Father of English Poetry, as he was crowned a couple of hundred years after his death, Geoffrey Chaucer’s imprint on the physical and literary world of Kent is immense. Born probably in 1340, and dying in 1400, his career included service to King’s, administrator for customs, travels abroad on government business (during one of which, as a young man, he became a prisoner) and, though he gained no real remuneration for this in his own life, man of letters. His enduring fame is based on the latter of all of these, and on the immense impact of his deployment of modes and genres from European languages (he knew Latin, French and Italian well) into a new wholly English language idiom.
The epic `Canterbury Tales’ took up most of the last decade of his life, when the majority of his public roles which he had occupied before then were over. It was written against the backdrop of the turbulent final years of Richard the Second’s reign, his usurpation by Henry IV, and the divisions that this caused. Chaucer, though, according to one of the finest of the most recent studies of his work and life by Marion Turner, managed to keep his allegiances fluid and flexible. His marriage, young, to the courtier Phillipa, from which two children who survived came, seemed to have occurred despite their very often being in separate places. His life was, for the times in which he lived, remarkable for how restless and mobile it was. In amongst the somewhat dry records of his existence as an administrator and servant of the government, there are the odd suggestions of his complexity. The darkest is the possible reference to abusing or even raping a woman with the contemporary sounding name of Cecily Champaigne. The accusation levelled against him of `raptus’ – `almost certainly’, as Turner says, `an accusation of sexual rape’ (`Chaucer: A European Life’, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2019, 211) – is deeply unsettling. It is supplemented by the accounts of abuse in the Wife of Bath’s tale. Chaucer, by all accounts, did not live gently, a recognition that he lived in an ungentle era.
Canterbury gains greatly from Chaucer’s use of the city’s name in the title of his great work. And yet the pilgrims famously never quite reach their target. The start, in the Prologue, is clear in its intent:
`Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shire ende
Of Engelonde to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke’
Despite the specificity of its opening (at the Southwark Tabard Inn, a real place at Chaucer’s time, with the real landlord named in the poem), as Turner says `Across the Canterbury Tales as a whole, there are only a few references to the geographical whereabouts of the pilgrims’ (Ibid, 469). At the end of the General Prologue, they have reached the Watering of St Thomas, two miles from the centre of London then. In the Reeve’s Tale, Deptford and Greenwich are mentioned, then within the historic county of Kent. In the Prologue to the Monk’s Tale, Rochester figures. Sittingbourne crops up in the Wife of Bath’s prologue, Only at the end does Canterbury come a little more into view, in the Manciple’s Prologue:
`Woot ye nat there stant a litel toun
Which that ycleped is Bobbe-up-and-doun,
Under the Blee, in Caunterbury Weye?’
Bobbe-up-and-doun must be the village of Harbledown, only a couple of miles from the city, and location of a fine Norman church, St Nicholas’s, built in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc as part of a hospital for lepers. In the Parson’s Prologue, the simple line `as we were entryng at thropes ende’ (`thrope’ like thorp here meaning `village’) shows the group are emerging from the final village. They must be at the edges of the city. But they are not quite at their end. From the `Tales’ at least, they never quite get there.
The Tales themselves are diverse in their tone and references. Some cover Europe (the famous `Knight’s Tale’). Others are more domestic (the infamous `Miller’s Tale’). They cover Britain, and the wider world, almost as though they were looking out from the small band of pilgrims as they travel along their imaginary way, largely consumed by the words and stories being told, not the place they are in. The landscape around them is captured well by the beautiful engraving from 1810 by William Blake, `The Canterbury Pilgrims’ , with its soft rolling hills and fields in the background, and nothing distinctive enough to show whether it is in the real work, and if so where.
That Kent was more than just something that existed in his imagination but a real place he engaged with and knew well is easy to argue for. Chaucer himself lived in Kent, and had strong links to the county. These went in a number of different directions. Some are highly specific. In 1389, he was appointed as Clerk to the works at the Tower of London, responsible for a number of building projects in the south east of Britain. In this position he had oversight over the greatest architect of his age, and possibly of any period, Henry Yevele. Yevele is credited with the sublime perpendicular nave at Canterbury, the Westgate in the city, and Cooling Castle. Through this work, therefore, Chaucer had a role in effecting physical changes to the landscape which endure to this day. But he was also a justice of the peace in Kent from October 1385, and from 1386 a Member of Parliament for the county.
While a native of London, Kent figures throughout his adult life. It would have been on the route he would have needed to pass through on his visits to Europe from the early 1360s when conducting business in Calais and Navarre. From the 1370s, he was granted wardship of Edmund Staplegate and William Soles, two Kent residents. It was the principle place of his residence from 1386, in the era in which he as largely working on the Tales. This, as Turner notes, `strongly suggests that he was a Kentish property owner’ (Ibid 383) So it is highly likely, and fitting, that if not written in Canterbury, the Tales were at least produced in the county. For sure, the likeliest places for Chaucer’s residence was Greenwich, somewhere long been part of London. But in the 14th century this place was firmly within Kentish territory. Only in the final year of his life did he return to London, to live beside the Abbey in Westminster. It is there that he was buried, and where his grave remains to this day – in Poet’s Corner.
These specific links of the real person Chaucer to the real places Kent and Canterbury are superseded by the cultural and intellectual impact that Chaucer’s work subsequently had on moulding English as a language, and the society in which that language developed. The Tales with their diversity, multivocality, and inventiveness in their language and content are not historic documents but have remained a dynamic inspiration to the current day. In this sense, they have not reached a destination in more ways than simply arriving at a physical final place. Instead, they are constantly in process. In 1944, as the Second World War was ending, in the relatively new medium of film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger issued their `A Canterbury Tale.’ Fittingly, Powell was born in the small village of Bekesbourne, only a few miles from the city. With its haunting references to `the old road’ that somehow endures despite all change, and the images of a city which had been recently levelled by the terrible raids in 1942, the film showed the relevance of Chaucer’s work in a wholly different political and social world. In the 1970s, continuing this tradition the great Pier Paulo Pasolini directed as part of his `Trilogy of Life’ group of films, `I racconti di Canterbury’. Scenes from the film were shot nearby. One in particular having the figure of an old man who is asked by the three men in the Pardoner’s Tale where they can find death was taken at Fairfield Church on Romney Marsh. The scene of the burning of a heretic was actually shot in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral itself. Even in these simple illustrations it can be shown how Chaucer’s work continues to shape and influence the world and landscape, creating new possibilities. That gives the work is enduring fascination.