Chaucer

A poet’s age can turn on a tombstone that never recorded it. Sir Adolphus William Ward begins with a question that changes the shape of Chaucer’s life: was he born in 1328, or nearer 1340?

Ward’s late-19th-century account sets Chaucer in fourteenth-century England, between the victories of Edward III and the troubled reign of Richard II. Plague has swept through the country, thinning London’s streets even as the city grows wealthier. To recover the poet’s life, Ward weighs public records against poems whose dates and authorship remain disputed—and shows that these scholarly puzzles can alter how we understand Chaucer’s work. What can the scattered evidence reveal about the observant poet moving through a city still marked by catastrophe?

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