and coins a lot of new words... he invented the word 'newfangled'." — Professor Marion Turner [45:27]

7. Chaucer as Character Innovator (Nuance Window, 52:05–54:21)

• Developed the “unreliable narrator” and complex, three-dimensional characters, notably nuanced female voices such as the Wife of Bath and Criseyde (in Troilus and Criseyde).
• "He made his characters much more 3D than previous characters in literature, especially his female characters." — Professor Marion Turner [53:02]

8. Controversies and Recent Discoveries

• The Cecily Chaumpaigne Case
  • Recent archival discoveries debunked the theory that Chaucer was accused of rape; it was actually a labor dispute.
  • "They were on the same side... both defendants together... [it was] a labour dispute." — Professor Marion Turner [36:37]

9. The End of Chaucer’s Life and Legacy

• Final Years and Death

  • Lived near Westminster Abbey; died in 1400 (exact date unknown)—before the arrival of the printing press in England.
  • His final poem, “Complaint to His Purse”, was a plea for back pay from the king.
  • “Complaint to His Purse” — his last known literary work. [48:47]

• Posthumous Fame

  • Manuscripts of his work were numerous and beloved before print. William Caxton’s first major printed English book was The Canterbury Tales.
  • "The first big book [Caxton] publishes is the Canterbury Tales." — Professor Marion Turner [51:02]
  • Chaucer’s style and innovations set a template for future poetry and narrative in English, influencing writers from Shakespeare to Zadie Smith.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Surviving the Plague:

  • "It was quite good to be a plague survivor..." — Prof. Turner [07:17]

• On Chaucer’s Early Fashion:

  • “…she buys him a Poltok with these two colored hose… the mini-Poltok, the scandalous items… exposing their genitals and buttocks inappropriately…” — Prof. Turner [14:19]
  • “It’s like the modern person thinking that Covid is because too many people are getting sleeve tats…” — Mike Wozniak [15:31]

• On Chaucer’s Capture in War:

  • "He was captured outside Reims, and then he was ransomed... For £16." — Prof. Turner [18:32]

• On Chaucer’s Patronage and Family Entanglements:

  • "Chaucer’s children were largely brought up in castles with Gaunt’s legitimate children, his illegitimate children, Catherine’s legitimate children… they were all associating together." — Prof. Turner [30:10]

• On The Canterbury Tales’ Unfinished Status:

  • "Chaucer hated finishing things. He really hated it." — Prof. Turner [39:56]

• On Reading Middle English:

  • “Oh, wow… I'm just going to go into it. Fine. Okay. Wish me luck…” — Mike Wozniak bravely reads Chaucer aloud, doing “offensive Danish,” to the group’s amusement. [42:14–42:47]

• On Language Invention:

  • “He was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.” — Prof. Turner [45:27]

• On Female Characters:

  • "Chaucer’s concern with depicting complex female characters is one of his great achievements..." — Prof. Turner [54:21]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Chaucer's origins and Black Death: 01:44–07:25
• Grammar school and education: 08:32–09:51
• First job in noble household and early evidence: 11:03–14:19
• Medieval fashion & Poltok incident: 14:19–15:47
• Wartime and capture: 17:03–18:53
• Chaucer’s marriage and children: 22:08–23:02
• Chaucer’s many royal jobs (Quiz Segment): 25:15–26:41
• Relationship with John of Gaunt: 27:40–31:12
• Chaucer’s literary works and The Canterbury Tales: 31:21–41:22
• Reading Middle English (hilarious segment): 42:14–43:17
• Canterbury Tales’ importance and form: 45:07–47:08
• Chaucer’s last years and death: 48:39–49:46
• Legacy: posthumous fame and early printing: 50:09–51:41
• Nuance window: Chaucer as character innovator: 52:05–54:21
• Lightning Quiz Recap: 55:09–57:55

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Geoffrey Chaucer’s life encompassed plague, war, social mobility, court intrigue, and cross-cultural travel; he embodies the drama, trauma, and diversity of the 14th century.
• Literarily, Chaucer revolutionized English as a poetic language, expanded narrative voices, and created unforgettable, complex female characters—predating Shakespeare by two centuries.
• His work’s survival and influence are due to both its quality and the circumstances of language standardization around London, the rise of the printing press, and continued enthusiasm from readers and writers right up to today.
• Chaucer as a character is as intriguing and varied as those in his tales: from scandalous wardrobe to diplomatic missions, from dicey labor disputes to wry poetic complaints about money.

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“He’s pretty good, Geoffrey Chaucer.” — Greg Jenner [54:56]

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For further fun and insight, tune in to past “You’re Dead to Me” episodes on Arthurian literature, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and more.

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Transcript

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[Mike Wozniak]

Are you really buying a car online

[Professor Marion Turner]

on Autotrader right now? Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget. You can really have it delivered or pick it up. Mommy's walking. I think kid is walking up the slide. Really? Auto trader. Buy your car online. Really?

[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 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. And 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 a Biography. It's Professor Marion Turner. Welcome, Marion.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

[Greg Jenner]

Very happy to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor and podcaster. You'll have seen him in Taskmaster man down and as Rose, Mattaffeo's assistant on the wonderful Junior taskmast. 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. Yeah, we went all King Arthur Y.

[Mike Wozniak]

I had 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 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. That's what I did. Maybe you saw the BBC's 2003 adaptation which transferred the famous Canterbury Tales to a 21st century setting. And if you're a naughties 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. Ooh, you excited about the leggings?

[Mike Wozniak]

I am 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, well, he's. Well, he's literate. Yeah, 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]

Yep. Brilliant.

[Mike Wozniak]

Merchant, is it?

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So a wine merchant. Oh, 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 heavens.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So John Chaucer, vintner, and Chaucer's mother is 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]

Which is appropriate because that's where the wine comes in. So Chaucer is born very near the river, and this is a huge time for mercantile trading. 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's only real export product. So he's living at the heart of mercantile life. So we think of him as a middle class kind of boy.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

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]

Where's the wine coming from? Primarily France. Okay, so the French are still good at wine, even in the 14th century.

[Professor Marion Turner]

They've always been good at wine.

[Greg Jenner]

My mum will be pleased to hear that. Good Gascon wine. But then one very big thing happened. Do you know the very big thing that happened to little Jeff when he was 5 years old? I think. Mid14th century. Big things.

[Mike Wozniak]

A plague upon the vintners.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, well, not just the vintners. Yes. The great plague of all plagues, the Black Death.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay. Hit hard.

[Greg Jenner]

It hit pretty hard.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[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 about Britain here.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It's, you know, and the near east, so hugely dramatic. And it also affected young people as much as the old. It wasn't only hitting the more vulnerable. All sectors of society are hit so extraordinary trauma, you know, quite, quite hard for us to imagine. 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. It was quite good to be a plague survivor, because if you think about the country as a whole, you've got the same amount of land to farm, for example, but half the number of people to farm it. So what's going to happen? Wages go up.

[Mike Wozniak]

Is vintnering. Is that. Is that sort of plague proof? Are people still getting on it?

[Professor Marion Turner]

I mean, everything's affected. Right. Because all over Europe you've got a much lower workforce, so everything is harder to do, but it means that people are then able to be paid more. So the wine still comes in. And, you know, the Chaucer family are not only fine economically in that level, but they also inherited a lot of. Because again, the people who survived, they're inheriting. 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 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. For higher wages, but it didn't work. None of those, you know, these statutes of labour 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.

[Mike Wozniak]

You were then doing well educationally, then what's the normal for a kid like that?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's not going to. One of the rarefied. There's no governess, I assume, or anything like that.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, he's. He would have gone to school.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So people of this kind of middle class level went to. Went to grammar school and that's what Chaucer did. So we don't have his school records, but there were several schools in London, including one at St. Paul's they had lots of books. He would probably have learned to read and write at home when he was very small and then went to grammar school education. So the schools were only for boys, though. Well off. Girls would also have been literate, but girls usually would have been literate in English and French, whereas boys are trilingual educated boys. English, French and Latin. So unlike today, you know, this was a multilingual educated society. Society in this country. And most of the education at school was in Latin.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But people, again, they often tend to think of older style education as very much the students being very passive, being, you know, receiving a lot of information. But that wasn't the case in medieval education. In schools, boys did a lot of performance, a lot of learning, rhetoric, you know, you might be given a fable and asked to invent different morals and then defend them.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Or get up and give different sides of the debate. So it was a kind of theater.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's not what I had at all. It was completely didactic, just sort of rammed down our throats, basically.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, I mean. I mean, it was strict. Often, you know, there's one great case of a schoolmaster getting injured because he was climbing up a tree trying to get lots of sticks to beat the school trophy. So it was strict, but feels like

[Mike Wozniak]

a fable in and of itself.

[Greg Jenner]

I was gonna say the moral of that story is don't beat children.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, absolutely. But yes, he would have got a really solid education there, though. He was also certainly a self educator. He was. Or to a didactic, because he read so much more than, you know, most people were reading at that time.

[Greg Jenner]

He's a swat. But he's also getting a good education, a really interesting childhood.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, very interesting.

[Mike Wozniak]

Brilliant.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Mike, if you were a teenage Geoffrey Chaucer, you've had this lovely education, 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 writing, he can. He can do that on the weekends.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a very sensible answer.

[Mike Wozniak]

I assume he.

[Greg Jenner]

He sort of goes.

[Professor Marion Turner]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Because his.

[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, 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 where you're also going to be, you know, doing some riding.

[Mike Wozniak]

And so you're not viewed as you're working, but you're honest, you're not serving class.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, exactly. So although you're doing some, as I say, relatively menial errand running, 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, Right.

[Mike Wozniak]

Like a sort of modern sort of equerry or something. Just sort of smartly dressed, standing about, not necessarily doing a lot, opening the posts.

[Professor Marion Turner]

He's mixing with kind of more aristocratic people, although he always stays really kind of middle class, but he's mixing with these higher class people.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's still Geoffrey from the block, but he is. He's making moves.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

Is Geoffrey the correct pronunciation for his name?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, he's often referred to in the records as Gaufrieda, so as the Latin version. So I mean, what we often see with names is that people are referred to in slightly different ways because people were so used to code switching between languages. I think Geoffrey is fine.

[Greg Jenner]

Geoffrey is fine. Okay. So he's working for Elizabeth Debur. No relation to Chris de Burgh, unfortunately. Lady in red. Maybe she was. Maybe she was. He does meet his wife doing this

[Professor Marion Turner]

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

[Mike Wozniak]

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

[Greg Jenner]

He's not Geoffrey de Chaucer, 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? 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. That Elizabeth de Burt bought him these clothes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And when I was researching my biography of Chaucer, I started to look up these clothes and try and find out more about what the Poltok was. Because what we're told is that she. She buys him a Poltok with these two colored hose, like these leggings and some shoes. Now it turns out tied hose. Yes, exactly. Now it turns out that. That Poltoks were brand new at this time.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And we start. So this is in the 50s. The 1350s.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And in the 1360s, we start to see references to the Poltok and the leggings that were associated with them. The mini Poltok, the scandalous items.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So. 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. So it's. It's a great. You know, it's all young people's fault. There they are wearing their appalling outfits, you know, not like it used to be.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's like the modern person thinking that Covid is. Because too many people are getting sleeve tats or something like that.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, exactly. And. And it's great because, you know, people think of Chaucer often as this, the father figure of English literature.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But, you know, here he is as a teenager. Everyone is a teenager.

[Mike Wozniak]

He has to wear these.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's been given. This is like when I was maybe the same age, my. My mother bought me some cycling shorts, black cycling shorts with a sort of bright, sort of lurid green flashes down the Side.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

And she made me wear them to a. A birthday party that I had. I personally, someone I didn't particularly know, some older boys there. It was absolutely murderous. It was just.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, is this a trauma?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, my God. That's really dragged it back up.

[Greg Jenner]

Are you having ptsd?

[Mike Wozniak]

I'm having ptsd. It'll be in my final slideshow. So I feel like I understand Chaucer a bit better.

[Greg Jenner]

So teenage Geoffrey Chaucer, he's not dressing sort of, you know, privileged, fancy big sort of fur robes. He's dressing like he's in Van Halen. He's wearing sort of skin tight leggings, short crop top.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I like to think of him as this fashionable Chaucer. But also it is so interesting to think that unlike teenagers today, he's not choosing his own clothes to express his own identity. He's being told what to wear. He's being paid in clothes and food and a place to sleep. At this, at this time, he also

[Greg Jenner]

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? Big 14th century extravaganza.

[Mike Wozniak]

Mega event.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

100 Years War.

[Greg Jenner]

Absolutely. Well done. Yeah, very good.

[Mike Wozniak]

Was he a soldier?

[Greg Jenner]

Well, I mean, soldier is perhaps a generous word. I get the feeling he's just guy on a horse.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, 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.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So he goes over.

[Mike Wozniak]

Because it can get boring up on that hill when you're watching. If there's a gap in the battle, you need someone for a bit of banter.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. And he did. But he was fighting. He did go off to fight. Yeah. And so the Hundred Years War, which, you know, actually was longer than 100 years.

[Greg Jenner]

It's 116 years.

[Professor Marion Turner]

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

[Greg Jenner]

This is Edward III of England claiming France for himself, saying, I should be king of France. And the French king saying, no, you know, famously, the pen is mightier than the sword.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

So how do you think our budding poet does in battle?

[Mike Wozniak]

I'm imagining he would do abysmally. Sort of want him to be abysmal because he's such a. Because he's still talked about as a writer. It's like, come on, you can't. Don't be a double threat or a triple threat. Like, leave something for the rest of us.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

You know, so I'm hoping that he was desperately cowardly, so pretending to guide his horse the wrong way, he does

[Greg Jenner]

get captured, does he?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he was.

[Mike Wozniak]

It suggests he was in a sort of zone of jeopardy, at least.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he was captured outside Reims, and then he was ransomed. And so when you were a prisoner of war in those days, it didn't tend to be that bad. Like, he probably wasn't thrown into a prison cell. You were kept in pretty decent conditions, especially if you weren't a peasant. And then he was ransomed for £16.

[Mike Wozniak]

I'm gonna take a little guess here. Yeah, I'm going to suggest that. That. That's more than £16 is today.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Just a little bit.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, it is.

[Greg Jenner]

The inflation crisis that we're all feeling. Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And we can compare it with other people, you know, so there were some people who were ransomed for £50 at the same time, but then there was also, you know, a Carter with seven of his fellows who were ransomed as a job lot for £12. So.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, you know, bargain.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It's okay to be £16, but it's, you know, there were people who were worth a lot more.

[Greg Jenner]

How much? What would your ransom be, Mike? You know, if we were in modern countries? I'm not planning to kidnap you, but I'm just curious of your economic value.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Who's kidnapping me is key, because I think I'd always like, prefer the idea of being exchanged.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

You see, it's the sort of Bridge of Spies thing. I think there's a lot. A lot more fun to be had. I'd rather be exchanged for some sort of deep cover North Korean saboteur or something like that. Someone of high value.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

That should never be let back into the wild. That's. Yeah.

[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, that's it.

[Mike Wozniak]

So not even. Not even Lizzie the Burr? She's not stepping up.

[Professor Marion Turner]

The king's paying all the ransoms.

[Greg Jenner]

Does Geoffrey Chaucer bounce back from his. His ransom fiasco? Because obviously he's. That must be quite traumatizing.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I think he was fine, to be honest. I don't think it was fine.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was a different time, wasn't it?

[Lucy Worsley]

I don't know.

[Greg Jenner]

He's 17, he's gone to war, he's seen people die.

[Mike Wozniak]

Mental health hasn't been invented at this point.

[Professor Marion Turner]

You've seen half the population die in the plague.

[Mike Wozniak]

I.

[Greg Jenner]

You know, this is nothing, isn't it?

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[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.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Exactly. 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. Rather wonderfully, he reappears in Navarre.

[Greg Jenner]

Spain.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. So then it was an independent kingdom. So now it's part of northern Spain, but then it was an independent kingdom. And really interesting that he went there because at that time, Navarre was a much more multicultural country than England. So this is the time that he went to a country where there were significant Jewish and Muslim populations as well as the Christian population. And he was there doing something that. We don't really know what he was doing, but we have his safe conduct. We know that he was doing something diplomatic. There were all kinds of things happening at that point. Aragon actually invaded Navarre while he was there. There were lots of English soldiers there at the time. So, I mean, there's many things he could have been doing. But I guess in terms of just thinking about his life, he probably went there from Aquitaine, which the Black Prince, the oldest son of Edward iii, was ruling at the time. He may have been in the service of the Black Prince. He may have been in royal service, in the king's service. He was doing something to do with other royal households, as he had been for Elizabeth and Lionel.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's the kind of 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 Roe. They were married till the late 80s when she dies. They had at least three children. So we know of Thomas Chaucer, who later became speaker in parliament, had a very successful career. Elizabeth, who became a nun in some extremely fancy nunneries, ended up in Barking, which was a lovely nunnery, where.

[Greg Jenner]

Good nunnery, yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Lots of premium, very expensive to get into. You had to pay a lot of money to get in. And then you could dine off imported fish gigs and read a lot of books. And in many ways, it was much better than entering the sexual economy at that time.

[Mike Wozniak]

Crumbs.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And then Lewis, who we know much less about, although we do know that Chaucer wrote him a book.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, that's nice.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Very nice. Trites on the astrolabe, because his son wasn't very good at Latin when he was 10. So Chaucer wrote him an English treatise to help him to understand his scientific object, the astrolabe, which helps you to tell the time.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so Philippa Chaucer, as she becomes known from this point, is a lady of the queen's chamber.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, absolutely.

[Greg Jenner]

So we now have them both in royal service. Quite nice. They've got. They sort of share a same. You know, when you do a career the same as your partner, it's quite nice.

[Mike Wozniak]

It can be tricky, can't it?

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, well, I was gonna say it can be nice because you both know the.

[Mike Wozniak]

You've got to make sure they're boundaries, though, as well.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

Absolutely true.

[Greg Jenner]

Is that. Does that come from.

[Mike Wozniak]

Especially when childcare comes into it and all that kind of stuff, it gets fiddly.

[Greg Jenner]

Fair enough. All right.

[Mike Wozniak]

Three and three is a lot.

[Professor Marion Turner]

What's interesting, or one of the things that's interesting is that his wife is working. Right. People often assume that women aren't working at this time, but women had all kinds of different jobs. His wife always has a. Has a salary, even though a lot of the time her job is kind of, you know, hanging around again, being kind of helpful, but also just being a lady in important women's chambers. 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 picture a day. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

How much is a picture?

[Professor Marion Turner]

It was probably about a gallon.

[Mike Wozniak]

Blimey.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a lot of wine.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's a lot to get.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

As you say, it's probably for his household. Right, yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Pre showering it.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Okay. 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 everyone's trilingual. Who is everyone? 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 Vintry 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. 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. Amazing as his career goes.

[Greg Jenner]

We'll get to that in a bit because that is obviously incredibly important. But I first, I want to ask Mike some. Some fun questions about Chaucer's very storied career.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So he had a staggering number of jobs. Yeah, 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. His service? So here we go. 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]

Okay, I. I can see he seems like an amenable fellow so far. Yeah, he feels like he's quite capable and a lot of people are getting him. I can see him being pressured into doing the ditches gig, maybe early doors, but I can see him putting his foot down at the old forestry thing. It doesn't seem like Forest is gonna be his millionaire.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so you're saying Deputy Forrester is one we've made up? Yeah, 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 representing Kent, not Suffolk. So he was in charge of the wall custom. Deputy forester. He did inspect those walls and ditches. He renovated the Tower of London. He negotiated the marriage of the King

[Professor Marion Turner]

of England, though that marriage didn't happen.

[Mike Wozniak]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, maybe he wasn't very good at his job, but he still will pay, right?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's paid by the day.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

You got to get a daily rate in if you're freelancing marriage negotiations, otherwise you get stiffed.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, it helps us to know a lot about him because we can know how many days he was absent from

[Mike Wozniak]

England because of the daily invoicing is the. Yeah. O Interesting.

[Lucy Worsley]

True crime meets history with a twist in a new series of lady Killers. Join me as we travel back in time to investigate the most astonishing lady killers of the 19th and 20th centuries. We visit the scene of the crime and we delve deep into their lives to ask, how did they do it? Why did they do it? What drove them to it? Watch Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley on BBC.

[BBC Announcer]

It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com find out [e-mail] unlimited.

[Greg Jenner]

The most important relationship in his life, other than Philippa, of course, and his children, would be to the the son of Edward iii. 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? Chaucer.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward iii. Chaucer probably met him when he was working for Elizabeth. We know they were at this, they were at the same place then. And John of Gaunt was so important really mainly because. So when Edward III died, his eldest son had pre deceased him. So his grandson, the 10 year old Richard II becomes king. Obviously a 10 year old can't really become king, can't do much. So his uncle John of Gaunt was the one who was really in charge. So John of Gaunt was really running things, the regent? Yeah, not officially, but was largely running things. So from 1377, for several years, John of Gaunt had also married Blanche of Lancaster, who was the greatest heiress in the kingdom. So we now often talk about the Duchy of Lancaster. So this is when the Lancaster lands start coming into the royal family. So John then becomes Duke of Lancaster, but he has all this wealth, as I say, not only because he's son of the king, but because he made a very good marriage and the role of women is really important. So John later, after Blanche's death and Blanche's death was the occasion of Chaucer's first poem that we, 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. The daughter of the King of, of Castile. But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swinford was Chaucer's sister in law.

[Greg Jenner]

Philippa's sister.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, Philippa's sister Catherine, who had been married to Swinford, who was a retainer of John of Gaunt after Swinford died. We think after he died, John of Gaunt and Catherine started a long, long relationship. So she was his mistress for 20 years. Right. They had four illegitimate children. And then right towards the end of gaunt's life, late 1390s, he married his mistress. Now, no one did that. Dukes did not do that. Marries his mistress, who's relatively unimportant. They've got four illegitimate children. He gets the children retrospectively legitimated.

[Greg Jenner]

Nice.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But parliament put in a clause saying that they could never use that legitimation to give them a right to the throne.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Nonetheless, all of our monarchs since Henry VII only have a right to the throne through those children, the Beaufort.

[Greg Jenner]

We need to change that. Right, okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So Chaucer was connected with John of Gaunt, you know, partly on his own merits. You know, he'd met him when he was in service. John of Gaunt gave him lots of jobs, but they stayed closely connected because of this sexual relationship between Gaunt and Chaucer's sister in law. And that probably, you know, encouraged John of Gaunt to help Chaucer. He gave him lots, 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 favoring him. And, you know, things were very relaxed at this time in terms of kind of sexual mores. So Chaucer's children were largely brought up in castles with Gaunt's legitimate children, his illegitimate children, Catherine's legitimate children that she had had with her husband. They were all associating together. And it meant that when Gaunt's son Henry IV later becomes king, he's favoring Chaucer's children as well as his illegitimate

[Greg Jenner]

half siblings, because they're almost half siblings.

[Professor Marion Turner]

They're all hanging out, grown up together,

[Mike Wozniak]

kind of commune existence.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, exactly.

[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, he's 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 earliest 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. 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 that.

[Greg Jenner]

At the time which his son became. Of course.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, exactly. So there's a movement at the time to allow one person to speak for others, to allow ordinary people to speak more in Parliament, in petitions, in that kind of world. And then. And, 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. And the rebels indeed came into London through Aldgate, and he lived in an apartment over Aldgate. Over that gate.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So this is a man who has survived the Black Death. Death, yeah. 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.

[Mike Wozniak]

Is that Wat Tyler?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Wat Tyler. And obviously, you know, famously, Richard II rides out and says, you have no other captain than I, you know? And he also ends up in a courtroom battle in 1379.

[Mike Wozniak]

Mike, do you know why 1379.

[Greg Jenner]

This one's not a famous one. So you don't know. Okay. You don't need to sort of.

[Mike Wozniak]

So it's not going to be.

[Greg Jenner]

Be.

[Mike Wozniak]

I don't know. What would it Be over. It's usually over money. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

I wonder if someone's made off with his old Poltox.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, someone's nicked his leggings.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I wish it were that. I mean, Marion, this is. We're gonna have to rewrite our medieval episode of Law and Order. This is a. This is quite interesting. There was a time a few years ago where Jeffrey Chaucer was quite controversial because of this case.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

And now we can remove this sort of sting of toxic cancellation because he's innocent. Right.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. 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, sexual rape. So a woman called Cecily Champagne released him from further actions relating to her raptors. And for a long time, you know, there were a lot of historians and literary critics who were really, really keen to emphasize that this could not possibly have been rape, were very invested in the idea that this poet, who we loved, could not have been a rapist. And then there were others who became very invested in the idea that he must have been a rapist, that we must just believe women and. And accept that someone could be a great poet and a rapist. And, of course, someone could be a great poet and a rapist.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But there was a lot of debate about what the word in the document meant, because in some documents, it means abduction. And abduction was not always forcible at this time. You know, sometimes that was a legal fiction where someone leaves of their own will, but then, because their family want to get them back, they call it abduction. Lots of complicated things going on. But a couple of years ago, and this is how exciting the world of Chaucer studies is. So two scholars, Spasty and Specky and Ewan Roger, found some new documents. And what they found was that Cecily Champagne 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 Staunton, 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]

And 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 former employer because it would be much harder to make a case against Chaucer and Cecily if she was saying, you know, I. This. This didn't happen forcibly. I wasn't forced away from the service because then all they have to do is defend the contract. The contract probably wasn't written down. It was easier to say, well, I left, and then was. Was employed. But these documents did, as I say it demonstrated they were on the same side and that this was something that was brought under the statute of laborers. So going back to talking earlier about the plague.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

The statutes of laborers had brought in a lot more legislation to make it harder for people to leave their employers for higher wages, of course.

[Greg Jenner]

And. And Jeffrey was offering higher wages.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

There we go. We can un. Cancel Geoffrey Chaucer. That's good. And there you go. Proof that being a historian is a very exciting job.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so many records still haven't been looked at, are still there in the National Archives.

[Mike Wozniak]

Where were they in the National Archives? They would be found.

[Professor Marion Turner]

There's a lot there.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Fabulous. 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. Mike, without further ado, could you just recite the Canterbury Tales for us, please?

[Mike Wozniak]

Or the list?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, just give us. Us all the books. And also just. If you could just start with the poetry. Just give us.

[Mike Wozniak]

Fine. So the books. I mean, Knight's Tale we've talked about. Obviously, you've got your. Your pilgrims. Yeah, Barmaids. Barmaid two. A horse whisperer. And then. Oh, I think there is. There's the summoners. Is there summoners or there's something like that. There's one that my sister told me about years ago that I can. I can barely remember.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a bit horse whisper. I love that.

[Mike Wozniak]

Might be a real one.

[Greg Jenner]

You've done pretty well there, I think. I mean, Marian, can you give us an actual synopsis of what is the Canterbury Towers?

[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.

[Greg Jenner]

Great.

[Professor Marion Turner]

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 gonna tell stories on the way there and on the way back, and they're gonna 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. Chaucers 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.

[Lucy Worsley]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

The miller, the reed, all of these kinds of people. So that's really, really important, the idea that a miller has just as much a right to tell a tale as a knight 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, this kind of sense that there's something for

[Greg Jenner]

everyone who wins the competition.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It's unfinished.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, come on, Geoffrey.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Chaucer hated finishing things. He really hated it. And I think it's because if you finish something, you kind of have to give it a meaning. You have to say, this is what it means. This is the winner. This is. And he hated that. So most of his poems are unfinished or stagily over finished in such a ridiculous way that it doesn't give you a resolution. So they don't get to Canterbury, never mind get back home.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, brilliant.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, that's. I feel like someone should finish the Canterbury Tales. We should have a sort of, you know, a modern ending somehow.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Some scribes did that. So manuscripts, you get people who change the order. So they have them get to Canterbury, they write things that happened in Canterbury, they turn them back around, they add bits in.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Would they credit themselves? Or they try and pretend that this is the original Chaucer work.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, in a way it's neither, because they're not. They're not making it overt. But also it was such a normal thing to do, to add different things

[Mike Wozniak]

in manuscripts has still managed to work out what the original.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Oh, yeah, it's obvious which ones are not by Chaucer.

[Greg Jenner]

And the interesting thing, of course, is you said the hierarchy. The knight goes first.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And then who butts in next?

[Professor Marion Turner]

The miller. And so the knight is the person of highest secular, non religious estate. And so he tells the first story after a kind of a fixed lottery. And then the host says, okay, well, the monk, the person of highest religious class, should tell the next story. And then the miller says, no, no, no, no, no. And the miller is very drunk and he says, I'm gon a great story. I'm gonna go next.

[Greg Jenner]

You know, you presumably have done a lot of traveling to gigs in cars with other comedians.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Does this feel very familiar?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, completely. I mean, I do a podcast with Henry Packham. Can't get a word in. Do you know what I mean?

[Greg Jenner]

He's a mighty storyteller. It's brilliant literature. And it's also varied, as you say. It's funny. Some of the stories are kind of beautiful. Some of them are quite sort of moving. But there is that rudeness, that raucousness. There are fart jokes, there are naughty. You know, there's is something for everyone. But I think what's very important now is that we hear some Middle English. Chaucer is writing in English, but it's not the English that we are using today. And I think the best person to do this would be, of course, a classically trained actor such as yourself, Mike, I don't know why you're laughing. I mean, I think of you as a consummate professional. Oh, sure. Mike, would you like to turn over the page in front of you and read us some Middle English, please?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, wow. Okay. I'm just gonna go into it. Fine. Okay. Wish me luck. There sow he first the Dirk imagining o felony and a the compassing the cruel eager reed as any gleed the peakers and eke the pale dread the smear with knife under the cloak, the ship nae brim wi the black smoke.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, I enjoyed that very much. That was really good. What was the accent you went for there?

[Mike Wozniak]

It was sort of. It went a bit sort of offensive. Danish, I think, in the end.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. There was a slight scandi noir feeling to it, but I thought it was quite good.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It was really good. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Professor Marian, would you like to give us the official pronunciation?

[Professor Marion Turner]

They're sorry. First the Dirk imagining a felony and al compassing the cruel ear read as any gleed the picker purse and eke the parlor dreda the smiler with the knif under the cloaker the schepner brenning with the blaka smoker.

[Greg Jenner]

Now, we heard picker, purse, pickpocket. Yeah, we heard knife.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Knife, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

There are words in there that we can all kind of go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are some Words, you go, what?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. And some of them, when you see it. So instead of saying pale parlor, because the vowels have shifted, the great vowel shift has changed those kinds of things. Or instead of I, you say E. So a mix of kind of saying it and reading it can often make it much more comprehensible. Yeah, but I think. So this is a. I think a really interesting passage. So it's from the Knight's Tale. When you're. It's talking about. About kind of dark elements of life. But that line of the Smiler with the knife under the cloak, that idea of hidden treachery coming. But also, part of this is a depiction of war. So it's Temple of Mars, but it's the war that Chaucer would have known. So the idea of the scorched earth, the shepherd's huts being burnt, the kind of war which he took part in, which was often not pitched battle, but was attacking the countryside.

[Greg Jenner]

Edward iii just setting fire to everything. Ye.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But the dark imagining of Felony is great, isn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

It's beautiful.

[Professor Marion Turner]

But Mike did brilliantly. I'm really impressed.

[Greg Jenner]

You did really well, Mike. That was excellent. What would the comedian's tale be in the storytelling competition?

[Mike Wozniak]

Mike the comedian's. Oh, well, it would be of the worst gig. Those were. That's when you. That's when the.

[Greg Jenner]

The heckler might send that. Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

In the green room or whatever. That's. That's when everyone shushes and just. Everyone leans in when there's a really nice 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. 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. Yeah. 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 language?

[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. His work is so well known. But he certainly was expanding the English language a lot in the Canterbury 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 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. So that's hugely important in terms of content. The Canterbury Tales really affirms the idea that we shouldn't just listen to one hegemonic, important voice, we should listen to the voices of people of all different classes, of both sexes, of all different kinds of people. And he's really the master of juxtaposition of those different kinds of voices and of different kinds of stories. So we have, you know, serious saints lives and philosophy, but also these extremely rude stories in which, you know, people have sex in a tree or stick their bums out of the window or divide up a fart into 12.

[Mike Wozniak]

I mean, that's the one my sister told me about. Yeah, exactly, I remember. Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So there's this kind of fabulous juxtaposition of all kinds of different things can be part of literature.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, absolutely. And also, you just on the way in today, you said that we still use Chaucerian metre when we. In our ordinary speech.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. I mean, the way that we talk is iambic often. So I want to go and have a cup of tea now. So partly iambic pentameter works because it's a natural way that we talk, and partly we've become used to that as a poetic mode. So that is how our stress patterns work in. In speech. I mean, as I say, it's not only Chaucer, of course, iambic pentameter is developed much more by later poets, but that kind of heartbeat rhythm is really fundamental to how we talk.

[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 know, 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 on 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. In 1399, Henry IV, the son of John of Gaunt, usurps the throne from Richard ii, his cousin. But Chaucer has great connections with both sides, so he's been connected with Gaunt and Gaunt's household all his life, as we've already talked about. But he'd also been employed by Richard. So he weathers that storm. And we see him getting his allowances renewed and in court increased by Henry 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 it. That's why he gets buried there. Because he lives there, not because. Poets Corner. Yeah, there was no Poets Corner at the time.

[Greg Jenner]

It's just his local church.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, 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 want to get 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.

[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.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, Mike, as a dad, you must get plenty of that from your kids. Complaint to the. Please, dad.

[Mike Wozniak]

Wonderful. I think all invoices should be titled Complaints to the Purse.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, as freelancers, I think we're all familiar with that. Come on, I've done the gig. Hey, up. So he died on Christmas Day, 1400, which is.

[Professor Marion Turner]

We don't know.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, come on, let's have it.

[Mike Wozniak]

No, no.

[Professor Marion Turner]

We don't know the day that he died. The date of his death is traditionally given in October, 1400.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, really?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. But that's just because that's when he doesn't get his allowance. Allowance? We don't know. That's when the records tell us he's not there anymore. So he died before that point, but we don't know the date.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Did he die because he couldn't afford groceries?

[Greg Jenner]

I was gonna say get it canceled. Because he was quite literally, you're dead to me. And then he's like, literally.

[Professor Marion Turner]

So he dies in 1400.

[Greg Jenner]

All right, okay.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Before. By the end of October.

[Greg Jenner]

A nice round number, though. Well done, Jeffrey. For. Yeah. 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. Highlights. The obvious thing to say, Marion, is that he died 76 years before the printing press came to England. So Caxton famously brings over a sort of Flemish printing press and prints the English things for the first time. So how come Chaucer's work is so embedded, it's so successful? You know, how can he so popular if this was not circulating in print?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah. So Chaucer was writing in London English, Right. In the East Midland dialect and around London. So that gives him an advantage because. Because his work is circulating around the capital. This is when standard English starts to develop in. In chancery, so in bureaucratic documents. And then it's also the language that Caxton does want mainly to publish in. So he's got an advantage there. People really liked his work. I mean, it was really good. Right. It's not just the luck of circumstance. It was also brilliant. People loved it. And so we see from early on in the 15th century, other poets promoting his work, calling him Father Chaucer. So hotly lydgate, the early 15th century poets are talking about him and trying to write poetry that imitated Chaucer's poetry, though it wasn't. It wasn't as good. So then when Caxton starts up his printing press, there are many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. You know, there's more than 80, which is a lot for that story.

[Greg Jenner]

80?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow. That's incredible.

[Professor Marion Turner]

And then Caxton is. The first big book that he publishes is the Canterbury Tales. And then a few years later, he prints a second edition because he'd got a better manuscript. So he prints another edition. Everyone went on loving it. When we look at the history of English literature, you can see references to or the influence of Chaucer in every single one of Shakespeare's plays. When you get to modernism, you know the opening of the wasteland. April is the cruelest month is an inversion of the opening line of the Canterbury Tales, when the Taprel with his shura Sweet. Just a couple of years ago, Zadie Smith writes her Wife of Willsden based on the wife of Bard's prologue and tale. We see him just all through English literature right up to the present.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing. So that's the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. 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 Marian turns a new page and tells us something we need to know about Geoffrey Chaucer. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Marion.

[Professor Marion Turner]

I'm going to talk about Chaucer and Carrick. 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. So 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. And 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 rape. And she talks explicitly about the lack of female voices in literature. In Troilus and Crusade 2, Chaucer changes the character of the heroine. 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 Crusader, 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, I love the. Yeah, the unreliable narrator thing. That's. That's. Yeah. I'm gonna take A deep dive. I love all that.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, we talked about that in our Agatha Christie episode. You know, another great literary sort of giant 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]

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]

He's pretty good. Geoffrey Chaucer.

[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]

And I think you can read it in the authentic Middle East.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, no problem. We've got that down.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

At the masterclass. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know now? Okay, well, it's time now for the Savada Know now. This is our quickfire quiz for Mike to see how much he has learned. Okay, Mike, you are famously good at quizzes. You are.

[Mike Wozniak]

Well, I've done. I think I've done okay in a couple of your quizzes. Yes, generally your pub quiz. Not. Not so much.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, this is not a pub quiz.

[Mike Wozniak]

Pub quiz. I'm a dead weight. Pub quiz. I'm the guy who's going to get some more crisps.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. All right, I've got 10 questions for you.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Question one. What business was Geoffrey Chaucer's father in?

[Mike Wozniak]

He was a vintner.

[Greg Jenner]

He was a wine merchant. Question 2. What is the first documentary evidence that we have for Chaucer's life?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh. Oh, crumbs, crumbs, crumbs.

[Greg Jenner]

Clothes.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was the Poltok. The crazy Leggins. The revealing leggings.

[Greg Jenner]

They were the scandalous Elizabeth de Bourgh. Very good. Question 3. What happened to Chaucer during the Hundred Years War?

[Mike Wozniak]

He was sent to war. He was captured and ransomed for £16.

[Greg Jenner]

£16. Bargain. Question 4. What was the name of Geoffrey Chaucer's wife?

[Mike Wozniak]

Philippa.

[Greg Jenner]

It was Philippa de Roethke. Yeah. Question five. What was Chaucer's connection to the powerful John of Gaultier?

[Mike Wozniak]

So Philippa's sister was John of Gaunt's squeeze, with whom he had four illegitimate, later legitimate children. And he was his sort of benefactor, his go to guy, his. He was the. The wizard's sleeve pocket up which Jeffrey disappeared.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a weird analogy, but okay, yeah. Questions. We've got question six. Name two. J jobs Chaucer had while in royal service.

[Mike Wozniak]

He was an inspector of walls and ditches.

[Greg Jenner]

He was.

[Mike Wozniak]

He was deputy forester.

[Greg Jenner]

He was very good and of course, he did the Tower of London. Diplomat, negotiator, controller of the wool trade.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Question seven. What is the framing narrative of the Canterbury Tales?

[Mike Wozniak]

It's taken from the idea of 10 tales told by 10 tail tellers over 10 tales. It's a bunch of guys, they're going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. They don't want it to be boring. So they all tell their tales and they'll have a competition. Yes. To see who will win. Knight goes first, followed by Miller.

[Greg Jenner]

But we don't know who wins.

[Mike Wozniak]

We don't know who wins.

[Greg Jenner]

Honestly.

[Mike Wozniak]

They don't make it.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 8. Name two of the storytellers in the Canterbury Tales.

[Mike Wozniak]

You've got the Miller's Tale.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

The knights. We've already mentioned. Pilgrim summoners.

[Greg Jenner]

Absolutely. Lots and lots of lovely ones. Nun, prioress, cook, wife of Bath. Physician's tale. Question 9. What new evidence tells us about Chaucer and Cecily Champagne?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, it was a labour dispute. They were co defendants.

[Greg Jenner]

And this for a perfect 10. Mike, what was Chaucer's final poem about? Do you remember the name?

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, it was about money.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

A complaint to the purse.

[Greg Jenner]

It was very good. Well done. A perfect 10 out of 10. Never in doubt. Well done, Mike. You are good. See, this is why we book you.

[Mike Wozniak]

I love it. I love it.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you so much, Marion as well. Thank you. 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 mentioned. 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. It's a very interesting guy. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to youo're 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]

It was lovely having you here. And thank you for reading the Middle English so beautifully. And in Comedy Corner we had the magnificent Middle English poet himself, Mike Wozniak.

[Mike Wozniak]

Thank you Mike, 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.

[Greg Jenner]

You're dead to me is a BBC studios production for BBC radio 4. This episode was researched by rosalind sklar. It was written by Dr. Emmy rose price goodfellow, Dr. Emma nagus and me. The audio producer was steve hankey and our production coordinator was jill hug it. It was produced by Dr. Emmy rose price goodfellow, me and senior producer Dr. Emma nagus. Our executive editor was philip sellers. Greg will be bringing a live version of the you're Dead to Me podcast to theaters around the UK this spring. You can join him in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester. And for more information and ticket details, go to your Dead to Me live dot com.

[Professor Marion Turner]

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So you can see the fraudsters coming before it's too late. That's the new series of Scam Secrets.

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