But although Chaucer was a great poet, we know very little about his life.  What we do know has nothing to do with his poems or of how he wrote them.  For in those days, and for long after, a writer was not expected to live by his writing; but in return for giving to the world beautiful thoughts, beautiful songs, the King or some great noble would reward him by giving him a post at court.  About this public life of Chaucer we have a few facts.  But it is difficult at times to fit the man of camp, and court, and counting-house to the poet and story-teller who possessed a wealth of words and a knowledge of how to use them greater than any Englishman who had lived before him.  And it is rather through his works than through the scanty facts of his life that we learn to know the real man, full of shrewd knowledge of the world, of humor, kindliness, and cheerful courage.

Chaucer was a man of the middle class.  His father, John Chaucer, was a London wine merchant.  The family very likely came at first from France, and the name may mean shoemaker, from an old Norman word chaucier or chaussier, a shoemaker.  And although the French word for shoemaker is different now, there is still a slang word chausseur, meaning a cobbler.

We know nothing at all of Chaucer as a boy, nothing of where he went to school, nor do we know if he ever went to college.  The first thing we hear of him is that he was a page in the house of the Princess Elizabeth, the wife of Prince Lionel, who was the third son of Edward III.  So, although Chaucer belonged to the middle class, he must have had some powerful friend able to get him a place in a great household.

In those days a boy became a page in a great household very much as he might now become an office-boy in a large merchant’s office.  A page had many duties.  He had to wait at table, hold candles, go messages, and do many other little household services.  Such a post seems strange to us now, yet it was perhaps quite as interesting as sitting all day long on an office stool.  In time of war it was certainly more exciting, for a page had often to follow his master to the battlefield.  And as a war with France was begun in 1359, Geoffrey went across the Channel with his prince.

Of what befell Chaucer in France we know nothing, except that he was taken prisoner, and that the King, Edward III, himself gave 16 pounds towards his ransom.  That sounds a small sum, but it meant as much as 240 pounds would now.  So it would seem that, boy though he was, Geoffrey Chaucer had already become important.  Perhaps he was already known as a poet and a good story-teller whom the King was loath to lose.  But again for seven years after this we hear nothing more about him.  And when next we do hear of him, he is valet de chambre in the household of Edward III.  Then a few years later he married one of Queen Philippa’s maids-in-waiting.

Of Chaucer’s life with his wife and family again we know nothing except that he had at least one son, named Lewis.  We know this because he wrote a book, called A Treatise on the Astrolabe, for this little son.  An astrolabe was an instrument used in astronomy to find out the distance of stars from the earth, the position of the sun and moon, the length of days, and many other things about the heavens and their bodies.