Geoffrey Chaucer: the medieval father of English literature

8:12Greg Jenner:Well, he would have gone to school.

8:14Mike Wozniak:Yeah.

8:14Greg Jenner:So people of this kind of middle class level 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 learnt 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 in this country.

8:50Greg Jenner:And most of the education at school was in Latin. But people, again, they often tend to think of older style education as very much the students being very passive, 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 might be given a fable and asked to invent different morals and then defend them or get up and give different sides of the debate. So it was a kind of theatre.

9:22Mike Wozniak:That's not what I had at all. It was completely didactic, just sort of rammed down our throats, basically.

9:26Greg Jenner:Yeah, 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 truck, for example. So it was strict, but...

9:39Mike Wozniak:It feels like a fable in and of itself. I was going to say, the moral of that story is don't beat children.

9:44Greg Jenner:Yeah, absolutely. But yes, he would have got a really solid education there, though he was also certainly a self-educator. He was an autodidact because he read so much more than most people were reading at that time. He's a SWAT,

9:57Professor Marion Turner:but he's also getting a good education. A really interesting childhood.

10:00Greg Jenner:Yeah, very interesting.

10:01Professor Marion Turner:Brilliant. 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? Me, personally,

10:12Mike Wozniak:I don't think I'd have made the most of this. Chaucer, I think, has got a bit of a 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, it'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.

10:34Professor Marion Turner:It's a very sensible answer.

10:36Mike Wozniak:I assume.

10:36Professor Marion Turner:He sort of goes.

10:38Greg Jenner: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. So and this is a very desirable thing to get. So usually, you know, higher class boys would get this kind of job. So his father probably got him this job because his father had been a royal tax collector. So he had connections in the royal court. So Chaucer's first job, when he's just a teenager, about 14 or 15, he pops up in the accounts of Elizabeth de 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.

11:18Greg Jenner: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 and...

11:32Mike Wozniak:So you're not viewed as... You're not a servant. You're working, but you're not a servant class.

11:36Greg Jenner: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.

11:53Mike Wozniak:Right. Like a sort of modern sort of equerry or something, just sort of slightly dressed, standing about, not necessarily doing a lot, poking the posts.

11:59Greg Jenner: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.

12:08Professor Marion Turner:So he's still Geoffrey from the block, but he's making moves.

12:12Greg Jenner:Exactly.

12:13Professor Marion Turner:Is Geoffrey the correct pronunciation for his name?

12:15Greg Jenner:Well, he's often referred to in the records as Galfrida, so as the Latin version. version. So, I mean, and 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.

12:29Professor Marion Turner:Geoffrey is fine. Okay. So he's working for Elizabeth de Burr. No relation to Chris de Burr, unfortunately. Who knows? Lady in red. Maybe she was. Maybe she was. He does meet his wife doing this gig, we think.

12:39Greg Jenner:Probably, yes. Philippa. So 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.

12:53Mike Wozniak:She's got a de in the middle of her name. Yes, Philippe de Ré.

12:58Professor Marion Turner: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.

13:05Greg Jenner:Yes, absolutely.

13:06Professor Marion Turner:What do you think it is, Mike?

13:07Mike Wozniak:Presumably from the annals of the de Burr 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 in a hunt somewhere? Have they gone to Ulster and they've killed the wrong stag and stirred up some local drama?

13:26Greg Jenner:I mean, I do think this is very impressive, researcher-type thinking, thinking about the accounts, because it is from the accounts, and people often expect that the first record is going to be, might refer to something to do with his poetry, for example. But in fact, it's a really frivolous reference. It's a reference to his fashion choices, to his clothes. This is where the snazzy leggings that Greg mentioned earlier come in. So the record is simply that Elizabeth de Burt bought him these clothes.

13:54Mike Wozniak:OK.

13:55Greg Jenner: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 buys him a poltok with these two coloured hose, like these leggings and some shoes. Now it turns out...

14:13Mike Wozniak:Pied hose. Yes, exactly.

14:16Greg Jenner:Now, it turns out that poltocs were brand new at this time. So this is in the 50s, the 1350s. And in the 1360s, we start to see references to the poltoc and the leggings that were associated with them.

14:30Mike Wozniak:The mini poltoc?

14:31Greg Jenner:The scandalous items. 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. So it's a great, you know, it's all young people's fault. There they are wearing their appalling outfits, you know. So that's, yes. Not like it used to be.

15:06Mike Wozniak:It's like the modern person thinking that COVID is because too many people are getting sleeve tats or something like that.

15:10Greg Jenner:Yeah, exactly. And it's great because, you know, people think of Chaucer often as this, the father figure of English literature. Yeah. But, you know, here he is as a teenager. Everyone is a teenager at some point. But he has to wear these.

15:22Mike Wozniak:Yes. He's been given, this is like when I was maybe the same age, my mother bought me some cycling shorts. Black cycling shorts with sort of lurid green flashes down the side. Yes. And she made me wear them to a birthday party. A birthday party for someone I didn't particularly know, some older boys there. I mean, it was absolutely murderous. It was just... Is this a trauma? Oh, my God. I mean, yeah, that does sound traumatic. That's really dragged it back up. Are you having PTSD? I'm having PTSD. It'll be in my final slideshow.

15:52Professor Marion Turner:So I feel like I understand Chaucer a bit better. 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.

16:07Greg Jenner: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 time.

16:23Professor Marion Turner:He also ticked off another major event in the 14th century, having survived the Black Death. He then rides straight into another one. Do you know what this one would be, Mike? Big 14th century extravaganza. Mega event. Yeah. 100 years war? Absolutely. Well done. Yeah, very good. Was he a soldier? Well, I mean, soldier is perhaps a generous word. I get the feeling he's just a guy on a horse. OK.

16:48Greg Jenner: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 with them. So he goes over to this.

17:03Mike 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.

17:08Greg Jenner:Yeah, but he was fighting. He did go off to fight. And so the Hundred Years' War, which actually was longer than 100 years.

17:16Professor Marion Turner:Yeah, it's 116 years.

17:17Greg Jenner:Yeah, so it's supposed to start 1337, finish 1453. Chaucer's over there, 1359, 1360. He was a fighter.

17:26Professor Marion Turner:This is Edward III of England claiming France for himself, saying, I should be king of France, and the French king saying, no. Famously, the pen is mightier than the sword. So how do you think our budding poet does in battle?

17:39Mike Wozniak:I'm imagining he would do abysmally. I sort of want him to be abysmal 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. OK. You know, so I'm hoping that he was desperately cowardly, sort of pretending to guide his horse the wrong way. He does get captured. Does he?

18:02Greg Jenner:Yeah, yeah, exactly.

18:03Mike Wozniak:Which suggests he was in a sort of zone of jeopardy, at least.

18:07Greg Jenner: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.

18:28Mike Wozniak:I'm going to take a little guess here. Yeah. I'm going to suggest that that's more than£16 is today.

18:34Greg Jenner:Yes. Just a bit.

18:36Professor Marion Turner:Yes.

18:36Greg Jenner:It is.

18:36Professor Marion Turner:The inflation crisis that we're all feeling.

18:39Greg Jenner:And we can compare it with other people. So there were some people who were ransomed for£50 at the same time. But then there was also a carter with seven of his fellows who were ransomed as a job lot for£12.

18:50Professor Marion Turner:So, you know, it's OK to be£16.

18:54Greg Jenner:But there were people who were worth a lot more.

18:57Professor Marion Turner:What would your ransom be, Mike? I'm not planning to kidnap you, but I'm just curious of your economic value.

19:04Mike Wozniak:Yeah, who's kidnapping me is key. because I think I'd always prefer the idea of being exchanged it's the sort of bridge of spies I think it's 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

19:22Professor Marion Turner:that should never be let back into the wild So£16 gets Geoffrey Chaucer back, who's paying that ransom is it the King? The King, yes

19:30Mike Wozniak:So not even Lizzie DeBurre she's not stepping up

19:33Greg Jenner:The king's paying all the ransoms.

19:35Professor Marion Turner:Does Geoffrey Chaucer bounce back from his ransom fiasco? Because obviously he's, that must be quite traumatising.

19:40Greg Jenner:I think he was fine, to be honest. I don't think it was that rare. It was a different time.

19:45Professor Marion Turner:I don't know, he's 17, he's gone to war, he's seen people die, he's been captured.

19:48Mike Wozniak:Mental health hasn't been invented at this point.

19:51Greg Jenner:You've seen half the population die in the plague. I mean, you know, this is nothing. It's water on the ducks back, isn't it? 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.

20:05Professor Marion Turner:Soldier, what do you excel at? I'm really quite good at delivering letters. Exactly.

20:10Greg Jenner: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.

20:33Professor Marion Turner:Spain.

20:33Greg Jenner: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 Naval 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.

21:26Greg Jenner: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. That's the kind of role.

21:36Mike Wozniak:Has he left Elizabeth and Lionel's gaffe then? Yes. He's ploughing his own furrow at this point. Yeah.

21:43Greg Jenner:So he's married to Philippa de Rohe. 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.

22:04Professor Marion Turner:Good nunnery.

22:05Greg Jenner:Yeah, lots of...

22:06Professor Marion Turner:Premium nun.

22:07Greg Jenner:Premium. Very expensive to get into. You had to pay a lot of money to get in and then you could dine off imported figs and read a lot of books. And in many ways, it was much better than entering the sexual economy at that time.

22:19Mike Wozniak:Grumbs.

22:19Greg Jenner:And then Lewis, who we know much less about, although we do know that Chaucer wrote him a book. Oh, that's nice. Very nice. Treatise 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.

22:37Professor Marion Turner:OK, so Philippa Chaucer, as she becomes known from this point, is a lady of the Queen's chamber.

22:43Greg Jenner:Yes, absolutely.

22:44Professor Marion Turner: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. It can be tricky, can't it?

22:53Mike Wozniak:Well, I was going to say, it can be nice because you both know the... You've got to make sure there are boundaries, though, as well. Okay. Absolutely. True. Does that come from a place of knowledge? Especially when child care comes into it and all that kind of stuff. Do you know what I mean?

23:05Professor Marion Turner:It gets fiddly. Fair enough. All right. Three and three is a lot, isn't it?

23:08Greg Jenner: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 have all kinds of different jobs. His wife always has a salary. Yeah. 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 tonne of wine a year, which is something like 252 gallons.

23:43Greg Jenner:He probably didn't drink all that. He was probably giving it out to people. But, you know, wine is an ongoing thread.

23:49Mike Wozniak:Picture a day.

23:50Greg Jenner:Yeah.

23:50Professor Marion Turner:Yeah. How much was a pitcher?

23:51Greg Jenner:It was probably about a gallon.

23:53Professor Marion Turner:Blimey.

23:53Greg Jenner:Yeah.

23:54Professor Marion Turner:That's a lot of wine. That's a lot to get for, isn't it?

23:56Greg Jenner:Yeah.

23:57Professor Marion Turner:As you say, it's probably for his household, right? Yeah. It's probably for sharing it out. Okay. 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.

24:08Greg Jenner:Yeah.

24:08Professor Marion Turner:He's picking up languages or he knows languages.

24:10Greg Jenner:He knows languages. So everyone's trilingual. 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.

24:41Professor Marion Turner:Amazing.

24:41Greg Jenner:As his career goes on.

24:43Professor Marion Turner:We'll get to that in a bit because that is obviously incredibly important. But first I want to ask Mike some fun questions about Chaucer's very storied career. 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 here we go. 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.

25:18Professor Marion Turner:Which of those six things was not on Chaucer's CV? OK.

25:26Mike Wozniak: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... 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 Forrest is going to be his milieu. OK.

25:46Professor Marion Turner: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.

25:54Mike Wozniak:Was he really?

25:55Professor Marion Turner:So he did all six of those jobs in terms of being an MP, but he was representing Kent, not Suffolk. So he was in charge of the wall custom, Deputy Forrester. He did inspect those walls and ditches. He renovated the Tower of London. He negotiated the marriage of the King of England.

26:08Greg Jenner:Though that marriage didn't happen.

26:09Professor Marion Turner:OK. Maybe he wasn't very good at his job. But he still was paid, right?

26:14Greg Jenner:Yeah, he was paid by the day.

26:15Mike Wozniak:OK. You've got to get a daily rate in if you're freelancing marriage negotiations, otherwise you get stiffed.

26:22Greg Jenner:Well, it helps us to know a lot about him because we can know how many days he was absent from England because of the daily rate.

26:28Mike Wozniak:The invoicing is the... Yeah, OK. That's great, isn't it? That's interesting.

26:33Professor Marion Turner:History This Week. February 1905. A quiet morning at the rail yard until the ground gives way. An entire locomotive is swallowed whole. It is another setback for an audacious project to tunnel under the Hudson River. And today, 115 years later, these tunnels are a national emergency waiting to happen. Listen to History This Week from the History Channel, wherever you get your podcasts.

27:05Professor Marion Turner:The most important relationship in his life, other than Philippa, of course, and his children, would be to the son of Edward III. 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?

27:23Greg Jenner:So 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. And John of Gaunt was so important, really, mainly because 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.

27:55Professor Marion Turner:The regent.

27:56Greg Jenner: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 know about.

28:34Greg Jenner:The Book of the Duchess was about Blanche's death. John then made another important marriage to someone called Constance of Castile, the daughter of the King of Castile. But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swinford was Chaucer's sister-in-law.

28:53Professor Marion Turner:Philip's sister?

28:53Greg Jenner:Yes, Philip'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. 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. Nice. But Parliament put in a clause saying that they could never use that legitimation to give them a right to the throne.

29:33Professor Marion Turner:OK.

29:34Greg Jenner:Nonetheless, all of our monarchs since Henry VII only have a right to the throne through those children, the Beauforts.

29:40Professor Marion Turner:We need to change that. Wow. Illegitimate line.

29:44Greg Jenner:OK. 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 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 favouring him. And 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.

30:29Greg Jenner:They were all associating together. And it meant that when Gaunt's son, Henry IV, later becomes king, he's favouring Chaucer's children as well as his illegitimate half-siblings. Because they're almost half-siblings. Yeah, they're all hanging out. They've grown up together.

30:44Professor Marion Turner:A commune existence.

30:46Greg Jenner:Yeah, exactly.

30:47Professor 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, he's quite far along in his career.

30:56Greg Jenner: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. 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.

31:29Greg Jenner: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.

31:45Professor Marion Turner:Like The Knight's Tale, for example.

31:46Greg Jenner: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.

32:21Greg Jenner: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.

32:32Professor Marion Turner:Which his son became, of course.

32:34Greg Jenner: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, 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.

33:10Professor Marion Turner:So this is a man who has survived the Black Death, fought in the Hundred Years' War, and then is literally next door when the Peasants' Revolt happens. He's basically Forrest Gump. He's seen the entire 14th century. It just keeps happening to him. Is that Watt Tyler? Yeah, Watt Tyler. and obviously, you know, famously Richard II rides out and says, you have no other captain than I, and all that. And he also ends up in a courtroom battle in 1379. Mike, do you know why?

33:37Mike Wozniak:1379.

33:37Professor Marion Turner:This one's not a famous one, so you don't need to know this one. No, OK. You don't need to sort of...

33:40Mike Wozniak:So it's not going to be, I don't know, what would it be over? It's usually over money, right? Yeah. I wonder if someone's made off with his old pole talks.

33:51Professor Marion Turner:Oh, someone's nicked his leggings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wish it were that. I mean, Marion, this is, we're going to have to rewrite our medieval episode of Law and Order. This is quite interesting. There was a time a few years ago where Geoffrey Chaucer was quite controversial because of this case. Yes. And now we can remove the sort of sting of toxic cancellation because he's innocent, right?

34:16Greg Jenner: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 raptus. and for a long time you know there were a lot of um 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 yeah and then there were others who became very invested in the idea that he must have been a rapist that we must believe women and um and accept that someone could be a great poet and a rapist and of course someone could be a great poet and a rapist.

35:13Greg Jenner: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, Spassian 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.

35:51Greg Jenner:And then they found the writ, which was that someone called Thomas Stondon was making a lawsuit against the two of them. What had happened, according to Stondon, 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. And the reason then that Cecily would release him from any actions relating to a raptus 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, this didn't happen forcibly.

36:34Greg Jenner: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 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 labourers. So going back to talking earlier about the plague, the statutes of labourers had brought in a lot more legislation to make it harder for people to leave their employees for higher wages. Of course.

37:00Professor Marion Turner:And Geoffrey was offering higher wages.

37:02Greg Jenner:Yes, exactly.

37:03Professor Marion Turner:There we go. We can uncancel Geoffrey Chaucer. That's good. And there you go. Proof that being a historian is a very exciting job.

37:09Greg Jenner:Yeah, absolutely. And so many records still haven't been looked at, are still there in the National Archives.

37:15Professor Marion Turner:Where were they? In the National Archives? In the National Archives.

37:17Greg Jenner:There's a lot there. Fabulous.

37:19Professor Marion Turner: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? The list? Yeah, just give us all the books. And also, if you could just start with the poetry, just give us... Fine.

37:35Mike Wozniak:So the books, I mean, Knight's Tale we've talked about, obviously. You've got your Pilgrims. Yeah. Barmaids. Barmaid Two. A Horse Whisperer, I think. 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 barely remember it's a bit horse

37:59Professor Marion Turner:whisper i love that might be a real one you've done pretty well there i think i mean marian can you give us an actual synopsis of what is the canterbury tales a group of people meet they meet

38:10Greg Jenner:in the tabard inn which was a real pub just south of the river in southwark great they're all going off on pilgrimage to canterbury and they decide that you know to make it less boring so they don't just have to think about pilgrimage and god all the time they're going to tell stories on the way there and on the way back and they're going to compete for a free meal and the host the innkeeper harry bailey is going to kind of run this tale telling competition so you get this kind of group of people together who are all going to tell stories but it's really different from boccaccio's and the big difference is the nature of the tale tellers so boccaccio's tale tellers are all of the

38:43Mike Wozniak:same class which is high class choices are not so the highest class person is the knight who's not

38:49Greg Jenner: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 yeah yeah 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 and might tell a better tale. So it allows Chaucer to tell lots of different kinds of tales and lots of different genres, lots of different forms. So you really do get this kind of sense that there's something for everyone.

39:28Professor Marion Turner:Who wins the competition?

39:29Greg Jenner:It's unfinished.

39:30Professor Marion Turner:Oh, come on, Geoffrey.

39:32Greg Jenner: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. And he hated that. So most of his poems are unfinished or stagily overfinished 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.

39:54Professor Marion Turner:Oh, brilliant. Yeah. I mean, I feel like someone should finish the Canterbury Tales. We should have a modern ending somehow.

40:01Greg Jenner: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.

40:09Mike Wozniak:Would they credit themselves or would they try and pretend that this is the original Chaucer work?

40:15Greg Jenner:In a way, it's neither because they're not making it overt, but also it was such a normal thing to do to add different things in manuscripts.

40:22Mike Wozniak:But someone has still managed to work out what the original texts were.

40:25Greg Jenner:Oh, yeah, it's obvious which ones are not by Chaucer.

40:29Professor Marion Turner:And the interesting thing, of course, as you said, the hierarchy, the knight goes first.

40:32Greg Jenner:Yeah.

40:33Professor Marion Turner:And then who butts in next?

40:35Greg Jenner: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, OK, 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 going to tell you a great story. I'm going to go next.

40:58Professor Marion Turner:You presumably have done a lot of travelling to gigs in cars with other comedians. Does this feel very familiar?

41:03Mike Wozniak:Oh, completely. I mean, I do a podcast with Henry Packer.

41:07Professor Marion Turner:I can't get a word in, you know what I mean? 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 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.

41:40Professor Marion Turner: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?

41:49Mike Wozniak:Oh, wow. OK, I'm just going to go into it. Fine. OK, wish me luck. There saw he first the derke imagining

42:07Mike Wozniak:Oh,

42:11Professor Marion Turner:I enjoyed that very much. That was really good.

42:15Mike Wozniak:What was the accent you went for there? It was sort of, it went a bit sort of offensive Danish, I think, in the end.

42:22Professor Marion Turner:Yeah, there was a slight Scandi Noir feeling to it, but I thought it was quite good. It was really good. Professor Marion, would you like to give us the official pronunciation?

42:32Greg Jenner:The sorry first, the dirk imagining of felony, and owl encompassing, the cruel ear read as any glee, the picker purse and eek the parlor dreader, the smear with the kniff under the cloaker, the shepner brenning with the blarker smoker.

42:47Professor Marion Turner:Now, we heard picker purse, pickpocket. Yeah. We heard kniff, knife.

42:52Greg Jenner:Yeah.

42:52Professor Marion Turner:There are words in there that we can all kind of go, oh, yeah, yeah. And there are some words that you go, what?

42:56Greg Jenner: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. But I think this is, I think, a really interesting passage. So it's from the Knight's Tale. It's talking 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, but it's Temple of Mars, but it's the war that Chaucer would have known.

43:34Greg Jenner:So the idea of the scorched earth, the shepherd's huts being burnt, to the kind of war which he took part in, which was often not pitched battle, but was attacking the countryside. That's like the chivalry, isn't it? The kind of Edward III, the second fight of everything. But the dark imagining of felony is great, isn't it?

43:51Professor Marion Turner:It's beautiful.

43:52Greg Jenner:But Mike did brilliantly. I'm really impressed.

43:53Professor Marion Turner:You did really well, Mike. That was excellent. What would the comedian's tale be in the storytelling competition, Mike?

43:59Mike Wozniak:The comedians? Well, it would be of the worst gig.

44:04Professor Marion Turner:The heckler might send us.

44:06Mike Wozniak:In the green room or whatever, That's when everyone shushes and everyone leans in when there's a gig that went really, really badly.

44:13Professor Marion Turner:So it's not the storming gigs? It's not the ones where you've absolutely killed?

44:16Mike Wozniak:No one wants to hear that at all. No? No, that comic is being booted out of the car immediately. It's the real stinker. OK, so the... It's the one where the audience, yeah, people were following you out to do violence upon you.

44:31Professor Marion Turner:Running to the car park. Yeah, yeah. 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?

44:42Greg Jenner:I suppose in terms of language, Chaucer borrows and coins a lot of new words. Now, of course, sometimes that's simply been recorded because his work is so well known. But he certainly was expanding the English language a lot in The Canterbury Tales and in his other works as well. You know, my favourite example is that he was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled. Oh, lovely. He also changed what poetic forms were available in English. So he was the first person to use the 10-syllable line and to use an early form of the iambic pentameter. So the five-stress line that became the fundamental building block of English poetry.

45:19Greg Jenner: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, a serious saint's 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.

45:57Mike Wozniak:I mean, that's the one my sister told me about. Yeah, exactly. I remember, yeah.

46:01Greg Jenner:So there's this kind of fabulous juxtaposition of all kinds of different things can be part of literature.

46:07Professor Marion Turner:Yeah, absolutely. And also, on the way in today, you said that we still use Chaucerian metre in our ordinary speech.

46:14Greg Jenner: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 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.

46:43Professor Marion Turner:So Chaucer's writing in English, and that is why he is the father of the English language in many ways. And obviously, you said iambic pentameter, that's Shakespeare later on. But we need to move on with Chaucer's later life. Is he just constantly writing until the end of his life or is it a phase?

46:57Greg Jenner:No, he writes all of his life. 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. 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 increased by Henry.

47:34Greg Jenner: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. Wow. But he's living there. That's why he gets buried there, because he lives there, not because Poets' Corner existed there. Yeah, there was no Poets' Corner at the time.

47:51Professor Marion Turner:It's just his local church.

47:53Greg Jenner: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 gets started. But, yeah, certainly in the last year of his life, we see him writing a poem to the new king, asking for his money. Oh, great. Yeah.

48:15Professor Marion Turner:So his final literary work is titled Cash, Please. In fact, it's called, what's the name of the poem?

48:21Greg Jenner:Yeah, a complaint to his purse.

48:23Professor Marion Turner:A complaint to his purse. Good. I mean, Mike, as a dad, you must get plenty of that from your kids. Oh, relentless. A complaint to the purse. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:30Mike Wozniak:Please, Dad. It's wonderful. I think all invoices should be titled Complaints to the Purse from now on.

48:35Professor Marion Turner:Yes, as freelancers, I think we're all familiar with that. Yeah. Come on. I've done the gig. Pay up. So he died on Christmas Day, 1400.

48:44Greg Jenner:We don't know. No.

48:45Professor Marion Turner:Oh, come on. Let's have it.

48:46Greg Jenner:No, no. We don't know the day that he died. The date of his death is traditionally given in October 1400. Oh, really? Yeah. But that's just because that's when he doesn't get his 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.

49:04Mike Wozniak:Yeah. Did he die because he couldn't afford groceries? I was going to say. He got it cancelled because he was dead.

49:09Professor Marion Turner:Quite literally, you're dead to me. And then he's like, literally dead.

49:11Greg Jenner:So he dies in 1400.

49:14Professor Marion Turner:All right.

49:14Greg Jenner:By the end of October.

49:16Professor Marion Turner:A nice round number, though. Well done, Geoffrey. first. He basically saw the whole 14th century and went, that's enough of that. Thank you. Done it. Mission accomplished. Saw all the 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 English things for the first time. So how come Chaucer's work is so embedded? It's so successful. How can he be so popular if this was not circulating in print?

49:44Greg Jenner:Yeah, so So Chaucer was writing in London English, right, in the East Midland dialect and around London. So that gives him an advantage because his work is circulating around the capital. This is when standard English starts to develop 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.

50:18Greg Jenner:So Hockleave, Lydgate, the early 15th century poets are talking about him and trying to write poetry that imitated Chaucer's poetry, though it wasn't as good. So then when Caxton starts up his printing press, there are many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. There's more than 80, which is a lot for that time. 80? Wow, that's incredible. And then Caxton, it's 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. So 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.

50:58Greg Jenner: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 Shure is Sweet. Just a couple of years ago, Zadie Smith writes her Wife of Wilsdon based on the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale. We see him just all through English literature, right up to the present.

51:16Professor Marion Turner:Amazing. So that's the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Wow. Quite the life, quite the sort of literary history, really.

51:22Mike Wozniak:The Nuance Window!

51:28Professor Marion Turner:Time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Mike and I spend two minutes silently inspecting ditches while Marion turns a new page and tells us something we need to know about Geoffrey Chaucer. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Marion.

51:40Greg Jenner:I'm going to talk about Chaucer and character. So when people think of Chaucer, they often think about his characters, the wife of Bath, the miller, the knight, the host. And Chaucer did two really significant things with literary character. First of all, he developed the idea of the unreliable narrator. 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.

52:15Greg Jenner: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.

52:53Greg Jenner: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. In Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, 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.

53:29Greg Jenner:Other authors sometimes disapproved of this. In the 15th century, Henderson wrote a sequel to Troilus and Crusade, in which Crusade is punished by becoming a prostitute with a venereal disease. Later artists such as Pierre 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.

53:56Professor Marion Turner:Amazing. Thank you so much. Lovely. There we go. Geoffrey Chaucer. Amazing. We often say Shakespeare writes great female characters, but Chaucer was doing it 200 years earlier.

54:05Mike Wozniak:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the, yeah, the unreliable narrator thing. That's, that's, yeah. I'm going to have a deep dive. I love all that.

54:11Professor Marion Turner: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, a line alley. But he's already doing it in the 1380s.

54:23Greg Jenner:Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting. And that whole sense of perspective of shifting, how do you see things? Really fundamental to Chaucer's poetry.

54:31Mike Wozniak:He's pretty good, Geoffrey Chaucer, isn't he? He sounds good. I'm going to have to have a bit of a read, doesn't it? Yeah. I think, yeah, thank you. And I think you can read it in the authentic Middle English. Oh, no problem. You've got the accent. No problem, I've got that down. At the masterclass, yeah. So what do you know now?

54:51Professor Marion Turner:OK, well, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Mike to see how much he has learned. Mike, you are famously good at quizzes

55:00Mike Wozniak:Well, I think I've done okay in a couple of your quizzes Generally, your pub quiz not so much Well, this is not a pub quiz Pub quiz, I'm a dead weight Pub quiz, I'm the guy who's going to get some more crisps

55:11Professor Marion Turner:Okay, alright, I've got ten questions for you Question one What business was Geoffrey Chaucer's father in? He was a vintner He was, a wine merchant Question two What is the first documentary evidence that we have for Chaucer's life? Oh, crumbs, crumbs, crumbs

55:26Mike Wozniak:Big clothes. It was the Poltok, the crazy leggings, the revealing leggings.

55:33Professor Marion Turner:They were the scandalous... Elizabeth de Bourgh. Very good. Question three. What happened to Chaucer during the Hundred Years' War? He was sent to war. He was captured and ransomed for£16. £16. Bargain. Question four. What was the name of Geoffrey Chaucer's wife? Philippa. It was Philippa de Rouey. I think it was. Question five. What was Chaucer's connection to the powerful John of Gaunt?

55:57Mike Wozniak:So Philippa's sister was John of Gaunt's squeeze with him. He had four illegitimate, later illegitimate children and he was his sort of benefactor, his go-to guy. He was the wizard's sleeve pocket up which Geoffrey disappeared.

56:16Professor Marion Turner:That's a weird analogy, but OK. Yeah, it's the best we've got. Question six. name two jobs Chaucer had while in royal service.

56:25Mike Wozniak:He was an inspector of walls and ditches. He was. He was deputy forrester.

56:29Professor Marion Turner:He was very good. And of course he did the Tower of London, diplomat negotiator, controller of the wall trade. Question seven. What is the framing narrative of the Canterbury Tales?

56:38Mike Wozniak:It's taken from the idea of tentails, told by tentail tellers over tentails. It's a bunch of guys, they're going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. They don't want it to be boring, so they'll tell their tales and they'll have a competition to see who will win. Knight goes first, followed by Miller. But we don't know who wins. We don't know who wins. They don't make it. Question eight. Name two of the storytellers in the Canterbury Tales. You've got the Miller's Tale. The Knights, we've already mentioned.

57:05Professor Marion Turner:Pilgrim. Absolutely. Lots and lots of lovely ones. Nun, prioress, cook, wife of Bath, physician's tale. Question nine. What new evidence tells us about Chaucer and Cecily Champagne? Oh. It was a labour dispute. They were codependents. And this for a perfect 10, Mike, what was Chaucer's final poem about? Do you remember the name? Oh, it was about money. Yeah.

57:28Mike Wozniak:A complaint to the purse. It was. Very good. Well done.

57:31Professor Marion Turner:A perfect 10 out of 10. Lovely. Never in doubt. Well done, Mike. You are good at this. See, this is why we book you. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much, Marion, as well. Thank you. Really enlightening and very interesting. Oh, it's been great. 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.

57:56Professor Marion Turner:And for more 14th century lives, we have our travel episode about Ibn Battuta. He's a very interesting guy. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You'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 listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the marvellous Professor Marion Turner from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Marion.

58:20Greg Jenner:Oh, I've loved it. Thank you for having me.

58:22Professor Marion Turner:It was lovely having you here and thank you for reading Middle English so beautifully. And in Comedy Corner, we had the magnificent Middle English poet himself, Mike Wozniak. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me back. I've had a joyous time. Brilliant. 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. Bye!

58:53Professor Marion Turner:Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4. This episode was researched by Rosalind Scalar. It was written by Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr. Emma Naguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett. It was produced by Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, me and senior producer Dr. Emma Naguse. Our executive editor was Philip Sellers.

59:17Professor Marion Turner:Greg will be bringing a live version of the Your Dead to Me podcast to theatres around the UK this spring. You can join him in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester. And for more information and ticket details, go to yourdeadtomelive.com.

59:32Greg Jenner:I'm Shari Vahl and I've been investigating fraud for decades. Now I'm shining light on the secret techniques criminals use to steal your money. With insight from guest experts and the real

59:46Professor Marion Turner:people involved in these scams, so you can see the fraudsters coming before it's too late. That's the new series of Scam Secrets. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

1:00:09Professor Marion Turner:at the rail yard until the ground gives way. An entire locomotive is swallowed whole. It is another setback for an audacious project to tunnel under the Hudson River. And today, 115 years later, these tunnels are a national emergency waiting to happen. Listen to History This Week from the History Channel, wherever you get your podcasts.