After a much needed shower (it had been 26 hours since the last one in the Seattle hotel), I’m off to Westminster Abbey, only a few minutes walk away.
I had forgotten how glorious the facade is. Known to millions as the site of various Royal weddings, it is an iconic building, central to British history – in place since 960 AD, with every coronation of every king or queen held there since 1066 AD. Over 3,000 Britons are interred there – including Geoffrey Chaucer. Somehow fitting to start my journey where he ended his…
I’d bought my entrance ticket online so was whisked in. The audio tour was excellent, but I was surprised (I should have known better) to see the “No photography” sign. This would make my post a wee bit more challenging!
After a circuitous tour, I came to the Lady Chapel. In December 1399 Chaucer was granted the lease of a tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel for a term of 53 years. The site of this garden is now covered by the enlarged Lady Chapel built by Henry VII in the early 16th century. Chaucer died in the tenement around October, 1400 and was buried at the entrance to the chapel of St Benedict, in the south transept of the Abbey.
torn
But that’s not where I found his name, for the plain slab of stone which marked his grave was torn up when a monument to poet John Dryden was erected there in 1720. In 1556 the present Purbeck marble monument about thirty yards away was erected to Chaucer’s memory by poet Nicholas Brigham.
Chaucer was the first poet to be interred in the Abbey, and as more poets joined him, that area became (and is still) known as Poet’s Corner. Bruce, a very helpful docent I spoke to, suggested Chaucer was buried there because of his position as Clerk of the King’s Works at the Palace of Westminster prior to his death.
But I agree with an alternate theory by Chaucer biographer Marion Turner. She suggests in Geoffrey Chaucer: A European Life that Chaucer was buried there because he was known by – and a friend to – the monks who lived next to him; it was a Benedictine Abbey then, with many apartments and houses let to men like Chaucer who would have worked at the Palace of Westminster, a stone’s throw away.
Thank you Bruce for allowing me to take these pictures!
As I exited the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament loomed not 200 metres away. In Chaucer’s day this was the Palace of Westminster, where Chaucer began his career serving as valet to Prince Lionel of Antwerp, then King Edward III, and where he would have met his eventual wife, Philippa Rouen, who was lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa. Endings and beginnings…
Abutting the Abbey and the Palace is Parliament Square Garden, where I made my way through hundreds of anti-Brexit protesters who shouted against current Brexit efforts, a scene Chaucer would have witnessed over 600 years earlier in 1381 when the population rose up against the imposition of the poll tax (and many other grievances). Now called the Peasant’s Revolt, it was the first great rebellion in English history – but that’s for another post. Suffice to day, what comes around, goes around…
After a very informative tour of the Houses of Parliament, I walked to the west side of the building and the open green space , now called Victoria Gardens. I imagined the original Palace of Westminster that had stood here since before Chaucer’s day and that had burned down in 1834. Apple orchards may have ringed a courtyard next to the Thames, and Chaucer could very well have read his poems aloud to the courtiers of the day, perhaps even competing in a storytelling contest, or “puy”, popularized by King Edward III – a scene central to The Storyteller’s Reputation.
