Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), son of a London wine merchant, was the poet who made Middle English a literary language. A royal page from 1357, he moved in court circles. Taken prisoner at the siege of Reims in 1360, he was ransomed by the king for £16, and around 1366 he married Philippa Roet, whose sister married John of Gaunt.

Italian missions introduced him to poetry he later drew on. From 1374 he controlled London's customs and sat for Kent in Parliament in 1386. In the early 1380s he began The Canterbury Tales, framed as pilgrims' tales to Becket's shrine; it remained unfinished.

Clerk of the King's Works from 1389, he took a house in Westminster Abbey's close in 1399 and died in 1400. The poet Thomas Hoccleve called him the first finder of English poetry, and in 1556 his remains were moved to Poets' Corner, its first writer.