Who invented ‘twitter’?

On Wednesday, the wonderful elves at Qikipedia (the Twitter presence of QI) announced that:

The word ‘twitter’ was first used by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1374.

Now, this is obviously the sort of thing to make lexicographers (even washed-up former lexicographers) sit up and take notice. So let’s get the big, obvious and pedantic problem out of the way first.

If you look at the OED‘s entry for twitter, v.1 (originally published in 1926; included in the 1989 Second Edition), the first quotation in the first sense (‘intr. Of a bird: To utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously with a tremulous effect.’) is:

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