Forget the dusty scholar in a stone tower. The Geoffrey Chaucer found in medieval tax audits, royal ransom notes and a 2022 archival discovery was a prisoner of war, a diplomat running secret missions across Europe, and for 12 years the customs controller policing corrupt wool officials at the Port of London. This episode uses those records to rebuild the real life of the man who legitimized the English language almost as a side project.

We start with the wealthy vintner family and the 1324 kidnapping of his 12-year-old father by an aunt trying to keep real estate in the family, then follow Chaucer as a page in a Plantagenet household, his capture at the siege of Reims and the 16 pounds Edward III paid to ransom him, and the Italian missions that exposed him to Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and to the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood. We unpack  ...