been the poet's grandfather, was descended. Whether or not he was at any
time a shoemaker (chaucier, maker of chausses), and accordingly belonged
to a gentle craft otherwise not unassociated with the history of poetry,
Richard was a citizen of London, and vintner, like his son John after him.
John Chaucer, whose wife's Christian name may be with tolerable safety set
down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not far from the
arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury or beyond, and in
the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in Chaucer's own day, emptied
its travellers on their errands, sacred or profane, into the great
Southern road, the Via Appia of England. The house afterwards descended
to John's son, Geoffrey, who released his right to it by deed in the year
1380. Chaucer's father was probably a man of some substance, the most
usual personal recommendation to great people in one of his class. For he
was at least temporarily connected with the Court, inasmuch as he attended
King Edward III and Queen Philippa on the memorable journey to Flanders
and Germany, in the course of which the English monarch was proclaimed
Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine. John
Chaucer died in 1366, and in course of time his widow married another
citizen and vintner. Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-
blood, was likewise a member of the same trade; so that the young Geoffrey
was certainly not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence. The "Host"
of the "Canterbury Tales," though he takes his name from an actual
personage, may therefore have in him touches of a family portrait; but
Chaucer himself nowhere displays any traces of a hereditary devotion to
Bacchus, and makes so experienced a practitioner as the "Pardoner" the
mouthpiece of as witty an invective against drunkenness as has been
uttered by any assailant of our existing licensing laws. Chaucer's own
practice as well as his opinion on this head is sufficiently expressed in
the characteristic words he puts into the mouth of Cressid:--