What was Chaucer's contribution to English literature?

In
writing in English, Chaucer was not unique in the Middle English period. On the contrary,
writing in English continued apace in parochial documents and literary texts after the Norman
Conquest, despite the language of government being French. The idea of a "standard"
English, which had begun to develop at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, disappeared, but the
result was that English diverged into an astonishing number of written dialects, localizable to
different geographic areas and social classes. Chaucer plays upon this idea in ,
in which two northern students in the south speak in an almost unrecognizable . What
is notable about Chaucer's English is that he was writing at a time when the
"standard" we now know was slowly returning, hastened by the invention of the printing
press. Chaucer was of course not really responsible for the fact that his southern, London-based
English was to set the written standard for all time, but the fact that his written dialect was
London (Chancery) English, combined with his enormous popularity, certainly contributed. There
are more surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's works than of any other text from this period, from
which we know that he was an extremely successful and influential author. The closest
challengers, in terms of surviving manuscript numbers, are generally religious texts like
"The Pricke of Conscience."

Why this was the case is an interesting
question. Certainly, Chaucer created vivid and entertaining depictions of people interacting
with each othercontemporary English people and archetypes from classical literature alike. In
terms of his contribution to English literature, he cannot be said to have engineered any
notable plots or stories, the vast majority of his works being variants of existing tales.
However, perhaps the most significant impact Chaucer did have on literature in English was that
he brought us to expect authorship.

Chaucer was writing
at a time when works were not signed, by and large. Works were anonymous, written by monks and
often embellished by them until they became, effectively, communally-authored pieces, to which
each transcriber would add his or her own additions and amendments. Chaucer identified himself
as "auctor" in the texts he wrote. He consciously set himself against the
long-standing convention of changing texts as they passed through many hands, saying in theto
, "so prey I God that noon myswrite thee" (I pray that nobody
will make changes to my work). People bought works on the understanding that they had been
written by Chaucersomething that sometimes backfired, as many works were then falsely attributed
to Chaucer, but which has certainly had an enormous impact on English literature. Before
Chaucer, anonymity was the norm in English literature. Today, we have and expect authors, of
whom Chaucer was arguably the first English champion.