However, it was the influence of the great Italian writer, Dante Alighieri, which mattered the most, because Dante set a real precedent in abandoning Latin to write his Divine Comedy in contemporary Italian, and following Dante’s lead, Chaucer abandoned Latin and French to write in vernacular English—and he did this with such great success, with such excellence, that his English style set the standards for the next two hundred years.

Chaucer had no constraints in how he wrote, really. English hadn’t yet been used seriously for literature. English didn’t have any history of style——it didn’t even have a formal grammar or a dictionary. What Chaucer had was a liberal education, a broad experience of the world, and a keen ear for how language——the languages of England——were used by the people. And with these abilities—and with his great poetic talent——he created a new, a fuller and richer, blend of what would eventually emerge as our modern language.

About fifty percent of Chaucer’s vocabulary has its source in the Romance languages, but they weren’t French or Italian or Latin borrowings—his language wasn’t a hybrid of his own devising. Chaucer wasn’t coining words from his familiarity with continental French or Italian. No, Anglo-Norman still had a very strong presence in England, and it’s this that Chaucer’s vocabulary reflects. Much Norman-French had entered the English vocabulary by Chaucer’s time, and its foreign origin was recognized as little as we today recognize the foreignness of the words “hotel” or “parachute”. Words like “bachelor” in the Merchant’s carry the Norman-French meaning of “an unmarried man” 一 as it primarity does today — not the continental French meaning of “a high school graduate” .