Professor Marion Turner

speaker

759 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 29 May

Professor Marion Turner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Geoffrey Chaucer: the medieval father of English literature · 27 Feb 2026 podcast

Because if you think about the country as a whole, you've got the same amount of land to farm, for example, but half the number of people to farm it.

So what's going to happen?

Wages go up.

I mean, everything's affected, right?

Because all over Europe, you've got a much lower workforce.

So everything is harder to do.

But it means that people are then able to be paid more.

So the wine still comes in and the Chaucer family are not only...

fine economically in that level but they also inherited a lot because again the people who survived they're inheriting so both his parents inherited property and land and money from their relatives who had died in the plague so there's a lot of social mobility after the plague it's actually the late 14th century is an amazing time for social mobility people can move jobs if their employer isn't paying a decent wage they can go to another employer or they can move to the city

The government passed lots of laws to try and stop employees from asking for higher wages, but it didn't work.

So we've got massive inflation and wage inflation.

If you were alive, you were then doing well.

Yeah, yes.

Well, he would have gone to school.

So people of this kind of middle-class level went to grammar school and that's what Chaucer did.

So we don't have his school records, but there were several schools in London, including one at St Paul's.

They had lots of books.

He would probably have learnt to read and write at home when he was very small and then went to grammar school.

Education.

So the schools were only for boys, though well-off girls would also have been literate.

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