Geoffrey Chaucer

Catching up from a backlog for project #EuropeanBios, entry #34 is Geoffrey Chaucer, a poet who wrote the Canterbury Tales. If you knew that already you knew more about him than I did when I started this biography. But Chaucer's life turns out to be incredibly relevant to 2020.

Unlike the biography of Dante Alighieri that I read, 85% of which was a complete waste of time that blathered on about poetry, this one is an actual biography and uses Chaucer's life to tell the story of what life was like then and includes a number of fun facts.

Chaucer also has a neatly direct connection to our previous subject, Isabella of France, in that he spent nearly all of his life (1342-1400) in service to the royal family under Edward 3, Isabella's son, so this is chronologically almost a sequel.

Chaucer was born in London and lived at 179 Thames Street, making him the first subject of this project to have a regular street address, a sign that we're approaching modernity. (Marco Polo's house still exists and has an address, but didn't at the time)

Chaucer's biographer talks at length about how different social roles were in Chaucer's time, in a way that we don't appreciate now. In particular, in Chaucer's time the definitions of "public" and "private" spaces were rapidly evolving, as were the ideas of "home" and "work".

Chaucer's family were wealthy wine merchants at a time when those were an influential political force. This status allowed him to obtain a job as a teenager in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, a rich Countess. But being part of a household was more a lifestyle than a "job".

As part of a household, you lived and ate and slept where your boss was. That might be a single physical place but more often they would have several huge homes and would move between them over the year. You had no choice about where you were or when. Your job was your life.

Your employer was also responsible for dressing you, and nobles are competitive, so you would be dressed expensively in the latest fashions in order to show off your boss' wealth. The risqué fashion at the time for men was to aggressively highlight the groin.

Fun fact: Chaucer and his fellow servants were dressed so sluttily that when the Black Death swept through London and decimated the population their provocative clothing was in particular blamed as evidence of moral breakdown that the plague was sent to punish.

Chaucer got a series of jobs as a messenger, a diplomat, a soldier and eventually as a comptroller at the customs house, a substantial position which he kept for a long time and gave him money and time to write. This idea of a job, separate from your identity, was new.

At the same time that the nature of work was changing, so was the nature of buildings. Noble houses, previously a series of huge interconnected rooms, were being given hallways: the idea that a room could be closed off and private was novel, even to kings and queens.

A similar transformation was happening in more humble houses: instead of a single large room, homes were being divided into smaller rooms, some public and some private. It's hard to imagine a time when the idea that your house has private space was novel, but this was it.

This process of creating separate rooms created another new phenomenon: different spaces for "working" and "living". Until then, your home and where you worked were exactly the same. A blacksmith lived in his smith, a farmer lived on a farm. Now that was changing.

You can probably see where I'm going with this: in Chaucer's time the concept of privacy emerged. People's homes became private spaces. Their office became a separate room, then a separate building from their home. This was a profound social change that 2020 has reversed.

Now for a lot of people their home and office have become the same again. In Zoom chats every day we catch glimpses of everyone's home, eroding the privacy of the space. These concepts, separated in the 14th century, are merging again in the 21st, a profound change.

Chaucer wrote poetry and I'm sure it was great. His fortune rose and fell as the nobles he worked for struggled for power in complex and uninteresting ways. But what struck me was the way his home and work life in the 1300s changed in exactly the opposite way to mine in 2020.