Geoffrey Chaucer was not, in his own lifetime, mainly known as a poet. He was a busy royal servant: a page in a noble household as a boy, a soldier captured in France and ransomed (the king contributed), a diplomat sent to Italy and France, and for twelve years the official in charge of customs on wool in the Port of London. During those years he lived in rooms over Aldgate, one of the gates in London’s city wall, and wrote in his spare time.

What he wrote changed English literature. At the royal court the fashionable language was French, and serious learning was in Latin, but Chaucer chose to write in English, the language of London’s streets. On his travels in Italy he discovered the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and he brought their ambitions home. His long poem Troilus and Criseyde, a love story set during the siege of Troy, is one of the first great works of English poetry.

Then, around 1387, he began The Canterbury Tales. The idea is simple and brilliant. A group of pilgrims meet at an inn in Southwark, south of the Thames, before riding to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and to pass the time each agrees to tell stories. They are a cross-section of England: a knight, a miller, a prioress, a cook, a lawyer, a much-married woman from Bath. The tales range from noble romance to very rude farce, and the pilgrims interrupt and insult one another between them. The plan was for each pilgrim to tell four tales. Chaucer finished twenty-four.

He also wrote a guide to using an astrolabe, an instrument for reading the stars, for his young son Lewis, and it is one of the earliest scientific works in English.

Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey, not because he was a poet, but because he had been renting a house in the Abbey grounds. In 1556, an admirer built him a grander tomb, which gives the date of his death as October 25, 1400. Later poets asked to be buried near him, and that corner of the Abbey became Poets’ Corner.