It may not seem so, but it is a full 600 years since Geoffrey Chaucer passed away. He died on October 25th, 1400, at the then venerable age of 60 years - or so we think, since we do not know exactly when first he saw light of day.
He was born of prosperous parents sometime around 1341, and enjoyed relative prosperity for most of his life through the patronage of John of Gaunt, to whom he was related through his wife.
Chaucer, it must be said, is not the most readable of English poets. It is to be supposed that he rhymed quite well to those who spoke the language in a medieval way, but to modern ears his verses come across as possessing, as it were, more than a hint of Afrikaans.
His magnum opus, as we know, was Canterbury Tales, a richly-varied compendium of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket. To meteorologists, however, the Tales are disappointing for their paucity on weather.
It is to another poem, Troilus and Criseyde, in which the distraught Criseyde is torn hopelessly between her love for Diomede and her former paramour, young Troilo, that we must turn for Chaucer's best-known dictum on the science of meteorology. It contains a plaintive cri de coeur to the inconstant donna mobile:
There is no faith that may your heart embrace:
But, as a weathercock that turns his face
With every wind, you change.
But the Tales are rich in astronomy, a subject in which the poet had a lifelong interest. The stories which Harry Bailly, landlord of the Tabard Inn, coaxed from the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury contain a number of references to different contemporary ways of telling time. One of the tales, that of the "Man of Law", describes how a person's shadow can be used in this way, almost like a sundial; he began his tale when . . .
the shadow of each tree
Had reached a length of that same quantity
As was the body which had cast the shade;
And on this basis he conclusion made:
That on that day, and in that latitude,
The time was 10 o'clock.
Since the craft of printing did not evolve until 1476, none of Chaucer's work was published in his lifetime. These two masterpieces are considered to be the first major works of English poetry, however, and Chaucer's burial place in Westminster Abbey became the nucleus for the Poets' Corner in that august establishment.