Chaucer and His Times (Hardcover)

The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities according to one of the most famous of Chaucer scholars, and the more carefully we consider e evidence upon which this statement is used, the more fully do we find it endorsed, the name Chaucer itself has been variously used from the Latin calcearius, a shoe maker, the French chaussier, a maker of long hose, and the French chaufecire, chafe-wax (i.e. a clerk of the court of Chancery whose duty consisted in affixing seals to royal documents). The one point of agreement Seems to be that the family was undoubtedly French origin, though whether the founder of the English branch came over with the Conqueror or in Henry III's reign, cannot be decided. Most scholars are now agreed that Chaucer was from about 1340, and that his father was John Chaucer, a vintner of Thames Street, London, though at one time his birth was dated as early as 1328, and Mr. Snell, in his Age of Chaucer, endeavours further to darken counsel -already sufficiently obscure- by suggesting that there may have been two contemporary Geoffrey's, and that the facts which are usually accepted as throwing light on the history of the poet may really apply to his unknown namesake.