Doomed to Fail - Ep 174: We're men, we're men in tights (Tight tights!) - Geoffrey Chaucer

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Poetry Professor Taylor will be walking us through the life and times of Geoffery Chaucer! Just kidding - a normal person who doesn't understand Middle English at all, Taylor, will walk us through this story today! We tie back to last week's peasant revolt to talk about how Chaucer's apartment was above the Aldgate - so he would have watched people rush into London. We also talk about the precipice of change in this time period - in hindsight, it's easy to see we're on our way to The Renaissance, but we're pretty sure some folks knew then too!  Sources:Sony Pictures to pay $1.5 million to settle suit over fake film critichttps://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2005/08/05/sony-pictures-to-pay-15-million-to-settle-suit-over-fake-film-critic/28856581007/?utm_source=chatgpt.comChaucer: A European Life -- Marion Turner https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160092/chaucer    Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Let's get that banter going. I got hot glue everywhere just a second ago. I'm like about to set my office on fire. Don't do that. We're going to try to avoid any fires at the moment.

How are you, Taylor? Good. Very busy. Yeah, you had friends in town, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, we had our friend Jamie and Karen. They came with their kids. We had a great time.

The kids all slept in tents in their bedroom. So cute. So fun. And they had so much fun. And we had a great time. But then, you know, both days of the weekend, Florence and I had to go to the Walmart to do a cookie booth. And then I have trying to organize my softball team. And that's been a whole thing because, you know, I had to do a draft last week.

And I practiced starting on Wednesday. and I'm just like, now we have an activity every single day. Yeah, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you keep up. I'm about to have a heart attack. Yeah. I get tired when I hear about your life. I just don't even know how any manage.

Also, did I get cookies this year or not? Not yet, but you can order them still. Okay. Is there a link that you shared with me? I'll share it again. Okay. Thank you. Yeah.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I try to get cookies every time. Thank you. I appreciate you. Sweet. So, yeah, let's go ahead and dive in. Who is going first today?

Oh, wait, we had an intro. I'll do it. Hello. I'm still fired, aren't I? Welcome to Doom to Fail. We are a podcast, and we bring you history's most notorious disasters, epic failures. I actually called a historical drama the other day. That was fun.

Twice a week, and I'm Taylor, joined by Fars. Yes, I'm here as well. Again, we leave my duties of doing the intro for reasons that should become obvious by now. Yeah. Yeah. I'm ready. Okay. So who is doing what first and what? I think I go first. Yeah, let's do it. But I need to reopen my Chrome. I close my Chrome just for you because it's too much. No. Taylor, this whole, how does a plane land upside down? Okay. Seriously, just think about it. How does that happen? How did everyone? Okay, so it's Monday, the 17th. And we're just like an hour ago, a plane landed.

upside down in Toronto and right Toronto and I don't I don't know how nobody died is my first thing I think is there's no wheels on the roof and there shouldn't be so I don't know

so I'm so not excited for the fact that I'm going to be traveling a lot very shortly I know I'm not excited for you there actually I think you go first this week but doesn't matter either way do you want to go first i'll go i already have it open there you go okay great um

so i told you last week i talked about the peasants revolt and this week i was going to talk about geoffrey chaucer so that's what i'm doing i told you're gonna do it and here we are but first let's talk about a knight's tale have you seen a knight's tale is that the heat pleasure one no i just know the Heath Ledger's in it. Okay, it's great. And it came out in 2001. In 2001, on the posters and in the ad, the ads for a night's tale, a critic named David Manning of the Ridgefield Press called Heath Ledger this year's hottest new star, quote, quote, quote. But the problem is, David Manning is not a real person. The Ridgefield Press is a real newspaper, but he is not a real person and he is not a real movie critic. So two moviegoers in California sued Sony for this because they said they were tricked

into seeing a Knight's Tale because of that quote from that fake person and ended up in a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sony Pictures and you could get $5 back if you could prove that you saw Vertical Limit, a Night's Tale, The Animal, Hollow Man, or the Patriot because they used fake reviews for all five of those films. We have to have tort reform in this country. This is ridiculous. I'm so angry right now. Also, Holloman was great. Yeah, I said this is insane

because a Knight's Tale is great and it had real good reviews. And Heath Ledger is the talent of the century or whatever, they said. And, yeah, my third point for this ridiculous lawsuit is that this was 2001, but 10 things I hate about you

came out in 1999. So he was 1999's hottest star of the year. Like, young breakout star. I can't argue with that. He was a new story. star in 1999, not 2001. We already knew who he was by then. So anyway.

Can you tell you a fun he flutter fact? Of course. I love one. Okay. I just learned this. Apparently, when the masseuse

found his corpse in his room, she made like a bunch of phone calls to who's that, what is their name, Elizabeth Olson, Mary Kay and Ashley's sister who's really famous and hot right now? Yeah. She made a bunch of phone calls

to that person. And before she called the cops It was interesting An hour or so between calls Before she ever called the police Huh And Wild And Elizabeth Olson

Is in Wanda Vision And you've seen that right? No Okay Well the guy who plays vision In Wanda Vision Is Paul Bettney Who played Chaucer in a Knight's Tale

So I was going to say Before you even said that That when I picture Chaucer I picture Paul Bettney he's 6-3, he's married Jennifer Connolly. You know how I'm talking about. You can picture. Jennifer Connolly, okay.

That's what I picture. Anyway. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was in a beautiful mind. He was the guy that he got it. Okay, yep. Yeah, he's very tall. Yes.

Yes. He's even handsome when he's like vision and he's like red. He's like, I don't know. I'm so sorry, everyone. He's like a superhero. I don't know what that means, but he's very handsome. Anyway, I thought that was hilarious and fun. that you would sue someone because of that because i mean what what okay so can you care about

screaming in the background no okay great do you want to explain that or should i just edit that out um no it's my children are home and they have a friend over it's president's day so we're all home um so okay so i i did not watch a night to tell but i should rewatch it because it's great um but i did read a very dense book about poetry this week um called chaucer by marian turner i do not pretend to understand what is going on. Like, I obviously am not someone who digs deep into poetry. And so, like, I am not sure a lot of it. And there's a lot of symbolism.

And there's so much you could, you could be a Chaucer scholar if you wanted to. But I got some facts out of the book about his life that I will share with you right now. So, also, I think that there are some things that fill in holes from last week's episode, like why they did certain things during the peasants or fault that I think is really helpful. also this is only 600 years ago like the end of the medieval period and like going into the renaissance and i feel like in the grand scope of things that is not that long ago you know i know it's just different because like we're in america where everything is like measured in like 200 300 year range territory but like yeah in europe it's not that long ago it's not that long ago it's not

that long ago it's really wild and like i like my grandmother like the oldest person i ever knew was my great grandma she was born in 1904 and she died in the 90s like she is not obviously not so alive but i knew someone who was alive over a hundred years ago and like she probably knew people who were alive you know so it's like i don't know if like you don't go that far back to the end of 600 years really um so there's that also middle english which is what chaucer's poems were written in and like what they spoke at this time sounds insane and i hate it i will do some pretending to read to you later but it is really hard to read um like absolutely impossible to read in middle english for i feel like 99.9% of people and then like difficult in modern english yeah it's on shakespeare yes yeah um

so also just like a note travel during this time takes forever so he did a lot of traveling and you could probably do the 25 miles in a day if you were like really hardcore traveling um and also like the lot of this is in london and they talk about Chaucer's house which is at Aldgate which is a part of London that we talked about last week and then Westminster Abbey as being like different places in the world and they're like four miles apart you know so like because a lot of his stuff is about traveling and like traveling is just really hard obviously so Jeffrey Chaucer was born around 1343 which is an insane time to be born like things aren't great and I was going to do a bet there Taylor whether whether when they travel so Sometimes their horse carriages go upside down. Oh, God. Well, I bet they did. Sorry, keep going.

I bet they did. So it's a crazy time to be born because it's the plague. It's a hundred years of war. All this stuff is happening. But good news for Trosser is that he was not poor. He actually came from a really well-off family, which is great for him because he didn't like, you know, die as a child in a pit of mud or whatever. You did then.

he his family were wine merchants so they had a bunch of like stores and like places where they would sell wine and they would be wine traders previously they were pepper traders remember we talked about this like a long time ago when you were like how could pepper be a spice that like changed the world but like it totally was because they never had pepper before right so his dad john married his mom agnes they had 24 little shops in london so like they were you're going to say kids no i mean I don't know what my kids did say. I think just one. And even though he was well off, he had to get a job, and he got a job as a teenager, Chaucer himself, got a job as a teenager in the household of Elizabeth DeBurge, the Countess of Ulster. So now he's like in court.

So when he's a teenager, he like leaves home and goes to get this like courtly position. And this is some stuff that I thought was super interesting that I learned reading this book is that if you're part of a household, that doesn't necessarily mean a physical location. it means that like you're part of a group of people who travel around with like the person who you're in their household and you like put yourselves together everywhere you go you know you're like we bring everything to our country estate we bring everything to visit someone else we bring everything to london so there are like tons of people that would always be with this this countess and her husband when you were in a house like this is there's so much changing right now at this time that we talked about this like you don't know when you're in the the Renaissance until like it's over but like that it's very clear that stuff that stuff is going to happen really soon. One of the things that is happening now is houses are starting to have privacy like we were actually in a house, which is interesting because before that you didn't. It was like one long railroad apartment. There were no hallways. Like there was nowhere to like be intimate. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom where people weren't looking. Yeah, I remember

hearing that like hallways were like a later invention. Yeah. Like in Versailles, there's no hallways. It's just like room to room to room Yeah Have you been in Versailles? No Okay We should go We should get a boat

And find our way to France No planes No we're gonna Had a lot of we over That would be great So But that So I also saw something on Instagram

This week that was like A little pod for sleeping That was like a box That people would go in and sleep That was like the first time You'd have like privacy When you were asleep Or like you know

With someone you know, in bed, you'd want to, like, be in a place that was, that was private. Chaucer is actually one of the first times in his work that they used the word closet at all because there weren't closets either, you know, plus you were traveling so much. So he's part of his household and you wouldn't really get paid in money, you would get paid in things. So this is also a time where, like, money has a new, starting to have a new meaning because they start to use gold instead of silver.

And so now they have both. And they can do things like give change. change because when everyone you know like I mean you have like just one silver coin for anything there's no change you know yeah seriously you never think about like change was an invention yeah yeah exactly so things are changing like around that but but for the first couple years at least he was paid in like goods and one one example of this and a lot of this we know because this is in like the accounting for the household and like in like those papers that we still like that people have access to but at one point Elizabeth bought Chaucer a pal talk which is is an outfit that is literally tights and a tiny tiny shirt and it was like very scandalous because when men would wear it obviously you could like see everything and then their tiny tiny shirt would kind of be like at their waist level and so it was very very scandalous and some people thought that that is why um the plague came to england because of these scandalous um shorts which is funny because people still think that gay people make hurricanes it i it also sounds uncomfortable

it does it's kind of like why don't want to wear something super tight like that's sounds horrible it's like men and tights you know that movie oh yeah okay you know it's like that so yeah yeah yeah I'm sure I'm sure so that was like that's like a fun thing that we have on the record so we know he was wearing these like scandalous little like tight clothes and another thing that we talked about last week and we like named episode after that like you know you wouldn't let um the peasant class like buy nice things like it really was this was the first time where there was like conspicuous consumption and people were were buying nice things to show that they were rich.

So that was like, it was, it's why it felt like such a big deal to them. Interesting. Okay. So this is one like the merchant class started having economic means. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Exactly.

And that it caused a stir because people were getting paid in that kind of thing, you know? Yeah. Like, and you were like, I earned this pair of tights by working. I earned these Jordans. Yes, exactly. Another really horrible thing that I learned about is a food. called a galatine, which is cold meat in like jello. And it was really fancy because it was hard to debone meat. So it was like, you know, spent all this time like deboning like a chicken. And then like

it was like in like a jelly, jelly mold. And it looks so gross. It makes you want to die. And in one of his tossers works called To Rosamond, he says, quote, no pike ever wallowed in Galentine as I in love and wounded and mirrored, which means like I'm in love and I'm stuck. It's so hard to understand. How do you even know that? Did you run that through Chad GBT? He made no sense at all.

It made no sense at all and that's the modern English version of that sentence. So anyway, I learned about that. That sounds gross. You know that we talk about how the thing about time travel is that you couldn't eat the food. No, no, God. No. You wouldn't even want to. And you would, you, if you had a bite

of medieval Galentine, you would die. Yeah, of course, of course. Like literally die. I also learned from Wikipediaing it that this is gross and not related, but during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, they created Gallatin from 2,000 tons of lamb guts that had they found in the seaport to feed the starving people. And also a reminder that Putin's brother starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. And that explains a lot of his personality. Really? He hadn't been born yet.

So when at the time he was born, his parents had this, like, dead older brother that they, like, idolized and were, like, really sad about forever. Oh. Yeah, we should an episode on Putin one time. We should. We did. You did that one, like, him, people, like, falling off buildings by accident. We should do it about it. What did, like, his life and, like, how he can't, anyways.

Yeah, I've read a good book about it. So, anyway, we know these things about Chaucer because the records of the household that he was in. And it was a great position for him because I had to travel around and do business for the household. So in 13, 15. we start the hundred years war and I was like obviously they didn't call it that because like hey guys

I'm starting a war it's going to be 116 years hop in there's a one year war than a two year war than the three year war so just for everyone's knowledge there's three phases of the war that like some truces in between

but there's an Edwardian war the Caroline war and the Lancastrian war so this is the Edwardian part that he's in he goes to Europe he goes to France with Elizabeth's husband he gets captured as like a prisoner of war and they get him out for 16 pounds that pay to get him out which is 15,000 pounds in today's money and I just want to say that if you go to jail and you need $15,000 to get out I could probably find it but I would not I'd be worried I don't think anybody

does that right like don't you just go to a bail bondsman they just charge you 10% interest I think so yeah I think so yeah so he's traveling around he's seeing other other religions other people like stuff that he wasn't, he wouldn't be able to see in England. So he's in France and he sees Jews and Muslims working together, which he would not have seen in England. He goes to Italy and he is reading Dante and he is seeing art. Art at this time that we talked about is changing. One thing is perspective is being added into art.

So you're seeing things like not just like that totally flat 2D. He would have seen a lot of Giotto's work. And so Gado died right before he got there, but he's like the very late medieval, beginning of the Renaissance painter. And a fun Jaddo story that I learned for $200,000 because of my art history degree is that one time like a king wanted Jadot to make a painting for him and they sent someone to his house and said, we need you to prove that you're a good painter.

And Jaddo just looked at him and he painted a perfect circle and said, that's it. That's all I can do to prove how great I am. That's like the Hemingway Baby Shoes story. Yeah. That's fun. So he would, Chaucer would be collecting tariffs. He'd be working in the wool trade for a while. And he works for John of Gantt, who talked about last time.

He's the regent of King Richard II. Because Richard II is 10 when he becomes king. So he works for him a lot. He does have an apartment in London. He lives literally above the Aldgate. So he talked about how the old gate is where some of the peasants came through during the peasants revolt. Chaucer would have been there, like looking down from his apartment, watching people storm

the city, which is kind of exciting. Probably a little scary. Yeah. He married a woman named Philippa in 1366. She also worked in the household. She would make her own money. So she, we, you kind of, the record shows that she has passed away because the record stops giving her money.

You know, like that's, like, there's no like, thing about her death, but like the financial records for like the king who was like paying her stop. Right. So, like, assume that she died. They had at least three kids. be more, like the record is not clear on that. Their son, Thomas, had a great job as chief butler to several kings. His daughter, Elizabeth, became a nun. His daughter, Alice, married a Duke, and there might have been a Lewis as well. So, like, there's more kids probably. He's kind of

at home, his family being like a writer on the side. It was kind of a side hustle being a writer, but he would mostly be out on the road working in the trades. When he's home, another thing that's brand new now, because we talked about, like, rooms being new is like a home office is new, too. so he would like work from home which was like one of the first times you could like do that weird be like a literary person and like work from home otherwise you would have been like at a library

or at like a communal space like this is when you would have like privacy to do these things so he also started to get like you can get paper easier and books easier so we're just like all of this stuff is happening and people who are in the middle classes like you're merchant classes like you were saying have more time to read now

so they're going to be learning and doing this that which is cool some interesting tidbits about his poetry again I know nothing about poetry but if you can think of like one way to write a poem what do you think of right me yeah that but like what two word phrase is like a particular style I want to say stanza or something um iambic pentameter do you think that like you have so much faith in me you you think so highly of me to think that I would ever know that. There are a couple of things that I feel like I think about in my head a lot that

like sound that way, like, iambic pentameter. I feel like I think that word a lot. And I also think the word Harrison Bergeron, which is a Kervoniket story. So in my head, like, six times a week, I'm like Harrison, Bergeron, Iambic pentameter. Wait, what is our hergeron-Hergeron? Harrison-Bergron is a, is a, is a Kervoniket story about a society where they try to make everybody equal. So Harrison-Bergron is like very famous, not very famous, very handsome and smart.

So they, like, make him, like, carry weights around, and they, like, make him, like, not be able to see so that he's, like, equal to everybody else because he is, like, whatever, whatever. Wait, wait, why is that bouncing around your head? Just the words, the words, like, just, like, the thought, like, Harrison Bergeron idea, Iambic pentamper. It's, like, what I'm thinking of, I don't know, a couple times a week. That's too funny. So, Chaucer invented Iambic pentameter, which is a rhythmic pattern of five iams or unstressed syllables follow. by stressed syllables in a line. So here's an example from Shakespeare.

Two households, both alike in Dignity and Fair Verona, where we lay our scene. That's all. That's what it sounds like. It's like, da-dum, do-dum, do-dum, to-dum. I, um, man, my brain just is not going to stop and get a degree of poetry. Yeah, my, my, there's some things that I'm not even going to pretend I care about or understand or, and poetry is one of those things. I know. That's as far as I can go. And you have an art degree.

I do, but like visual art. Visual. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So he was also one of the first people to write about space. His is the first mention of the Milky Way in English. This is when people were starting to think about space again for the first time, both like their own physical space and like what it would be like to be in the air. And I know I talked shit about the Tower of London, how it's not a tower. But it would have been like the highest place you could have gone in London for a very long time.

And so that was the first time he would write about, like, flying over the countryside and just like have this idea of like, what could you see if you could look down? But it was not something that like he, they ever had the opportunity to do. He wrote about the astrolabe, which was like a way to look at the stars as well. So he was really interested in that too. So who is reading this stuff that he's writing? So he's writing mostly for men and women of the upper classes. And Queen Anne, who we talked about last time as well, is the wife of Richard II. and they called her good Queen Anne because she, you know, really wanted people to read and to have an education.

That was a big part of her thing for both men and women. So he would have changed his writing to be for everyone. And then also the middle classes because they would have time to read. He also talked about how he wrote about Troy and how, like, the mythical Troy and not about how, like, there's no historical truth or mythical past. And so that was super interesting because they could talk about that too. and a lot of his works were copied and passed down and people started talking about him later so like within like 200 years

someone had written a biography about him and then like now you know you could get a PhD in Chaucer I'm sure if you wanted to some of his things that you might have heard about if you're not Fars he you know

I don't think you're going to list a bunch of Chaucer things what me just off the top of my head yeah yeah a Canterbury Tales that's my list yes there's other ones there's one um a couple about like ancient greece there's one about troilus and crusadia one about um when about that's that's the Troy one um whatever there's a couple a bunch of them but let's talk about the Canterbury tales because that's the most famous one and he planned to do 130 stories but he did 24 so he had like a grand vision but

he did not finish it and it they're also not for kids I feel like you read them in school but there's like sexual assaults and death and you know it's not i actually don't recall any of the actual story i know and i feel like it's just so hard to read you know so you know what tell you say that but i'll say this so for some reason i have no idea why patrick duval came up in casual conversation the weekend for me and i mentioned that the first major movie that he was in was to kill mockingbird remember um no he was and please i hope i'm not wrong for the hate no i'm gonna get but even in that and i've read to kill mockingbird i've seen the movie i still don't remember exactly what the movie like i couldn't tell you exactly what it's about i know atticus finch i know the name

of that guy but like that's basically and so that's where like i'm sure i've read canterbury tales I've read a bridge version of it or a cliff notes of it, but I had no idea what it's about. It just didn't stick. Do you mean Robert Duvall? What did I say? Patrick. Who's Patrick Duvall?

I don't think there is one. Thanks for saving us a lot of hate mail. You're welcome. But yeah, no, totally. I think that, like, I can only tell you what happened in Romeo and Juliet it because I watched it so many times because of Leonardo DiCaprio. Exactly. Or like had to read it, you know.

Exactly. Or hate mail from all the poets that listen to this. But the way that the Canterbury Tales are set set is it's people telling stories in an inn. They're all on a pilgrimage and they're stopping and telling stories of their life. They, there are some religious, obviously connotations. The Western schism had just happened. So I think this is when there were like two popes. Like they couldn't decide who was going to be pope.

And obviously also it's black death time where people have their suspicion about the church because priests died as well, which we talked about last time. So some of the ones that are famous in the Canterbury tales that I'll go through, there's obviously a knight's tale, which is like two knights joust over a lady and one of them dies, essentially. Last cycle. Yes. There is the Miller's tale. This one seems fun. So there's a Miller who's older, who's like a person who makes flower. and he has a young wife and then someone seduces her and the man who seduces a wife

convinces the husband that the second great flood is coming so the husband gets in a bathtub and ties it to the ceiling so this whole time the husband's like in his bathtub on the ceiling and then there's another suitor trying to get the wife's attention and the wife tricks him to kissing her bare butt and he's like super embarrassed and because he's so embarrassed he takes a fire poker and burns the first suitor who screams and that scares the miller and the and the bathtub falls and chatters and everybody thinks that the miller's crazy this is a very stupid story i'm sorry but a little comedy of errors um and then there's one the wife of bath where a knight in king arthur's court is sentenced to death for something and queen um guennavier gives him a chance to save himself

he must discover what women truly want within a year. So the night goes out to figure out what women want. And he finds an old, ugly woman who tells him that women want power over their husbands. Like, that's all that women want. And then she says, you have to marry me now that I told you that. And she said, I can be an old woman and faithful, or I could be young and unfaithful. You get to choose. And he said, well, I'm going to let you choose since I know that women want to have the power over their husbands.

and because he let her choose, she decides to be young and faithful. I mean, they live happily ever after. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. I like that one. That's kind of fun. So they're like that. Okay, so here, I'm going to try to tell you what they sound like, and it's going to be insane.

So the general prologue is like the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, and this is translated into modern English. Okay. When April, with its sweet showers, has pierced the drought of the drought of. March to the root and bathed every vein in such liquid that it gives birth to the flower. Okay. Okay. In old

Middle English, it sounds like this, maybe. Vaughn that April with his shoe race suto, the droat of March hath par said to the ruta and bathe every vein in sweet liqueur of which

virtue engendered is the floor. it's not English so hard to say so hard to try um yeah so that's you know if you ever have time to watch like YouTube clips of people um

speaking in like you know middle English it's wild they like pronounce you have a last podcast episode where they played someone speaking like Welch in another quarter it was like you had like it was like no clue what any of the words actually meant

but it was like English technically yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like it's very very heavily accented yeah man from the north of england you know you'd be like what um so that's what it's that's what it sounds like and that's his like most most famous most famous work um at one point chaucer was accused of sexual assault himself but it was settled out of court so it's not clear exactly what what actually happened because he and his wife lived apart for a while um they probably just like they just like live several lives. They still had, when she passed away, they had a baby, so they still were like,

together when they could be, but they didn't live together. In the 1370s, Chaucer traveled around Europe. He went over the mountains and the snow and to Italy again several times. He was probably involved in the uprisings that Richard second had with the Lord's appellant, because if you remember from last week, there was a little bit of time when Richard was not on the throne until he died, and then Henry IV became king. At one point, King Richard paid Chaucer. a gallon of wine a day for life for an unspecified task. I wonder what that was. I think it might have been poetry, which is funny.

And then that was when Richard was like not the ruler when he was in the middle of that crisis. And then when he became ruler again, he changed it to a monetary sum per day. But at one point he was getting paid in wine. One thing about Richard is that he wanted to be above the law because he was king. And he talked about this last time as well. He thought that, like, God appointed him all those things. And the rest of the people in, like, Parliament and the court were like, no, we have checks and balances. You can't do that.

So that was a big part of that, of that uprising in the late 1300s. Charles Stubord moved around England, serving various government jobs. He was in Parliament in Kent. He was the controller of customs for a port. So he had a bunch of, like, of government jobs, but he was writing always on the side. And then Philippa does pass away, but they had not been living together. And again, the way that we know that is because he went to go pick up their paychecks, essentially, and hers was not there. And he knew she was dead, but, like, we know on the record that she's dead because her paycheops stopped coming.

You would think that if your husband is, like, a world famous author, when you die, there'd be some memorialization of your death outside of the king stopped paying you? Because I don't, I don't know how, like, world famous he is right now. you know he's like a little famous but i don't think he's like he's on a first same basis with the king he's getting free wine sure sure sure and wine's probably really expensive back then well yeah he also comes from a family of wine people so i wonder if he was picky there you go anyway he stops working around 1390 um so he had a pension of around 20 pounds a year which is about 22 000 pounds in today's money and um he ended up moving near

Westminster Abbey when Henry the 4th became king and that's where he ended up dying he died on October 25th 1400.

It says of unknown causes but I'm just like he was in his mid-50s in the middle ages he just died. Yeah.

You know, it's normal probably. Yeah. He's buried in Westminster Abbey. He was the first person buried in a place called Poets Corner

which now it was like looking at it and there's like a ton of statues and memorials, and it's hard to tell who's actually buried there and whose ashes are there, like Rudyard Kipling's ashes are there. There's a sign for Jane Austen, but I don't think she's actually buried there. But then, guess how many people are buried in Westminster Abbey? It'd be a lot. It'd be like in the high hundreds.

It's like over 3,000. Wow. Which I don't really understand. But that is where he is in the corner with all of the other poets. The problem is that, like, you set a standard, right? You set a standard for, like, what kind of person can be buried there? Yeah. And then you, as the population increases, the people that fit that category increases as a percentage of the population. But then you can't dig up the old corpses and get rid of them. I know.

Maybe they have. Well, never mind. Maybe you can. No, I don't know. I'm just saying. And also, it's been 600 years. So, like, yeah, that adds up. Right.

Yeah. So that's it. I learned a little bit about poetry this week. And it is hard for me. me but I struggled through it um Taylor fun fun side anecdote here because you kept saying stuff like oh yeah until then nobody had ever done that like you mentioned something about like nobody ever thought of what the city looked like from the top down nobody thought about change and nobody thought about a hall but there's a lot of that going on I was listening to a podcast about

like quantum computing and I have no idea what it is I don't understand any of it not even an iota of it but it was tied into how migratory birds are able to track the magnetic field of the earth despite how like very like light the magnetic field of the earth is it's all tidily this weird quantum computing thing like these two atoms or whatever neutrons can like even though they're not connected in the bird's brain they like it's like it's like I'm no idea what it is but it got me thinking about how much stuff is going on around us that we just can't understand or see. Oh, totally.

Oh, my God. There's got me so much stuff like that where it's like, you never thought of like, oh, yeah, I never seen a city from the top. Nobody's ever seen a city from the top. It's impossible. How would you ever? Right, exactly. And actually, so I also want to say, like, I'm sure that, like, I'm saying in Western civilization,

I'm sure there's, like, other civilizations who had thought of it before, potentially, that I don't know about, you know, but I mean Western. And also, this is a fun story that that reminded me of. There was some point in Europe where they didn't know where birds went during the winter. You know, because they were like, I don't know, the birds just disappeared. And then one day, a bird came back with an African arrow through it because it had been shot at in Africa. And then they were like, holy shit, this bird's been to Africa. They didn't know.

I saw that. I was actually really upset when I saw it. It was like me like a month ago. I was at the local park for my house walking Luna outside by that lake. And there was all these like geese or ducks, whatever there. And there was one with an arrow sticking through it and like just walking around normal. I swear to God. It was walking around.

I sure wasn't wearing those, like, joke headbands. Yeah, I was wearing one of those joke headdance. He's just trying to rile up his friends. The reincarnation of some S&L character. Very, very fun. Oh, sweet. Okay, well, thanks for talking through that and introducing us to the undigestable words of Chaucer. Thank you.

Yeah, if you're an English teacher, give us a call. Yeah, please, give us a call. I'm sure you're listening to this. um sweet do you have anything else for us taylor no just thank you everyone for um for listening um i have doomed to fail stickers if you want one email us i'll mail it to you doomed to fail pod at gmail com for free i'll melt you and we're actually kind of starting to hit like an exponentialish adjacent growth curve and so people who are telling your friends thank you because that is the best way to grow is your word of mouth and if you haven't told your friends

what are you waiting for? Just all your friends. Yeah. Tap him on the shoulder and be like, hey, listen to this. We appreciate it. Yeah. Do you have a field pod on all the social medias. And thank you.

Sweet. We'll go ahead and cut things off.