Professor Marion Turner

Especially when childcare comes into it and all that kind of stuff. It gets fiddly. Three and three is a lot, isn't it? One of the things that's interesting is that his wife is working. People often assume that women aren't working at this time, but women have all kinds of different jobs. His wife always has a salary.

Even though a lot of the time her job is kind of hanging around, again being kind of helpful, but also just being a lady in important women's chambers. And when he's in royal service, he's getting an annuity from the king, also from other people at various times. He's also paid in wine.

Joten hän saa yhden päivän vihreän kuvan, joka myöhemmin tuntuu vuodeksi vuodeksi, joka on noin 252 galonista. Hän ei todennäköisesti syönyt kaikkea sitä. Hän oli todennäköisesti antanut sitä ihmisille, mutta vihreä on yhden päivän kuvan. Yhden päivän kuvan? Kyllä. Kuinka paljon on yhden kuvan? Se oli todennäköisesti noin galonista. Vahvaa. Kyllä.

Hän tietää kielet. Jokainen kielikoulutettu on kielikoulutettu tällä hetkellä, mutta hän tietää myös italiasta, jota hän olisi varmasti ottanut kaikkiin pankkeihin ja rahoitukseen Vintry Wardin kanssa, koska hänellä oli merkintäläinen taustaa, joten aristokraatit ovat paljon vähemmän todennäköisiä italiasta.

He had Italian, which is probably why he was picked to go on the Italian missions. Going on those Italian missions is where he then picks up and reads Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. And his reading of those poets enables him utterly to change English literature as his career goes on. We will get to that in a bit, because that is obviously incredibly important. But first I want to ask Mike some fun questions about Chaucer's very storied career. Yeah.

Though that marriage didn't happen. Maybe he wasn't very good at his job. But he still got paid, right? Yeah, he was paid by the day. You've got to get a daily rating if you're freelancing marriage negotiations, otherwise you get stiffed. Well, it helps us to know a lot about him, because we can know how many days he was absent from England because of the daily page. Oh, nice. The invoicing is good. That's great, isn't it?

John of Gaun, Edvard IIIin neljännen isä. Chaucer oli varmasti oppinut häneltä, kun hän työskennelli Elisabethista. Me tiedämme, että he olivat samassa paikassa silloin. John of Gaun oli niin tärkeä, että kun Edvard III kuoli, hänen vanhempansa isäni olikin hänen eläintensä. Joten hänen isänsä, 10-vuotias Richard II, tuli isänsä.

Obviously a 10-year-old can't really become king, can't do much. So his uncle, John of Gaunt, was the one who was really in charge. So John of Gaunt was really running things. The regent. Yeah, not officially, but was largely running things. So from 1377 for several years. John of Gaunt had also married Blanche of Lancaster, who was the greatest heiress in the kingdom. So we now often talk about the Duchy of Lancaster. So this is when the Lancaster lands.

start coming into the royal family. So John then becomes Duke of Lancaster. But he has all this wealth, as I say, not only because he's son of the king, but because he made a very good marriage. And the role of women is really important. So John later, after Blanche's death, and Blanche's death was the occasion of Chaucer's first poem that we know about. The Book of the Duchess was about Blanche's death.

John then made another important marriage to someone called Constance of Castile, the daughter of the king of Castile. But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swinford was Chaucer's sister-in-law.

Philippa's sister?

And then, right towards the end of Gaunt's life, late 1390s, he married his mistress. Now, no one did that. Dukes did not do that. Marries his mistress, who's relatively unimportant. They've got four illegitimate children. He gets the children retrospectively legitimated. Nice. But parliament put in a clause saying that they could never use that legitimation to give them a right to the throne. Nonetheless, all of our monarchs since Henry VII only have a right to the throne through those children, the Beaufort.

Meidän täytyy muuttaa sitä.

Gaunt ja Chaucerin isä. Ja se varmasti edusti Johna Gauntia auttamaan Chaucera. Hän auttoi hänet saamaan paljon työtä. Hän oli se, joka oli valmistunut, kun Chaucer oli saanut hänen asuntonsa Londonissa, hänen työnsä kustannuksessaan. Hän jatkoi hyödyntämään hänet. Ja asiat olivat erittäin relaktioita tällä hetkellä seksuaalisia moneja. Eli...

Chaucers' children were largely brought up in castles with Gaunt's legitimate children, his illegitimate children, Catherine's legitimate children that she had had with her husband. They were all associating together. And it meant that when Gaunt's son, Henry IV, later becomes king, he's favouring Chaucers' children as well as his illegitimate half-siblings. Because they're almost half-siblings. They've grown up together. It's a sort of commune existence. Exactly.

This is fairly middle-aged Geoffrey Chaucer. You know, he's kind of, he's quite far along in his career. Yeah, I mean, The Book of the Duchess is the first poem that has survived. So he may have written earlier poems. He may have written poems in French when he was younger. That's what most people were writing in French. But the earliest poem that has survived, yeah, he's around 30, early 1370s. And then he was just prolific. You know, he wrote so much. And today people have often only heard of The Canterbury Tales, but he wrote so much else. So from the

Early 1370s to mid 1380s, he writes several dream poems, so the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women. He translates Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy from Latin into English. He translates parts of the Romance of the Rose. He writes lots of short poems and lyrics.

He writes some of the Canterbury Tales as stand-alone texts that then later he put into the Canterbury Tales. Like the Knight's Tale, for example. Yes, exactly. Most famously the Knight's Tale. So he's writing in English, whereas it would, although some people were writing in English, it would have been more normal, especially for a court poet, someone writing kind of courtly forms, you know, love visions, dreams. It would have been more normal to write in French. Yeah.

He's also very influenced by the world around him. There's this idea that you need both. You need to read the books. He's steeped in literary influences from all kinds of places. But he's also interested in contemporary society. And I think he does take a lot of inspiration from the things that are going on around him. So we can link things like his great interest in different voices, in the common voice world.

We might link that to things like the development of the speaker in parliament at the time. Which his son became, of course. Yeah, exactly. So there's a movement at the time to allow one person to speak for others, to allow ordinary people to speak more in parliament, in petitions, in that kind of world. And then...