The Myth of the Poor, Homeless Poet: Revising the Chaucer Biography

Discovery that Geoffrey Chaucer’s legal entanglement de raptu with Cecily Chaumpaigne did not involve sexual assault, but rather accusation of violating the Statute of Laborers, suggests that other familiar elements of the author’s biography, based on incomplete life-records, are also open to fresh consideration. This article speculates that Chaucer was much richer than evidenced by official records and that his playful begging poem Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse has overdetermined our sense of the poet’s poverty, or what Paul Strohm has termed his “chronic insolvency.” To the contrary, his generous royal annuities were supplemented by invisible income, including corrupt income, which enabled Chaucer and his household to live grandly. This article engages in a second line of speculation that he did not lead such a rootless existence as the standard biographers believed, but steadily maintained a series of affluent households in London and nearby Greenwich.