50 Fun Facts About Geoffrey Chaucer

Which Chaucer poem is thought to hold the first recorded link between Valentine's Day and romantic love?

Parlement of Foules sets a parliament of birds choosing their mates on the saint's feast, and no earlier romantic meaning for Valentine's Day is known.

In 1374 King Edward III rewarded Chaucer with a daily gallon of which drink for the rest of his life?

Wine by the gallon was granted on Saint George's Day, when artistic work was traditionally rewarded, so it is read as an early royal nod to his poetry.

Chaucer was captured at the siege of Reims in 1360 and ransomed by the king during which long conflict?

The Hundred Years' War took the young Chaucer to France with the English army, and Edward III paid £16 towards his release.

In The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims ride to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of which murdered archbishop?

Thomas Becket was cut down inside the cathedral by knights of Henry II, and the martyr was soon reputed to have healing powers.

Chaucer was the first writer buried in what became Poets' Corner, inside which church?

Westminster Abbey buried Chaucer as a royal official and tenant, not for his verse; a grander tomb followed in 1556 and Edmund Spenser was later laid nearby.

Which English actor played Geoffrey Chaucer opposite Heath Ledger in the jousting film A Knight's Tale?

Paul Bettany's scene-stealing Chaucer won him the London Film Critics' Circle award for British supporting actor of the year.

Chauntecleer, the vain hero of the Nun's Priest's Tale who is flattered and snatched by a fox, is what animal?

A rooster so proud of his crowing that he shuts his eyes to sing, Chauntecleer escapes by coaxing the fox into opening its mouth to boast.

The famous opening lines of The Canterbury Tales praise the sweet showers of which month?

April's rain ends the drought of March in the poem's first lines, and with spring comes the urge to go on pilgrimage.

Chaucer wrote a prose manual for his ten-year-old son Lewis explaining how to use which scientific instrument?

An astrolabe guide for a child is an odd legacy for a poet, yet Chaucer's is sometimes cited as the first technical writing in English.

When Anglo-Norman French and Latin dominated literature at court, which vernacular did Chaucer write his poetry in?

Middle English in the emerging London dialect was Chaucer's choice, and almost two thousand words are first recorded in his manuscripts.

At which Southwark inn do Chaucer's pilgrims gather before setting out on the road to Canterbury?

The Tabard was a real inn, opened in 1307 where Borough High Street met the old road to Canterbury and Dover.

What prize, paid for by all the other pilgrims, does the Host promise for the best Canterbury tale?

A free meal back at the inn was the stake, but the contest is never settled because Chaucer finished only a fraction of the stories he planned.

Which merchant-turned-printer chose The Canterbury Tales as one of the first books printed in England?

William Caxton studied the new trade in Cologne and ran a press in Bruges before opening his Westminster shop, some seventy-five years after Chaucer died.

Which author of the Decameron wrote the poems Chaucer reworked into the Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde?

Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida became the Knight's Tale, cut from nearly 10,000 lines to 2,250, and his Il Filostrato became Troilus.

Which playwright co-wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, with John Fletcher?

William Shakespeare went back to Chaucer more than once: Troilus and Cressida also draws on one of his poems.

In Chaucer's tale of three rioters who set out to kill Death, what do they find beneath an oak tree?

Gold coins by the bushel make the three forget their quest, and greed finishes the job as each plots against the others until all are dead.

A knight in one Arthurian Canterbury tale has a year and a day to learn that women most desire what?

Sovereignty over their husbands is the answer an old hag trades for the knight's hand, and when he lets her choose her own form she turns young and faithful.

In the Miller's Tale, the student Nicholas tricks the carpenter John into expecting which disaster next Monday night?

A great flood, twice as bad as Noah's, is the lie that puts the carpenter in a tub hung from the rafters while Nicholas slips off with Alisoun.

Which Duke of Lancaster, Chaucer's patron, became his brother-in-law by marrying Katherine Swynford?

John of Gaunt wed the sister of Philippa Chaucer in 1396, and three years later his son took the throne as Henry IV.

What is the name of the Southwark innkeeper who proposes and judges the Canterbury storytelling contest?

Harry Bailey was a real man, and one study argues the Prologue's cast echoes his own 1381 poll-tax list of Southwark residents.

Which seven-line stanza form, introduced to English poetry by Chaucer, carries his Troilus and Criseyde?

Rhyme royal may take its name from James I of Scotland, who used the stanza for his Chaucerian poem The Kingis Quair.

Rhyming pairs of five-stress lines, pioneered by Chaucer in The Legend of Good Women, go by which name?

Heroic couplets went on to carry most of The Canterbury Tales and were later polished by John Dryden and Alexander Pope.

Chaucer's long poem Troilus and Criseyde sets a doomed love affair against which ancient war?

The Trojan War stays in the background while Troilus, a son of King Priam, courts Criseyde by letter with her uncle's help.

Which sly uncle in Troilus and Criseyde, the lovers' go-between, gave English a word for catering to base desires?

Pandarus became 'a pander' thanks to Chaucer's poem, at first a noun for someone who furthers other people's illicit love affairs.

Which early Chaucer dream poem has a black-clad knight mourning White, a figure for Blanche of Lancaster?

The Book of the Duchess is thought to be Chaucer's first major work, and its repeated word White is almost certainly a play on the name Blanche.

In Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame, which bird snatches the narrator and carries him into the sky?

An eagle swoops as Chaucer tries to flee, lifts him skyward and, when he faints, rouses him by calling his name.

Chaucer made a prose translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by which sixth-century Roman?

Boethius was a hazard as well as a hero for Chaucer, whose Latin copy was probably corrupt, which explains some slips in the translation.

In the Clerk's Tale, which peasant bride endures a series of cruel loyalty tests from the marquis Walter?

Griselda bears her trials so meekly that her story recalls the biblical Book of Job, asking only for a proper burial when her child is taken.

The Canon's Yeoman's Tale exposes the shady tricks of practitioners of which medieval science?

Alchemy is described so accurately that Elias Ashmole later cited the tale as proof Chaucer had mastered the science himself.

Which Arts and Crafts designer's Kelmscott Press produced a lavish Chaucer with 87 Burne-Jones wood engravings?

William Morris drew many of the designs and initials himself, and the Chaucer became the most famous of the 53 books his press published.

Which Italian director filmed The Canterbury Tales in 1972 and cast himself as Geoffrey Chaucer?

Pier Paolo Pasolini made it the second film of his Trilogy of Life, between The Decameron and Arabian Nights, and it took the top prize at Berlin.

Which centuries-long change in spoken English, begun soon after Chaucer died, makes his rhymes sound foreign today?

The Great Vowel Shift reshaped the long vowels of English between roughly 1400 and 1700, and its causes are still not fully understood.

Which Canterbury pilgrim sells fake relics and admits that he preaches against greed purely for personal gain?

The Pardoner preaches that greed is the root of all evil, then brazenly tries to sell his pardons to the very pilgrims he has just confessed to.

Which Canterbury pilgrim ends the storytelling with a prose treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins?

The Parson declines to tell a story at all, and the Host agrees that a sermon from him is the fitting way to close the contest.

Which post at the port of London did Chaucer hold for twelve years while writing many of his major poems?

Customs comptroller meant watching the duty collectors, who were presumed to cheat, while the Exchequer in turn kept watch on him.

Chaucer sat in the Wonderful Parliament of 1386 as a knight of the shire for which English county?

Kent had become his home by then: he was already a justice of the peace for the county when it sent him to the 1386 session.

In the Knight's Tale, the cousins Palamon and Arcite fight a tournament for the hand of which sister-in-law of Theseus?

Emelye prays to Diana to stay unmarried, but the dying Arcite, victor of the contest, urges her to take Palamon instead.

In the Merchant's Tale, where does young May meet her lover Damyan while blind old Januarie waits below?

In a pear tree is where the god Pluto catches the pair and restores the old man's sight, but Proserpina hands May a ready excuse.

A crater named after Geoffrey Chaucer in 1970 lies on which body in the solar system?

The Moon's Chaucer crater sits beside the walled plain Hertzsprung, on the hemisphere that always faces away from Earth.

Which narrative structure does The Canterbury Tales share with the Decameron and the One Thousand and One Nights?

Frame story collections spread west over the centuries, and Chaucer's twist was that each pilgrim tells his own kind of tale.

Which genre of bawdy comic tale from medieval France did Chaucer rework in stories such as the Reeve's Tale?

Fabliau writers mocked the church and the nobility with cheerful obscenity, and some 150 of the French originals survive.

Which queen's story opens Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women, ahead of those of Thisbe, Medea and Dido?

Cleopatra leads a parade of wronged heroines that Chaucer writes as a penance, after the god of love scolds him for showing women in a poor light.

Which poet, famed for his sonnets to Laura, does Chaucer's Clerk claim to have heard his tale from in Padua?

Petrarch had translated the story into Latin in 1374, holding up its heroine as a model of constancy.

Chaucer's son Thomas, chief butler of England for almost thirty years, also held which high office five times?

Speaker of the Commons was only part of it: Thomas was elected to Parliament fifteen times, and his daughter Alice married the Duke of Suffolk.

Which burlesque romance about a knight seeking an elf-queen does Chaucer's own pilgrim tell until the Host interrupts?

Sir Thopas is a joke at the author's own expense: the Host cuts in to call the rhyming worthless, so Chaucer tells the Tale of Melibee instead.

Chaucer first appears in records in 1357 in the household of which noblewoman, a daughter-in-law of Edward III?

The Countess of Ulster's household accounts are the first of nearly 500 records of Chaucer's life, and the post put him close to the royal court.

Which illuminated copy of The Canterbury Tales, with a famous portrait of Chaucer on horseback, sits in California?

The Ellesmere manuscript is named for the Egerton family, earls of Ellesmere, who sold it to the collector Henry Huntington in 1917.

What name is given to the closing passage of The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer asks forgiveness for worldly works?

The Retraction disowns Troilus and the tales that tend toward sin, and nobody can agree whether Chaucer meant it sincerely or as one last irony.

In a short comic verse, Chaucer wishes a scalp disease on a careless man named Adam who did which job for him?

Copied his poems, as his scrivener: the verse dreads the day Adam must write out Boece or Troilus anew.

The Second Nun's Tale in The Canterbury Tales recounts the life of which saint, a Roman noblewoman married to Valerian?

Saint Cecilia's legend is a hagiography, a devout change of pace told by a nun whose own name the reader never learns.