A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a civil servant has been identified as the only surviving handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer, revered as the father of English literature.
While it was known that the individual seeking a leave of absence was the author of The Canterbury Tales – during his 12-year employment as controller of the London Wool Quay – the application was assumed to have been made on his behalf by a clerk.
Now a leading scholar argues that it was actually written by Chaucer and submitted by him for King Richard II’s approval.
Prof Richard Green, a Canadian academic, said: “This would be the only known example of his hand.”
The potential for discovering more about Chaucer through an actual example of his handwriting is huge, he said. “There are still lots of public records from the middle ages that haven’t been looked at. My hope is that, if we identify the hand, then it might be recognised in other documents.”
The document is held in the National Archives and has been known for more than 150 years. Although it bears the name of “Geffray Chaucer”, the spelling used on the author’s own seal – Green argued it has never been recognised for what it is, “partly because of Victorian snobbishness” about its informal nature, “which is short, simply worded, and carelessly written”.
“The real question is why would anyone else write it? … It’s been, for a long time, an assumption that [a] superior gentleman who wouldn’t have written like an ordinary scribe … The Victorians dismissed it as not being likely to be in his hand – and people have just followed them ever since,” said Green.
From 1374 to 1386, Chaucer was the king’s controller, overseeing the payment of duty on exported and imported wool, among other goods. In the late middle ages, the English Crown charged an export tax on wool. Each of the principal ports around the coast, including London, provided two citizens known as collectors to levy this tax. The king appointed a supervisor – known as the controller – to ensure that he was not cheated.
The document, a thin strip of parchment (27.5cm x 7cm), bears a spidery hand written in French, the primary bureaucratic language of the day. The applicant requested permission to appoint a proxy to perform his duties.
Green, professor emeritus of the Ohio State University, argued that the evidence includes the fact that Chaucer had no clerical staff and was expected to provide his own official documentation. “Employing a professional scrivener for such a document would be like hiring a lawyer to write an inter-office memo.”
Although Chaucer was famously infuriated by one scribe’s carelessness so much that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs, the script of this document does not exhibit the kind of attention to detail one might expect of a professional scrivener, Green said.
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He added, while Chaucer’s contemporaries wrote petitions that were far more elaborate, this document is “both informal in tone and casual in execution”.
His research will feature in the Chaucer Review, to be published this month by the Pennsylvania State University.
Green writes: “The cumulative evidence is conclusive. Chaucer may well have known in advance that his request for leave of absence would be granted, but he was still obliged to go through a formal process that required him to draft his petition in writing, get the chamberlain to confirm that the king had approved it, and then have it sent over to Chancery to receive official authorisation.
“There is every indication that [this] represents the actual document that he submitted, and that he wrote it in his own hand.”