About this public life of Chaucer we have a few facts.
But it is difficult at times to fit the man of camp, and court,
and counting-house to the poet and story-teller who possessed a
wealth of words and a knowledge of how to use them greater than
any Englishman who had lived before him. And it is rather
through his works than through the scanty facts of his life that
we learn to know the real man, full of shrewd knowledge of the
world, of humor, kindliness, and cheerful courage.
Chaucer was a man of the middle class. His father, John Chaucer,
was a London wine merchant. The family very likely came at first
from France, and the name may mean shoemaker, from an old Norman
word chaucier or chaussier, a shoemaker. And although the French
word for shoemaker is different now, there is still a slang word
chausseur, meaning a cobbler.
We know nothing at all of Chaucer as a boy, nothing of where he
went to school, nor do we know if he ever went to college. The
first thing we hear of him is that he was a page in the house of
the Princess Elizabeth, the wife of Prince Lionel, who was the
third son of Edward III.
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