It is to Mr Furnivall that we are indebted for finally settling the parentage of Chaucer. Speght in the course of his researches had hit upon the name of one Richard Chaucer, a vintner, who died in 1348, and made a bequest to the church of St Mary Aldermary. Merely on the ground of the name, Speght supposed this to be the father of Chaucer; but Urry and Tyrwhitt, in the 18th century, disputed this, and wished to give the poet a higher lineage, because in the grant of a pension made to him in 41 Edward III. he was described as “valettus noster.” Mr Furnivall settled the question by bringing to light a deed dated 1380, in which Chaucer, relinquishing his right in a house belonging to his father, described himself as “the son of John Chaucer, vintner.” By other documents this John Chaucer is shown to be the son of Speght’s Richard. It is thus established that both the poet’s father and his grandfather were London vintners. The precise date of his birth has not been ascertained. The accepted date till lately was 1328 The difficulty with this date was his being described as. “forty years and upwards” in 1386, and of late opinion has inclined to 1340 as a more probable year. This is favoured by the discovery that the poet was Richard Chaucer’s grandson and not his son, and fits in better with the facts than 1328.

How Chaucer was educated, whether like “Philogenet,” the name which he assumes in the Court of Love, he was “of Cambridge clerk,” and how he was introduced to the notice of the court, is left to conjecture. His name occurs in the household book of the wife of Prince Lionel, second son of Edward III., in 1357, probably, Mr Furnivall conjectures, as a page. He bore arms in Edward III.’s invasion of France in 1359, John Chaucer being also in the expedition, probably in connection with the commissariat. There was little fighting in that expedition, the ravages of the English for several years before having left little to fight for; but in the course of a disastrous retreat, compelled rather by hunger than by martial force, Chaucer was taken prisoner. In 1360 the king paid £16 for his ransom. From 1360 to 1366 there is a gap in the record of his life; but in the latter year his name occurs in a list of the members of the royal household as one of thirtyseven “esquires” of the king, who were to receive a gift of clothes at Christmas. By this time also he would seem to have been married, if the Philippa Chaucer, one of the demoiselles of Queen Philippa, who in 1366 was granted a yearly pension of ten marks, was, as is most probable, his wife (see the discussion of the question in Sir H. Nicolas’s memoir). In 1367 Chaucer himself received a pension of twenty marks from the king, being described as “dilectus valettus noster.” To show that in being courtier and scholar he had not ceased to be soldier, he took part in another inglorious expedition against France in 1369, in which from the Fabian tactics pursued by the French king there was little opportunity for distinction He was back in London towards the end of 1370, and henceforward devoted himself to more peaceful pursuits. His talents for diplomacy and his acquaintance with commerce were recognized by the crown. In 1372 he was despatched to Genoa as a commissioner to arrange a commercial treaty with the Genoese. About this embassy much has been written on the supposition that he may have made the acquaintance of Petrarch in the course of his visit to Italy. Whether in recognition of his services or on other grounds, he received on his return, in 1374, the grant of a pitcher of wine daily; and soon after, in further evidence of the royal favour, he was appointed comptroller of the customs and subsidy of wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London. In 1376 he was associated with Sir John Burley on some secret service, the nature and place of which are not known, and in 1377 he was sent on the secret mission to Flanders. And it was not merely in commercial matters that the poet was considered serviceable; in 1378, after the accession of Richard IL, he was attached to a mission sent into France to negotiate a marriage for the young king His fortunes continued steadily to improve; with his pension of twenty marks from the king, £10 from the duke of Lancaster, his allowance for robes as one of the king’s esquires, his salary as comptroller, his payments for occasional services, his pitcher of wine (commuted in 1378 into an annuity of twenty marks), and his wife’s pension, he had no reason to complain that his genius was neglected. The wonder was that his genius was not smothered. His employment as comptroller was not a sinecure; he was bound to write the rolls of his office with his own hand, and he had to be continually present at his office, not having the option of appointing a deputy. Apparently as he rose in the world he was allowed to make an easier arrangement; in 1382 he was appointed comptroller of the petty customs of the port of London, with the privilege of appointing a deputy, and in 1385 he was allowed to appoint a deputy for the other comptrollership. In 1386 he touched the summit of his fortune, being returned to Parliament as a knight of the shire of Kent. But that was an unfortunate year for him; his patron, John of Gaunt, lost his ascendency at court, and a commission which sat to inquire into the abuses of the preceding administration superseded Chaucer in his two comptroller-ships. In the course of two years he was obliged to transfer his annuities to another man, probably selling them for a sum of ready money. The return of Lancaster to power in 1389 again brightened his prospects; he was appointed clerk of the king’s works, and four years afterwards obtained a grant of an annnity of £20. How much he wanted this assistance appears from the fact that he was several times obliged to apply for small portions of it in advance. When Bolingbroke came to the throne in 1399 he gave the old poet an additional annuity of forty marks, which came in time to comfort the last year of his life. The minutes of his pension cease in 1400, and, according to the inscription on his tomb, he died on the 25th of October of that year

These are the main facts of Chaucer’s life as brought to light by successive investigators, and they form a tolerably complete outline biography, more complete than Spenser’s or Shakespeare’s. They are significant facts, throwing light on the singularly varied circumstances, aptitudes, and occupations of the man, supplementing in a really substantial way what may be gathered from his works. They show that Chaucer was not merely a poet and a scholar, deeply read in what then passed for science and philosophy, as well as in the rich literature of his poetical predecessors, but a soldier, a courtier, a man of business, familiar from the circumstances of his birth and subsequent rise in position with all sides of the life of his time, ready to undertake any kind of employment that his powerful patrons chose to obtain for him,—comptrollership of customs, secretaryship of an embassy, diplomatic commissionership, guardianship of a minor. Mr Furnivall has also discovered that, rather late in life, he was charged with being concerned in the “raptus” (abduction, probably) of a girl, which would show that he was willing to undertake more questionable services, unless the “raptus” was for his own benefit. Great caution must be observed in trying to fill up from hints in his poems the gaps in the documentary facts of his biography,—great caution, that is, if we wish to get at the truth and not merely to speculate for the sake of speculating. Antiquarian speculators are usually more distinguished for fancy than imagination. They catch at hints and push them to conclusions without having imagination enough to take account of qualifying considerations. Thus it has often been taken for granted that in the description of the poet of the Canterbury Tales, we have an authentic portrait of Chaucer himself. The poet is a very quiet unobtrusive man, and the Host, master of the ceremonies, suddenly casts his eye on him, and addresses him in his bullying way :—

What man art thou? quod he.

Thou lookest as thou wouldst find an hare, For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. Approachè near, and lookè merrily.

Now ware you, sirs, and let this man have space.

He in the waist is shapen as well as I; This were a puppet in an arm to embrace For any woman, small, and fair of face. He seemeth elvish by his countenance, For unto no wight doth he dalliance.

There is no reason to suppose that this quaint, shy little figure was any more like Chaucer than the Spectator was like Addison or Steele. The allusion to his waist, coming from the burly host, is evidently jocular, and the whole picture is in all likelihood a humorous description of the opposite of Chaucer’s own appearance. We must be particularly careful in accepting literally the statements of a writer one of whose favourite veins of humour, appearing in every one of his works, is self-depreciation. We should remember that Chaucer wrote for a limited audience, all of whom knew him personally, and for whose amusement he was in the habit of making comical allusions to himself. His jokes were more of the nature of family jokes than we are now accustomed to in writings intended for wide and promiscuous circulation. When he made the eagle in the House of Fame complain of his being heavy to carry, or promise to make him the butler of the gods, or append to the statement that he lived like a hermit, the qualification —“although thine abstinence is little,” or remind him that he had had no personal experience of love, he knew that these little jests at his own expense would be fully appreciated by his few readers. The extreme of frivolous conjecture is reached when it is supposed that his wife was a termagant because he “chaffs” women frequently. His graceful and chivalrous compliments to women are quite as frequent as his chaff. There is, indeed, one passage in the House of Fame which is pretty clearly intended for his wife, that where the eagle cries “awake” to him—

Right in the samè voice and steven (sound) That useth one I couldè neven (name).

But if it had been anything more serious than commonplace conjugal banter, he would hardly have dared to circulate it. A conjecture of an equally frivolous kind is that he was unmarried in 1369, because in that year he spoke of having suffered for eight years pangs which none but one could heal. The pangs may have been matrimonial pangs, or pangs of poverty, or purely imaginary pangs, officially becoming in the poet-narrator; but Mr Furnivall is so convinced that the poet’s sickness was a real lovesickness, and that he was not then married to the queen’s demoiselle Philippa Chaucer, that he accounts for this lady’s name by supposing her to have been Chaucer’s cousin.

A similar inelasticity of conjecture appears in the grounds on which certain of the works commonly attributed to Chaucer are rejected as spurious. The Testament of Love, the Assembly of Ladies, and the Lamentation of Mary Magdalene bear no internal marks of being Chaucer’s, and are now universally rejected j but of late some commentators have adopted a test of genuineness which would deprive us of several works which are in no respect unworthy of Chaucer’s genius. It is known from Chaucer’s own statement in the undisputed Legend of Good Women that he translated the Roman de la Rose, but Mr Bradshaw refuses to believe that the extant translation, of which we have only one 15th century manuscript, can be his, because its rhymes do not conform to a rhyme-test which Chaucer observed in works which are undoubtedly his. The extant Romance of the Rose admits the adverbial ly to rhyme with the adjectival or infinitival ye, and it cannot be Chaucer’s because y is never allowed to rhyme with ye in the House of Fame and the Canterbury Tales. For the same reason—no other of any shadow of validity has yet been adduced—the Court of Love, which Mr Swinburne calls “that most beautiful of young poems,” and the Flower and the Leaf, which Dryden and Hazlitt have praised and quoted as a choice example of the poet’s genius, have also been pronounced to be spurious. We cannot give up such poems unless more urgent reasons are advanced for their confiscation. They cannot be set aside as spurious so long as their variation from the rhyming rule, which the commentators have shown much ingenuity in detecting, can be explained in any reasonable way. There is no getting over the plain question which every one asks when first told that they are not Chaucer’s. If they are not his, who else could have written them? Is it conceivable that the name of the writer of such works could have been utterly unknown in his own generation, or if known could have been by accident or design so completely suppressed? If he deliberately tried to palm them off as Chaucer’s upon the transcribers, would not this rule of rhyme have been precisely the sort of mechanical likeness which he would have tried to preserve l The Court of Love we have special reasons for declining to give up. It might be argued that, though the Flower and the Leaf bears internal marks of being Chaucer’s, although its picturesque richness, its tender atmosphere, and the soft fall of its words are like his, yet it is easy to grow the plant once you have the seed, and it may be the work of an imitator. The Flower and the Leaf professes to be written by a lady, and there may have been at the court some wonderful lady capable of it, although it passed in the monkish scriptorium as Chaucer’s. But there is some external evidence for the authenticity of the Court of Love, which also contains traces of Chaucer’s most inimitable quality, his humour. Mr Minto has put forward some minor considerations for believing this to be Chaucer’s (Characteristics of English Poets, p. 22), but the strongest fact in its favour is that the Court of Love was imitated by James I. of Scotland in the King's Quhair, and that in paying the customary compliment to his poetical masters, he mentions no names but Lydgate and Gower, who were clearly incapable of writing the poem, and Chaucer. James’s captivity in England began five years after Chaucer’s death, and it is simply inconceivable that he could have attributed the Court of Love to Chaucer in ignorance, and without having heard a whisper of its real authorship. If, indeed, this rhyme-test were absolute, we should have to treat these other considerations as inexplicable difficulties and submit. But when we remark that all the poems in which y ye rhymes occur are earlier works of Chaucer’s, if they are his at all, bearing the touch of his hand but wanting the sustained strength of his mature workmanship, and when we remember that the y ye rhyme was the common practice of his predecessors, a very simple explanation of the rhyme difficulty becomes apparent. Chaucer adhered to the practice of his predecessors till he felt strong enough to impose upon himself a restriction of his own devising.

At what periods of his life Chaucer wrote his poetry, we have no means of ascertaining. There are no manuscripts of any of his works that can be referred to his own time; the earliest of them in existence are not supposed to have been written till several years after his death. The only one of his works of which the date is fixed by an external circumstance is the Book of the Duchess; if, as is taken for granted, this was written to commemorate the death of the wife of his patron John of Gaunt, its date is 1369. Chaucer, if born in 134O, would then have been twenty-nine, and there is none of his extant works, except the translation of the Romance of the Rose, and the Dream (which we hold to be Chaucer’s, though its authenticity is not worth contending for), which can be confidently assigned to an earlier period. Philogenet, in the Court of Love, professes to be eighteen, but this is not the slightest reason for concluding that Chaucer was that age when he wrote it. The Book of the Duchess is certainly not very mature work for a poet of twenty-nine, and it is probable that Chaucer did not cultivate the art, as he certainly did net develop the faculty, till comparatively late in life. The translation of the Romance of the Rose is to all appearance the earliest of his surviving compositions. If we may judge from his evident acquaintance with dry studies, and his capacity for hard business work, the vintner’s son received a scholastic training in the trivium and quadrivium which then formed the higher education. If he had been nurtured on troubadour love from his youth up, it is exceedingly unlikely that he would afterwards have been able to apply himself to less fascinating labours. His study of mathematics and astronomy in his old age for the benefit of “little Lewis, his son,” looks like a return such as we often see in age to the studies of youth. But, indeed, he can hardly be said ever to have lost his interest in such studies, for in his theory of sound in the House of Fame and his description of alchemical processes in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue he shows a genuine scholar’s interest in the dry details of learning. His knowledge of the Trouvère and Troubadour poetry, from which his genius received its impulse, probably began with his introduction, however that was brought about, to court society. He was about seventeen at the date of the first mention of his name as attached to the household of Prince Lionel. It is permissible to conjecture that he had French poets to beguile his captivity in France a few years afterwards.

Professor Ten Brink divides Chaucer’s work into three periods :—a period of French influence, lasting up to 1372-3, the date of his visit to Italy; after that a period of Italian influence, lasting up to 1387, the supposed date of his House of Fame ; finally, a period of mature strength and originality, in which he pursued the bent of his own genius. Not much is gained by this division into strict periods. It is obvious enough that, in the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women, and the general plan of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer strikes out more unmistakably a path for himself, and exhibits a maturer power, a more masterly freedom of movement than in his earlier works, but there profitable division ends. To erect a period of Italian influence, implying that at any time the stimulus that Chaucer received from Italian sources...