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 the 1379 Cecily Champaigne case and the 2022 documents that reframed the Latin word raptus as a labor dispute rooted in post-plague poaching laws. Then the craft: the five-stress line, rhyme royal, nearly 2,000 new words, the first Valentine’s Day romance in Parliament of Fowls, an astrolabe manual written for his ten-year-old son, and a burial at Westminster Abbey that happened only because he rented a tenement on the grounds.

• Why writing in low-status English instead of French or Latin was a professional risk
• Cultural smuggling: how the Italian Renaissance crossed the Alps in Chaucer’s luggage
• The raptus mystery and the National Archives find that rewrote his biography
• A daily gallon of wine and other perks of being a poet inside the royal machine
• The Retraction, the fake Plowman’s Tale and how Tudor publishers rebranded him