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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Usually, you know, higher class boys would get this kind of job.

So his father probably got him this job because his father had been a royal tax collector.

So he had connections in the royal court.

So Chaucer's first job is.

when he's just a teenager, about 14 or 15, he pops up in the accounts of Elizabeth de Boer, Countess of Ulster, who is the daughter-in-law of the king.

So the daughter-in-law of Edward III, she was married to Prince Lionel.

So a page boy is, I mean, he would have done a bit of kind of errand running and things like that.

But you're also simply a member of this lavish aristocratic household where you're also going to be doing some riding and

Yes, exactly.

So although you're doing some, as I say, relatively menial errand running, but you're mainly just kind of sitting about learning some poetry.

You're there partly to make the heads of the household look good because they can have a retinue.

He's mixing with kind of more aristocratic people, although he always stays really kind of middle class.

But he's mixing with these higher class people.

Exactly.

Well, he's often referred to in the records as Galfrida, so as the Latin version.

So, I mean, and what we often see with names is that people are referred to in slightly different ways because people were so used to code switching between languages.

I think Geoffrey is fine.

Probably, yes, Philippa.

So Philippa de Rohe.

There's a reference in the records to her being connected with the same group.

Showing 321–340 of 759 · page 17 of 38