The Age of Chaucer2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

John Dryden gave Chaucer the title 'Father of English Poetry' in his Preface to the Fables (1700). Chaucer earned it by raising the East Midland dialect of Middle English into a polished literary language, introducing the rhyme royal stanza and the heroic couplet into English verse, and creating the first great gallery of realistic characters in The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's career is conventionally divided into the French period (works modelled on French romance, e.g. his part-translation of the Roman de la Rose and The Book of the Duchess), the Italian period (influence of Dante and Boccaccio, e.g. Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls), and the English period (his mature, original work — The Canterbury Tales).

Rhyme royal is a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ABABBCC, introduced into English by Chaucer. He used it in Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls. It is called 'royal' because King James I of Scotland later used it in The Kingis Quair.

In the General Prologue, around thirty pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark; the Host, Harry Bailly, proposes that each tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two returning — about 120 tales in all. Chaucer completed only about 24, so the work is unfinished. It opens in April, with the famous line 'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote.'

Piers Plowman (c. 1362–1387) is attributed to William Langland. It is a Middle English alliterative dream vision in which the narrator, Will, falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees 'a fair field full of folk'. It survives in three versions, known as the A, B and C texts, and is the great poem of social protest of the age.

Confessio Amantis (c. 1390, 'The Lover's Confession') is John Gower's major English poem — a collection of exemplary tales of love within the frame of a lover's confession to Genius, the priest of Venus. Gower wrote his three major works in three languages: Mirour de l'Omme in French, Vox Clamantis in Latin, and Confessio Amantis in English.

John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) is called the Morning Star of the Reformation because his attack on Church corruption and his sponsorship of the first complete English translation of the Bible (c. 1382) anticipated the Protestant Reformation by more than a century. His followers were called Lollards.

The Pearl Poet, or Gawain Poet, is the anonymous 14th-century author of four alliterative poems preserved in a single manuscript: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness (Purity). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest Middle English romance, built on the beheading-game motif.

Chaucer wrote in the East Midland dialect of Middle English — the dialect of London, the court and the universities. Because Chaucer (and later Caxton's printing press) gave it literary prestige, the East Midland dialect became the basis of Modern Standard English.

Three events dominate the period: the Hundred Years' War with France (began 1337), which sharpened English national identity; the Black Death (1348–49), which killed perhaps a third of England's population and destabilised feudalism; and the Peasants' Revolt (1381) under Wat Tyler, the great social uprising reflected in Langland's and Gower's writing.

Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene (Book IV), called Chaucer 'the well of English undefyled', honouring him as the pure source of English poetry. The tribute is itself a favourite examination question, often confused with Dryden's 'Father of English Poetry'.

The Book of the Duchess (c. 1369) is Chaucer's earliest major work, a dream-vision elegy written on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of his patron John of Gaunt. It belongs to Chaucer's French period and is modelled on French courtly love poetry.

Chaucer died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey — the first poet to be interred in what later became Poets' Corner. His death is traditionally taken to close the Age of Chaucer, after which English poetry declined for over a century until Wyatt and Surrey.

John Barbour wrote The Bruce (1375), a long narrative poem on Robert the Bruce and the Scottish War of Independence, including the Battle of Bannockburn. It is the earliest major work of Scottish literature, making Barbour the father of Scottish poetry.

Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) is Chaucer's longest and most perfectly finished poem — a five-book narrative in rhyme royal adapted from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. Set during the Trojan War, it traces Troilus's love for Criseyde, brokered by Pandarus (the origin of the word 'pander'), and her eventual transfer to the Greek camp. The ending — in which the slain Troilus looks down from the eighth sphere and laughs at earthly grief — reflects Chaucer's translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy.

The General Prologue presents about thirty pilgrims spanning the entire medieval social hierarchy — from the Knight at the top to the Miller and Pardoner at the bottom — making it the first sustained piece of social realism in English literature and a classic example of Estates Satire (literature surveying and criticising the three estates: clergy, nobility, commons). Each portrait fuses physical detail with moral characterisation: the Prioress's coral trinket, the Monk's sleek palfrey.

The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382) is a short dream vision in rhyme royal, framed by the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero. The narrator enters a garden and watches all the birds assemble on St Valentine's Day to choose their mates; three eagle suitors debate their claim to the 'formel' (female eagle). It is the earliest extant poem linking St Valentine's Day with romantic love, and its opening line — 'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne' — adapts the Hippocratic maxim Ars longa, vita brevis.

A fabliau is a short comic tale of bourgeois trickery and bawdy adultery, originating in Old French. Chaucer domesticated the form in The Miller's Tale (the amorous carpenter and the student Nicholas), The Reeve's Tale and The Shipman's Tale, placing them in deliberate contrast to the courtly Knight's Tale that precedes them. Chaucer's 'apology' in the General Prologue — that he must report even 'villeinye' faithfully — is itself an ironic literary device.

The pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury provides the outer frame: approximately thirty pilgrims ride from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, and the Host, Harry Bailly, proposes a storytelling contest — two tales each way, best tale wins supper. The frame allows Chaucer to juxtapose radically different genres — romance, fabliau, saint's life, sermon — and to create dramatic interplay between tellers, notably the quarrel between the Knight, the Miller and the Reeve.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375–1400) is a 2530-line alliterative romance in four 'fitts': at Arthur's Christmas feast a monstrous Green Knight offers a beheading exchange; Gawain strikes, the Knight retrieves his own head. Facing the return blow a year later, Gawain flinches and keeps the Knight's wife's magic girdle — a slight failure of honour. The pentangle on Gawain's shield represents his five-fold virtue; the green girdle becomes his badge of shame and humility.

Pearl (c. 1370–1400), preserved in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and attributed to the same poet, is an elegy of 1212 lines in 101 twelve-line stanzas with a demanding concatenation scheme. The narrator, grieving for a 'pearl' (widely understood as a dead infant daughter), dreams of a heavenly landscape where the Pearl-maiden — now a bride of the Lamb — rebukes his earthly grief and visions the New Jerusalem. Its interlocking stanzas, each opening with the closing word of the previous, are among the most technically complex in medieval English.

The Lollards were the followers of John Wycliffe's reforming teachings, spreading via Wycliffe's vernacular Bible and his trained preachers after his death (1384). They rejected transubstantiation, clerical wealth and the Pope's authority in secular affairs. The name may derive from Dutch lollaerd (mumbler). Under Henry IV, the statute De heretico comburendo (1401) authorised burning Lollards at the stake; the movement was driven underground but persisted until it fed directly into the English Reformation.

William Caxton set up the first printing press in England at Westminster in 1476. His edition of The Canterbury Tales (1478) was the first major English literary text to be printed, and his presses fixed spellings and vocabulary in ways that accelerated the rise of a standard written English. By printing Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485), Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's Troilus and other works, Caxton also established the English canon for the Renaissance generation.

The Scottish Chaucerians were 15th–16th-century Scottish poets who consciously imitated Chaucer: Robert Henryson (The Testament of Cresseid — a continuation of Troilus — and the Morall Fabillis), William Dunbar (The Thrissill and the Rois, Lament for the Makaris), Gavin Douglas (the first complete translation of the Aeneid into English, 1513) and King James I of Scotland (The Kingis Quair, 1424, in rhyme royal). They represent the finest poetry of the century after Chaucer's death.

The Alliterative Revival is the mid-to-late 14th-century flourishing of Old-English-style alliterative verse in the West and North Midlands — far from the French-influenced London court: Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, Cleanness and the alliterative Morte Arthure. The Revival shows the alliterative tradition had never died in the provinces; Chaucer parodies it in The Parson's Prologue, where the narrator disclaims alliterative verse as a Southren man who cannot geeste by lettre — rhyme by letter (i.e., initial sound).

Boccaccio was Chaucer's principal Italian source: Troilus and Criseyde is from Il Filostrato; The Knight's Tale is from the Teseida; and individual Canterbury Tales find analogues in the Decameron — though Chaucer almost certainly encountered these through French intermediaries rather than the Decameron directly. The Italian journeys of c. 1372–73 and 1378 also introduced him to Dante and Petrarch, marking his transition from the French to the Italian period.

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in 1170; canonised in 1173, his shrine became the most visited in England. Chaucer's choice of destination situates his diverse company in a charged national landscape — a journey with an explicit spiritual goal — while the unfinished structure (no return tales survive, the pilgrims never arrive) leaves the Tales open-ended, as if the pilgrimage of human life is itself incomplete.

The Roman de la Rose is a French allegorical poem in two parts: Guillaume de Lorris wrote the first 4,000 lines (c. 1230) as a courtly dream vision of a lover pursuing a rose; Jean de Meun added 18,000 more (c. 1275) in a cynical, encyclopaedic spirit that attacks women and the clergy. Chaucer translated part of it — the Romaunt of the Rose — and it was the single greatest influence on his French period, shaping the allegorical dream-vision form he used in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls.