Terry Jones: Who Murdered Chaucer?
Sunday October 19
Terry Jones didn't set out to be a historian; as an undergraduate he studied English. Perhaps this is why he asks the questions that no-one else realised were questions. Wondering why Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, usually so entertaining and funny, should contain some dull and conventional passages, set him off on investigations which completely revised the interpretation of the character of the Knight. Now he has turned his attention to the question Who Murdered Chaucer?
This was an unconventional murder mystery: Chaucer's death is not usually regarded as suspicious. The first major poet of the English language wrote his masterpiece towards the end of the fourteenth century, so it's natural to take his death for granted, without asking when or how it happened. Terry Jones points out that although Chaucer was not a young man, he was by no means exceptionally old. He was famous, related by marriage to the king's uncle, and reasonably wealthy - yet he simply vanished from the record. There is a mystery here, and Terry Jones and his team of researchers set out to solve it.
As soon as Terry Jones took the stage of the Gala Theatre for the closing session of the 2003 Literature Festival, it was clear that he was passionate about his subject: he strode back and forth in front of the huge and colourful slides with which his talk was illustrated, arguing his case, pointing out details and generally persuading the audience that the late fourteenth century had been an exciting and turbulent period and that Chaucer, by the mere fact of writing in English, had declared himself one of the young king's party, and so placed himself at risk.
It was an ambitious project to take the audience, within the space of a lecture, from a starting point of knowing practically nothing about Chaucer's death and its political background, to the conclusion that Chaucer was probably murdered by his political enemies, and the exposition inevitably left a number of gaps. But Terry Jones's own conviction was infectious, and his audience were certainly queuing up after his talk to buy his book and get the whole story.
