This is a much bigger mystery then people seem to realize. Now Geoffrey Chaucer was an incredibly popular author in medieval England, one of the few who told his tales in the language of the commoners, English. Ostensibly he was a linchpin in preserving the English language and assuring its rise to the most prolific tongue in the world. Also, he was a rather controversial satirist, namely of the church. For example, one of his tales mocks the corruption of the church by telling a story of how a Friar died and went to hell, was confused about being the only Friar there before discovering thousands of winged Friars inhabiting the devil's arse. Luckily for Chaucer though, the court of Richard II was very intellectually uninhibited, so he could get away with this sort of thing. Though when Richard II was deposed in 1399 by Henry IV, a crackdown begun on any potential heretics. At this point Chaucer simply disappeared off the face of the earth, no public execution, no leads to any possible assassination, he didn't even leave a will, he simply disappeared. Former Monty Python star Terry Jones has recently written a book postulating that Chaucer was murdered by the establishment in attempt to keep him quiet but chroniclers of Chaucer's life for the most part rebuke his claims and prefer to leave all the different possibilities open (so few popularly accepted theories emerge). It seems strange to me that Chaucer's mysterious end has not been the subject of more contemporary books, as this event would be at least comparable to, say: Michael Jackson or Britney Spears vanishing without trace today. As such this is one big mystery I'd like to uncover