Geoffrey Chaucer

Father of English literature and poet of The Canterbury Tales

Best known for The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, writer, and civil servant.^[1] Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner received its first writer burial with him.^[1]

Last updated 2026-09-30 from the source article.

Quick Facts

Other names

Geffray Chaucer (orthographical variant), Geffroy Chaucer (orthographical variant)

Born

c. 1343

Birthplace

London, England

Died

25 October 1400

Resting place

Westminster Abbey

Occupation

Author
poet
philosopher
bureaucrat
diplomat

Era

Plantagenet

Children

4, including Thomas

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London, most likely in the early 1340s, though the precise date and location remain unknown.^[2] His father John Chaucer was an important wine merchant with a royal appointment.^[2] Chaucer became a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, in 1357 through his father's connections.^[3] The clerk of the king's works appointment came on 12 July 1389, a foreman role overseeing many of the monarch's building projects.^[4]

The sole evidence for his death on 25 October 1400, from unknown causes, is the engraving on his tomb.^[5] Because he was a tenant of the Abbey's close, Chaucer was interred in Westminster Abbey in London.^[6] His body was moved to a more elaborate tomb in 1556, which made him the initial writer buried in what is today called Poets' Corner.^[6]

What the cited sources add

Butterfield states that Chaucer's use of English was not aggressively anti-French.^[7] Butterfield explains that for Chaucer and his European contemporaries, French was the language that defined vernacular poetic authority.^[7] The Poets' Corner History records that the first poet to be buried there, in 1400, was Geoffrey Chaucer.^[8]

References

Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Geoffrey Chaucer in Context", Cambridge University Press, 2019; "Chaucer", Cambridge University Press, 2011; Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, Samantha Zacher, eds, A Companion to British Literature, Volume 2: Early Modern Literature, 1450–1660, John Wiley & Sons, 201 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Echard, "The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set", John Wiley & Sons, 2017, p. 425; Derek Brewer, "Chaucer and His World", Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 1992, p. 18–19; Marion Turner, "Chaucer: A European Life", Princeton University Press, 9 April 2019, p. 26; Briggs, "The Ipswich ancestors of Geoffrey Chaucer", Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 2024, p. 691-701; Briggs, "The Malins in Chaucer's Ipswich Ancestry", Notes and Queries, June 2019, p. 201–202; "The Oxford Dictionary of Family en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Skeat (1899); Vol. I, p. xvii. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Morley (1890), Vol. 5, p. 245. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery", Methuen, 2003 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Poets' Corner History" (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Butterfield, "Chaucer and the idea of Englishness", History Extra. facts only, no text reused. historyextra.com
"Poets' Corner History". facts only, no text reused. westminster-abbey.org

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Geoffrey Chaucer (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.