Chaucer's Tomb Chronology

ca. 1400 Chaucer dies--no record is made of his burial. 

ca. 1478 William Caxton's preface to Chaucer's English translation of Boethius asks readers to pray for the soul of the "worshipful mann Geffrey Chaucer first translatour of this sayde boke into englissh and enbelissher in making the sayd langage ornate and fayr.  whiche shal endure perpetuelly. and therefore he ought eternelly to be remembrid . of whom the body and corps lieth buried in thaabbay of wesmestre beside london to fore the chapele of seynte benet."  Caxton also pays Stephen Surigonis to compose a Latin poem praising Chaucer, the text of which he reprints in the preface and has engraved in marble somewhere "near" the tomb.

1561  Nicholas Brigham, a wealthy fan of Chaucer's poetry, pays for the erection of a marble tomb with new verse inscriptions and a bas-relief sculpture of poet on the southeast wall of Westminster Cathedral.  Chaucer's remains may or may not have been moved from its original grave, probably beneath the paving stones of the Abbey floor, to the wall-mounted tomb.

1570  John Foxe writes that Chaucer is buried in an aisle on the south side of Westminster Abbey "not far from the doore leading to the cloyster" and that two "old verses" are written on the "grave stone."

1602  Thomas Speght (in his 1602 edition of Chaucer) reproduces the verses said to be inscribed on the Brigham tomb, but that the "verses about the ledge" have been "cleane worn out."

1700 John Dryden published Fables Ancient and Modern; translated into verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, and Chaucer (PR3418 .F3 1713) the same year in which he dies and is buried in Westminster Abbey

1720  John Sheffield, the duke of Buckingham, erects a tomb for Dryden in the Abbey

1723  John Dart, in the Westmonasterium, writes that Chaucer's "stone of broad Grey Marble, as I take it, was not long since remaining; but was taken up when Mr. Dryden's Monument was erected, and sawn to mend the pavement."