Poetry Professor Taylor will be walking us through the life and times of Geoffery Chaucer! Just kidding - a normal person who doesn't understand Middle English at all, Taylor, will walk us through this story today! We tie back to last week's peasant revolt to talk about how Chaucer's apartment was above the Aldgate - so he would have watched people rush into London. We also talk about the precipice of change in this time period - in hindsight, it's easy to see we're on our way to The Renaissance, but we're pretty sure some folks knew then too!
Poetry Professor Taylor will be walking us through the life and times of Geoffery Chaucer! Just kidding - a normal person who doesn't understand Middle English at all, Taylor, will walk us through this story today!
We tie back to last week's peasant revolt to talk about how Chaucer's apartment was above the Aldgate - so he would have watched people rush into London. We also talk about the precipice of change in this time period - in hindsight, it's easy to see we're on our way to The Renaissance, but we're pretty sure some folks knew then too!
Sources:
Sony Pictures to pay $1.5 million to settle suit over fake film critic
Chaucer: A European Life -- Marion Turner
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160092/chaucer
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Taylor: Very busy this week. Very busy. How are you, Taylor
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Let's get that banter going.
>> Taylor: I got hot glue everywhere just a second ago. I'm, like, about to set my office on fire.
>> Farz: Don't do, that. We're gonna try to avoid any fires at the moment. How are you, Taylor?
>> Taylor: good. Very busy.
>> Farz: Yeah. You had friends in town, huh?
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. We had our friend Jamie. Jamie and Karen. They came with their kids. We had a great time. the kids all slept in tents in their bedroom. So cute.
>> Farz: So fun.
>> Taylor: and they had so much fun, and we had a great time. But then, you know, both days of the weekend, Florence and I had to go to the Walmart to do a cookie booth. And then I've tried to organize my softball team, and that's been a whole thing because, you know, had. I had to do a draft last week, and I practice starting on Wednesday, and I'm just like, now we have an activity every single day.
>> Farz: Yeah, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you do it either. I'm about to have a heart attack. Yeah, I get tired when I hear about your life. I just don't even know how to manage. Also, did I get cookies this year or not?
>> Taylor: Not yet, but you can order them still.
>> Farz: okay. Is there a link that you shared with me?
>> Taylor: I'll share it again.
>> Farz: Okay. Thank you.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yes.
>> Taylor: Yes. Yes.
>> Farz: I try to get cookies every time.
>> Taylor: Thank you. I appreciate you.
>> Farz: Sweet.
Doomed to Fail brings you history's most notorious disasters, epic failures
So, yeah, let's go ahead and dive in. Who is going first today? Oh, wait, we had an intro.
>> Taylor: I'll do it. Hello.
>> Farz: I'm still fired, aren't I?
>> Taylor: Welcome to Doomed to Fail. We are a podcast, and we bring you history's most notorious disasters, epic failures. I, actually called it historical drama the other day, which I thought was fun. twice a week. And I'm Taylor, joined by fars.
>> Farz: Yes, I'm here as well. again, relieve my duties of doing the intro for reasons that should become obvious by now.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: yeah, I'm ready. Okay, so who is doing what first? And what?
>> Taylor: I think I go first.
>> Farz: Yeah, let's do it.
>> Taylor: But I need to reopen my chrome. I close my chrome just for you because it's too much.
>> Farz: No, Taylor, this whole. How does a plane land upside down? Okay, serious, Just think about it. How does that happen?
>> Taylor: How did everyone. Okay, so It's Monday the 17th, and we're just like an hour ago, a plane landed upside down in Toronto and. Right, Toronto. And I don't. I don't know how nobody died is my first thing, I think.
>> Farz: There's no wheels on the roof.
>> Taylor: and there shouldn't be. So I don't know.
>> Farz: So I'm so not excited for the fact that I'm gonna be traveling a lot very shortly.
>> Taylor: I know I'm not excited for you there, actually. I think you go first this week.
>> Farz: But it doesn't matter if you want to either way. Do you want to go first?
>> Taylor: I'll go. I already have it open.
>> Farz: There you go.
>> Taylor: Okay, great. so I told you last week I talked about the peasants revolt, and this week I was going to talk about Geoffrey Chaucer. So that's what I'm doing. I told you I was going to do it, and here we are.
Two moviegoers in California sued Sony over fake review of A Knight's Tale
But first, let's talk about A Knight's Tale. Have you seen A Knight's Tale?
>> Farz: Is that the Heath Ledger one?
>> Farz: No, I just know the Heath Ledger's in it.
>> Taylor: Okay. It's great. And it came out in 2001. And in 2001, on the posters and in the ad, the ads for A Knight's Tale, a critic named David Manning of the Ridgefield Press called Heath Ledger this year's hottest new star. Quote, quote, quote. But the problem is David Manning is not a real person. The Ridgefield Press is a real, newspaper. But he is not a real person and he is not a real movie critic. So two moviegoers in California sued Sony for this because they said they were tricked into seeing A Knight's Tale because of that quote from that fake person and ended up in a $1.5 million lawsu against Sony Pictures. And you could get $5 back if you could prove that you saw Vertical Limit, A Knight's Tale, the Animal Hollow man or the Patriot, because they used fake reviews and all for all five of those films.
>> Farz: We have to have tort reform in this country. This is ridiculous. I'm so angry right now. Also, Hollow man was great.
>> Taylor: And yeah, I said this is insane because A Knight's Tale is great and it had real good reviews.
>> Farz: And Heath Ledger is the talent of the century or whatever they said.
>> Taylor: And yeah, my third point for that, this ridiculous lawsuit is that this was 2001, but 10 things I hate about you came out in 1999. So he was 1999's hottest star of the year. Like young breakout star.
>> Farz: I Can't argue with that.
>> Taylor: he was a new star in 1999, not 2001. We already knew he was by then. so, anyway, yeah.
>> Farz: Can you tell you a fun Heath Ledger fact?
>> Taylor: Of course. I love.
>> Farz: Okay. I just learned this. Apparently, when the, masseuse found his corpse in his room, he m. She made, like, a bunch of phone calls to. Who's that? What is her name? Elizabeth Olsen. Mary Kate and Ashley's sister, who's really famous and hot right now. Yeah, she made a bunch of phone calls to that person. And before she called the cops, it was, like an hour or so between calls before she ever called the police.
>> Taylor: And Elizabeth Olsen is in WandaVision. And you've seen that, right? No. Okay, well, the guy who plays vision in WandaVision is Paul Bettany, who played Chaucer in A Knight's Tale. So I was going to say, before you even said that, that when I picture Chaucer, I picture Paul Bettany. He's six, three. He's Mary Jennifer Connelly. You know who I'm talking about.
>> Farz: You can picture Connolly. Okay.
>> Taylor: That's what I picture, anyway.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: He was.
>> Farz: He was in, He was in A Beautiful Mind. He was the guy that. He got it. Okay. Yep.
>> Taylor: Yeah, he's very tall. Yes. he's even handsome when he's like vision and he's like red. It's like. He's like. I don't know. I'm so sorry, everyone. He's like a superhero. I don't know what that means, but he's very handsome. Anyway, I thought that was hilarious and fun that you would sue someone because of that. Because, I mean, what? What? Okay, so can you hear that screaming in the background?
>> Farz: No.
>> Taylor: Okay, great.
>> Farz: Do you want to explain that, or should I just edit that out?
>> Taylor: no, it's. My children are home, and they have a friend over. It's President's Day, so we're all home. so. Okay, so I. I did not watch A Night's Tale, but I should rewatch it because it's great. but I did read a very dense book about poetry this week called Chaucer by Marion Turner. I do not pretend to understand what is going on. Like, I obviously am not someone who digs deep into poetry. And so, like, I am not sure a lot of it, and there's a lot of symbolism, and there's so much. You. You could. You could be a Chaucer scholar if you wanted to. But I got some facts out of the book. About his life that I will share with you right now. So, also, I think that there are some things that fill in holes from last week's episode, like why they did certain things during the Peasants revolt that I think is really helpful. also, this is only 600 years ago, like the end of the medieval period and like going into the Renaissance. And I feel like in the grand scope of things, that is not that long ago. You know, I, know it's just.
>> Farz: Different because, like, we're in America where everything is like, measured in like 200, 300 year range territory. But, like.
Taylor: Jeffrey Chaucer was born around 1343, which is insane
Yeah, in Europe, it's not that long ago.
>> Taylor: It's not that long ago. It's really wild. And like, I. Like my grandmother, my. The oldest person I ever knew was my great grandma. She was born in 1904 and she died in the 90s. Like, she is not obviously not so alive, but I knew someone who was alive over 100 years ago and like, she probably knew people who were alive, you know, so it's like. I don't know. It's like you don't go that far back to get it. 600 years, really. so there's that also Middle English, which is what Chaucer's poems were written in. And like, what they spoke at this time sounds insane, and I hate it. I will do some pretending to read to you later, but it is really hard to read. like absolutely impossible to read in Middle English for I feel like 99.9% of people. And then like difficult in modern English.
>> Farz: Yeah, it's on Shakespeare.
>> Taylor: Yes. Yeah. so also just like a note. Travel during this time takes forever. So he did a lot of traveling and you could probably do the 25 miles in a day if you were like, really hardcore traveling. and also, like, a lot of this is in London, and they talk about Chaucer's house, which is at Aldgate, which is a part of London that we talked about last week. And then Westminster Abbey as being like different places in the world. And they're like four miles apart, you know, so, like, Because a lot of his stuff is about traveling and like, traveling is just really hard, obviously. So, Jeffrey Chaucer was born around 1343, which is an insane time to be born. Like, things aren't great. And I was going to do a.
>> Farz: Bit there, Taylor, about whether when they travel, sometimes their horse carriages go upside down.
>> Taylor: Oh, God. Well, I bet they did.
>> Farz: Sorry. Keep going.
>> Taylor: I bet they did. so it's a crazy time to be born. Because it's the plague. It's 100 years war. All this stuff is happening. But good news for Chaucer is that he was not poor. He actually came from, like, a really, like, well off family, which is great for him because he didn't, like, you know, die as a child in a pit of mud or whatever you did. And he. His family were wine merchants. So they had a bunch of, like, stores and, like, places where they would sell wine and they would be wine traders. Previously, they were pepper traders. Remember, we talked about this, like, a long time ago when you were like, how can pepper be a spice that, like, changed the world? But, like, it totally was because they'd never had pepper before.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: So his dad, John, married his mom, agnes. They had 24 little shops in London. So, like, they were kids. No, I mean, I don't know. My kids have. I think just one. and even though he was well off, he had to get a job. And he got a job as a teenager. Chaucer himself got a job as a teenager in the household of Elizabeth DeBerge, the Countess of Ulster. So now he's, like, in court. So when he's a teenager, he, like, leaves home and goes to get this, like, courtly position. And, this is some stuff that I thought was super interesting that I learned reading this book is that if you're part of a household, that doesn't necessarily mean a physical location. It means that, like, you're part of a group of people who travel around with, like, the person who. You're in their household, and you, like, put yourselves together everywhere you go. You know, you're like, we bring everything to our country estate. we bring everything to visit someone else. We bring everything to London. So there are, like, tons of people that would always be with this, this countess and her husband. when you were in a house like this is. There's so much changing right now at this time that we talked about this. Like, you don't know when you're in the Renaissance until, like, it's over. But, like, that, it's very clear that this stuff is going to happen really soon. one of the things that is happening now is houses are starting to have privacy, like, when you're actually in a house. Which is interesting because before that you didn't. It was like one long railroad apartment. There were no hallways. Like, there was nowhere to, like, be intimate. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom where people weren't looking.
>> Farz: Yeah, I remember hearing that, like, hallways were like, a later invention.
>> Taylor: Yeah, like, In Versailles, there's no hallways. It's just, like, room to room to room. Yeah.
>> Farz: Have you been to Versailles?
>> Taylor: No. Okay, we should go. We should get a boat and find our way to France. No planes, no pedal our way over. That would be great. so. But that.
This is when the merchant class started having economic means
So I also saw something on Instagram this week that was, like, a little pod for sleeping. That was, like, a box that people could go in and sleep. And that was, like, the first time you'd have, like, privacy when you were asleep or, like, you know, with someone, you know, in bed. You'd want to, like, be. Be in a place that was, That was private. Chaucer is actually one of the first times in, his work that they use the word closet at all, because there weren't closets either, you know, plus, you were traveling so much, so he's part of this household. And you wouldn't really get paid in money. You would get paid in things. So this is also a time where, like, money has a new starting to have a new meaning, because they start to use gold instead of silver. And so now they have both. And they can do things like give change. Because when everyone, you know, like. I mean, you have, like, just one silver coin for anything, there's no change, you know? Yeah.
>> Farz: It's interesting. You never think of it like change was an invention.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So things are changing, like, around that. But. But for the first couple years at least, he was paid in, like, goods. and one. One example of this, and a lot of this we know, because this is in, like, the accounting for the household and, like, in, like, those papers that we still like that people have access to. But at one point, Elizabeth bought Chaucer a Pal Talk, which is an outfit that is literally tights and a tiny, tiny shirt. And it was, like, very scandalous because when men would wear it, obviously you could, like, see everything, and then their tiny, tiny shirt would kind of be, like, at their waist level. And so it was very, very scandalous. And some people thought that that is why, the plague came to England, because of these scandalous, shorts. Which is funny because people still think that gay people make hurricanes.
>> Farz: It. I, It also sounds uncomfortable.
>> Taylor: It does. It's kind of.
>> Farz: I want to wear something super tight. Like, that sounds horrible.
>> Taylor: It's like men in tights. You know, that movie.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah. Okay.
>> Taylor: You know, it's like that. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. So that was, like. That's, like, a fun thing that we have on the record. So we know he was wearing these, like, scandalous little, like, tight clothes. And another thing that we talked about last week and we like, named the episode after that, like, you know, you wouldn't let, the peasant class, like, buy nice things. Like, it really was. This was the first time where there was, like, conspicuous consumption and people were buying nice things to show that they were rich. So that was like. It was. It's why it felt like such a big deal to them.
>> Farz: Interesting. Okay. You know, so this is when, like, the merchant class started having economic means.
>> Taylor: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. And that it caused a stir because people were getting paid and that kind of thing, you know, like. And you were like, I earned this pair of tights by working.
>> Farz: I earned these. These Jordans.
>> Taylor: Yes, exactly. another really horrible thing that I learned about is a food called a galatine, which is cold meat in, like, jello. And it was really fancy because it was hard to debone meat. So it was like, you know, spend all this time, like, deboning like, a chicken. And then like, it was like in like a jelly. Jelly mold. And it looks so gross and it makes me want to die. And, in one of his Chaucer's works called to Rosamund, he says, quote, no pike ever wallowed in Galentine as I in love and wounded and mirrored. Which means, like, I'm in love and I'm stuck.
>> Farz: It's so hard to understand. How do you even know that? Did you run that through Chad? GPT made no sense at all.
>> Taylor: It made no sense at all. And that's the. That's the modern English version of that sentence.
If you had a bite of medieval Valentine, you would die
So anyway, I learned about that. That sounds gross. You know that we talk about how the thing about time travel is that you couldn't eat the food?
>> Farz: No. We know. God, no.
>> Taylor: And you would you. If you had a bite of medieval Valentine, you would die?
>> Farz: Yeah, of course.
>> Taylor: Literally die. I also learned from Wikipedia ing it that this is gross and not related, but during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, they created Gallatine from 2000 tons of lamb guts that had they found in the. In the, seaport to feed the starving people. And also reminder that Putin's brother starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. And that that explains a lot of his personality, really. He hadn't been born yet, so by the time he was born, his parents had this, like, dead older brother that they, like, idolized and were, like, really sad about forever.
>> Farz: Oh, hey. Ah, we shoot an episode on Putin one time.
>> Taylor: We should. We. Did you did that one like him, people like falling off buildings by accident.
>> Farz: We should do it like his life and like how he came.
>> Taylor: Anyways, yeah, I've read a good book about, about it. so anyway, we know these things about Chaucer because they're records of the household that he was in. And it was a great, position for him because he had to travel around and do business for the household. So in 1359, we start the Hundred Years War. And I was like, oh, obviously they didn't call it that because, like, hey, guys, I'm starting a war. It's gonna be 116 years. Hop in.
>> Farz: It was a one year war, then a two year war, then three year war.
>> Taylor: So just for everyone's knowledge, it, there's three phases of the war that like some truces in between, but there's an Edwardian war, the Caroline war, and the Lancastrian war. So this is the Edwardian part that he's in. He goes to Europe, he goes to France with Elizabeth's husband. He gets captured as like a prisoner of war. And they get him out for £16 they have to pay to get him out, which is £15,000 in today's money. And I just want to say that if you go to jail and you need $15,000 to get out, I could probably find it, but I would not, I'd be worried.
>> Farz: I don't think anybody does that. Right. Like, don't you just go to a bail bondsman? They just charge you 10 interest?
>> Taylor: I think so, yeah. I think so, yeah. so he's traveling around, he's seeing other, other religions, other people. Except that he wasn't, he wouldn't be able to see in England. Like, so he's in France and he sees Jews and Muslims working together, which he did. Would not have seen in England. He, goes to Italy and he is reading Dante and he is seeing art. One art at this time that we talked about is changing. One thing is perspective is being added into art. So you're seeing things like, not just like that, totally flat 2D. He, would have seen a lot of Giotto's work. And so Giotto died like right before he got there. But he's like the very late medieval beginning of the Renaissance painter and I. The fun Giotto story that I learned for $200,000 because of my art history degree is that, one time, like a king wanted Giotto to paint, make a painting for him, and they sent someone to his house and said, we need you to Prove that you're a good painter. And Jada just looked at him and he painted a perfect circle and said, that's it. Like, I've. That's all I can do to prove how great I am.
>> Farz: That's like the Hemingway baby shoes story.
>> Taylor: Yeah. That's fun. So he would. Chaucer would be collecting tariffs. He'd be working in the. In the wool trade for a while. And he works for John of Gaunt, who we talked about last time. He's the regent of King Richard II, because Richard II is 10 when he becomes, king. So he works for him a lot. He does have an apartment in London. He lives literally above the Aldgate. So we talked about how the Aldgate is where some of the peasants came through during the Peasants Revolt. Chaucer would have been there, like, looking down from his apartment, watching people storm in the city, which is kind of exciting.
>> Farz: That's probably a little scary.
>> Taylor: Yeah. He married a woman named Philippa in 1366. She also worked in the household. And, she would make her own money. So she. We. You kind of. The record shows that she has passed away. Because. Because the record stops giving her money. You know, like, that's like. There's no, like, thing about her death. But, like, the financial records for, like, the king who was, like, paying her stop.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: So you, like, assume that she died. they had at least three kids, maybe more. Like, the record is not clear on that. their son Thomas had a great job as chief butler to several kings. His daughter Elizabeth became a nun. His daughter Alice married a duke. And there might have been a Lewis as well. So, like, there's more kids, probably. he's kind of at home, his family being, like, a writer on the side. It was kind of a side hustle, being a writer.
Office is new, too. Another thing that's brand new now is poetry
But he'll mostly be out on the road working in the trades, when he's home. Another thing that's brand new now because we talked about, like, rooms being new is like a home. Office is new, too. So he would, like, work from home, which was one of the first times you could, like, do that.
>> Farz: Weird.
>> Taylor: Be, like, a literary person. Like, work from home. Otherwise, you would have been, like, at a library or at, like, a communal space. Like, this is when you would have, like, privacy to do these things. So he also started to get, like, you can get paper easier and books easier. So we're just like, all of this stuff is happening, and people who are in the middle classes, like you, merchant classes, like you were saying, have more time to read now. So they're going to be learning and doing this. That. Which is cool. some interesting tidbits about his poetry. Again, I know nothing about poetry, but if you can think of like one way to write a poem, what do you think of that? Because what, what two word phrase is like a particular style.
>> Farz: I wanted to say stanza or something.
>> Taylor: iambic pentameter.
>> Farz: Do you feel like that's like you have so much faith in me. You, you think so highly of me to think that I would ever know that.
>> Taylor: There are some couple things that I feel like I think about in my head a lot that like, sound that way. Like iambic pentameter. I feel like I think that word a lot. And I also think the word Harrison Bergeron, which is a Kurt Vonnegut story. So like, in my head, like six times a week, I'm, like, Harrison Bergeron iambic pentameter.
>> Farz: Wait, what is a herger on Bergeron?
>> Taylor: Harrison Bergeron is a. Is a carvonic story about, society where they try to make everybody equal. So Harrison Bergeron is like very famous. Not very famous, very handsome and smart. So they like make him like, carry weights around and they like, make him like, not be able to see so that he's like, equal to everybody else. Because he is like, whatever, Whatever.
>> Farz: Wait, wait, why is that bounce around your head?
>> Taylor: Just the words. The words, like, just like the thought like, like Harrison Bergeron is like what I'm thinking. I don't know. A couple times a week.
>> Farz: Too funny.
>> Taylor: So Chaucer invented iamic iambic pentameter, which is a rhythmic pattern of five iambs, or unstressed syllables followed by stress syllables in a line. So here's an example from Shakespeare. Two households, both alike in dignity and fair Verona, where we lay our scene. That's all. That's what it sounds like. It's like, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum.
>> Farz: I,
>> Taylor: I'm.
>> Farz: My brain just does not get a degree. Yeah, there's. There's some things that I'm not even going to pretend I care about or understand or. And poetry is one of those things.
>> Taylor: I know that's as far as I can go.
>> Farz: and you have an art degree?
>> Taylor: I do, but like visual art.
>> Farz: Visual, yeah, yeah, sure.
Chaucer was one of the first people to write about space
>> Taylor: so he was also one of the first people to write about space. He. His is the first mention of the Milky Way in English. This is when people were starting to think about space again for the first time. Both like their own Physical space and, like, what it would be like to be in the air. And I know I talked shit about the Tower of London, how it's not a tower, but it would have been like the highest place you could have gone in London for a very long time. and so that was like. That was the first time people he would write about, like, flying over the countryside and just like, have this idea of, like, what could you see if you could look down? But it was not something that, like, he ever had the opportunity to do. he wrote about the astrolabe, which was like a way to look at the stars as well. So he's really interested in that too. So who is reading this stuff that he's writing? So he's writing mostly for men and women of the upper classes. And Queen Anne, who we talked about last time as well, is the wife of Richard ii. And they, called her Good Queen Anne because she, you know, really wanted people to read and to have an education. That was a big part of her thing for both men and women. So he would have changed, his writing to be for everyone and, then also the middle classes because they would have time to read. he also talked about how he wrote about Troy and how, like, the mythical Troy and not about how, like, there's no historical truth or mythical past. And so that was super interesting because that. We talk about that too. and a lot of his works were copied and passed down and people started talking about him later. So, like, within, like 200 years, someone had written a biography about him. And then, like, now, you know, you could get a PhD in Chaucer, I'm sure, if you wanted to.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: Some of his, things that you might have heard about if you're not fars. he, you know, I don't think you're going to list a bunch of Chaucer things.
>> Farz: What, me? Just off the top of my head? Yeah, yeah. Canterbury Tales. That's my list.
>> Taylor: Yes. There's other ones. There's one, a couple about, like, ancient Greece. There's one about Troilus and Crusadia. One about, What about. That's. That's the Troy one. a lot of them. Whatever. There's a couple. Bunch of them. But let's talk about the Canterbury Tales, because that's the most famous one. And he planned to do 130 stories, but he did 24. So he had, like, a grand vision, but he did not finish it. And it. They're also not for kids. I feel like you read them in school, but there's, like, sexual assault and death, and, you know, it's not.
>> Farz: I actually don't recall any of the actual story.
>> Taylor: I know. And I feel like it's just so hard to read, you know, so.
>> Farz: So. You know what, Taylor? You say that, but I'll say this. So for some reason, I have no idea why Patrick Duvall came up in casual conversation this weekend for me.
I've read Canterbury Tales. I still don't remember exactly what it's about
And I mentioned that the first major movie that he was in was To Kill Mockingbird, remember?
>> Taylor: no.
>> Farz: Okay, well, he was. And please, I hope I'm not wrong for the hate mail I'm Yet. But even in that. And I've read To Kill Monkey More. I've seen the movie. I still don't remember exactly what the m. Like, I couldn't tell you exactly what it's about. I know Atticus Finch. I know the name of that guy. But, like, that's basically. And so that's where, like, I'm sure. I've read Canterbury Tales. I've read an, abridged, version of it, or Cliff Notes of it. I had no idea what it's about. It just didn't stick.
>> Taylor: Do you mean Robert Duvall?
>> Farz: What did I say Patrick? Who's Patrick Duvall?
>> Taylor: I don't think there is one.
>> Farz: Thanks for saving us a lot of hate mail.
>> Taylor: You're welcome. But, yeah, no, totally. I think that, like, I can only tell you what happened in Romeo and Juliet because I watched it so many times. Because of Leonardo DiCaprio.
>> Farz: Exactly.
>> Taylor: I, like, had to read it, you know.
>> Farz: Exactly.
>> Taylor: More hate mail from all the poets that listen to this. But the way that the Canterbury Tales are set up, set is it's people telling stories in an inn. They're all on a pilgrimage, and they're stopping and telling stories of their life. They. There are some religious, obviously, connotations. The Western schism had just happened. So I think this is when there were, like, two popes. Like, they couldn't decide who was going to be pope. And, obviously, also, it's Black Death time, where people have their suspicion about the Church because priests died as well, which we talked about last time. So some of the ones that are famous in the Canterbury Tales, that I'll go through, there's obviously a Knight's Tale, which is like, two nights joust over a lady, and one of them dies, essentially. Yes. There is the Miller's Tale. This one. This one seems fun. So there's a miller, who's, like, older, who's like, a person who makes flour and he has a young wife, and then someone seduces her. And the man who seduces a wife convinces the husband that the second great flood is coming. So the husband gets in a bathtub and ties it to the ceiling. So this whole time, the husband's, like, in this bathtub on the ceiling. And then there's another suitor trying to get the wife's attention. And the wife tricks him to kissing her bare butt. And he's, like, super embarrassed. And because he's so embarrassed, he takes a fire poker and burns the first suitor who screams. And that scares the miller. And the. And the bathtub falls and shatters, and everybody thinks that the miller is crazy.
>> Farz: This is a very stupid story.
>> Taylor: I'm sorry. A little comedy of errors. Sure. and then there's one. The Wife of Bath, where a knight in King Arthur's court is sentenced to death for something. And Queen, Guinevere gives him a chance to save himself. He must discover what women truly want within a year. So the night goes out to figure out what women want, and he finds an old, ugly woman who tells him that women want power over their husbands. Like, that's all that women want. And then she says, you have to marry me now that I told you that. And she said, I can be an old woman and faithful, or I could be young and unfaithful. You get to choose. And he said, well, I'm going to let you choose, since I know that women want to have the power over their husbands. And because he let her choose, she decides to be young and faithful and they live happily ever after.
>> Farz: Well, that's sweet. Yeah, I like that one.
>> Taylor: That's kind of fun. so they're like that.
In Middle English, Chaucer's prologue sounds like this
Okay, so here I'm going to try to tell you what they sound like, and it's going to be insane. So the general prologue is like the beginning of the Canterbury Tales. And this is. This is translated into modern English. Okay. When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root and bathed every vein in such liquid that it gives birth to the flower.
>> Farz: Okay, okay.
>> Taylor: In old Middle English, it sounds like this. Maybe Vaughn, that April with his shoe race suito. The droat of March hath par said to the rota and bathe every vein in sweet liqueur of which virtue engendered is the fleur.
>> Farz: It's not English.
>> Taylor: So hard to say. So hard to try. yeah, so that's. You know, have you ever have time to watch, like, YouTube clips of people, speaking in, like, you know, Middle English. It's wild.
>> Farz: They like, or thing last podcast episode where they played someone speaking, like, Welch on the recorder. It was like you had, like. It was like, no clue what any of the words actually meant, but it was like, English, technically.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like. It's very, very heavily accented.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Man from the north of England. You know, you'd be like, what? So that's what it said. That's what it sounds like. And that's his, like, most. Most famous, most famous work. at one point, Chaucer was accused of sexual assault himself, but it was settled out of court. So it's not clear exactly what actually happened, because he and his wife lived apart for a while. They, probably just, like, they just, like, live separate lives. They still had. When she passed away, they had a baby, so they still were like, you know, together when they could be, but they didn't, like, live together. In the 1370s, Chaucer traveled around Europe. He went over the mountains in the snow, into Italy again several times. He was probably involved in the uprisings that Richard 2nd had with the Lord's appellant, because, if you'll remember from last week, there was a little bit of time when Richard was not, on the throne until he died, and then Henry IV became king. at one point, King Richard paid Chaucer a gallon of wine a day for life, for an unspecified task.
>> Farz: I wonder what that was.
>> Taylor: I think it might have been poetry, which is funny. But, and then that was when Richard was, like, not the ruler when he was in the middle of that crisis. And then when he became ruler again, he changed it to a monetary sum, per day. But at one point, he was getting paid in wine. One, thing about Richard is that he wanted to be above the law because he was king. And he talked about this last time as well. He thought that, like, God appointed him all those things, and the rest of the people in, like, parliament and the court were like, no, we have checks and balances. You can't do that. so that was a big part of that, of that uprising, in the late 1300s, Chaucer would move around England, serving various government jobs. He was in Parliament in Kent. He was the controller of customs for a port. So he had a bunch of, government jobs, but he was writing always on the side. and then Philippa does pass away, but they had not been living together. And again, the way that we know that is because he went to go pick up their paychecks essentially, and hers was not there. And like, he knew she was dead, but like, we know on the record that she's dead because her paycheck stopped coming.
>> Farz: You would think that if your husband is like a world famous author, when you die, there'd be some memorialization of your death outside of the fact that the King stopped paying you.
>> Taylor: Because I don't, I don't know if he. How like world famous he is right now. You know, he's like a little famous, but I don't think he's like, he's.
>> Farz: On a first name basis with the King. He's getting free wine.
>> Taylor: Sure, sure.
>> Farz: And wine's probably really expensive back then.
>> Taylor: Well, yeah. He also comes from a family of wine people, so I wonder if he was picky.
>> Farz: There you go.
>> Taylor: Anyway, he stops working around 1390. so he had a pension of around £20 a. A year, which is about £22,000 in today's money. And, he ended up moving near Westminster Abbey when he, when Henry IV became king and that's where he ended up dying. He died on October 25th, 1400. it says of unknown caus, but I'm just like, he was in his mid-50s. In the middle Ages. He just died.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, probably, yeah. he's buried in Westminster Abbey. He was the first person buried in a place called Poet's Corner, which now it was like, looking at it and there's like a ton of statues and memorials and it's hard to tell who's actually buried there and whose ashes are there. Like Rudyard Kipling's ashes are there. There is a sign for, Jane Austen, but I don't think she's actually buried there. But then guess how many people are buried in Westminster Abbey?
>> Farz: Sorry, be a lot. It's got to be like in the high hundreds.
>> Taylor: It's like over 3,000.
>> Farz: Wow.
>> Taylor: Which I don't really understand, but, but that is where he is, in the corner with all of the other poets.
>> Farz: The problem is that, like, you set a standard, Right. You set a standard for like, what kind of person can be buried there.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: And then, then you. As the population increases, the people that fit that category increases as a percentage of the population. But then you can't dig up the old corpses and get rid.
>> Taylor: I know, Maybe they have.
>> Farz: Well, never mind. You can.
>> Taylor: No, I don't know.
Taylor: I learned a little Bit about poetry this week
I'm just saying. And Also, it's been 600 years, so like. Yeah, that adds up.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: yeah, so that's it. I learned a little Bit about poetry this week, and it is hard for me, but I struggled through it.
>> Farz: Taylor, fun, fun side anecdote here, because you kept saying stuff like, oh, yeah, until then, nobody'd ever done that. Like, you mentioned something about, like, nobody ever thought of what the city looked like from the top down. Nobody thought about change, and nobody thought about hallways. Like, there's a lot of that going on.
I was listening to a podcast about, like, quantum computing
I was listening to a podcast about, like, quantum computing, and I have no idea what it is. I don't understand any of it, not even an iota of it. But it was tied into how migratory birds are able to track the magnetic field of the Earth, despite how, like, very, like, light the magnetic field of the Earth is. It's all tidally. This weird quantum computing thing. Like, these two atoms or whatever neutrons can. Like, even though they're not connected in the bird's brain, they, like, it's, like, sensing it and, like, is able to. So it's no idea what it is. But it got me thinking about how much stuff is going on around us that we just can't understand or see.
>> Taylor: No, totally. Oh, my God, there's going to be.
>> Farz: So much stuff like that where it's like, you never thought of, like, oh, yeah, I never seen a city from the top. Nobody's ever seen a city from the top. it's impossible. How would you ever.
>> Taylor: Right, Exactly. And actually, so I also want to say, like, I'm sure that, like, I'm saying in Western civilization, I'm sure there's, like, other civilizations who had thought of it before, potentially.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, but I mean, Western. But then also, this is a fun story that. That reminded me of. There was some point in Europe where they didn't know where birds went during the winter, you know, because they were like, I don't know, the birds disappear. And then one day, a bird came back with an African arrow through it because it had been shot at in Africa. And then they were like, holy, this bird's been to Africa. They didn't know I saw that.
>> Farz: I was actually really upset when I saw it. It was like, maybe like a month ago, I was at the local park by my house, walking Luna outside by that lake. And there was all these, like, geese or ducks, whatever, there. And there's one with an arrow sticking through it. And, like, just walking.
>> Taylor: There was not.
>> Farz: I swear to God, it was walking around.
>> Taylor: I sure wasn't wearing one of those, like, joke headbands.
>> Farz: Yeah, I was wearing one of those joke headbands.
>> Taylor: He's just trying to rile up the.
>> Farz: Reincarnation of some SNL character. Very m. Very fun. Oh, sweet. Okay, well, thanks for. Thanks for talking through that and introducing us to, the undigestible, words of Chaucer.
>> Taylor: Thank you. Yeah, if you're an English teacher, give us a call.
>> Farz: Yeah, please give us a call. I'm sure you're listening to this. sweet.
Taylor: Word of mouth is the best way to grow a podcast
Do you have anything else for us, Taylor?
>> Taylor: No, just thank you, everyone, for, for listening. I have doomed to fill stickers. If you want one, email us, I'll mail it to you. Doomed to fill pod gmail.com for free. We'll mail it to you.
>> Farz: And we're actually kind of starting to hit like an exponential ish adjacent growth curve. And so people who are telling your friends, thank you. Because that is the best way to grow is word of mouth. And if you haven't told your friends, what are you waiting for? Just tell your friends the shoulder and be like, hey, listen to this.
>> Taylor: Cool.
>> Farz: We appreciate it.
>> Taylor: yeah, doom default pod on all the social medias. And thank you.
>> Farz: Sweet. We'll go ahead and cut things off.