Product Description

Geoffrey Chaucer has some claim to being the greatest poet in the English language. Yet he has also been considered to be an invisible poet, self-depreciating and ironic, leaving only the breath of his comedy behind. In truth a great deal is known of him. He was a royal servant, who was indicted for rape. He was captured in battle and held for ransom. He knew at first hand the most powerful people in the country and, as the king's servant; he was concerned with the most pressing events of the realm. Yet even in this crowded life he found time and opportunity to write some of the finest poems in the language. Troilus and Criseyde is the first modern work of English literature. His genius was prolific and diverse and, while he was a true London artist, he was also part of the European renaissance of learning. The Canterbury Tales is an epic of Englishness itself, presided over by the genial and generous figure of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117013 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From the Publisher
Introducing a brilliant new series: Peter Ackroyd's Brief Lives. To be launched with Geoffrey Chaucer in Chatto hardback.

About the Author
Peter Ackroyd's most recent novel is The Clerkenwell Tales, set in Chaucer's London.

Excerpted from Chaucer (Brief Lives S.) by Peter Ackroyd. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Londoner

Chaucer grew up, and found his true place, in what he called 'our citee'. He was born, in the phrase of Oscar Wilde, into the purple of London commerce. He did not need to rise through his own individual effort because his position in urban society was comfortable and assured.

His paternal grandparents had come from Ipswich to London, part of that steady influx into the city from the Midlands and East Anglia; London had become the vortex for mercantile activity. His grandfather, Robert le Chaucer, was a mercer who like his grandson eventually entered the king's service; there was a strong affinity between trade and the court. He was also known as Robert Malyn, the surname meaning 'astute'. That was another characteristic he bequeathed to his famous scion. The derivation of 'Chaucer' is more uncertain. It may come from chauffecire, to seal with hot wax in the manner of a clerk, but it is more likely to derive from chaussier or shoemaker and hosier. But this in itself has little to do with Chaucer's family - Robert le Chaucer acquired his name from his quondam master, a mercer named John le Chaucer who was killed in the course of a brawl.

The poet's father, John Chaucer, was a successful and influential vintner, or wine merchant, who also entered royal service; he was part of Edward III's abortive expedition against Scotland in 1327, and eventually became deputy butler to the king's household. In his early youth he was kidnapped by some agents for his aunt and forcibly removed to Ipswich, to take part in a marriage advantageous to that lady, but the aunt was sued and despatched to the Marshalsea prison. It is a bizarre episode but serves only to confirm the sporadic lawlessness and violence of fourteenthcentury life. Chaucer's maternal grandfather, John de Copton, was murdered in 1313 close to his house in Aldgate. The city records reveal that murder, abduction and rape were commonplace; at a later date, as we shall see, Chaucer himself was accused of rape. Agnes de Copton, Chaucer's mother, was a notable addition to the Chaucer family; she was an heiress, owner of many tenements and of acres in Stepney; in addition she was niece and ward of the Keeper of the Royal Mint.

Geoffrey Chaucer first saw the light, therefore, in a wealthy and influential household. The date of his birth is not certainly known but all the available evidence suggests some time between 1341 and 1343. There is some evidence of a sister, named Katherine, but no contemporaneous record of siblings has been found. He was born in an upper chamber of the family house in Thames Street, which ran parallel to the river in the ward of Vintry, which of course was the district of the wine merchants. The house itself was commodious and well proportioned; in the records it is described as stretching from the river in the south to the stream called the Walbrook in the north, into which all the household refuse was dumped. Anyone who understands the topography of London will realise that this was indeed a large house, which must have possessed a sizeable garden stretching down to the Walbrook at the back. It contained cellars in which the barrels of wine were stored after being unloaded from the wharves a few yards away. On the ground floor, above the cellars and looking out upon the street, was a chamber which acted as his father's business premises; behind it there would have been a hall, in which the more formal aspects of familial life were conducted. There would have been upper chambers, a kitchen and larder, a privy and perhaps garret rooms.

The neighbourhood itself reflected the solidity and prosperity of the house. It encompassed the dwellings of other rich vintners, some of them with their own courtyards, but it was not necessarily a fashionable area. It was a place of work and commerce. There were several lanes and alleys leading down from Thames Street to the riverside and, in particular, to Three Cranes Wharf where the wines of Gascony were unloaded. A little to the west was Queenhithe to which fish and salt, fuel and corn, were brought in a variety of ships. Chaucer would have known intimately these clamorous thoroughfares - Simpson's Lane, Spittle Lane, Brikels Lane, Brode Lane most suitable for the passage of the carts, and Three Cranes Lane known in his childhood as Painted Tavern Lane. A few hundred yards away stood the Steelyard, the defended quarters where the German merchants lived and worked; a colony of Genoese merchants was also situated by the riverside, and it has been suggested that Chaucer's!
knowledge of Italian sprang from such early contacts. Certainly he came to maturity in a cosmopolitan city.

So we can imagine him standing in one of the principal thoroughfares of London, Cheapside, which he knew all of his life. He was the poet of sunrise rather than of sunset, which is as much to say that he was medieval rather than modern, and at dawn in Cheapside the whole city would awake around him. The bell rang at the church of St Thomas of Acon, at the corner of Ironmonger Lane, on the hour before sunrise; then the wickets beside the great gates of the city were opened, and through the darkness trailed in the petty traders, the chapmen, the hucksters with baskets of gooseberries or apples, the journeymen, the labourers and the servants who lived outside the walls in the crowded and malodorous suburbs which were the city's shadow. At dawn the bells in the churches rang to proclaim the ending of the curfew, but already the majority of working citizens were awake and washed. There was a proverbial refrain:

Rise at five, dine at nine,
Sup at five, and bed at nine,
Will make a man live to ninety and nine.

Customer Reviews

A strong start
This book is everything that a short biography of a massive subject should be: readable, entertaining, informative and even-handed. And, as always, Ackroyd brilliantly evokes old London and the people who lived there - he excels at breathing life into the past.

Ackroyd was more than a little brave to tackle this book. He had to condense a vast field of study - in which there are many gaps of knowledge, and dozens of controversies and partisan camps - into a few pages without arriving at a superficial and facile treatment. He succeeds: where we can't be sure, he just says so; and where controversial views exist among academics, he objectively reports what is of interest to the lay reader, and ignores the rest.

By the end of this book, I felt that knew as much about Chaucer the man, his literature and his life as if I had made a prolonged study of the subject. All from a little book that barely covers the palm of my hand. Not bad, I think you'll agree.

A strong start to what promises to be a top-notch series - I look forward to more.

Delightful in every way
A splendid short life of Chaucer. The book is well written, full of historical and literary insights and illustrations and the cover of this paperback edition is delightful to look at. A delight all round.

First class
As always Peter Ackroyd gives us something special. This is a brilliant biography which illuminates a life which would seem too distant to be accessible. It has given an extraordinary depth and breadth to this period and to the man.