Did Chaucer Live at 177 Upper Thames Street?: The Chaucer Life-Records and the Site of Chaucer's London Home

Abstract

In the much-admired biography of Chaucer by Derek Pearsall published in 1992, we are informed of the following: Chaucer family home was one of those houses on the north side [of Thames Street]. Its site was that of a property known as 177 Upper Thames Street in the eight eenth and nineteenth centuries; in the late nineteenth century, the area was levelled and redeveloped and in 1940 it was levelled again by bombs during the Blitz.1 Pearsall's information is taken from Chaucer Life-Records, published in 1966, where, in a commentary on a deed describing property which once belonged to Chaucer's father, a claim is made for the first time that the Chaucer site can be identified with 177 Upper Thames Street: These descriptions of the Chaucer tenement, with the later history of the tenements on either side of it and with the title deeds in the posses sion of the Worshipful Company of Vintners, identify its site with that of premises known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as No. 177 Upper Thames Street.2 This is an interesting assertion?indeed startling in its exactitude. But does it have substance? To answer that question, one must examine the research lying behind the unequivocal statement that Chaucer lived at 177 Upper Thames Street as found in Crow-Olson and perpetuated in the Pearsall biography. In 1873, F. J. Furnivall discovered an important document bearing on the life of Chaucer in the Guildhall Library, London. This was a quit claim deed, dated June 19, 1381, in which one Geoffrey Chaucer names himself as the son of John Chaucer, vintner of London, and releases his interest in a tenement once owned by his father located in Thames Street in the City of London. The significance of the deed is twofold. In the first place, of the more than four hundred documents relating to Chaucer's life known to us today, it is the only one giving any information about his