Who Murdered Chaucer?
A Medieval Mystery By Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor London: Methuen 2003 408 pages, £20.00 (Hardcover) ISBN 0413759105 Terry Jones’s interest in the Middle Ages dates to his days at Oxford, before he became famous as a member of British comedy troupe Monty Python. After the huge financial success of the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which Jones starred in, co-wrote, and directed, he took a year off to write a well-received book about The Canterbury Tales. That study left him wondering about the details of Geoffrey Chaucer’s life and the story of his death. His new book,Who Murdered Chaucer?, developed from a “coroner’s inquest” into the poet’s death held at the Sorbonne in 1998. To make his case for foul play, Jones creates a compelling picture of life in fourteenth-century England, a period when the arts flourished and feudalism waned. Chaucer was a member of the English court, an able administrator, and even a spy for a time. Durin
