In a time when French poetry was still the dominant influence on aristocratic taste in England, Chaucer's literary range was unusually broad. Fully at home with the French tradition, he was widely read in Latin poetry and philosophy, classical and medieval, and he was perhaps the first non-Italian to fully appreciate the achievement of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. One result of this extensive literary culture is a remarkably rich poetic vocabulary. Chaucer fundamentally altered the expressive capacities of English by drawing much of his language from these sources, and he moves among them with brilliant effect, balancing the colloquial force of English with coinages from the learned Latin tradition and the courtly vernaculars of France and Italy.

Middle English was peculiarly well suited to such linguistic play. The Norman Conquest had imposed on England a French-speaking aristocracy and administrative hierarchy, relegating the native vernacular to a largely sub-literate status. English had been reasserting itself since the early thirteenth century, but showed the effect of “colonization” in a tendency to accord a higher status to words drawn from French than to their English equivalents. Later, as the language of learning and formal devotion was adapted to English, Latinate terms became similarly privileged. Evidence of the relative status of the three languages pervades Chaucer's poetry. In the Reeve's tale the essence of the social ambition of the miller Symkyn is distilled in the rich French rhyme that expresses his anger at the presumption of the clerk Aleyn to “disparáge” his daughter and her “lynáge” (birth).