Chaucer’s Mockery of the Clergy Backfired on Him
Chaucer is best known today for his literary output. In his day, however, he was also a prominent and capable government official, and a member of the courts of both King Edward III and his successor, King Richard II. Despite that prominence, he simply disappears from the historic record after June 5th, 1400, after he signed a receipt for the payment of five pounds. So what happened? To figure that out, we have to go back to the reign of Chaucer’s benefactor, King Richard II. Richard has a bad rap as a tyrannical monarch. However, his reign was a relatively good one for the arts, letters, and even saw some glimmers of religious freedom, or at least tolerance. His reign was certainly good for Chaucer.
Richard was deposed in 1399 by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who took the crown, became King Henry IV, and had his predecessor quietly disposed of. The new regime saw the rise of new powerful figures, whose numbers included Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury – England’s most powerful church official. Arundel had not been a fan of Richard II’s religious tolerance, and sought to roll back the religious freedoms of that reign. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had mocked and depicted the clergy in unflattering terms, and that put him in the archbishop’s crosshairs. As seen below, Arundel might have turned to criminal means to do away with a writer he loathed.
