Sophie Gee

Yeah.

It's unbelievable.

Yeah.

Totally incredible.

Nice wrap up of his literary output.

I just got one PS, which is a work of kind scientific literature that he writes for his son, whose name was Lewis Chaucer, called Treatise on the Astrolabe.

which apparently is quite a credible medieval scientific, a piece of scientific technical writing.

So he had a lot of feathers to his quill, did Chaucer.

He was good at lots of things.

So we're going to kind of plunge into the history of England.

You really can't.

explain why the Canterbury Tales is so important and why the prologue is so arresting without sort of understanding what Chaucer's coming out of historically.

But before we go into the historic detail, I just want to point out again that Chaucer would have most, he would have grown up speaking English at home, but in all of that work that we've just been talking about, he would have been speaking French because that was still the language of the court and the language of

diplomatic work.

He also would have written in Latin.

And so the decision to write literature in the vernacular, in spoken English, is an extraordinary decision.

It's also quite a politically charged decision because in some

In 1362, which is when Chaucer's about 20 years old, there is an Act of Parliament passed called the Pleading in English Act.

And it's a really important piece of legislation because it said, and I'll read it actually, "...all pleas which shall be pleaded in any courts whatsoever before any of his justices whatsoever or before any of his other ministers whatsoever..."

et cetera, et cetera, shall be pleaded, showed, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English language and they will be entered and enrolled in Latin.