The Heyrons of London: A Study in the Social Origins of Geoffrey Chaucer

Abstract

GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S grandmother Mary had three husbands. The second, Robert Chaucer, a London vintner, gave to the poet his surname and his descent from a line of Ipswich taverners, sometimes called Malyn.2 The third, Richard Chaucer, also a vintner of London, brought up Geoffrey's father John Chaucer in the wholesale wine trade. The first, John Heyron the younger of London, by whom Mary had a son Thomas Heyron, a vintner,3 seems to have been a pepperer by trade. He and his son certainly exerted a powerful, albeit indirect, influence upon the environment of Geoffrey Chaucer in childhood, if not in later life also. The identity of Mary Chaucer's first husband with John Heyron the younger of London is proved by her dealings with land at Ashwell in Hertfordshire and Edmonton in Middlesex and by the descent to her son Thomas of two London tenements which had belonged to this John Heyron. At Ashwell, John Heyron had a leasehold house and garden which he surrendered to the Abbot of Westminster, as lord of the manor, after the lessor under whom he held had been hanged for felony. The Abbey accountants long associated the tenement with his name, and in 1306, his widow, Mary, joined her second husband Robert Chaucer in releasing it to the Abbot, describing it as held by her former husband, John Heyron of London.4 The land at Edmonton lay on the normal route by which the Abbot's corn was taken from Ashwell to London and Westminster, being first carted to Ware and thence down the River Lea past Enfield and Edmonton. In January, 1305, Robert Chaucer and Mary sued out a writ concerning ten acres of her land at Edmonton, claiming that her former husband, John Heyron, had let them to Ralph the Clerk of Edmonton against her will. The parties agreed in 1307 that Ralph should retain the land in exchange for 100 s.5 The tenements of which the descent proves the identity of Mary's husband, John Heyron of London, with John Heyron the younger, son to a Thomas Heyron, citizen and pepperer, lay on either side of that stretch of Watling Street which ran eastwards from the church of St Mary Aldermary to the corner where Soper Lane entered the street from the north. The northern tenement (A) was divided by the parish boundary between St. Mary and St. Antolin (or Antony,