You're Dead to Me - Geoffrey Chaucer (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Greg Jenner is joined in medieval England by Professor Marion Turner and comedian Mike Wozniak to learn all about Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales.Since the 15th century, Chaucer has been referred to as the father of English literature. He was one of the first authors to champion the use of Middle English for poetry instead of Latin, and after the invention of the printing press, his works became the foundation of the English literary canon – long before Shakespeare ever put quill to parchment. But Chaucer’s life was as extraordinary as his legacy, living as he did through the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and the Peasants’ Revolt.In this episode, Greg and his guests explore Chaucer’s dramatic biography: growing up the son of a wine merchant in fourteenth-century London, his work for the royal court and long career as a medieval civil servant, his relationship with John of Gaunt through his mistress Katherine Swynford, and his travels throughout Europe. They also examine the poets that influenced him – including Petrarch, Bocaccio and Dante – and take a deep dive into the famous Canterbury Tales.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Rosalyn Sklar Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. A history of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible in BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 99% of visible feed wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian author and broadcaster. And today we are preparing our pens and parchment and peregrinating back to the 14th century

to learn all about Jeffrey Chaucer, author of the famous Canterbury Tales. And to inform and entertain us on our journey, we're joined by two very special traveling computers. In History Corner, she's the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Languages at the University of Oxford and an expert on Chaucer and late medieval literature. Maybe you've read her award-winning biography, Chaucer, a European life, or her new book, The Wife of Bath, a biography. It's Professor Marion Turner. Welcome Marion. Delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me. We're very happy to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor and podcaster, you'll have seen him in Taskmaster, Man Down, and as Rose Matafayo's assistant on the wonderful junior taskmaster. Plus, you may have heard his dulcet tones on my favourite podcast, Three Bean Salad,

or seen his new live tour show, The Bench. But you'll definitely know him from our previous episodes of Your Dead to Me, most recently, Charles Dickens at Christmas and Arthurian literature. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome back, Mike. Thank you. Hello. Thanks for having me back. Mike, we went medieval with you last time out. Yeah. All King Arthurie.

I had a lovely old time. You knew a lot. It was grist to my mill. It was, yeah, I felt like I hadn't wasted my childhood. You were in your element. But this, this is a different kettle of food. Oh, is it? Yeah, this is utter bleak ignorance.

A new level of ignorance. It's beyond the unknown unknowns. Okay, well, we're going to have a lovely time talking about one of the great poets of English literature. So, what do you know? So let's start with the first segment of the podcast. It's the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing

what you are lovely listener might know about today's subjects. And if we're using Mike as the benchmark, maybe not much. But you've possibly heard Chaucer described as the father of English literature. Perhaps you've read his Canterbury Tales at school, and you modelled your way through the Middle English while looking for the rude bits. Maybe you saw the BBC's 2003 adaptation, which transferred the famous Canterbury Tales to a 21st century setting. And if you're a naughty's kid, like me,

you will remember Paul Bettany's turn as Geoffrey Chaucer in the brilliant movie, a knight's tale that all medieval historians love. But what about the life behind? in the literature. What did Chaucer get up to when he wasn't scribbling his poems? And where do snazzy leggings fit into our story? Let's find out. You're excited about the leggings? I'm excited about the leggings. Okay. Mike, from your high level of knowledge, you've already promised us, what sort of family do you think Jeffrey Chaucer was born into? What kind of class do you think he arrived into? Oh, he's literate and not just literate. I don't know, the son of

some sort of merchant or trailer or ship's captain or someone who's got some qualifications, possibly a member of a guild, that kind of thing, but not nobility, I'm saying. That neck of the woods. Are you hustling us? Are you pretending to not know anything and then suddenly rolling out knowledge? Marion, I think Mike got it first time, son of a merchant. Yeah, brilliant. Is it a merchant, okay.

Yeah, so a wine merchant. So his father was a vintner, that's what we call them. That's what we call them in Devon as well. Well, we do when we're trying to be. a little bit classy and a bit pretentious. I have a local vintner near us and called Ian and he's absolutely, he's magnificent.

Well, Ian, which is a version of the name John, which is Chaucer's dad. Good heavens. So John Chaucer, Vintner and Chaucer's mother was called Agnes. Chaucer was born early 1340s. We don't know the exact year, but about 1342 in London. In Ventry Ward, so the ward which had lots of vintners in.

So it was one of the areas of London. London that is right next to the Thames. So he's born in a place where he can see the ships coming in, loaded with products from all over the world, bringing spices from as far away as Indonesia, and then going out again laden with English wool, which was England's only real export product. Chaucer was living in this very multilingual, cosmopolitan kind of area.

You know, people often think of the Middle Ages as people are kind of grubbing about. And of course, you know, some people were. But life in London was really. internationally. He was rubbing shoulders with people who spoke lots of different languages, were bringing in lots of luxury products. But then one very big thing happened. Do you know the very big thing that happened

to little Jeff when he was five years old? Think mid-14th century big things. A plague upon the vintners? Not just a vintners, I'm afraid. Yes, the great plague of all the plagues, the black death. Okay. Hit hard? It hit pretty hard. Yeah. Family-wise?

Yeah. And to everyone. So the Black Death came to England at 1348 and it completely dwarfs the pandemic that we've been through. If you imagine a pandemic that wiped out maybe a third, maybe a half of the population really quickly. Of Europe. You know, we're not just talking to Britain here. And the Near East. It's a hugely dramatic. And yes, Chaucer lost several relatives, but not his parents, not his immediate family.

And what then happened to Chaucer's family is typically. of what happened to the country as a whole. Because if you survived, although probably psychologically, you might be in a bad way, but materially, things were quite good for you. So both his parents inherited property and land and money from their relatives who had died in the plague. So there's a lot of social mobility after the plague. It's actually the late 14th century is an amazing time for social mobility. People can move jobs if their employer isn't paying a decent wage.

They can go to another employer or they can move to the city. The government passed lots of laws to try and stop employees from asking for higher wages, but it didn't work. None of those, you know, these statutes of labourers did not work. It's very clear which sign they were on. Yes. Yeah. So we've got massive inflation and wage inflation. If you were alive, you were then doing well.

So, Mike, if you were a teenage Geoffrey Chaucer, you're living in Cosbopolitan London. What sort of profession are you aiming to go into next? Me personally, I don't think I'd have made the most of this. I think I have. Chaucer, I think it's got a bit better work ethic than me. Sure. I think Chaucer, I'm assuming he would have gone into the family trade. Okay, so you think wine? You think he's going, following Dad?

I think wine, you know, if he's having a lovely life and wine, it's got a bit of glamour, hasn't it? And, you know, if he's into his reading and his writing, he can do that on the weekends. It's a very sensible answer. I assume. He sort of goes. He doesn't, no, he does something quite different. He kind of starts to leap classes in a way. Yeah.

Up or down? Up. he becomes a page boy in a great household. And this is a very desirable thing to get. So usually, you know, higher class boys would get this kind of job. So his father probably got him this job because his father had been a royal tax collector. So he had connections in the royal court. So Chaucer's first job, when he's just a teenager, about 14 or 15,

he pops up in the accounts of Elizabeth DeBur, Countess of Ulster, who is the daughter-in-law of the king. So the daughter-in-law of Edward III, she was married to Prince Lionel. So a page boy is, I mean, he would have done a bit of kind of errand running and things like that. But you're also simply a member of this lavish, aristocratic household. But you're mainly just kind of sitting about learning some poetry. You're there partly to make the heads of the household look good because they can have a retinue. Right.

So he's working for Elizabeth DeBer. He does meet his wife doing this gig, we think. Probably, yes, Philippa Deroa, there's a reference in the records to her being connected with the same group. So we're not certain, but he probably meets his wife at this point. And she was a little bit, a little bit higher class than him. Oh, she's got a Duh in the middle of her name. Exactly. Yeah, that seems like, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. He's not Jeffrey Dut Chaucer, is he? No. No. It's from this period that we have our first documentary evidence for Chaucer's life. Yes, absolutely. What do you think it is, Mike? Presumly from the annals of the De Beur family in some way.

So I'm wondering what they would document. Has he got involved in a wedding or has there been a sort of a disaster and a hunt? Oh, right. Have they gone to Ulster and they've killed the wrong stag and stirred up some local drama? I mean, I do think this is very impressive researcher-type thinking about the accounts.

Because it is from the accounts and people often expect that the first record is going to be, might refer to something to do with his poetry, for example. Yeah. But in fact, it's a really, frivolous reference is a reference to his fashion choices, to his clothes. This is where the snazzy leggings that Greg mentioned earlier are in. So the record is simply that Elizabeth DeBur bought him these clothes. She buys him a poltock with these two-coloured hose, like these leggings,

and some shoes. And chroniclers in the early 1360s start to write about the fact that young men are going about wearing these clothes and that they are very tight. and short and are exposing their genitals and buttocks inappropriately. And indeed, some chroniclers said that they thought that the plague had returns to England because God was punishing people for wearing these outrageous clothes. He also ticked off another major event from the 14th century. Having survived the Black Death, he then rides straight into another one. Do you know what this one would be, Mike?

Mega event. Yeah. A hundred years war? Absolutely. Well done. Yeah, very good. Was he a soldier? So essentially the whole household went to war. So by this point he seems to be working for Lionel, Elizabeth's husband.

And so the princes are all going to war. They take their retinues with them. And so the 100 years war, which actually was longer than 100 years. Yeah, it's 116 years. Yeah. So it's supposed to start 1337, finish 1453. Chaucer's over there 1359, 1360. He does get captured.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he was captured. was in a sort of zone of jeopardy, at least. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he was captured outside reams, and then he was ransomed for 16 pounds. So £16 gets Geoffrey Chaucer back.

Who's paying that ransom? Is it? The king, yes. Is it? Does Geoffrey Chaucer bounce back from his ransom fiasco? I mean, so we see him just afterwards carrying letters, and I think that was what he was better at, you know, across his life. Soldier, what do you excel at?

I'm really quite good at delivering letters, actually. I mean, across his life, we do see him occasionally in these fighting situations, but much more commonly we see him doing things like diplomacy, secret business of the king, carrying letters, peace treaties, that's more his thing. But then we actually don't see him in the records for several years. So between 1360 and 1366, we're not sure what he's doing. He was doing something to do with other royal households, you know, as he had been for Elizabeth and Lionel.

That's the kind of rule. As he left Elizabeth and Lionel's gaff then? Yes. He's ploughing his own furrow at this point. Okay. So he's married to Philippa de Roet. They were married till the late 80s when she dies. They had at least three children.

And when he's in royal service, he's getting an annuity from the king, also from other people at various times. He's also paid in wine. So he gets a picture of wine a day, which later on becomes a ton of wine a year, which is something like 252 gallons. He probably didn't. drink all that. He was probably giving it out to people, but, you know, wine is an ongoing

picture a day. Yeah. How much is a picture? It was probably about a gallon. Blimey. Yeah. It's a lot of wine. That's a lot to get that, isn't it? Yeah. As you say, it's probably for his household, right? Yeah. It's probably sharing it out. Okay. And so he's an international diplomat. Yeah. Jeffrey Chaucer diplomat. Man overseas. He's in Italy. He's in France. He's been to Spain, Navar. Yeah. He's picking up languages or he knows languages. He knows languages. So every educated man is trilingual at this time. But he also knew Italian, which he'd probably picked up from all the bankers and traders in Ventry Ward, because he had a mercantile background. So aristocrats, much less likely to come across Italian.

He had Italian, which is probably why he was picked to go on the Italian mission. Oh, I see. He's the only bloke at court who knows any Italian. And that's then, going on those Italian missions is where he then picks up and reads Dante, Bacaccio, Petrarch. And his reading of those poets enables him utterly to change English literature. So he had a staggering number of jobs. We've already heard several already, but I've got a mini-quiz for you. Which of these was not a position that Geoffrey Chaucer held during his service?

So, Inspector of Walls and Ditches, Deputy Forrester, Clark of the King's Works overseeing the renovations of the Tower of London, the Member of Parliament for Suffolk, the controller of the wool custom trade, and negotiator of the marriage of King Richard II of England to the daughter of the Lord of Milan. Which of those six things was not on Chaucer's CV? He seems like an amenable fellow so far.

Yeah. He feels like he's quite capable. I can see him being pressured into doing the ditches gig. Maybe early doors. Yeah. But I can see him putting his foot down at the old forestry thing. It doesn't seem like a forest is going to be his milieu. Okay.

Okay. So you're saying Deputy Forrester is one we've made up. Yeah. I'm afraid MP for Suffolk was wrong. Curses. Because he was actually MP for Kent. Was he really? So he did all six of those jobs in terms of being an MP,

but he was representing Kent, not Suffolk. A history of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible in BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known. Many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 90s. 99% of visible feed wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever heard of John of Gaunt, Mike? I don't think I have, no.

He's one of those big names in medieval history that no one really knows who he is, but they know he's famous. Who is John of Gaunt? Why is he important to Chaucer? John of Gorn, fourth son of Edward III. Chaucer probably met him when he was working for Elizabeth. We know they were at the same place then. John of Gaunt had also married Blanche of Lancaster.

Blanche's death was the occasion of Chaucer's first poem that we know about. Really? The Book of the Duchess was about Blanche's death. John of Gaunt then made another important marriage to someone called Constance of Castile, the daughter of the King of Castile. But the person he loved was Catherine Swinford. Catherine Swinford was Chaucer's sister-in-law. And that probably encouraged John of Gant to help Chaucer.

He helped him get lots of jobs. He was the one in charge when Chaucer got his apartment in London, his job at the customs office. He kept on favouring him. You said the Book of the Duchess is Chaucer's first poem. This is fairly middle-aged, Geoffrey Chaucer, so he's kind of quite far along in his career. Yeah, I mean, the Book of the Duchess is the first poem that has survived. So he may have written earlier poems.

He may have written poems in French when he was younger. That's what most people were writing in French. But the earliest poem that has survived, yeah, he's around 30, early 1370s. And then he was just prolific. You know, he wrote so much. And today, people have often only heard of the Canterbury Tales. But he wrote so much else. So from the early 1370s to mid-1380s, he writes several dream poems.

So the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowles, the Legend of Good Women. He translates Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy from Latin into English. Wow. He translates parts of the Romance of the Rose. He writes lots of short poems and lyrics. He writes some of the Canterbury Tales as standalone texts that then later he put into the Canterbury Tales. Yes, exactly. Most famously, The Knight's Tale.

So he's writing in English, whereas it would, although some people were writing in English, it would have been more normal, especially for a court poet, someone writing kind of courtly forms, you know, love visions, dreams. It would have been more normal to write in French. Yeah. He's also very influenced by the world around him. There's this idea that you need both. You know, you need to read the books. He's steeped in literary influences from all kinds of places. But he's also interested in contemporary society.

And I think he does take a lot of, a lot of inspiration. from the things that are going on around him. So we can link things like his great interest in different voices, in the common voice. We might link that to things like the development of the speaker in Parliament at the time. And then, you know, this is also the time when we see insurgent voices, which can be productive but can also be really problematic. So the Great Revolt, usually known as the Peasants' Revolt, though it wasn't really mainly peasants.

It was lots of different people. But that also happens during Chaucer's lifetime. This is a man who has survived the Black Death, fought in the Hundred Years' War, and then is literally next door when the Peasants' Revolt happens. He's basically Forrest Gump. He's seeing the entire 14th century just keeps happening to him. And he also ends up in a courtroom battle in 1379. Marion, this is quite interesting. There was a time a few years ago where Geoffrey Chaucer was quite controversial because of this case. Yes.

And now we can remove this sort of sting of cancellation because he's innocent, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting case. It's also really interesting in terms of letting us know what's still out there to find in the records. So this is a case in which Chaucer was essentially accused of something called raptus in Latin, which in different cases is sometimes abduction is sometimes rape. A woman called Cecily Champagne released him from further actions relating to her raptus. But there was a lot of debate about what the word and the document meant, because in some documents it means abduction. But a couple of years ago, and this is how exciting the world of Chaucer studies is, so two scholars, Spatine and Sbeki and you and Roger, found some new documents. And what they found was that Cessley Champagne and Chaucer were on the same side of this law case. And they were both defendants together. And they employed the same lawyer. Right.

And then they found the writ, which was that someone called Thomas Stonden was making a lawsuit against the two of them. What had happened, according to Staunton, was that Cessaly, had been his servant and she had left before the end of her contract to go and be Chaucer's servant. So this was a labour dispute. Sure. The reason then that Cecily would release him from any actions relating to A Raptus would be that she was saying, no, I was not forcibly removed from my former employer. So we can uncanncel, Geoffrey Chaucer. That's good.

I think it's time for us to move on to his most famous poem. It's time for us to get to the Canterbury Tales? Marion, can you give us an actual synopsis of what is the Canterbury Tales? A group of people meet, they meet in the Tabard Inn, which was a real pub, just south of the river in Southwark. Great. They're all going off from pilgrimage to Canterbury. And they decide that, you know, to make it less boring, so they don't just have to think about pilgrimage and God all the time. They're going to tell stories on the way there and on the way back and they're going to compete for a free meal.

And the host, the innkeeper, Harry Bailey is going to kind of run this tale-telling competition. So you get this kind of group of people together who are all going to tell stories. But it's really different from Bacchios. And the big difference is the nature of the tale tellers. So Baccio's tale tellers are all of the same class, which is high class. Chaucers are not. So the highest class person is the knight who's not that high. And there is a plowman at the bottom.

The vast majority are in between. So we have a summoner, a friar, a merchant, a man of law, a lawyer. A sailor, a cook, all of these... The miller, yeah. Yeah, the miller, the reed. All of these kinds of people. That's really, really important. The idea that a miller has just as much a right to tell a tale as a knight,

I might tell a better tale. So it allows Chaucer to tell lots of different kinds of tales and lots of different genres, lots of different forms. So you really do get this kind of sense that there's something for everyone. What would the comedian's tale be in the storytelling competition, Mike? Well, it would be of the world. worst gig. That's when you, that's when the,

the heckler might send that, yeah. In the green room or whatever, that's, that's when everyone shushes and just everyone leans in when there's a really nut gig that went really, really badly.

So it's not the storming gigs. It's not the ones where you've absolutely killed. No one wants to hear that at all. No, no, that, that comic is being booted out of the car immediately. It's the real stinker. Okay. So, yes.

It's the one where the audience, yeah, people were following you out to do violence upon you. Running to do violence upon you. Running to, yeah. Running to the car park, locking the doors. Marion, why is the Canterbury Tales so important, both as a literary work and also in terms of our sense of the English language? I suppose in terms of language, Chaucer borrows and coins a lot of new words. Now, of course, sometimes that's simply been recorded because his work is so well known.

But he certainly was expanding the English language a lot in the Canterbury Tales and in his other works as well. You know, my favourite example is that he was so newfangled that he invented the word. Newfangled. Oh, lovely. He also changed what poetic forms were available in English. So he was the first person to use the 10-syllable line and to use an early form of the iambic pentameter. So the five-stress line that became the fundamental building block of English poetry.

So Chaucer's writing in English, and that is why he is the father of the English language in many ways. And obviously, you know, you said iambic pentameter. That's Shakespeare later on. But we need to move on with Chaucer's later life. Is he just constantly writing until the end of his life? or is it phase? No, he writes all of his life. Yeah. So most of the Canterbury Tales are written in the 1390s, which is also when he writes his treatise on the Astrolabe. He rewrites the prologue Lenged of Good Women. He writes lots of short poems. And he's working. So we see him working throughout the 90s. Towards the end of his life, he's living in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which was not necessarily a religious thing. I mean, there were lots of shops and brothels and things like that in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. But he's living in. That's why he gets buried there because he lives. there, not because Poets Corner existed there. Yeah, there was no Poets Corner at the time.

It's just his local church. Yeah, I mean, it would have been more normal for him to have been buried in St Margaret's Westminster. He must have had a good relationship with the monks for them to bury him there. But it's because he lives there and it's later his tomb gets moved and Poets Corner gets started. But, yeah, certainly in the last year of his life, we see him writing a poem to the new king asking for his money. Oh, great. Yeah. So his final literary work is, It's titled, Cash, please. In fact, it's called, what's the name of the poem? Yeah, complaint to his purse.

A complaint to his purse. Good. I think all invoices should be titled Complaint to the purse. So he dies in 1400 by the end of October. A nice round number though. Well done Geoffrey first. He basically saw the whole 14th century and went, that's enough of that. Thank you.

Done it. Yeah. Mission accomplished. So all the highlights. So that's the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Wow. Quite alive, quite the sort of literary history, really. But you want's window.

Time now for the nuance window. This is where Mike and I spend two minutes silently inspecting ditches while Marion turns a new page and tells us something we need to know about Geoffrey Chaucer. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Marion. I'm going to talk about Chaucer and character. So when people think of Chaucer, they often think about his characters, the wife of Bath, the Miller, the knight, the host.

And Chaucer did two really significant things with literary character. First of all, he developed the idea of the unreliable narrator. So in many of his poems, the person telling the story is biased and withholds part of the story, or lets their prejudices come through in the telling, so they're not objective. And the idea of unreliable narration was to become a really key part of the novel. We see it especially in modern novels such as Lolita, for example. Chaucer shows us that what we see is dependent on where we are standing. And I think this interest in perspective can be linked to the rise of artistic perspective at exactly this time.

Chaucer would have seen Giotto's art, for instance, when he travelled in Italy. So he's really interested in using literary character to explore subjectivity and ambiguity. Secondly, he made his characters much more 3D than previous characters in literature, especially his female characters. The wife of Bath is based on characters

from Latin and French texts who were stereotypes, cynical old prostitutes. Chaucer's version is far more nuanced. She's much funnier and more appealing. She has a memory and a sense of the future, She talks about domestic violence, and she talks explicitly about the lack of female voices in literature. In Troilus and Crusade 2, Chaucer changes the character of the heroine. In Boccaccio's Ilfalostrato, Chaucer, Crusade is a fickle, promiscuous betrayer.

Chaucer, though, shows us the powerlessness and vulnerability of Crusade's situation, reveals the patterns of her thought and her constrained options, makes her a much more rounded and sympathetic character. He's interested in depicting character's complexity and interiority. especially women's. Other authors sometimes disapproved of this. In the 15th century, Henriksen wrote a sequel to Troilus and Crusade in which Crusade is punished

by becoming a prostitute with a venereal disease. Later artists such as Pierre Paolo Pasolini turned the wife of Bath into a monstrous stereotype. Chaucer's concern with depicting complex female characters is one of his great achievements and makes him stand out both from his contemporaries and from many of his successes. Amazing. Thank you so much.

Lovely. There we go. Jeffrey Chaucer. Amazing. We often say Shakespeare writes great female characters, but Chaucer was doing it 200 years earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the, yeah, the unreliable narrator thing.

That's, that's, yeah. I'm going to have to deep dive. Yeah, I love all that. Well, we talked about that in our Agatha Christie episode, you know, another great literary sort of giant and her sort of, you know, the narrator who's actually leading you down, you know, but he's already doing it in the 1380s.

Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting. And that whole sense of perspective of shifting, you know, how do you use. see things really fundamental to Chaucer's poetry. He's pretty good, Geoffrey Chaucer, isn't he? He sounds good. I'm going to have to have a bit of a read, doesn't it? Yeah.

I think, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Marion, as well. Thank you. Really enlightening and very interesting. Oh, it's been great. Listener, if you want more literary history, you can check out Mike's earlier episodes on our theory and literature, which is an absolute hoot, or Charles Dickens at Christmas. Of course, our Agatha Christie episode, too.

We've also got the episode, the live episode, done at Hay Festival, about printing in medieval England, where we mentioned Chaucer. And for more 14th century lives, we have our travel episode about Ibn Bebbing Tuta. It's a very interesting guy. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. But I just like to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we had the marvellous Professor Marion Turner from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Marion. Oh, I've loved it. Thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner, we had the magnificent Middle English poet himself. Mike Wozniak, thank you, Mike. Thanks having me back. I've had a joyous time. Brilliant.

Yeah, we learned a lot, didn't we? And to you lovely listener, join me next time. We read another chapter from the big You're Dead to Me book of history. But for now, I'm off to go and drag people out of the pub and force them to walk to Canterbury while I regale them with the podcaster's tale. It's very long and very rude. Bye! I'm Sharie Val and I've been investigating fraud for decades.

Now I'm shining light on the secret techniques criminals use to steal your money. With insight from guest experts and... the real people involved in these scams so you can see the fraudsters coming before it's too late. That's the new series of scam secrets. Listen now on BBC Sounds. A history of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible in BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known. Many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment.

Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 99% of visible feed wherever you get your podcasts.