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 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

So we're not certain, but he probably meets his wife at this point.

And she was a little bit higher class than him.

I mean, I do think this is very impressive researcher type thinking, thinking about the accounts that because it is from the accounts and people often expect that the first record is going to be might refer to something to do with his poetry, for example.

But in fact, it's a really frivolous reference.

It's a reference to his fashion choices, to his clothes.

This is where the snazzy leggings that Greg mentioned earlier come in.

So the record is simply that Elizabeth de Bourgh bought him these clothes.

And when I was researching my biography of Chaucer, I started to look up these clothes and try and find out more about what the poltok was.

Because what we're told is that she buys him a poltok with these two coloured hose, like these leggings and some shoes.

Yes, exactly.

Now, it turns out that Paltocks were brand new at this time.

OK.

So this is in the 50s, the 1350s.

Yeah.

And in the 1360s, we start to see references to the Paltock and the leggings that were associated with them.

The scandalous items.

And chroniclers in the early 1360s start to write about the fact that young men are going about wearing these clothes and that they are very tight and short and are exposing their genitals and buttocks inappropriately.

And indeed, some chroniclers said that they thought that the plague had returned to England because God was punishing people for...

for wearing these outrageous clothes.

So it's a great, you know, it's all young people's fault.

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