(Sketch of Geoffrey Chaucer from The Illustrated Magazine of Art. 1-1
(ca. 1853), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in
1342 to a family with some ties to government bureaucracy (court and minting),
but Chaucer’s father mainly made a living by producing wine. When Geoffrey
Chaucer was around fifteen years of age, he managed to gain a position as page
to the Countess of Ulster. In that position he acted as a servant and a
messenger for his noble employer. Two years later, in 1359, Chaucer was sent to
fight in the long-running Hundred Years War between England and France. French
soldiers, however, captured the seventeen-year-old youth. Thankfully for
Chaucer, he was not imprisoned for very long. The Countess of Ulster’s
father-in-law, King Edward III of England, must have seen something he liked in
young Geoffrey Chaucer, for he paid the boy’s ransom and negotiated his release
in 1360.
