Chaucer: A European Life

General Prologue

I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.

—Jorge Luis Borges

On 4 July 1378, a bead maker, Simon Wylde de Estland, robbed a haberdasher’s shop in London. The victim, Thomas Trewe, made a list of the items that had been stolen: accessories such as caps, laces, threads, and purses; children’s clothes of different colours; musical instruments; cushion-frames; and chess sets complete with pieces described in the terms of medieval affinities as a ‘familia’ (household) or ‘mesne’ (retinue).¹ The range of items suggests a clientele who cared about their leisure time, who thought about appearance and self-fashioning, and who were interested in their children and their domestic surroundings. Notebooks and hats were jumbled up with pictures of the Crucifixion painted on fabric and items for use in the Mass.

Several details of this case illustrate aspects of the late-medieval use and understanding of space. The shop was located in the area of Paternoster Row, a street directly north of St Paul’s churchyard. This area was the centre of both the rosary-selling and the bookmaking trades.² Two kinds of products frequently recur in the inventory of stolen items: beads of many different kinds, including wood, jet, and black alabaster, and items relating to book production, such as skins of parchment, inkhorns, pencases, quires of paper, and paper covered in leather. People who worked in the same trade tended to cluster together in medieval London,³ and indeed Thomas Trewe’s two formal supporters in his lawsuit were also haberdashers (John Salle and Richard Spencer), and the accused worked in an associated trade (bead making). The specific location of Trewe’s shop is not identified by a street address. Instead, it is described by two different markers: parish (St Ewen’s) and ward (Farringdon Within), signifying ecclesiastical and civic jurisdictions. A fourteenth-century house or shop was located under more than one kind of authority, and the property holder had responsibilities to both ward and parish. As the shop was situated within the city of London itself, the case could be heard under the law of ‘infangenthef,’ a privilege that allowed the London mayor and aldermen to exercise summary justice (including execution) on thieves within the city. History, law, convention, and social practice all contributed to the particular character of Trewe’s shop and to the fate of the man who robbed it.

Geoffrey Chaucer was a Londoner, born and brought up a few streets south and east of Thomas Trewe’s place of business. At this time, he resided on the edge of the city, above Aldgate, on the eastern walls of London, but on the day when this case was heard (6 July 1378) he was in Italy, having been sent on a diplomatic mission to Lombardy.⁴ This was his second trip to Italy, and he was particularly suitable for these missions because of his urban background. Although by the 1370s he had become a member of the royal household and a retainer of John of Gaunt, his background was mercantile and urban. His upbringing in the city of London had given him the opportunity to mix with Italians and to learn the language.⁵ Growing up in a wealthy merchant’s house on the banks of the Thames, watching the ships come in bringing products from all over the world, provided a cosmopolitan childhood for the boy who was to become an exceptionally cosmopolitan poet. Items sold in Trewe’s shop demonstrate the importance of international trade networks for medieval Londoners. Trewe sold a great deal of paper, for instance, which was almost certainly imported from Italy.⁶ He also had piper quernes (pepper mills) for sale to feed the affluent class’s insatiable appetite for pepper, a luxury product that traversed the world.⁷ This appetite had provided the foundation of Chaucer’s comfortable upbringing, as his grandmother’s first husband had been a pepperer, and she and her subsequent two husbands had continued to live in the heart of the spice traders’ quarter. Chaucer’s life and his poetry were embedded in and determined by a world of international trade, manuscript exchange, multilingual creativity, and the movement of things and ideas across ever-changing borders.

In writing a biography of Chaucer, I’ve chosen to tell the story of his life and his poetry through spaces and places, rather than through strict chronology. Each chapter focuses on a particular space that mattered in Chaucer’s life, as I attempt to recreate multiple kinds of environment. Some are actual places, such as Vintry Ward or Florence. Some represent contemporary structures that mattered both socially and in the contemporary imagination, such as the Great Household or the Inn. Others are more abstract and draw on key metaphors used by Chaucer, such as the Cage or the Threshold. In every case, my aim in exploring the space is to find out more about Chaucer’s imaginative development—as opposed to his emotional life, which I believe is beyond the biographer’s reach.⁸ The spaces and institutions in which Chaucer lived and worked, and the places that he visited, shaped him as a person and as a poet.⁹ I have therefore maintained a roughly chronological structure, as one of my interests is to track how Chaucer the poet developed to emerge as the confident innovator of the Canterbury Tales.

The arrangement of space participates in the very construction of identity: our understanding of the nature of selfhood is contingent upon our understanding of private and public spaces, of the boundaries of the individual. Chaucer lived, for instance, in the public space of itinerant great households, between a set of rooms and an office in London, south of the river in Kent, and in a house in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. His life was also profoundly determined by more abstract institutional spaces, such as Parliament, which was going through a period of rapid change, or the house of Lancaster (headed by John of Gaunt), a shaping influence on Chaucer’s entire life and the lives of his children. His travels around Europe gave him access to different modes of living and to multicultural societies. He spent time imprisoned in France, visited international courts in Navarre and Milan, and had opportunities to read and acquire manuscripts of European poetry. Most of his travels involved negotiation and trying to open up and maintain connections, both through marriage and peace talks and through trade agreements. The physical space between different countries was well understood by a man who had ridden from England to Italy at least twice, and who crossed the mountain passes of the Pyrenees in February. The global economy was also vividly present to Chaucer, a boy brought up in the heart of London, where expensive products from as far afield as Indonesia were sold.¹⁰ Later in life, he saw the darkest side of global trade networks when he visited Genoa, where Tartar slaves were for sale, having been trafficked through Caffa and on into Italy.

A recent biographer of Shakespeare, Charles Nicholl, draws on forensics when he cites Locard’s Exchange Principle, that ‘every contact leaves traces.’¹¹ To try to understand the imagination of the poet, throughout this book I explore the things that surrounded him, the streets he walked, the communities in which he participated, and the structures that he inhabited. As the son of a wine merchant, and as a man who spent many years deeply involved in the wool trade, Chaucer’s life was bound up with the movement of things between England and the Continent. In his writings, too, Chaucer was interested in materiality, in the literal terms of metaphor and how they signify, in the naturalistic depiction of rooms and objects. To give one example: in Book III of Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus runs to fetch a cushion for Troilus to kneel on as he petitions Criseyde for sexual favour (964).¹² Pandarus’s use of a prop underlines his role as author of the episode—a role that Chaucer has dramatically expanded and altered from Boccaccio’s version. But the prop itself also merits attention.¹³ What did a cushion mean to a fourteenth-century reader? Cushions were highly desirable domestic objects in the later fourteenth century: owning a cushion made a statement. The objects being sold in Thomas Trewe’s shop demonstrate the growing importance of interior comfort and an idea of the home at this time. Trewe sold frames for cushions and he also sold quirky items such as a ‘flekage,’ probably a decorative fly cage to be hung up on the wall, as well as more standard decorative objects such as mirrors.¹⁴ Prosperous merchants as well as members of the higher echelons of society were increasingly interested in spending disposable income on comfortable interiors: soft furnishings such as tapestries and cushions were becoming more and more popular.¹⁵ Pandarus’s Trojan house is designed and furnished like a smart fourteenth-century London home, with its large public area, its (semi)private spaces, its lavatory, and its accessories.¹⁶ Around the middle of the fourteenth century, well-off Londoners started to build parlours, reception rooms for socializing and conversation separate from the more public great hall. By the later part of the century, we see a multiplication of private chambers on the upper floors of London houses, developing the earlier fashion for having one private room, or ‘solar.’¹⁷ Pandarus’s house evokes contemporary understandings of the public and private and contemporary interest in domesticity and home comforts.

Aristotle explored place in detail in his Physics, a widely read text in the late Middle Ages, defining place as the ‘innermost motionless boundary’ that contains things. He emphasized its wonder-ful nature, writing that ‘the power of place must be a marvelous thing and be prior to all other things.’¹⁸ Medieval commentators supplemented the Greek topos idea of place-as-container with the Latin ubi, meaning ‘where something is.’ Scholarly discussions about space and place influenced medieval poetry too; Matthew Boyd Goldie has recently argued that Chaucer evokes debates about Aristotelian ideas in his rhyming of ‘place’ and ‘space’ in the ‘Knight’s Tale,’ for instance.¹⁹ More generally, medieval poets were fascinated by the symbolic and imaginative potential of place. Indeed, place functioned as a crucial metaphor in many medieval poems: as Sarah Kay comments, ‘Readers are forever being invited to locate themselves on a path somewhere, by some fountain, in some study, or within some garden, castle, or city.’²⁰ Many poets came to focus not on static places but on the journey through different locations; in dream vision in particular, dreamers often move across multiple places, which represent the complexity of the landscape of the mind. Throughout his work, Chaucer repeatedly uses natural landscapes, buildings, and the movement between various locations to depict psychological journeys; he shows us in detail how our understanding is directed by the kinds of structures we inhabit and the objects that we see.²¹ Chaucer’s specific interest in the contingency and variability of perspective can be compared both with the work of contemporary visual artists such as Giotto and with the work of contemporary scientists.²² One of the fourteenth century’s most original thinkers, the philosopher, mathematician, economist, and astronomer Nicole Oresme developed and refined the arguments of Jean Buridan about the movement of the cosmos and relativity, speculating about the rotation of the earth. In Joel Kaye’s words, Oresme formulated ‘a fully relativized perspectival system,’ arguing, for instance, that if one day the earth revolved and the heavens were still, and the next day the heavens revolved and the earth were still, ‘everything would appear exactly the same both today and tomorrow.’²³ At the time of Chaucer’s birth, thinkers were newly able ‘to imagine the cosmos as a working system with no privileged point of viewing.’²⁴ Oresme, like Giotto and Chaucer, was fully aware that how you perceive space is determined by where you are standing.²⁵

Chaucer repeatedly contrasts the aerial, bird’s-eye perspective with the street-level view, and the viewpoint of the idealist with that of the pragmatist. In his earliest poem, the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer tells us that you have to look with someone else’s eyes in order to understand their perspective (1051). He also, however, makes clear the near-impossibility of escaping one’s own standpoint. Even in a dream, his body remains relentlessly present and physical. The House of Fame depicts the narrator, Geffrey, caught up by an eagle, who comments upon how heavy the poet-avatar is: ‘Thou art noyous [annoying] for to carye!’ (574). This whole scene parodies part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but while Dante moves from a partial perspective to revelatory enlightenment, Geffrey remains an embodied presence, limited by his own weight, symbolizing the limitations that prevent any of us from experiencing complete understanding. Chaucer is a deeply secular poet, with no interest in supporting the grandiose claims of the Italian poets laureate who aspired to be poet-theologians.²⁶ Rather, his brilliance lies precisely in his understanding that all perspective is partial, and that therefore we need to hear as many voices as possible. The Canterbury Tales does many different things, but its greatest achievement is to demonstrate the importance of reading each tale, or version of events, in conjunction with other tales, other versions, as Chaucer blends and juxtaposes sources, styles, and genres. In marked contrast to other contemporary tale collections, such as the Decameron or the Confessio Amantis, Chaucer makes this variation of perspective absolutely central to the text by presenting us with tale-tellers from widely different social backgrounds.

In this biography, I trace the journey of Chaucer’s life, from his early experiences of travelling, reading, and beginning his career under the patronage of the royal family, through his centred years at the Custom House in London, where he found time to become a fully fledged and prolific poet, to his mature years in Kent and Westminster, working in various parts of England and writing the Canterbury Tales. This is a literary biography, and throughout I am interested in the ways that the texture of Chaucer’s poetry illuminates his life, and vice versa. I hope that this book will be of interest not only to scholars and students of literature and history but also to a broader audience: Chaucer’s life and writings have much to teach anyone interested in European cultural history and its place in the world.

Chaucer evolved from a poet writing imitative dits amoureux (French-inspired love narratives) to a poet of unprecedented innovation and power.²⁷ His reading was exceptionally varied, and he wrote in an extraordinary range of genres. He did all this while holding down numerous day jobs, travelling frequently, and living through events including the Rising of 1381, several parliamentary rebellions, and finally the usurpation of the throne. His life story is a European story, everywhere dependent on the translation—the carrying across—of ideas, texts, and things. It is the story of the development of one of the most surprising imaginations in literary history, an imagination that changed what poetry could do.

¹ See Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: Letter-Book F, 1337–1352 (London: John Edward Francis, 1904), fol. ccxxii, 267–68. Folios ccxvii–ccxxv comprise cases of the delivery of ‘infangenthef’ (discussed below), 1338–1409. The description and valuation of the contents of the shop are translated and printed in Henry Thomas Riley (ed.), Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 422.

² C. Paul Christianson, ‘The Rise of the Book-Trade,’ in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3:128–29. ‘Paternoster’ was another word for ‘rosary’; for the making of rosaries in Paternoster Row, see Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 112.

³ See, for instance, Erik Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation,’ in Daniel Wakelin and Alexandra Gillespie (eds.), The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 181.

⁴ Martin Crow and Claire Olson (eds.), Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 53–61.

⁵ Wendy Childs, ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century,’ in Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65–88. Robert R. Edwards terms Vintry Ward Chaucer’s ‘first Italian place,’ in ‘Italy,’ in Susanna Fein and David Raybin, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 7.

⁶ Edward Heawood, ‘Sources of Early English Paper Supply,’ The Library s4-X (3) (1929): 305–7. See also Orietta da Rold, ‘Materials,’ in Gillespie and Wakelin, Book Production, 12–33.

⁷ See Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–11.

⁸ I do not mean to imply that this is inevitably the case for biographers of all subjects, but in the case of a subject who has left no personal correspondence, diaries, or records of conversations, I do not think we can understand that person’s emotional life.

⁹ Gaston Bachelard argues that the spaces in which we live are the fundamental reflections of our intimate selves. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 3–73. On the ‘affective bond between people and place of setting,’ see also Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

¹⁰ On the spice trade, see Freedman, Out of the East, 1–11.

¹¹ Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 16.

¹² Quotations from Chaucer’s writings are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

¹³ As James Krasner comments, ‘the tangible dynamics of our everyday lives create our identities.’ Krasner, Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Space (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 2.

¹⁴ Riley, Memorials of London, 422n5. The mirrors are ‘specularia,’ mistakenly translated by Riley as ‘spectacles.’ Spectacles were, however, imported and sold in London at this time in large quantities. See Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 71–72.

¹⁵ P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘The Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity in Later Medieval England: A Material Culture Perspective,’ in Maryanne Kowaleski and P.J.P. Goldberg (eds.), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 132–33.

¹⁶ For detailed discussions of Pandarus’s house, see Saul Brodie, ‘Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,’ Speculum 73, no. 1 (1998): 115–40; and H. M. Smyser, ‘The Domestic Background of Troilus and Criseyde,’ Speculum 31, no. 2 (1956): 297–315.

¹⁷ John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 66.

¹⁸ Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:315–446, 1:212a20 (361), 1:208b32–33 (355); emphasis mine.

¹⁹ Matthew Boyd Goldie, Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 63–65.

²⁰ Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 2.

²¹ Writing recently about the House of Fame, Kathryn McKinley comments that ‘Chaucer pursues extremely complex intellectual problems … by thinking through a set of objects—three buildings and their very material features.’ See Kathryn McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016), 71.

²² See chapter 6 in this study. For discussion of Giotto and space, see Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

²³ Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 461; Nicole Oresme, Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde, ed. and trans. Albert Menut and Alexander Denomy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 522–23.

²⁴ Kaye, History of Balance, 458.

²⁵ On medieval optics more generally, see Michael Camille, ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,’ in Robert Nelson (ed.), Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 197–223.

²⁶ On Chaucer and Dante, see Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). For a recent discussion of what it means to term Chaucer ‘secular,’ see Megan Murton, ‘Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 75–107.

²⁷ For more information about the dit amoureux, see Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 75–80.

PART I

BECOMING

Prologue

Book II of Chaucer’s House of Fame opens with an address to the audience: ‘Now herkeneth every maner man / That Englissh understonde kan’ (509–10). The language could hardly be more straightforward; the invitation includes all social classes and emphasizes that the narrator is interested in a local, English audience. However, in the next few lines, he refers to figures from the Bible, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and the Aeneid, appealing to the Muses, and meditating on the nature of thought processes and the workings of the brain. This juxtaposition of tones and textures is entirely typical of Chaucer’s poetic style. Indeed, part of Chaucer’s talent lies in his ability to be all things to all readers: his texts are funny, accessible, and full of local interest and recognizable details, but they are also highly sophisticated and erudite, rooted in a world of international learning and culture. He can describe a local community, based around a recognizable university town and an abbey, with a blacksmith, carpenter, students, and parish clerks, visualizing even the contemporary shoe fashions worn by the antihero, cut to look like the windows of St Paul’s, a building known to all his early listeners and readers.¹ But his writings are also steeped in French, Latin, Tuscan, and Hainuyer poetry, he translated late antique philosophy and paid homage to Muslim scientists, he was multilingual, and he was exceptionally well travelled. His ability to bring together the popular and the learned, the global and the local, and the international and the parochial has enabled generations of different kinds of readers to think that their souls are ‘congenial’ to his.² In his own lifetime he wrote texts that (at least aspirationally) addressed the greatest nobles in the land, and that were certainly read by courtiers, but that were read and sold in urban merchants’ halls and by brothel owners in inns as well.³ How did Chaucer gain his international sophistication and his interest in writing for a broader audience than a court or great household alone? Were there tensions between Chaucer’s fundamental debts to courtly traditions and his emergence as a poet of the marketplace? And why did this cosmopolitan man decide to write in the unpromising vernacular?

Chaucer was born around 1342 in Vintry Ward in London, the area of the city dominated by vintners and hosting more immigrants than any other part of the city.⁴ Just over thirty years later, in 1374, he returned to London, to live above Aldgate, and to work on the waterfront, in the Custom House, dealing with wool exports and the flow of international trade on a daily basis. The first section of this book is about what happened to Chaucer between those dates, in the first thirty or so years of his life. These were years of exploration, literal and metaphorical. He was born in London and he circled back to London, but in between he was a prisoner of war in France, a trade envoy in Italy, and a diplomat of some kind in Navarre and also in France. He married a woman whose family came from Hainault, and he travelled extensively around England. Intellectually, by the time he returned to London he had begun making poetry and was ready to embark upon an extraordinary period of writing. He had read widely in Latin and especially French texts; he had almost certainly written his first long narrative poem (the Book of the Duchess) as well as shorter poems and translations; and he was acquainted with many poets and thinkers at the English court. He returned to London ready to begin building his poetic identity: in the next decade, he was to produce almost all of his major works, apart from the Canterbury Tales. When he returned to London, Chaucer was a married man and a father of at least two children, and his mother was still alive, although his father had died a few years earlier. He was a retainer both of the king and of John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster.

Over the next few chapters, I recreate the environments that mattered most to Chaucer in the early years of his life: his first home in a prosperous, outward-looking, but then plague-stricken city (chapter 1, ‘Vintry Ward’), his first job in a structure that influenced his life and poetry in all kinds of ways (chapter 2, ‘Great Household’), and his first trip abroad to a country that signified war and poetry to the English (chapter 3, ‘Reims and Calais’). I then move on to the French borders in chapter 4, discussing two no-longer-independent countries, Hainault and Navarre, one of which was the home of Chaucer’s wife’s family, of the queen, and of many contemporary poets, the second of which provided Chaucer with his first experience of a truly multicultural society. The penultimate chapter of this section, chapter 5, focuses on the house of Lancaster, a power base that dominated Chaucer’s whole life and supplied the context for his first long poem, and the section ends with chapter 6, about Genoa and Florence, Chaucer’s destinations in 1373, cities that brought together art, literature, finance, and trade, and set Chaucer up for his job at the wool customs.

By the time Chaucer returned from Italy in May 1373, he was poised to become a significant poet and, indeed, had embarked on a career of innovative and sophisticated writing. This first section of his life story explores how he entered into adulthood and authorship.

¹ This describes the ‘Miller’s Tale’; the shoe fashions are referred to in 3318.

² The words are Dryden’s; for a detailed discussion of this attitude to Chaucer, see Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Modern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

³ Martha Carlin, ‘Thomas Spencer, Southwark Scrivener (d. 1428): Owner of a Copy of Chaucer’s Troilus in 1394?,’ Chaucer Review 49:4 (2015): 387–401.

⁴ Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 97.

CHAPTER 1

Vintry Ward, London

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience.

—James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In the early 1340s, in Vintry Ward, London—the time and place of Chaucer’s birth—a book went missing. It wasn’t a very important book. Known as a ‘portifory,’ or breviary, it was a small volume containing a variety of excerpted religious texts, such as psalms and prayers, designed to be carried about easily (as the name demonstrates, it was portable).¹ It was worth about 20 shillings, the price of two cows, or almost three months’ pay for a carpenter, or half of the ransom of an archer captured by the French.² The very presence of this book in the home of a merchant opens up a window for us on life in the privileged homes of the richer London wards at this time: their inhabitants valued books, objects of beauty, learning, and devotion, and some recognized that books could be utilized as commodities. The urban mercantile class was flourishing, supported and enabled by the development of bureaucracy and of the clerkly classes in the previous century.³ While literacy was high in London, books were also appreciated as things in themselves: it was not unheard of for merchants to accept books as payment, as a form of treasure.⁴

The man from whom this book was stolen, Benedict de Fulsham, lived in Vintry Ward, and had worked with wines, as the king’s butler, although he was primarily a pepperer, employed in the lucrative spice trade.⁵ The thief, Richard de Pembroke, was a tailor, probably a lowly one. Standing as pledges for the prosecution were two local men: one of these men was Richard Chaucer, the step-grandfather of the poet and himself a vintner, although he lived in the neighbouring Cordwainer Ward, a few streets away.⁶ The case was heard by the mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen of London on the Wednesday after the Feast of the Translation of St Thomas the Martyr, in the fifteenth year of Edward III’s reign. This description of the date (12 July 1341 in our terminology) foregrounds the importance of both the king and the church. Time was measured according to the number of years that the monarch had been on the throne, and according to the moment in the liturgical year, a timescale punctuated by saints’ and feast days. On a more microlevel, the very rhythms of the week and the day were determined by the time of the church too: there were meat-eating days and fast days, and the time of day tended to be marked in relation to the canonical hours, such as prime, terce, and nones.⁷ But merchant’s time moved to a different beat: to the logic of the flow of money, to the rhythms of payment, delivery, debt, and interest, and to the calculation of the cost of delay.⁸ For the society into which Chaucer was born, city, church, monarch, and trade guild all exerted their pressures.

London life, then, was carefully regulated and ordered by a number of authorities. Another case, also from around the time of Chaucer’s birth, illustrates the street-level policing of life in Vintry Ward. This case—heard on the Wednesday before the Feast of the Circumcision in the seventeenth year of Edward III (31 December 1343)—concerned an ‘affray’ in Vintry Ward three days earlier.⁹ John de Oxford, John de Cleuf, and Henry de Ledham were walking, holding a light before them, when they encountered John Harris, the beadle of the ward, and his men at La Ryole. They passed peacefully, but a little way behind them followed two more of John de Oxford’s company, without a light. The beadle asked them what they were doing without a light, and where they were going, and a quarrel broke out. John de Oxford and Henry de Ledham now returned, drew their swords, and assaulted the beadle, wounding him in the right arm. The scenario immediately illustrates the careful policing of the wards. The beadle and his men were actively watching the nighttime streets and were alert to anything being done in darkness. Whether they were engaged in nefarious or innocent pursuits, John de Oxford and his friends were armed and drew their swords at the first hint of trouble. The incident occurred at La Ryole. The name of the street—a version of La Reole, a town in Bordeaux—is testament to the number of Gascon dwellers (many temporary, some more permanent) in Vintry Ward, and to the importance of the wine industry in the fabric of the ward. The name became corrupted to the Tower Royal or La Royal, because the king owned property there, and his mansion became the Queen’s Wardrobe. The street reached up to the border of Vintry Ward and Cordwainer Ward, and it is likely that the beadle was policing the boundaries of the ward, the edge of his jurisdiction. Such boundaries were not marked by walls or other physical divisions; streets cut across multiple wards, and parishes could also straddle more than one ward, but everyone knew where the authority of one ward ended and another began.

Violence broke out quickly. John de Oxford, who is depicted as the instigator of this Vintry Ward affray, was a skinner, engaged in the often putrid but very lucrative fur trade. His name tells us his origins, and other contemporary documents identify him as the servant of Henry of Eynsham.¹⁰ Eynsham is a small settlement very close to Oxford, so we see here immigrant men from the same area working together in London. This was not the only time that John was engaged in fights in the street, and he was even imprisoned in 1340.¹¹ His standing, however, was not affected: we find him in 1344 designated as one of twelve upstanding skinners with the good of the trade at heart, appointed to inspect the practices of others within the trade.¹²

These cases give us a snapshot of Vintry Ward in the early 1340s, before the demographic and social upheaval brutally wrought by the plague, before the English victories at Poitiers and Crécy, before the dramatic rise of English as a literary language. These were years on the cusp of change. This was the decade in which gunpowder was developed and gold coins were first minted in London; at court Queen Philippa was patronizing Hainuyer poets from her native land; over in France and Italy, Machaut and Boccaccio were writing some of their greatest works—works that were to be hugely influential on Chaucer.¹³ While all educated English people knew French (and educated men all knew Latin), Chaucer’s Thameside mercantile upbringing gave him the opportunity to mix with Italians and to learn their language—a skill that was to transform not only Chaucer’s own poetry but English literature.¹⁴

Vintry Ward was located on the river, where cargos of Gascon wine were unloaded and stored in the vintners’ cellars before the ships were sent back to the Continent, piled high with English wool. To live in the middle of things, at the pulsing centre of a hectic, ever-moving city, is to experience a constant, intoxicating assault on the senses. The sounds of the city came from all sides: sellers shouting their wares, civic proclamations, the snufflings of animals such as pigs who found their way into houses and shops, carts and horses rumbling down the streets, and the bells. There were no public clocks in London yet, though they would arrive soon, and the tolling of the church hours was an important way of structuring the day.¹⁵ The small square mile or so of the walled and gated city supported 108 parish churches, including Chaucer’s parish church, St Martin in the Vintry, so churches could be seen everywhere, punctuating the urban landscape.¹⁶ At street level, the cityscape comprised densely built tenements, many of which were made up of shops fronting the street with living quarters above and behind. Houses extended up about three storeys and down to the cellars, particularly important for the vintners (plate 1). Rooms also overhung the streets, although they had to be at least nine feet up so that a man could ride a horse underneath.¹⁷ In Vintry Ward, there were some magnificent residences, and the impressive houses owned by the wealthy merchants, complete with gardens and courtyards, were juxtaposed with multi-occupancy tenements.

There were, of course, public health problems in the medieval city. Chaucer’s family property stretched back to the Walbrook, a river that today is wholly subterranean and that, in Chaucer’s day, carried sewage to the Thames. Some people defecated in the open, animals could not easily be controlled, and offal, blood, and dung were transported out of the city in open carts.¹⁸ But civic officials were very much occupied with implementing public health measures. London had an aqueduct for piping water around the city, streets were regularly cleaned, and privies were common. The foremost historian of London cautions that ‘there is no reason to suppose that medieval London was unduly squalid,’ and that the worst problems developed in the sixteenth century, when the population rapidly increased.¹⁹ Sweet, more exotic smells were also to be found; incense was burnt in every church and a little way to the north of Chaucer’s home, near the house of his grandparents, the pepperers congregated around Sopers’ Lane. They sold a dazzling array of spices that would bewilder even the most sophisticated modern cook.²⁰ The fourteenth-century desire for spices supported an extraordinary trade that brought the products of Southeastern Asia to the shops and tables of London.²¹ More commonly, in the streets, cookshops, alehouses, and brewhouses of London, one might eat a hot pie and drink some ale—or, in a tavern, one could drink wine.²² Wine was the lifeblood of Chaucer’s family and their neighbours, and wine created the wealth and royal contacts that established the social identity of the Chaucers, along with other well-off vintners. The English strongly favoured the wines of Gascony; German wines were of much less interest to the medieval English palate.²³ Standing in these streets—in Thames Street, where Chaucer lived, or on one of the myriad lanes, such as Three Cranes Lane or Oxenford Lane, that led off this major thoroughfare—one might touch almost anything: the warm fur worn by prostitutes as well as queens, the smooth stone of a church, a hard silver coin minted nearby in the Tower, the soft dough being taken to the baker’s for cooking or the warm loaf of bread being brought back home, the heavy barrels of wine on which the area depended, a sheet of stiff parchment on which crucial accounts were carefully kept.²⁴ Vintry Ward, ca. 1342, was a place of excitement, business, corruption, entertainment, and opportunity.

For a newborn baby, interiors are more important than streets. Chaucer was lucky. He was born to comfortably off parents who lived in a spacious house, and both his parents, John and Agnes, were alive for his entire childhood and young adulthood. When he was born, his extended family, in similarly affluent circumstances, lived close by. His grandmother, Mary, with her third husband, Richard Chaucer, lived on Watling Street, in Cordwainer Ward, in a house that Mary had originally inherited from her first husband, John Heron, a pepperer. (Her second husband, Robert Chaucer, was Chaucer’s grandfather.) Chaucer’s uncle, Thomas Heron, John’s constant associate and friend, was based just round the corner from John and Agnes.²⁵ Chaucer was born at a time when the idea of domesticity and the home was increasingly important.²⁶ In the middle of the fourteenth century, not only did households seek privacy from outside observers, as lawsuits relating to overlooking and intrusion illustrate, but city dwellers were also concerned with the privacy of the individual within the house, demonstrated by the multiplication of rooms in London houses.²⁷ The kind of house that Chaucer was born in had private spaces as well as public areas, and contained relatively luxurious furnishings. The Chaucer home—probably 179 Thames Street—certainly had extensive cellars and private rooms.²⁸ There would have been a large hall, rooms upstairs known as ‘solars’ or living rooms, bedchambers, and a privy. The family might have all slept in one bedchamber, with apprentices in another bedroom.²⁹ An inventory of the Vintry Ward home of a prominent vintner, Henry Vanner, taken in 1349, describes a house with a hall, three chambers, a kitchen, a storeroom, a chamber below the hall, a shop, and a cellar.³⁰ Working from home, or living in the office, were standard practice for medieval merchants, whose houses were also places of business, and the household comprised the nuclear family plus apprentices and servants.³¹ Women often took part in running the business, and might keep running it themselves if they were widowed. Households such as Chaucer’s were furnished and decorated with tapestries and hangings, comfortable beds and cushions, and display objects, such as silver plates and cups.³² He would have had a cot to sleep in and soft coverings to keep him warm.

Simple things matter to babies: being warm, having good-quality milk—his mother would have been well nourished, and generally mothers breast-fed their children themselves, until their child was between one and three—and being comfortable.³³ Most of all, of course, babies need to be loved. We can’t hope to find out anything about John and Agnes’s emotional connection with their son, but most medieval parents loved their children, as do most modern ones,³⁴ and contemporary accounts and advice manuals demonstrate that parents cared about the same eternal issues of childcare as new parents do today—most pressingly, often, how do you help the baby get to sleep? How do you soothe them? Bartholomeus Anglicus, writing in the thirteenth century, recommended rocking a baby to sleep, and singing to them, methods that are still the preeminent ways of getting babies to sleep.³⁵ Very wealthy households even employed someone as a ‘rocker’ in nurseries.³⁶ Parents or nurses and babies sometimes co-slept, not simply because of lack of space but for comfort.³⁷ Indeed, a scurrilous story was spread that the real John of Gaunt had been accidentally smothered by a nurse in this way and replaced in the royal nursery by a butcher’s son.³⁸ Some advice manuals reveal neglect and abuse: William of Pagula’s manual, written about fifteen years before Chaucer’s birth, warns that parents must not tie a baby into a cot or leave them unattended for too long.³⁹ Contemporary London records tell of tragedies and atrocities—a baby eaten by a pig, others killed by fire along with their parents in cramped living quarters, and, rarely, infanticide.⁴⁰ Chaucer’s young life, though, was privileged, and he is likely to have been cossetted and protected, insulated from some of the most egregious dangers of city life.

We do not know Chaucer’s exact date of birth, but it was probably in 1342 or 1343. In 1386, he declared that he was more than forty years old, and that he had borne arms for twenty-seven years. If he first bore arms in 1359 (on the French campaign in which he was taken prisoner), he is likely to have been sixteen or seventeen at that point, possibly a little older.⁴¹ He was born, then, when Edward III had been on the throne for about fifteen years, after his father, Edward II, had been deposed in 1327. Edward and Phillippa of Hainault already had several children, including Edward the Black Prince, Lionel of Antwerp (one of Chaucer’s first employers), and John of Gaunt, who was to be very important in Chaucer’s life, and who was almost exactly the same age as him. Babies were born at home and baptized within a day or so at the parish church. Baptism was a fairly traumatic experience for the brand-new baby, as it involved immersion in water three times. The baby, with father and godparents, but not the mother—who was not allowed to enter the church until she underwent the churching ceremony a few weeks after birth, and who anyway would have been recovering from the difficulties of giving birth without much medical help—gathered in the porch or doorway of the church. The baby, as a non-Christian, could not enter the church before she or he had been instructed, exorcised, blessed, and named. The party then went to the font, near the door, for the anointing and baptism ceremony. The ritual had several different parts; its central purpose was to bring the child into the Christian community so that she or he had the chance of ultimate salvation. This entry into the Christian community also, of course, made the baby a member of an earthly group, the large community of Christians and the small, local community of the parish. The godparents, who usually lived nearby and hence were on hand, gave gifts and often the name; they became the child’s spiritual family. The child’s name—in this case, Geoffrey—was repeated twenty-four times during the service, in a symbolic establishment of his identity as a valued individual, set now on his path in life, with the support of his parents, their friends (the godparents), and the structures of the parish.⁴²

St Martin Vintry offered a secure parish home. One of four churches in Vintry Ward—the others were St Michael Paternoster, St James Garlickhythe, and St Thomas Apostle—it was the church most specifically associated with the wine merchants; it provided an identity with a long history and a prestigious pedigree. Three hundred years earlier, not long after the Norman Conquest, it had been termed the baermannecyrce, the church (cyrce) of the carriers or porters (the baermanne—the men who bore things). It was, in other words, the church of merchants, of traders. There are several references to it as baermanecherche throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁴³ In 1299, it was rebuilt, largely at the expense of Matthew Columbars, who had left money for this purpose in his will. He was a Bordeaux wine merchant who had been the king’s chamberlain, or taker of wines, throughout England, responsible for choosing and buying the king’s wines. His arms were placed in the east window of the church.⁴⁴ The church, dedicated to St Martin, patron saint of the vintners’ company, was dominated by the wine trade. A few years after Chaucer’s baptism, for instance, the wealthy John Gisors, alderman, mayor, MP, and politician, scion of a patrician family that had long been dominant in London trade and politics, was buried in the church, before the rood.⁴⁵ Chaucer, the son of a prominent vintner, became part of a community that offered protection and stability.

Unlike the Gisors family, Chaucer’s own family did not have a long London provenance. His great-great-grandfather, Robert le Taverner, or Robert de Dinehinetune, was from Ipswich, in Suffolk. He was also known as Malen or Malyn of London, which suggests he traded in the capital as well as in East Anglia. Malyn seems to have been the family name, with Dinehinetune referring to their village, and taverner to their trade. His son, Andrew de Dynyngton, was married to Isabella, and was based in Ipswich.⁴⁶ Their son, Robert, went to London, where he became the apprentice to a mercer, John de Dowgate, also known as John le Chaucer. This John de Dowgate/Chaucer, had business dealings with John Heron, a wealthy pepperer. In 1302, John de Dowgate/Chaucer was involved in a street fight and eventually died of his wounds. He left a quarter of his business to his apprentice, Robert, who took his name as a token of respect.⁴⁷ And when John de Dowgate’s friend, John Heron, died, Robert married his widow, Mary. This couple were Chaucer’s grandparents, the parents of his father, John Chaucer. Robert held royal appointments, as deputy to the king’s butler, Henry de Say, in London, in 1308,⁴⁸ and as collector in London for customs on wine levied on merchants from Aquitaine in 1310.⁴⁹ Robert and Mary’s son, John, was born around 1312, and Robert died two or three years later.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, he still had family connections back in Ipswich, notably his sister, Agnes, who had married Walter de Westhale. Mary Chaucer, widowed for the second time, married again, this time to Richard Chaucer—we do not know if he had a relationship to Robert or to Robert’s erstwhile master. In 1324, anxious to secure John Chaucer’s inheritance from his own father (her brother), Agnes de Westhale abducted her nephew, hoping to marry him to her daughter. This dramatic episode is attested to in the subsequent lawsuits: Agnes and Geoffrey Stace (whom she would later marry) kidnapped John, a child of about twelve, from Cordwainer Street and carried him off. His stepfather, Richard, and half-brother, Thomas Heron, pursued the abductors to Ipswich, where they robbed Agnes of £40 worth of property. John was returned to his parents unharmed, and unmarried. After protracted lawsuits, the Chaucer family was awarded enormous damages of £250 by a London court in 1327.⁵¹

Family squabbles, jealousies, and infighting dominated high politics in England at this time too. In 1326, Queen Isabella, her lover, Roger Mortimer, and her teenage son, Edward of Windsor, had invaded England and taken up arms against Edward II, Isabella’s husband and Edward of Windsor’s father. Towards the end of the year, the king was captured. London strongly supported Isabella and Prince Edward and pushed for the deposition of Edward II and his replacement by his son. In January 1327, Edward II was indeed deposed, although he was not killed, and his son was crowned on 1 February. That night, a Scottish army attacked England, and plans were formed for a counterattack.⁵² In the summer, John Chaucer and his half-brother Thomas Heron, along with a troop of Londoners, took part in a shambolic campaign against the Scots. The following year, as tensions mounted in the country and Henry, earl of Lancaster, mobilized against Mortimer, John Chaucer was amongst a group who rode to fight with Lancaster against Isabella and Mortimer. This venture too collapsed, and a number of Londoners were summoned to appear at the Court of Hustings in 1329; those who failed to appear, including John Chaucer, were outlawed.⁵³ However, this is unlikely to have had much force or meaning, especially as Edward III was shortly to topple Mortimer and have him executed, with the support and help of the earl of Lancaster.

In the 1330s, John Chaucer entered into sober adulthood and became established as a wine merchant. His name often crops up in city records in association with other well-respected merchants. He travelled to Europe; for instance, in 1338 his name appears in a list of men to whom the king issued letters of protection just before an English army went to fight in France, basing itself at Antwerp. Vintner Henry Picard and John Heron also figure in this list.⁵⁴ He shipped wool between Ipswich and Flanders around the time of Chaucer’s birth.⁵⁵ Chaucer’s mother was Agnes de Copton, daughter of John de Copton, and niece of Hamo de Copton, who owned quite a lot of property in and around the city.⁵⁶ In material terms, both of Chaucer’s parents brought wealth to the marriage and both were Londoners and owners of London property. By 1342, around when Chaucer was born, John’s name appears, consenting to city legislation about wine, alongside other well-known vintners, such as Thomas Gisors and John de Stodeye.⁵⁷ In the 1360s, John Chaucer appears in the records as a supporter of Richard Lyons, a merchant who rose to extraordinary wealth and influence, was impeached by the Good Parliament, emerged relatively unscathed, but was then executed by the rebels during the Rising of 1381.⁵⁸ The inventory for Lyons’s house in Kerion Lane, at the heart of Vintry Ward and very close to the Chaucer residence, survives and bears witness to the lifestyle of the richest residents of the ward.⁵⁹ As well as detailing the contents of his ship, several taverns, and a shop, the inventory divides the house into the following rooms: ‘sale,’ ‘parlour,’ ‘principale chamber,’ ‘seconde chambre,’ ‘tierce chambre,’ ‘chapel,’ ‘garderobe,’ ‘naparie,’ ‘petit garderobe,’ ‘chapman chaumbre,’ ‘autre chambre pur autres,’ ‘panetrie et botellie,’ ‘cusyne,’ ‘larder,’ ‘stable,’ and ‘comptour.’ Featherbeds, occasional tables, chandeliers, chaise longues, and cushions abound.⁶⁰ Chaucer grew up surrounded by solid wealth, amongst people who cared about comfort and about lovely things.

The structures and communities of late-medieval London were idiosyncratic. A family’s identity was strongly tied both to ward and to parish. The ward was the bigger structure. London was divided into twenty-four wards at this point (in 1394 Farringdon was split in two, making twenty-five). The ward was an instrument of city government: the wardmote, a gathering of all the men in the ward, both householders and servants, under the direction of the ward’s elected alderman, met to elect jurors or advisors to the alderman, hear new civic legislation, discuss necessary public health and safety measures, and complain about antisocial and illegal behaviour. Being part of a ward meant taking some of the collective responsibility for making sure that the streets were clean, that precautions were taken against fire, and that brothel owners were made notorious. Ordinary householders knew that they could be the focus of criticism and accusation if they built illegal extensions, threw dung onto the street, or ignored price controls.⁶¹ The wards had markedly different characters. In 1304, a list of aliens (foreigners) who protested about paying a tax demonstrates that they were living in only eight of the twenty-four wards. Vintry Ward had the most immigrants, mainly from Gascony, the hub of the wine trade. Adjoining Dowgate was the home of Germans and people from the Low Countries; those from Spain, Italy, and Provence lived in the wards of Cordwainer, Cheap, and Langbourn.⁶² While there are certainly cases in which we see Londoners closing ranks against foreigners, we can also find cases in which European immigrants were treated with notable equity. One case, centering around the nonpayment of money owed for wine, which should have been paid on a quay in the Vintry, involved a Gascon merchant and a London apprentice. It went before a jury deliberately comprised half of Gascons, before going to the arbitration of four members of the vintners’ guild, and the decision was in favour of the Gascon merchant.⁶³ The existence of nearby Olde Iuwerie, however, so named after the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, reminds us that not all immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, were treated equally.⁶⁴

As a riverside ward, the Vintry must have been strongly influenced by all the immigrants and products arriving at the docks and being transported further into the city; it was a borderland, a transition point between the English market and the rest of the world. Ships arrived every day. They brought wine from Gascony, England’s most important import, but they also brought skins, furs, and leather from Spain; fish, timbers, beeswax, grain, iron, zinc, and copper from German and Baltic lands; squirrel skins from Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary; other skins from Russia, Finland, and Estonia; spices and silks from the Far East via numerous middlemen; glass, paper, and fustian from Italy; and sugar, fruits, and alum from the Mediterranean.⁶⁵ To see these ships unload, to experience the shops of London, to live in a wealthy household complete with luxury fabrics and sophisticated spices and wines, was to be aware of a global economy on a vast scale. References to products in Chaucer’s poetry often include their place of origin—‘cloth of Reynes’ (Book of the Duchess, 255); ‘a steede of Lumbardye’ (‘Squire’s Tale,’ 193); ‘outlandish [foreign] ware’ (The Former Age, 22)—suggesting that their provenance added to their value; people cared about the origin of their goods. The wharfs of Vintry Ward and the Thames itself were the doors and road that led to this greater world, a world everywhere evident within the ward itself.

Being part of a parish provided a different kind of identity. But just as the ward made its wealthiest members feel part of a global network, part of the superstructure of London, and part of a local community, so the parish rooted its members in international Christendom, in the English church, and in the diocese, while primarily being a local organization. Crucially, laypeople in the parish were not the passive recipients of the church’s services. They had responsibility for the upkeep of parts of the church, gave money to the church, and assisted with regular duties, such as locking up holy oil, chrism, and the host, and covering and locking the font. Some parishioners gave generous bequests.⁶⁶ The church was more than a place of worship for parishioners; it was a community centre where people might go for meetings, or to trade, or even for a cockfight.⁶⁷

Every church was supposed to contain a diverse range of objects, according to surviving lists of diocesan instructions. Above all, each church was supposed to have a range of books, including a manual, ordinal, missal, collect book, a legenda (of saints’ lives and scriptural lessons for readings), a number of music books, and a copy of the statutes of the synod. Not all churches had all these things, but they do all seem to have a reasonably wide range of items.⁶⁸ Chaucer’s parish church also contained an altar to St Thomas Martyr: Thomas à Becket, the great London saint whose shrine at Canterbury was to provide the never-reached goal of the Canterbury Tales. As well as attending weekly Mass, Chaucer, along with the other parishioners, heard instruction four times a year on six points: the fourteen articles of faith, the ten commandments of the law and two of the Gospel, the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, and the seven sacraments. Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, confession to one’s parish priest was mandatory every Lent; at this time the priest, if he were conscientious, also inquired into the confessant’s religious knowledge.⁶⁹ Each church was staffed by a few men—perhaps a deacon and subdeacon, as well as the priest; at the least a parish clerk and perhaps a holy water clerk or boy.⁷⁰ In the poll tax of 1381, St Martin Vintry returned three chaplains as well as the rector.⁷¹ St Martin Vintry would have been a constant part of Chaucer’s life, perhaps from the very day of his birth, certainly from the first few days, a place for worship and instruction, but also a place of gathering and belonging.

We do not know if Chaucer had siblings. There is a much later reference to Katherine, wife of Simon Mannyng, as Chaucer’s sister, and Chaucer did have connections with Simon, mainprising him (standing surety for him in law) in 1386.⁷² Most wealthy families in this period ended up with only two or three surviving children, so it would not be unusual if Geoffrey were the only child to survive.⁷³ It is very likely that he did have siblings who died either at birth or in infancy; certainly all children saw infant mortality at close hand in this era. Whether or not he had siblings as playmates, Chaucer was brought up in a district where everyone knew everyone else and where his father was a well-known personage; his childhood was embedded in his parents’ social networks, and it was probably highly social. Toys tend to be ephemeral and few have survived, but those that have bear witness to the essential similarity of many aspects of play across the centuries. Medieval children, it turns out, liked playing with toy cooking sets, dolls, and knights on horseback; in other words, they engaged in imitative and imaginative play, acting out what they saw adults doing and pretending to be grown-ups themselves.⁷⁴ Very wealthy children had more technical, mechanical toys.⁷⁵ Children played outside, particularly with balls, and also went swimming and fishing; inside they learnt games of skill, memory, and chance, such as dice, backgammon, draughts, chess, and cards.⁷⁶ Young children spent a lot of time with their parents and often followed the parent of the same gender: records of accidents show us that boys seem to have been outside more with their fathers, while girls led a more domestic existence.⁷⁷ We can’t know what kind of child Chaucer was—confident or introverted, the centre of attention or an observer, imaginative or orderly, careful or physically bold—but we can be sure that his early life was inflected by his father’s business. The life of a merchant’s son was infused with trade, with the products and practitioners of international importing and exporting, and with London retail too; business was everywhere in the houses and streets in which Chaucer spent his early years.

In 1347, John Chaucer got a new job: in February, he was appointed as deputy to the king’s butler, John de Wesenham, in Southampton; a couple of months later he was also made the deputy for collecting customs on cloth and beds exported by foreign merchants from Southampton, Portsmouth, Chichester, Seaford, and Shorham.⁷⁸ The position of deputy butler was essentially that of a tax collector, but one with specialist knowledge of wines.⁷⁹ The king’s butler appointed several deputies to oversee the purchase of wines in different ports, and both John’s father and his stepfather had held similar appointments.⁸⁰ John’s second role, exacting customs on the export of woolen cloths and beds, reflected the complexities of the wine trade as merchants tried to fill up their ships in both directions.⁸¹ The