Knight's Tale and the Franklin's Tale Chaucer thought that
love and marriage were perhaps compatible after all, provided
that the lover remained his wife's servant after marriage, in
private at least. If we read the Wife of Bath's Prologue we
shall see that she thought little of wives that did not master
their husbands. What solution to these problems was reached
by Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer he never revealed. He only
once alludes to her, or seems to do so, when in The House of
Fame he compares the timbre of her voice awaking him in the
morning to that of an eagle. His maturest work is increasingly
ironical about women considered as wives; what the Wife of
Bath and the Merchant have to say of them is of this kind. The
Wife of Bath's Prologue and the Merchant's Tale are perhaps
his two most astounding performances. By the time he wrote
them Philippa had long been dead. It is in any case by no
means certain that these two characters utter Chaucer's
private convictions; they are speaking for themselves. One
can only say that Chaucer was a great enough writer to lend
them unanswerable thoughts and language, to think and speak
on their behalf.

The King soon began to employ his beloved valet on im-
portant missions abroad. The details of most of these are not
known, but appear to have been of a civilian and commercial
nature, dealing with trade relations. We can infer that Chaucer
was trustworthy and efficient.

Meanwhile Chaucer was gratifying and extending his
passion for books. He was a prodigious reader and had the art
of storing what he read in an almost faultless memory. He
learnt in time to read widely in Latin, French, Anglo-Norman,
and Italian. He made himself a considerable expert in con-
temporary sciences, especially in astronomy, medicine,
physics, and alchemy. There is, for instance, in The House of
Fame a long and amusing account of the nature of sound-
waves. The Canon's Yeoman's Tale (one of the best) shows an
intimate knowledge of alchemical practice. In literary and
historical fields his favourites seem to have been Vergil, Ovid,
Statius, Seneca, and Cicero among the ancients, and the
Roman de la Rose and the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and

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