Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.

Chaucer’s early fame as the founding father of the English literary tradition is still justified on the basis of his linguistic and metrical achievements. However, he was only one of a number of later fourteenth-century writers engaged in making English a fit medium for literature. While Chaucer experimented with bringing complex continental forms of metre and stanza into English, the poets of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, the Morte Arthure, and Piers Plowman were turning the traditional alliterative metre into a vehicle to display poetic virtuosity. Chaucer’s prose works of learning and philosophy also have distinguished competitors. His translations of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and his Treatise on the Astrolabe were made at the same time as huge encyclopaedic and historical works were being translated into English by his contemporary John Trevisa. The work of Chaucer’s competitors, much of it now neglected, offers revealing perspectives on his achievements.