General Notes

MISC: 1st English Poet, and his greatest work is the Canterbury Tales of worldwide fame. It is thought that CHAUCER was sent for his early schooling to St. Paul's Almonry. From there he went on to be a page in the houselhold of the Countess of Ulster, later Duchess of Clarence, wife of Lionel, the third son of EDWARD III. The first mention of GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S existence is in her household accounts for 1357. She had bought him a short cloak, a pair of shoes and some parti-colored red and black breeches. In 1359 CHAUCER was sent abroad, a soldier in the egg, on one of those intermittent forays into France that made up so large a part of the Hundred Years' War. He was taken prisoner near Rheims and ransomed in the following year; the King himself contributed towards his ransom. Well trained and intelligent pages did not grow on every bush. Meanwhile he was promoted as a courtier. In 1367 he was attending on the King himself and was referred to as "Dilectus Valettus noster"...our dearly beloved Valet. It was towards that year the CHAUCER married. His bride was Philippa de ROET, a lady in attendance on the Queen. EDWARD III soon began to employ his beloved valet on important missions abroad. The details of most of these are not known, but appear to have been of a civilian and commercial nature, dealing with trade relations. Meanwhile
CHAUCER was gratifying and extending his passion for books. He was a prodigious reader and had the art of restoring what he had read in an almost faultless memory. He was rising by steady promotion in what we should now call the Civil Service, as a courtier. But in Dec. 1386 he was suddenly deprived of all his offices. JOHN of Gaunt had left England on a military expedition to Spain and was replaced as an influence on young King RICHARD II by the Duke of Gloucester. Gloucester had never been a patron of the poet, and filled his posts with his own supporters. We may be grateful to him for this, because he set Chaucer at leisure thereby.
It is almost certain that the poet then began to set in order and compose "The Canterbury Tales." In 1389 JOHN of Gaunt returned and Chaucer was restored to favor and office. He died on the twenty-fifth of October 1400 and was buried in Westminister Abbey. A fine tomb, erected by an admirer in the fifteenth century, marks his grave and was the first of those that are gathered into what we now know as the Poets' Corner. The Father of English Poetry lies in this family vault.