Geoffrey Chaucer (Radio Edit)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:29CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bull spend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn. The network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Enjoy the sunshine with sales on grill ready favorites from Whole Foods Market.

1:14Take cookouts to sizzling new heights with their marinated salmon and made in house marinated beef and chicken. Entertain with low price 365 brand chips and dips like hummus and guacamole and sweeten every party with brown butter chocolate chip cookies. Remember to pack the cooler with probiotic sodas, sparkling waters and more. Summer savings await you at Whole Foods Market.

1:40Professor Marion Turner:Hello and welcome to You'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, we're joined by two very special travelling companions. In History Corner, she's the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Languages at the University of Oxford and an expert on Chaucer and late medieval literature.

2:11Professor Marion Turner:Maybe you've read her award-winning biography, Chaucer, A European Life, or her new book, The Wife of Bath, A Biography. It's Professor Marion Turner. Welcome, Marion. Delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me. We're 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 Matafeo's assistant on the wonderful Junior Taskmaster. Plus, you may have heard his dulcet tones on my favourite podcast, Three Bean Salad, or seen his new live tour show, The Bench. But you'll definitely know him from our previous episodes of You're Dead to Me, most recently Charles Dickens at Christmas and Arthurian Literature.

2:46Professor Marion Turner:It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome back, Mike. Thank you. Hello. Thanks for having me back. Mike, we went medieval with you last time out. Yeah. All King Arthur-y. I had a lovely old time. You knew a lot. It was grist to my mill. It was, yeah, I felt like I hadn't wasted my childhood. You were in your element. But this, this is a different kettle of food. Oh, is it? Yeah, this is utter bleak ignorance. A new level of ignorance. It's beyond the unknown unknowns. OK, well, we're going to have a lovely time talking about one of the great poets of English literature. So, what do you know?

3:26Professor Marion Turner: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've 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.

4:02Professor Marion Turner: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. Are you excited about the leggings? I'm excited about the leggings. OK, Mike. Yes. 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? Ooh, he's literate 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.

4:39This is great. But not nobility, I'm saying.

4:42Professor Marion Turner:That neck of the woods. 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. Yeah, brilliant. It's a merchant, is it? Okay. Yeah, so a wine merchant. Ooh. So his father was a vintner, that's what we call them. That's what we call them in Devon as well. Well, we do when we're trying to be a little bit classy and a bit pretentious. I have a local vintner near us and call Ian and he's absolutely, he's magnificent. Well, Ian, which is a version of the name John, which is Chaucer's dad. Good heavens.

5:15So 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. Okay. 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. Chaucer was living in this very multilingual, cosmopolitan kind of area.

5:53People often think of the Middle Ages as people are kind of grubbing about. And of course, some people were. But life in London was really international. He was rubbing shoulders with people who spoke lots of different languages, were bringing in lots of luxury products.

6:08Professor Marion Turner:But then one very big thing happened. Do you know the very big thing that happened to little Geoff when he was five years old? Think mid-14th century big things. A plague upon the Vintners? Yeah, well, not just the Vintners, I'm afraid. Yes, the great plague of all plagues, the Black Death. OK. Hit hard? It hit pretty hard. Yeah. Family-wise and family and friends? Yeah, and to everyone. So the Black Death came to England about 1348, and 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.

6:44Professor Marion Turner:Of Europe. We're not just talking Britain here. And the Near East. It's 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 have been 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 social mobility after the plague. It's actually the late 14th century is an amazing time for social mobility.

7:23People 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 these, you know, these statutes of labourers did not work. It's very clear which side they were on. Yeah. So we've got massive inflation and wage inflation. If you were alive, you were then doing well.

7:46Professor Marion Turner:So, Mike, if you were a teenage Geoffrey Chaucer, you're living in cosmopolitan London. What sort of profession are you aiming to go into next? Me personally, I don't think I'd have made the most of this. I think Chaucer, I think, has got a bit better work ethic than me. Sure. I think Chaucer, I'm assuming he would have gone into the family trade. Okay, so you think wine? You think he's going following Dad? I think wine. You know, if he's having a lovely life, and wine's got a bit of glamour, hasn't it? And if he's into his reading and his writing, he can do that on the weekends. It's a very sensible answer.

8:18Professor Marion Turner:I assume. He sort of goes... He doesn't. No, he does something quite different. He kind of starts to leap classes in a way. Yeah, up or down? Up. He becomes a page boy in a great household. And this is a very desirable thing to get. Usually, 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 Burr, 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.

9:00So 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.

9:21Professor Marion Turner:Right. So he's working for Elizabeth de Burr. He does meet his wife doing this gig, we think. Probably, yes, Philippa de Rohe. 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. She's got a de in the middle of her name, doesn't she? Philippa de Rohe. He's not Geoffrey de Chaucer, is he? No. It's from this period that we have our first documentary evidence for Chaucer's life. Yes, absolutely. What do you think it is, Mike? Presumably from the annals of the de Boer family in some way.

9:55So I'm wondering what they would document. Has he got involved in a wedding or has there been a sort of a disaster in a hunt? Have they gone to Ulster and they've killed the wrong stag and stirred up some local drama? 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.

10:34So the record is simply that Elizabeth de Burt bought him these clothes. She buys him a poltok with these two coloured hose, like these leggings, and some shoes. And chroniclers 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.

11:10Professor Marion Turner:He also ticked off another major event in the 14th century, having survived the Black Death. Yes. He then rides straight into another one. Do you know what this one would be, Mike? Mega event. Yeah. A hundred years war. Absolutely. Well done. Yeah, very good. Was he a soldier? 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 with them. And so the Hundred Years' War, which actually was longer than 100 years. It's 116 years. Yeah. So it's supposed to start 1337, finish 1453.

11:45Chaucer's over there, 1359, 1360.

11:49Professor Marion Turner:He does get captured, does he? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he was captured. Which suggests he was in a sort of zone of jeopardy, at least. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he was captured outside Reims and then he was ransomed for£16. So£16 gets Geoffrey Chaucer back. Who's paying that ransom? Is it the king? The king, yes. Does Geoffrey Chaucer bounce back from his ransom fiasco? 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. Soldier, what do you excel at? I'm really quite good at delivering letters. 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.

12:33That'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. Has he left Elizabeth and Lionel's gaff then? Yes. He's ploughing his own furrow at this point. Yeah. So he's married to Philippa de Rohe. 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.

13:11So he gets a pitcher of wine a day, which later on becomes a tonne 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. But, you know, wine is an ongoing thread. Picture a day.

13:25Professor Marion Turner:Yeah. How much is a picture? It was probably about a gallon. Blimey. Yeah. That's a lot of wine. That's a lot to get for, isn't it? As you say, it's probably for his household, right? Yeah, for sharing it out. And so he's an international diplomat. Yeah. Geoffrey Chaucer, diplomat, man overseas. He's in Italy. He's in France. He's been to Spain, Navarre. Yeah. He's picking up languages or he knows languages. 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 Vintry Ward because he had a mercantile background.

13:56So aristocrats much less likely to come across Italian. He had Italian, which is probably why he was picked to go on the Italian mission.

14:03Professor Marion Turner:He's the only bloke at court who knows any Italian. 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. 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 Forrester, 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, a negotiator of the marriage of King Richard II of England to the daughter of the Lord of Milan.

14:43Professor Marion Turner:Which of those six things was not on Chaucer's CV? 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. Yeah. But I can see him putting his foot down at the old forestry thing. It doesn't seem like a forest is going to be his milieu. OK. OK, so you're saying Deputy Forrester is one we've made up? Yeah. I'm afraid MP for Suffolk was wrong. Curses. Because he was actually MP for Kent. Was he really? So he did all six of those jobs in terms of being an MP, but he was representing Kent, not Suffolk.

15:21We all can agree that housing is expensive. Rent, mortgage, it doesn't matter which one you're paying, it stings every month. But Bilt can make you feel a little better. Let me explain. Bilt started out rewarding members on their rent. Now, as of 2026, Built Members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use toward flights with top travel partners like United & Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. And here's what you might not expect. Built Members can also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while being rewarded at more than 45 ,000 merchant partners.

16:04It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home is better with Bilt. Join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash podcasts. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash podcasts. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Like those$5 roses at a gas station? or a second-hand piece of technology that breaks in the first 10 minutes? Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts.

16:42But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bull spend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. you'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply.

17:27Enjoy the sunshine with sales on grill-ready favorites from Whole Foods Market. Take cookouts to sizzling new heights with their marinated salmon and made-in-house marinated beef and chicken. Entertain with low-priced 365 brand chips and dips like hummus and guacamole. And sweeten every party with brown butter chocolate chip cookies. Remember to pack the cooler with probiotic sodas, sparkling waters, and more. Summer savings await you at Whole Foods Market.

17:56Professor Marion Turner:Have you ever heard of John of Gaunt, Mike? I don't think I have, no. 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? 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 Gawain then made another important marriage to someone called Constance of Castile, the daughter of the King of Castile.

18:31But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swinford was Chaucer's sister-in-law. And that probably encouraged John of Gawain 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.

18:49Professor Marion Turner: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. 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 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.

19:20So 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 Fowles, 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.

19:47Professor Marion Turner:Like The Knight's Tale, for example. 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. 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.

20:23So 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.