We do not know exactly where or when Chaucer was born (though London seems a safe answer to the first question), and indeed all biographies of him have to make do with a limited and by now rather stale set of facts around which a narrative can be woven; accounts of the ‘Age of Chaucer’ type abound, however, in which any shortfall in details relating to the author can be made up by lavish accounts of the court of Edward III. In giving evidence to a legal inquiry in 1386 Chaucer is recorded as being ‘of forty years and more’, and scholars generally accept a date of birth for him of some time in the early 1340s. His family, who originally came from East Anglia, had been settled for some time before his birth in the Vintry ward of the City of London, where his father indeed had a vintner's business, a circumstance that in some of the more picturesque novelizations of Chaucer's life has the infant poet already gathering material for the Canterbury Tales from the colourful and jovial characters pressing into his father's pub. His father, of course, was not an innkeeper but a wine merchant, a member of an affluent and influential mercantile class, and someone whose services to the Crown helped prepare the way for his son's entry into the royal household. We know nothing about Chaucer's education, though his court training doubtless fostered that love of reading he refers to throughout his works (notably in the House of Fame ll. 652–60), and the omnivorous intellectual interests they evince.

Nearly 500 documentary life-records relating to Chaucer survive from the Middle Ages, preserved in the invaluable compilation by Crow and Olson, and ranging from pleas of debt against Chaucer in the Court of Common Pleas to payments to him from the royal purse and court-records concerning three robberies he was subject to between 3 and 6 September 1390. There are no records, however, relating to his infancy or boyhood, and our first account of him comes in 1357, when, as a page in the household of the Countess of Ulster, wife of Edward III's son Prince Lionel, he is in a list of those authorized to receive a new suit of clothes.