Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was born in London to a family of wine merchants and spent his working life in royal service — as a diplomat, customs official, and clerk of the king's works — while writing in the hours it left him. Widely read in French, Italian, and Latin literature from his diplomatic travels, he did more than any other writer to establish English, rather than French or Latin, as a serious literary language, in works including Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s) and his unfinished masterwork, The Canterbury Tales. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the area that later became known as Poets' Corner.