CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE.

“A more enlightening picture than any we have yet read.”—Times.

“It will, I hope, be read by every one who wants to know what the Middle Ages were really like.”—Dr. Rashdall in Independent Review.

“Extraordinarily vivacious, fresh, and vivid.”—Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, M.P., in Speaker.

FRIAR’S LANTERN: A Mediæval Fantasia.

“Written with undeniable ability.”—Times.

“Worthy of a place beside the ‘Cloister and the Hearth’ as a true work of art.”—Commonwealth.

FATHER RHINE; with 14 Illustrations.

“This is a very pleasant book of journeying.”—Spectator.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND PUBLIC NEEDS.

“If the ‘man in the street,’ who and whoever he be, will take the trouble to read it, his eyes will be opened.”—Times.

MEDIÆVAL STUDIES: Seven Essays mostly reprinted from the monthly and quarterly reviews.

[Larger Image]

PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER

PAINTED BY ORDER OF HIS PUPIL THOMAS HOCCLEVE, IN A COPY OF THE LATTER’S “REGEMENT OF PRINCES.”
THE HAIR AND BEARD ARE GREY, THE EYES HAZEL: HE HAS A ROSARY IN HIS LEFT HAND AND
A BLACK PENCASE OR PENKNIFE HANGS FROM HIS NECK

CHAUCER AND HIS
ENGLAND

BY
G. G. COULTON, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
“FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE,” ETC.

WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1908

PREFACE

No book of this size can pretend to treat exhaustively of all that concerns Chaucer and his England; but the Author’s main aim has been to supply an informal historical commentary on the poet’s works. He has not hesitated, in a book intended for the general public, to modernize Chaucer’s spelling, or even on rare occasions to change a word.

His best acknowledgments are due to those who have laboured so fruitfully during the last fifty years in publishing Chaucerian and other original documents of the later Middle Ages; more especially to Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the indefatigable founder of the Chaucer Society and the Early English Text Society; to Professor W. W. Skeat, whose ungrudging generosity in private help is necessarily known only to a small percentage of those who have been aided by his printed works; to Dr. R. R. Sharpe, archivist of the London Guildhall; to Prebendary F. C. Hingeston-Randolph and other editors of Episcopal Registers; to Messrs. W. Hudson and Walter Rye for their contributions to Norfolk history; and to Mr. V. B. Redstone’s researches in Chaucerian genealogy. His proofs have enjoyed the great advantage of revision by Dr. Furnivall, who has made many valuable suggestions and corrections, but who is in no way responsible for other possible errors or omissions. The many debts to other writers are, it is hoped, duly acknowledged in their places; but the Author must here confess himself specially beholden to the writings of M. Jusserand, whose rare sympathy and insight are combined with an equal charm of exposition.

He has also to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall, Messrs. E. Kelsey and H. R. Browne of Eastbourne, and the Librarian of Uppingham School, for kind permission to reproduce seven of the illustrations; also the Editor of the Home and Counties Magazine for similar courtesy with regard to the plan of Chaucer’s Aldgate included in a 16th-century survey published for the first time in that magazine (vol. i. p. 50).

Eastbourne

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

LIST OF PLATES

CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

ENGLAND IN EMBRYO

Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain from pressing too literally the poet’s fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer’s times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them; but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the 20th century. There is indeed a glory over the distant past which is (in spite of the paradox) scarcely less real for being to a great extent imaginary; scarcely less true because it owes so much to the beholder’s eye. It is like the subtle charm we feel every time we set foot afresh on a foreign shore. It is just because we should never dream of choosing France or Germany for our home that we love them so much for our holidays; it is just because we are so deeply rooted in our own age that we find so much pleasure and profit in the past, where we may build for ourselves a new heaven and a new earth out of the wreck of a vanished world. The very things which would oppress us out of all proportion as present-day realities dwindle to even less than their real significance in the long perspective of history. All the oppressions that were then done under the sun, and the tears of such as were oppressed, show very small in the sum-total of things; the ancient tale of wrong has little meaning to us who repose so far above it all; the real landmarks are the great men who for a moment moulded the world to their own will, or those still greater who kept themselves altogether unspotted from it. Human nature gives the lie direct to Mark Antony’s bitter rhetoric: it is rather the good that lives after a man, and the evil that is oft interred with his bones. The balance may not be very heavy, but it is on the right side; man’s insatiable curiosity about his fellow-men is as natural as his appetite for food, which may on the whole be trusted to refuse the evil and choose the good; and, in both cases, his taste is, within obvious limits, a true guide. It is a healthy instinct which prompts us to dwell on the beauties of an ancient timber-built house, or on the gorgeous pageantry of the Middle Ages, without a too curious scrutiny of what may lie under the surface; and at this distance the 14th century stands out to the modern eye with a clearness and brilliancy which few men can see in their own age, or even in that immediate past which must always be partially dimmed with the dust of present-day conflicts. Those who were separated by only a few generations from the Middle Ages could seldom judge them with sufficient sympathy. Even two hundred years ago, most Englishmen thought of that time as a great forest from which we had not long emerged; they looked back and saw it in imagination as Dante saw the dark wood of his own wanderings—bitter as death, cruel as the perilous sea from which a spent swimmer has just struggled out upon the shore. Then, with Goethe and Scott, came the Romantic Revival; and these men showed us the Middle Ages peopled with living creatures—beasts of prey, indeed, in very many cases, but always bright and swift and attractive, as wild beasts are in comparison with the commonplace stock of our fields and farmyards—bright in themselves, and heightened in colour by the artificial brilliancy which perspective gives to all that we see through the wrong end of a telescope. Since then men have turned the other end of the telescope on medieval society, and now, in due course, the microscope, with many curious results. But it is always good to balance our too detailed impressions with a general survey, and to take a brief holiday, of set purpose, from the world in which our own daily work has to be done, into a race of men so unlike our own even amid all their general resemblance.

For the England of Edward III. was already, in its main national features, the England in which we live to-day. “In no country of Europe are the present-day institutions and manners and beliefs so directly derived from the social state of five centuries ago.”[1] The year 1340, which saw the abolition of the law of Englishry, was very likely the exact year of Chaucer’s birth; and from that time forward our legislation ceased to recognize any distinction of races: all natives of England were alike Englishmen. Sixteen years later it was first enacted that cases in the Sheriff’s Courts of London should be pleaded in English; seven years later, again, this became in theory the language not only of the King’s law courts, but also to some extent of Parliament; and Nicolas quotes an amusing instance of two ambassadors to France, a Knight and a Doctor of Laws, who confessed in 1404 “we are as ignorant of French as of Hebrew.” The contemporary Trevisa apparently attributes this rapid breakdown to the Great Pestilence of 1349; but even before this the French language must have been in full decay among us, for at the Parliament which Edward III. called in 1337 to advise him about declaring war on France, the ambassador of Robert d’Artois took care to speak “in English, in order to be understanded of all folk, for a man ever knoweth better what he would say and propose in the language of his childhood than in any other.” Later in the same year, in the famous statute which forbade all sports except the longbow, it was further ordained “that all lords, barons, knights, and honourable men of good towns should be careful and diligent to teach and instruct their children in the French tongue, whereby they might be the more skilful and practised in their wars.”[2] But Acts of Parliament are not omnipotent even in the 20th century; and in the 14th they often represented rather pious aspirations than workaday facts. It was easier to foster a healthy pastime like archery than to enforce scholastic regulations which parents and masters were alike tempted to neglect; and certainly the French language lost ground very rapidly in the latter half of the century. In 1362 English superseded French as the spoken language of the law courts; next year the Chancellor opened Parliament in an English speech; and in 1385 Trevisa complained that boys at grammar-schools “know no more French than their left heel.” The language lingered, of course. Chaucer’s friend and contemporary, Gower, wrote as much in French as in English. French still kept the upper hand in Parliament till about fifty years after Chaucer’s death, nor did the statutes cease altogether to be published in that language until the reign of Henry VIII. But though it was still the Court tongue in Chaucer’s time, and though we do not know that Edward III. was capable of addressing his Commons in their native tongue, yet Henry IV. took care to claim the throne before Parliament in plain English;[3] and even before that time French had already become an exotic, an artificial dialect needing hothouse culture—no longer French of Paris, but that of “Stratford attë Bowë.”[4] The tongue sat ill on a nation that was already proud of its insularity and unity. Even while labouring to write in French, Gower dedicates his work to his country: “O gentile Engletere, a toi j’escrits.” It is not the least of Chaucer’s claims on our gratitude that, from the very first, he wrote for the English people in English—that is, in the mixed dialect of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French which was habitually spoken in London by the upper middle classes of a mingled Norman and Teutonic population[5]—and that in so doing he laid the foundations of a national literary language. Much, of course, still remained to be done. Caxton, in 1490, shows us how an Englishman might well be taken for a Frenchman outside his own country,[6] as in modern Germany a foreigner who speaks fluently, however incorrectly, passes easily for a German of some remote and barbarous province. Indeed, English unity in Chaucer’s time was as recent as that of the modern German empire. Men would still go before bishops and magistrates to purge themselves by a solemn oath from the injurious suspicion of being Scots, and therefore enemies to the realm; and a couple of generations earlier the suspected Welshman had found himself under the same necessity. The articles of peace drawn up in 1274 at Oxford between the northern and Irish scholars “read like a treaty of peace between hostile nations rather than an act of University legislation”; and even at the end of Chaucer’s life we may find royal letters “licensing John Russell, born in Ireland, to reside in England, notwithstanding the proclamation that all Irish-born were to go and stay in their own country.” But the Oxford Concordia of 1274 was the last which recognized that division of students into “nations” which still remained so real at Paris and other continental universities; and though blood still reddened Oxford streets for a century longer in the ancient quarrel of north and south, yet the “great slaughter” of 1354 was entirely a town and gown affray.[7]

The foundations of modern England were laid by Edward I., who did more than any other king to create a national parliament, a national system of justice, and a national army.[8] Edward III., with far less creative power, but with equal energy and ambition, inherited the ripe fruits of his grandfather’s policy, and raised England to a place in European politics which she had never reached before and was seldom to reach again. “That which touches all,” said Edward I., “should be approved by all”; and, though continental sovereigns might use similar language as a subtle cloke for their arbitrary encroachments, in England the maxim had from the first a real meaning. The great barons—themselves steadily dwindling in feudal power—no longer sat alone in the King’s councils; by their side sat country gentlemen and citizens elected to share in the responsibilities of government; and the clergy, but for their own persistent separatism, might have sent their chosen representatives to sit with the rest. Moreover, already in Chaucer’s time we find precedents for the boldest demands of the Long Parliament. The Commons claimed, and for a time obtained, the control of taxation; and five of Richard II.’s ministers were condemned as traitors for counselling him to measures which Parliament branded as unconstitutional. Professor Maitland has well described the “omnicompetence” of Parliament at this time. Nothing human was alien to its sphere of activity, from the sale of herrings at Yarmouth fair and the fashion of citizens’ girdles to those great constitutional questions which remained in dispute for three centuries longer, and were only settled at last by a civil war and a revolution.

Nor was the judicial system less truly national than the Parliament. Maitland has pointed out that the years 1272-1290 were more fruitful in epoch-making legislation than any other period of English history, except perhaps that which succeeded the Reform Bill of 1832. Chaucer, like ourselves, lived in an age which was consolidating the great achievements of two generations past, and looking forward to far-reaching social changes in the future. Already in his time the Roman Law was outlandish in England; our land laws were fixed in many principles which for centuries remained unquestioned, and which are often found to underlie even the present system. Already under Edward III., as for many centuries afterwards, men looked upon the main principles of English jurisprudence as settled for ever, and strove only by a series of ingenious accommodations to fit them in with the requirements of a changing world. The framework of the law courts, again, was roughly that of modern England. The King’s judges were no longer clerics, but laymen chosen from among the professional pleaders in the courts; and here again “one remarkable characteristic of our legal system is fixed.”

In many other ways, too, the kingdom had outgrown its clerical tutelage. Learning and art had long since ceased to be predominantly monastic; for at least two centuries before Chaucer’s birth they had left the protection of the cloister, and flourished far more luxuriantly in the great world than they ever could have done under strictly monastic conditions. True monasticism was predominantly puritan, and therefore unfavourable to free development in any direction but that of mystic contemplation; if the spirit of St. Bernard had lived among the Cistercians, the glories of Tintern and Rievaulx would have been impossible; and even our cathedrals and parish churches owed more of their beauties to laymen than to clerics. So also with our universities, which rose on the ruins of monastic learning; and in which, despite the fresh impetus received from the Friars, the lay spirit still grew rapidly under the shelter of the Church. In the 14th century, when Oxford could show such a roll of philosophers that “not all the other Nations and Universities of Europe between them could muster such a list,” a growing proportion of these were not cloistered, but secular clergy. At no earlier time could these latter have shown three such Oxford doctors as Bradwardine, Richard of Armagh, and Wycliffe. The General Chapter of the Benedictines strove repeatedly, but in vain, to compel a reasonable proportion of monks to study at Oxford or Cambridge.[9] Before the end of Edward III.’s reign, the English Universities had become far more truly national than at any previous time; their training and aims were less definitely ecclesiastical, and their culture overflowed to laymen like Chaucer and Gower.[10] Moreover, the Inns of Court had become practically lay universities of law: and, quite apart from Wycliffism, there was a rapid growth not only of the non-clerical but even of anti-clerical spirit. Blow after blow was struck at Papal privileges by successive Parliaments in which the representatives of the lower clergy no longer sat. The Pope’s demand for arrears of John’s tribute from England was rejected so emphatically that it was never pressed again; Parliament repudiated Papal claims of presentation to vacant benefices, and forbade, under the severest penalties, all unlicensed appeals to Rome from English courts. It is true that our kings constantly gave way on these two last points, but only because it was easier to share the spoils by connivance with the Popes; and these statutes mark none the less an epoch in English history. In 1371, again, Edward III. assented to a petition from Parliament which pleaded “inasmuch as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of the men of Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for their acts, whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may happen in times to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of his own realm be elected to replace them, and that none but laymen henceforth be chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of privy seal, or other great officers of the realm.” Already the partial sequestration of the Alien Priories by the three Edwards, and the total suppression and spoliation of the Templars in 1312, had accustomed men’s minds to schemes of wholesale disendowment which were advocated as earnestly by an anti-Lollard like Langland[11] as by Wycliffe himself; and indeed this writer, the most religious among the three principal poets of that age, was also the most anticlerical. In Edward III.’s reign the Reformation was already definitely in sight.

In short, Chaucer’s lot was cast in an epoch-making age. Then began our definite claim to the lordship of the sea; Sluys, our first great maritime victory, the Trafalgar of the Middle Ages, was won in the same year in which the poet was probably born; six years later we captured Calais, our first colony; and it was noted even in those days that the Englishman prospered still more abroad than at home. Never before or since have English armies been so frequently and so uniformly victorious as during the first thirty years of Chaucer’s life; seldom have our commerce and our liberties developed more rapidly; and if the disasters which he saw were no less strange, these also helped to ripen his many-sided genius. The Great Pestilence of 1349, more terrible than any other recorded in history; the first pitched battle between Labour and Capital in 1381; the first formal deposition of an English King in 1327, to be repeated still more solemnly in 1399; all these must have affected the poet almost as deeply as they affected the State, notwithstanding the persistency with which he generally looks upon the brighter side. Professor Raleigh has wittily applied to him the confession of Dr. Johnson’s friend, “I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” It is difficult, however, not to surmise a great deal of more or less unwilling philosophy beneath Chaucer’s delightful flow of good-humour. His subtle ironies may tell as plain a tale as other men’s open complaints; and sometimes he hastens to laugh where we might suspect a rising lump in his throat. But the laugh is there, or at least the easy, good-natured smile. Where Gower sees an England more hopelessly given over to the Devil than even in Carlyle’s most dyspeptic nightmares—where the robuster Langland sees an impending religious Armageddon, and the honest soul’s pilgrimage from the City of Destruction towards a New Jerusalem rather hoped for than seen even by the eye of faith—there Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry England to which the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death and Tyler’s revolt are but a foil. Like many others in the Middle Ages, he seems convinced of the peculiar instability of the English character. He knew that he was living—as all generations are more or less conscious of living—in an uncomfortable borderland between that which once was, but can be no longer, and that which shall be, but cannot yet come to pass; yet all these changes supplied the artist with that variety of colour and form which he needed; and the man seems to have gone through life in the tranquil conviction that this was a pleasant world, and his own land a particularly privileged spot. The England of Chaucer is that of which one of his most noted predecessors wrote, “England is a strong land and a sturdy, and the plenteousest corner of the world, so rich a land that unneth it needeth help of any land, and every other land needeth help of England. England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft times able to mirth and game, free men of heart and with tongue, but the hand is more better and more free than the tongue.”[12]

CHAPTER II

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

The name Chaucer was in some cases a corruption of chauffecire, i.e. “chafewax,” or clerk in the Chancery, whose duty it was to help in the elaborate operation of sealing royal documents.[13] But Mr. V. B. Redstone seems to have shown conclusively that the poet’s ancestors were chaussiers, or makers of long hose, and that they combined this business with other more or less extensive mercantile operations, especially as vintners. The family, like others in the wine trade, may well have come originally from Gascony; but in the 13th and 14th centuries it seems to have thriven mainly in London and East Anglia, and recent research has definitely traced the poet’s immediate ancestry to Ipswich.[14] His grandfather, Robert Malyn, surnamed le Chaucer, came from the Suffolk village of Dennington, and set up a tavern in Ipswich. Robert left a child named John, who was forcibly abducted one night in 1324 by Geoffrey Stace, apparently his uncle. When Stace “stole and took away by force and arms—viz. swords, bows, and arrows—the said John,” his object was to settle possible difficulties of succession to a certain estate by forcing the boy to marry Joan de Westhale; and he pleaded in his justification the custom of Ipswich, by which “an heir became of full age at the end of his twelfth year, if he knew how to reckon and measure”;[15] but he was very heavily fined for his breach of the peace. We learn from the pleadings in this case that John Chaucer was still unmarried in 1328; that he lived in London with his stepfather, namesake, and fellow-vintner, Richard Chaucer, and that his patrimony was very small. Richard, dying twenty-one years later, left his house and his tavern to the Church; but he had very likely given his stepson substantial help during his lifetime. In any case, John must have thriven rapidly, for we find him, in 1338, at the age of twenty-six or thereabouts, among the distinguished company which followed Edward III. on his journey up the Rhine to negociate an alliance with the Emperor Louis IV. The Royal Wardrobe Books give many interesting details of this journey.[16] Queen Philippa accompanied the King half-way across Brabant, and then returned to Antwerp, where she gave birth to Lionel of Clarence, the poet’s first master. Among the party were also several of the household of the Earl of Derby, father-in-law to that John of Gaunt with whom Geoffrey Chaucer’s fortunes were to be closely bound. The travellers had started from Antwerp on Sunday, August 16; and on the following Sunday a long day’s journey brought them within sight of the colossal choir which, until sixty years ago, was almost all that existed of Cologne Cathedral. Here the King gave liberally to the building fund; and here John Chaucer probably stayed behind, since he and his fellow-citizens had come to promote closer commercial relations between the Rhine cities and London. The King was towed up the Rhine by sixty-two boatmen, sat in the Diet at Coblenz as Vicar Imperial, formed a seven years’ alliance with the Emperor, and sent on his five-year-old daughter Joan to Munich, where she waited many months vainly, but probably without impatience, for the young Duke of Austria, who was at present bespoken for her, but who finally turned elsewhere. Meanwhile Edward came back to Bonn, where he had to pay the equivalent of about £330 modern money for damage done in a quarrel between the citizens and those of his suite whom he had left behind—John Chaucer probably included. The Queen met the party again in Brabant, and they returned to Antwerp after a journey of exactly four weeks. We meet with several further allusions to John Chaucer among the London city records. It was very likely he who, in July, 1349, brought a valuable present from the Bishop of Salisbury to Queen Philippa at Devizes, at the time when the ravages of the Black Death in London supply a very probable reason for his absence from town, so that he might well have had his wife and son with him on this occasion. Certainly it was he who, with fourteen other principal vintners of the city, assented in 1342 to an ordinance providing that “no taverner should mix putrid and corrupt wine with wine that is good and pure, or should forbid that, when any company is drinking wine in his tavern, one of them, for himself and the rest of the company, shall enter the cellar where the tuns or pipes are then lying, and see that the measures or vessels into which the wine is poured are quite empty and clean within; and in like manner, from what tun or what pipe the wine is so drawn.” This salutary ordinance was set at nought afterwards, as it had been before; but this and other records bear witness to John Chaucer’s standing in his profession.

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LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE’S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS’S MAP)

THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE RIGHT-HAND COW.
THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father’s London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as “a certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the King’s highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook northwards.”[17] The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields, divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands. Similar streams, or “fleets,” creeping between overhanging houses, are still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and there even in England.[18] Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving it still “a fair brook of sweet water” in its upper course; and he takes pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, “a Roman captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled.” In Chaucer’s time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret’s, Lothbury, and ran under the kitchen of Grocer’s Hall, and again under St. Mildred’s church; “from thence through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street.” In this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically “stopped up by divers filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city.” The “King’s highway of Thames Street,” though one of the chief arteries of the city, cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted the “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne,” many of whom were mayors of the city; and Stow’s survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First, the headquarters of the wine trade, “a large house built of stone and timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry. There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the town.” Here also “Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363, did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III., King of England, John, King of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England), Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect.” Picard, as Mr. Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer’s fellow-vintners on Edward III.’s Rhine journey in 1338.[19] Then there were the Vintner’s Hall and almshouses, which were built in Chaucer’s lifetime; the three Guild Halls of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that London was up in arms against him, “and unless he took great heed, that day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made his complaint.”

MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL
(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)

Of Chaucer’s childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the serious risk of other people’s windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday, and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of football, or at “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the stone.” In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he would be sure to flock out with the rest to “play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the time of war.”[20] In spring he would watch the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this. Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet’s Tower flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and between them, close by Chaucer’s own home, the “Tower Royal,” in which the Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler’s revolt. But the Thames itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, “where the merchants of Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels,” and finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the cooks’ shops; “for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that upon the river’s side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks’ row.” Here, then, Chaucer would loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native craft from “far by west,” but broad-sailed vessels from every country of Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone’s throw from his father’s house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21] Chief among the Easterlings at this time were the Cologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic, half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of “a Dutch bun and a keg of sturgeon,” or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would pick up easily enough among this colony of “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne”; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul’s lay nearest to Chaucer’s home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great merchant city. “When they put me to school,” writes Froissart, “there were little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring; and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace ... and then would I say to myself, ‘When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be able to love in earnest?’... When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod.... I could not be at rest; I was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go and tumble with them again.”[22] Is not childhood essentially the same in all countries and in all ages?

The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems by Chaucer’s contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer’s continental journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet. Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess’s movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her train had an equally varied experience. “We may catch glimpses of Chaucer in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost, at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of Queen Isabella at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358), at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower.”[23]

Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun even before his birth,[24] was the tallest and handsomest of all the King’s sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says—

His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be Chaucer’s and Wycliffe’s best patron. For all John Chaucer’s favour with the King, the vintner’s son could never have found a place in this great society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like his own squire—singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May; already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under those conditions. Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more complacently to the page’s love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit Jean de Saintré and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the best possible commentary on Chaucer’s Court life.

Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that (as in Shakespeare’s case) differences of rank added to his despair. It may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no reason to suppose that Chaucer’s affections were less mercurial than those of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369, that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness—

Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty, Beauty, and Pleasance; but her surname is Fair-Ruthless. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity with his complaints of Love’s tyranny; but, alas!

The cruel fair stands high above him, a lady of royal excellence, humble indeed of heart, yet he scarce dares to call himself her servant—

But all is vain, for in the end “Ye recke not whether I float or sink.” Like the contemporary poets of Piers Plowman, Chaucer discovered soon enough that the high road to wisdom lies through “Suffer-both-well-and-woe;” and that, before we can possess our souls, we must “see much and suffer more.”[25] There is more than mere graceful irony in the beautiful lines with which, a few years later, he begins his “Troilus and Criseyde.” He is (he says) the bondservant of Love, one whose own woes help him to comfort others’ pain, or again, to enlist the sympathy of Fortune’s favourite—

CHAPTER III

THE KING’S SQUIRE

In Chaucer’s life, as in the “Seven Ages of Man,” the soldier follows hard upon the lover; he is scarcely out of his ’teens before we find him riding to the Great War, “in hope to stonden in his lady grace.” He fought in that strange campaign of 1359-60, which began with such magnificent preparations, but ended so ineffectually. Edward marched across France from Calais to Reims with a splendid army and an unheard-of baggage train; but the towns closed their gates, the French armies hovered out of his reach, and the weather was such that horses and men died like flies. “The xiii. day of Aprill [1360] King Edward with his Oost lay before the Citee off Parys; the which was a ffoule Derke day of myste, and off haylle, and so bytter colde, that syttyng on horse bak men dyed. Wherefore, unto this day yt ys called blak Monday, and wolle be longe tyme here affter.”[26] Edward felt that the stars fought against him, and was glad to make a less advantageous peace than he might have had before this wasteful raid. Chaucer’s friend and brother-poet, Eustache Deschamps, recalls how the English took up their quarters in the villages and convents that crown the heights round Reims, and watched forty days for a favourable opportunity of attack. Froissart also tells us how Edward feared to assault so strong a city, and only blockaded it for seven weeks, until “it began to irk him, and his men found nought more to forage, and began to lose their horses, and were at great disease for lack of victuals.” It was probably on one of these foraging parties that Chaucer was cut off with other stragglers by the French skirmishers; and the King paid £16 towards his ransom.[27] The items in the same account range from £50 paid towards the ransom of Richard Stury (a distinguished soldier who was afterwards a fellow-ambassador of Chaucer’s), to £6 13s. 4d. “in compensation for the Lord Andrew Lutterell’s dead horse,” and £2 towards an archer’s ransom.

John Chaucer died in 1366, and his thrifty widow hastened to marry Bartholomew Attechapel; “the funeral bakemeats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”[28] Geoffrey appears to have inherited little property from either of them; but it must be remembered that economies were difficult in the Middle Ages, so that men lived far more nearly up to their incomes than in modern times; and, again, that a considerable proportion of a citizen’s legacies often went to the Church. The healthy English and American practice of giving a boy a good start and then leaving him to shift for himself was therefore even more common in the 14th century than now. This is essentially the state of things which we find described with amazement, and doubtless with a good deal of exaggeration, in the “Italian Relation of England” of a century later. The English tradesmen (says the author) show so little affection towards their children that “after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.” Thus the children look more to their masters than to their natural parents, and, “having no hope of their paternal inheritance,” set up on their own account and marry away from home.[29] From this source (proceeds the Italian) springs that greed of gain and that omnipotence of money, even in the moral sphere, which are so characteristic of England. John Chaucer may have left little property to his son, but he had given him an excellent education, and put him in the way of making his own fortune; for in 1367 we find him a yeoman of the King’s chamber, and endowed with a life-pension of twenty marks “of our special grace, and for the good services which our beloved yeoman Geoffrey Chaucer hath rendered us and shall render us for the future.” The phrase makes it probable that he had already been some little time in the King’s service—very likely as early as the unlucky campaign in which Edward had helped towards his ransom—and other indications make it almost certain that he was by this time a married man. Nine years before this, side by side with Chaucer in the Countess of Ulster’s household accounts, we find among the ladies one Philippa Pan’, with a mark of abbreviation, which probably stands for panetaria, or mistress of the pantry. Just as the Countess bought Chaucer’s red-and-black hosen, so she paid “for the making of Philippa’s trimmings,” “for the fashioning of one tunic for Philippa,”[30] “for the making of a corset for Philippa and for the fur-work,” “for XLVIII great buttons of ... [unfortunate gap in the MS.] ... bought in London by the aforesaid John Massingham for buttoning the aforesaid Philippa’s trimmings”; and in each case her steward records the payment “for drink given to the aforesaid workmen according to the custom of London.” Eight years after this (1366) the Queen granted a life-pension to her “damoiselle of the chamber,” Philippa Chaucer. Six years later, again, Philippa Chaucer is in attendance upon John of Gaunt’s wife; and in another two years we find her definitely spoken of as the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, through whose hands her pension is paid on this occasion, and sometimes in later years. On the face of these documents the obvious conclusion would seem to be that the lady, who was certainly Philippa Chaucer in 1366, and equally certainly Philippa, wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1374, was already in 1366 our poet’s wife. The only argument of apparent weight which has been urged against it is in fact of very little account when we consider actual medieval conditions. It has been pleaded that if Chaucer complained in 1366 of an unrequited love which had tortured him for eight years and still overshadowed his life, he could not already be a married man. To urge this is to neglect one of the most characteristic features of good society in the Middle Ages. Even Léon Gautier, the enthusiastic apologist of chivalry, admits sadly that the feudal marriage was too often a loveless compact, except so far as the pair might shake down together afterwards;[31] and conjugal love plays a very secondary part in the great romances of chivalry. However apocryphal may be the alleged solemn verdict of a Court of Love that husband and wife had no right to be in love with each other, the sentence was at least recognized as ben trovato; and nobody who has closely studied medieval society, either in romance or in chronicle, would suppose that Chaucer blushed to feel a hopeless passion for another, or to write openly of it while he had a wife of his own. Dante’s Beatrice, and probably Petrarch’s Laura, were married women; and, however strongly we may be inclined to urge the exceptional and ethereal nature of these two cases, nothing of the kind can be pleaded for Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and Froissart’s anonymous lady-love. Chaucer, therefore, might well have followed the examples of the four greatest writers of his century. Moreover, in this case we have evidence that he and Philippa not only began, but continued and ended with at least a homœopathic dose of that “little aversion” which Mrs. Malaprop so strongly recommended in matrimony. His allusions to wedded life are predominantly disrespectful, or at best mockingly ironical; and though his own marriage may well have steadied him in some ways—Prof. Skeat points out that his least moral tales were all written after Philippa’s death in 1387—yet the evidence is against his having found in it such companionship as might have chained his too errant fancy. The lives of Burne-Jones and Morris throw unexpected sidelights on that of the master whom they loved so well; and neither of them seems fully to have realized how much his own development owed to modern things for which seventeen generations of men have struggled and suffered since Chaucer’s time. No artist of the Middle Ages—or, indeed, of any but quite recent times—could have earned by his genius a passport into society for wife and family as well as himself; nor could anything but a miracle have unbarred for Chaucer that paradise of splendid work, pure domestic felicity, and social success which attracts us so much in the life of Burne-Jones.[32] His wife was probably rather his social superior, and both would have had in any case a certain status as attendants at Court; but that was in itself an unhealthy life, and so far as Chaucer’s poetry raised him above his fellow yeomen or fellow squires, so far that special favour would tend to separate him from his wife. A courtly poet’s married life could scarcely be happy in an age compounded of such social licence and such galling restrictions: an age when a man might recite the Miller’s and Reve’s tales in mixed company, yet a girl was expected not to speak till she was addressed, to fold her hands when she sat down, to keep her eyes fixed on the ground as she walked, to assume that all talk of love meant illicit love, and to avoid even the most natural familiarities on pain of scandal.[33] We may very easily exaggerate the want of harmony in the Chaucer household; but everything tends to assure us that his was not altogether an ideal marriage. When, therefore, he tells us he has long been the servant of Love, and that he is the very clerk of Love, we need not suppose any reference here to the lady who had been his wife certainly for some years, and perhaps for nearly twenty. Prof. Hales, however, seems to go a good deal too far in assuming that Philippa was in attendance on Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, while her husband lived snugly in bachelor apartments over Aldgate.[34]

But who, it may be asked, was this Philippa of the Pantry before she became Philippa Chaucer? Here again the indications, though tantalizingly slight, all point towards some connection with John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s great patron. She was probably either a Swynford or a Roet, i.e. sister-in-law or own sister to Katherine Roet, who married Sir Thomas Swynford, and who became in after life first mistress and finally wife to John of Gaunt. From this marriage were descended the great Beaufort family, of which the most powerful member, the Cardinal Minister of Henry VI., speaks in one of his letters of his cousin, Thomas Chaucer.[35] This again is complicated by the doubt which has been thrown on a Thomas Chaucer’s sonship to Geoffrey, in spite of the definite assertion by the former’s contemporary, Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University.

WESTMINSTER HALL

(THE GREAT HALL OF THE KING’S PALACE AT WESTMINSTER)

Meanwhile, however, we are certain that Chaucer was in 1367 a Yeoman of Edward III.’s Chamber, and that he was promoted five years later to be a squire in the Royal household. The still existing Household Ordinances of Edward II. on one side, and Edward IV. on the other, agree so closely in their description of the duties of these two offices, that we may infer pretty exactly what they were in Chaucer’s time. The earlier ordinances prescribe that the yeomen “shall serve in the chamber, making beds, holding and carrying torches, and divers other things which [the King] and the chamberlain shall command them. These [yeomen] shall eat in the chamber before the King. And each of them, be he well or ill, shall have for livery one darre[36] of bread, one gallon of beer, a messe de gros[37] from the kitchen, and yearly a robe in cloth or a mark in money; and for shoes 4s. 8d., at two seasons in the year.[38] And if any of them be sent out of the Court in the King’s business, by his commandment, he shall have 4d. a day for his expenses.” The later ordinances add to these duties “to attend the Chamber, to watch the King by course, to go messages, etc.” The yeomen were bedded two by two, apparently on the floor of the great hall, so that visitors to Westminster Hall may well happen to tread on the spot where Chaucer nightly lay down to sleep. When he became a squire, he might either have found himself still on duty in the King’s chamber, or else an “Esquire for the King’s mouth,” to taste the food for fear of poison, to carve for the King, and to serve his wine on bended knee. He still shared a bed with some fellow squire; but they now shared a servant also and a private room, to which each might bring at night his gallon or half gallon of ale; “and for winter season, each of them two Paris candles, one faggot, or else a half of tallwood.” Besides his mess of great meat, he might now take a mess of roast also;[39] his wages were raised to 7½d. per day, and he received yearly “two robes of cloth, or 40s. in money.” Moreover, as the Household Book of Edward IV. adds, “these esquires of household of old be accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and in evenings to draw to Lords Chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of Chronicles of Kings, and of other policies, or in piping or harping, singing, or other acts martial, to help to occupy the Court, and accompany strangers till the time require of departing.” The same compiler looks back to Edward III.’s time as the crown and glory of English Court life; and indeed that King lived on a higher scale (as things went in those days) than any other medieval English King except his inglorious grandson, Richard II. King John of France might indeed marvel to find himself among a nation of shopkeepers, and laugh at the thrift and order which underlay even his Royal cousin’s extravagances.[40] But John’s son, Charles the Wise, was destined to earn that surname by nothing more than by his imitation of English business methods in peace and war; and meanwhile the longest laugh was with Edward, whose Court swarmed with French prisoners and hostages. Among the enforced guests were King John himself, four royal dukes, the flower of the nobility, and thirty-six substantial citizens sent over by the great towns as pledges for the enormous war indemnity, which was in fact never fully paid. All these were probably still at Court when Chaucer first joined it, and few poets have ever feasted their youthful eyes on more splendid sights than this. Palaces and castles were filled to overflowing with the spoils of France; and the prisoners themselves vied with their captors in knightly sports and knightly magnificence. One of the royal princes had sixteen servants with him in his captivity; all moved freely about the country on parole, hawking and hunting, dancing and flouting, rather like guests than prisoners. Indeed, as Mme. Darmesteter truly remarks, there was a natural freemasonry between the French nobility and the French-speaking courtiers of England; and Froissart draws a vivid contrast between our manners and those of the Germans in this respect. “For English and Gascons are of such condition that they put a knight or a squire courteously to ransom; but the custom of the Germans, and their courtesy [to their prisoners] is of no such sort hitherto—I know not how they will do henceforth—for hitherto they have had neither pity nor mercy on Christian gentlemen who fall into their hands as prisoners, but lay on them ransoms to the full of their estate and even beyond, and put them in chains, in irons, and in close prison like thieves and murderers; and all to extort the greater ransom.”[41] The French lords added rather to the gaiety of a Court which was already perhaps the gayest in Europe; a society all the merrier because it was spending money that had been so quickly won; and because, in those days of shifting fortune, the shadow of change might already be foreboded on the horizon. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may be captives in our turn. Few of the great leaders on either side escaped without paying ransom at least once in their lives; and the devil-may-care of the camp had its direct influence on Court manners. The extravagant and comparatively inartistic fashions which, at the end of the 14th century, displaced one of the simplest and most beautiful models of dress which have ever reigned, were invented, as a contemporary assures us, by “the unthrifty women that be evil of their body, and chamberers to Englishmen and other men of war that dwellen with them as their lemans; for they were the first that brought up this estate that ye use of great purfles and slit coats.... And as to my wife, she shall not; but the princesses and ladies of England have taken up the said state and guise, and they may well hold it if them list.”[42] Towards the end of Chaucer’s life, when Richard II. had increased his personal expenses in direct proportion to his ill-success in war and politics, the English Court reached its highest pitch of extravagance. The chronicler Hardyng writes—

And he adds a description of Court morals which may well suggest further reflections on Chaucer’s married life.[43]

[Larger Image]

A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE
(FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER)

But the Court was all that the poet could desire as a school of worldly manners, of human passion and character, and of gorgeous pageantry. The King travelled much with his household; a grievous burden indeed to the poor country folk on whom his purveyors preyed, but to the world in general a glorious sight. He took with him a multitude of officers already suppressed as superfluous in the days of Edward IV., “as well Sergeants of Arms and Messagers many, with the twenty-four Archers before the King, shooting when he rode by the country, called Gard Corpes le Roy. And therefore the King journied not passing ten or twelve miles a day.” Ruskin traces much of his store of observation to the leisurely journeys round England with his father in Mr. Telford’s chaise; and the young Chaucer must have gathered from these Royal progresses a rich harvest of impressions for future use.

CHAPTER IV

THE AMBASSADOR

Although we have nothing important dating from before his thirtieth year, we know from Chaucer’s own words that he wrote many “Balades, Roundels, and Virelays” which are now lost; or, as he puts it in his last rueful Retractation, “many a song and many a lecherous lay.” These were no doubt fugitive pieces, often written for different friends or patrons, and put abroad in their names. Besides these, we know that he translated certain religious works, including the famous “Misery of Human Life” of Pope Innocent the Third. Piety and Profanity, prayers and curses, jostle each other in Chaucer’s early life as in the society round him: we may think of his own Shipman, thoroughly orthodox after his simple fashion, but silencing the too Puritanical parson with a rattling oath at close range, and proceeding to “clynken so mery a belle” that we feel a sort of treachery in pausing to wonder how such a festive tale could be brought forth for a company of pilgrims as a pill to purge heterodoxy!

The first of his early poems which we can date with any certainty is also the best worth dating. This is the “Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse,” in memory of John of Gaunt’s first wife, who died in September, 1369. The poem is obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages, fresh to us even where the critics trace them to some obvious French source. Such, for instance, is the beginning of his dream, where he describes the inevitable May morning—inevitable in medieval verse, but here and there, when he or his fellow-poets are in their happiest mood, as fresh again as Nature herself, who is never tired of harping on the same old themes of sunshine and blue sky and fresh air. He wakes at dawn to hear the birds singing their matins at his eaves; his bedroom walls are painted with scenes from the “Romance of the Rose,” and broad sunlight streams through the storied glass upon his bed. He throws open the casement: “blue, bright, clear was the air, nor in all the welkin was one cloud.” A bugle rings out; he hears the trampling of horse and hounds; the Emperor Octavian’s hunt is afoot—or, in plainer prose, King Edward the Third’s. The poet joins them; a puppy comes up fawning, starting away, fawning again, until it has led him apart from the rest.

Here he finds a young knight all in black, mourning by himself. A little unobtrusive sympathy unlocks the young man’s heart. She was “my hap, my heal, and all my bliss;” “and goodë fairë White she hight.” The first meeting had been as sudden as that of Dante and Beatrice: a medieval garden-party—“the fairest companye of ladies, that ever man with eye had seen together in one place,” and one among them who “was like none of all the rout,” but who outshone the rest as the sun outshines moon and stars—

Her eyes shone with such simple enjoyment of life that “fools” were apt to read a special welcome in her glance, to their bitter disappointment in course of time. She disdained the “knakkes smale,” the little coquettish tricks of certain other ladies, who send their lovers half round the world, and give them but cold cheer on their return. The rest of the personal description is more commonplace, and (however faithful to medieval precedent) a little too like some modern sportsman’s enumeration of his horse’s points. The course of true love did not run too smoothly here. On the knight’s first proposal, “she saidë ‘nay!’ all utterly.” But “another year,” when she had learned to know him better, she took him to her mercy, and they lived full many a year in bliss, only broken now by her death. The poem, which had rather dragged at the beginning, here ends abruptly, as though Chaucer had tired of it. He has no effectual comfort to offer in such a sorrow; the hunt breaks in upon their dialogue; King and courtiers ride off to a long white-walled castle on a hill, where a bell rings the hour of noon and wakes the poet from his dream.

When we have reckoned up all Chaucer’s debts to his predecessors in this poem—and they are many—there is ample proof left of his own originality. Moreover, we cannot too often remind ourselves that the idea of copyright, either legal or moral, is modern. In the scarcity of books which reigned before the days of printing, the poet who “conveyed” most might well be the greatest benefactor to mankind. The educated public, so far as such a body then existed, rather encouraged than reprobated the practice of borrowing; and the poet, like the modern schoolboy versifier, was applauded for his skill in weaving classical tags into his own work. Chaucer differed from his predecessors, and most of his successors, less in the amount which he borrowed than in the extraordinary vitality and originality which he infused into the older work. If we had only these fragments of his early works, we should still understand how Deschamps praises him as “King of worldly love in Albion”; we should still feel something of that charm of language which earned the poet his popularity at Court and his promotion to important offices.

It is well known that medieval society had not developed the minute sub-divisions of labour which have often been pushed to excess in modern times. The architect was simply a master-mason; the barber was equally ready to try his hand on your beard or on a malignant tumour; the King might choose for his minister a frankly incapable personal favourite, or send out his most gorgeously accoutred knights on a reconnaissance which would have been infinitely better carried out by a trained scout. Similarly, the poets of the 14th century were very frequently sent abroad as ambassadors; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio had already set Chaucer this example, which his friend Eustache Deschamps was soon to follow. The choice implied, no doubt, a subtle tribute to the power of rhetoric, under which category poetry was often classed. The rarity of book-learning did not indeed give the scholar a higher value in general society than he commands nowadays, or bring more grist to his mill; he and his horse were commonly lean enough, and his only worldly treasures were his score of books at his bed’s head. But the medieval mind, which persistently invested lunatics with the highest prophetic qualities, seems to have had an equally touching faith in poetic clairvoyance at times when common sense was at fault, and to have called upon a Dante or a Chaucer just as, in similar emergencies, it called upon particular saints whose intercession was least invoked in everyday life. Much, of course, is to be explained by the fact that formal and elaborate public speeches were as necessary as spectacular display on these embassies; but, even so, we may wonder that the Ravennati ever entrusted an embassy to Dante, who is recorded to have been so violent a political partisan that he was capable of throwing stones even at women in the excitement of discussion. Chaucer, however, had neither the qualities nor the defects of such headlong fanaticism; and from the frequency with which he was employed we may infer that he showed real talents for diplomacy.

His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had taken part in a second French campaign, he was “abroad in the King’s service” during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and 1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the latter year, when he “was joined in a commission with James Pronam and John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where the Genoese might form a commercial establishment.”[44] This journey lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or about £1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions that Chaucer’s business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest of business documents opens out a vista of things in themselves most romantic.

Of all that makes the traveller’s joy in modern Italy, the greater part was already there for Chaucer to see, with much more that he saw and that we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of these things, and less inclined to find God’s hand in the mountains or the sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of mountain scenery which comes out in the “Pearl” and in early Scottish poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance’s sea-voyages, he expedites them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel passage in the rough little boats of those days, “a perilous horse to ride,” indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant elbow room—

Worse passages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us how Hervé de Léon “took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days, and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Hervé of Léon was so sore troubled that he had never health after.” King John of France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel,[46] and Edward III. had one passage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the arts of “necromancers and wizards.” Moreover, nearly all Chaucer’s embassies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372, when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, “the most desolate, the most solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia.”[47] But, after all these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches had been inhospitable:

We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least delightful passages of Goethe’s Italienische Reise are those which describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish brought out of the sea.

For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their first freshness, with thousands more which have long since disappeared. Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built, the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new Æneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with each other in every department of human skill—

Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet’s business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy. To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante’s literary personality was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense individualism and the frankness with which he asserted his own personal convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which Dante wielded the keys of heaven and hell is the fundamental independence of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to hell, he was only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent. But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady whom he had loved on earth—in this choice, and in his corresponding independence of expression, he gave an impetus to free thought far beyond what he himself can have intended. Virgil’s parting speech at the end of the “Purgatorio,” “Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I make thee King and High Priest over thyself,” conveyed a licence of which others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked effectually upon a mind which “was going through an intense religious crisis.”[49] Dante’s mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the earliest extant from his pen. “Chaucer’s A. B. C.,” a rapturous hymn to the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach more perilously near to Mariolatry than this—“Almighty and all-merciable Queen”! Another poem of the same period is the “Life of St. Cecilia,” with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante, and its fervent prayer for help against temptation—

But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the great Florentine’s style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in Chaucer’s later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him, and of none after him until the 16th century brought English men of letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.

Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey, of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of the “Clerk’s Tale” would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the former; and most biographers have assumed that it is not only the fictitious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he had just translated into Latin from the “Decameron” during the very year of Chaucer’s visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English poet’s fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready passport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from Petrarch “at Padua,” the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer’s Italian journey at Arquà, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily assumed as a proof of Chaucer’s ignorance, does in fact show that he possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch’s whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal intercourse.[51] This is admirably illustrated by the story of Chaucer’s relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days, before Boccaccio’s first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious difficulty. Great as are Chaucer’s literary obligations to the author of the “Decameron,” he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio’s.[52] It is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and that Chaucer, while claiming the right of “conveying” from Boccaccio as much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked out with Boccaccio’s true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer’s character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the assumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see that in Dante’s and Petrarch’s cases he proclaims his debt with the most commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval manuscripts were quite commonly written without anything like the modern title-page; and, even when the author’s name was recorded on the first page, the frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a title after his own fancy.[53] Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the streets of Boccaccio’s Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of Fiesole under which the lovers of the “Decameron” had sat, and missed by a few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated whole books of his without ever realizing their true authorship. In those days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the King’s Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed, assure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore, that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.

It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of 1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This, however, was taken as disproved by the more recent assertion of Nicholas that Chaucer drew his pension in England “with his own hands” during all this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby’s researches have reopened the possibility of the old tradition.[54] He ascertained, by a fresh examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to Milan, but the words into his own hands are omitted from this particular entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght’s assertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer’s own silence on the subject may have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the Knight’s mouth in protest against the Monk’s fondness for tragedies—

Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer’s old master. The Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan on the bridegroom’s arrival. But three months after the wedding “my lord Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for that the fashion of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan, and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one accord.” This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55] Why should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters in his life—the Black Death, and Wat Tyler’s revolt. It is still possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of Milan.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

“Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a ledger.”—Times

The Italian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer’s last embassy. In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February of next year he was associated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur’s partner at the battle of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer, would have seen his old fellow-envoy’s head grinning down from the spikes of London Bridge side by side with “a quarter of Sir Harry Percy.”[56] In April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d’Angle and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no authority to treat. So the embassy ended only in a very brief extension of the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later, when Richard took to second wife Marie’s niece Isabella, then only in her eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again associated with Sir Guichard d’Angle and two others on a mission to negotiate for Richard’s marriage with one of poor little Marie’s sisters. Here also the discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir Edward Berkeley on a fresh embassy to Italy. This time it was to treat “of certain matters touching the King’s war” with the great English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate afforded matter for one of the Monk’s “tragedies” in the “Canterbury Tales”—

During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this, so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.

It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant circumstances of these later embassies, important as they are for showing the high estimate put on Chaucer’s business talents, and much as they must have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully matured at last in the poet of the “Canterbury Tales.” But they show us that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate sister of Clarence’s Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins. These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he became no longer the mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a genius) of French and Italian classics, but a classic himself, master of a style that could express all the accumulated observations of half a century—Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English men and women, and no other man. The analysis and criticism of the works which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough, strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare has been to us ever since.

It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at court. On St. George’s day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of wine daily for life, “to be received in the port of London from the hands of the King’s butler.” Such grants were common enough; but they take us back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition had come down. St. George’s was a day of solemn feasting in the Round Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services rendered during the past year. But the grant was already in those days more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was commuted for a life-pension of about £200 modern value.

Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune. Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however, are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household amounted to some £1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wardships and a large share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer’s financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another comptrollership which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollership also; and in this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the Shire for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues. Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years. In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet “de raptu meo.” Raptus often means simply abduction, and it may well be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia as had been made upon his own father, who, as it will be remembered, had narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the gratification of other people’s private interests. This is rendered all the more probable by two other documents connected with the same matter which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57] It is, however, possible that the raptus was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer’s “little son Lowis” was just ten years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation, have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on Cecilia’s part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pass a law exacting that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pass on to the next of kin.[58] But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into a case of raptus, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]

During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer occupied those lodgings over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary point of view. Here he studied with an assiduity which would have been impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in his later years of want and sordid shifts. Here he translated Boethius, of whose philosophical “Consolations” he was so soon to stand in bitter need. Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that “Troilus and Cressida” which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In 1382 he composed his “Parliament of Fowls” in honour of Richard II.’s marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the “House of Fame” and the “Legend of Good Women.” These two poems, like most of Chaucer’s work, are unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind ourselves that he was no professional litterateur, but a courtier, diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their gratitude for what he told them, few in those days would have been inclined to complain of all that Chaucer “left half-told.” So the poet freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness after all these centuries.

This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. His contemporary, Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, “at the palace of Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, nobles, and counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease. And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports, and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin, French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days before in all that he should say.” Chaucer’s Parliament sat more probably in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly passed off with less order and unanimity than Froissart’s of 1337, though the main theme was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crécy and Poitiers and a dozen other victories in pitched battles, our ships had been destroyed off La Rochelle in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60] and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and his fellow-members assembled on October 1, “it had still seemed possible that any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of the Thames.”[61] The militia of the southern counties was still assembled to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out any longer. As a contemporary puts it, “The King would not come to Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to attend.”[62] The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed preparations.

Meanwhile, however, other protégés of his had suffered besides the great men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted from Richard a commission for a month “to receive and dispose of all crown revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and set up others in their stead.”[63] Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls of this Parliament that the commission was issued “for inquiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the Subsidies and Customs; and as the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed to that investigation.” It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so, and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the poet’s character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then, when Richard’s patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer’s other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile—at such a moment it was almost inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in December both his comptrollerships were in other men’s hands. Even in his best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse would very naturally drive him to desperate shifts. It is not surprising, therefore, that we soon find him assigning his two pensions to one John Scalby (May 1, 1388).

But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV.[64] At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter’s pension as usual, but not at Michaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet’s already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he probably wrote the greater part of the “Canterbury Tales.”

Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain attempt to reassert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer’s old colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world, he struck his blow. In May, 1389, “he suddenly entered the privy council, took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, ‘What age am I?’ They answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am of full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.’” He at once dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John’s factious younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester.

With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was natural that Chaucer’s luck should turn. Two months after this scene in Council he was appointed by Richard II. “Clerk of our Works at our Palace of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern Langley, and Feckenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages.” Our poet had also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the King’s prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back runaways, and “to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the injunctions given in our name.” That these time-honoured clauses were no dead letter, is shown by the still surviving documents in which Chaucer deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen and impounding materials, by the constant petitions of medieval Parliaments against this system of “Purveyance” for the King’s necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short while by “pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of Windsor.”[65]

We have a curious inventory of the “dead stock” which Chaucer took over from his predecessors in the Clerkship, and for which he made himself responsible; the list ranges from “one bronze image, two stone images unpainted, seven images in the likeness of Kings” for Westminster Palace, with considerable fittings for the lists and galleries of a tournament, and 100 stone cannon balls for the Tower, down to “one broken cable ... one dilapidated pitchfork ... three sieves, whereof two are crazy.”[66] For all this, which he was allowed to do by deputy, Chaucer received two shillings a day, or something like £450 a year of modern money.[67] Further commissions of the same kind were granted to him: the supervision of the works at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, which was “threatened with ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground;” and again of a great scaffold in Smithfield for the Royal party on the occasion of the tournament in May, 1390. Two months earlier in this same year he had been associated with his old colleague Sir Richard Stury and others on a commission to repair the dykes and drains of Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich, which were “so broken and ruined that manifold and inestimable damages have happened in times past, and more are feared for the future.” A marginal note on a MS. of his “Envoy to Scogan,” written some three years later, states that the poet was then living at Greenwich; and a casual remark in the “Canterbury Tales” very probably points in the same direction.[68] Either in 1390 or 1391 a Geoffrey Chaucer, who was probably the poet, was appointed Forester of North Petherton Park in Somerset.

But here again we find one single mischance breaking the even tenour of Chaucer’s new-born prosperity. In September, 1390, while on his journeys as Clerk of the Works, he was the victim of at least two, and just possibly three, highway robberies (of which two were on one day) at Westminster, and near “The Foul Oak” at Hatcham. Two of the robbers were in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the moment by turning King’s evidence. He was, however, accused of another robbery in Hertfordshire, and attempted to save his life by charging Thomas Talbot’s servant with complicity in the crime. This time the accused offered “wager of battle.” Brerelay was vanquished in the duel, and strung up out of hand.

It is difficult to resist the conviction that Chaucer was by this time recognized as an unbusiness-like person; for the King deprived him of his Clerkship in the following June (1391), at a time when we can find nothing in the political situation to account for the dismissal.

CHAPTER VI

LAST DAYS

From this time forward Chaucer seems to have lived from hand to mouth. He had, as will presently be seen, a son, stepson, or foster-son of considerable wealth and position; and no doubt he had other good friends too. We have reason to believe that he was still working at the “Canterbury Tales,” and receiving such stray crumbs from great men’s tables as remained the main reward of literature until modern times. In 1391 (if we may judge from the fact that problems in the book are calculated for that year) he wrote the “Treatise on the Astrolabe” for the instruction of his ten-year-old son Lewis.[69] It was most likely in 1393 that he wrote from Greenwich the “Envoy” to his friend Henry Scogan, who was then with the Court at Windsor, “at the stream’s head of grace.” The poet urges him there to make profitable mention of his friend, “forgot in solitary wilderness” at the lower end of the same river; and it is natural to connect this with the fact that, in 1394, Richard granted Chaucer a fresh pension of £20 a year for life. But the King’s exchequer was constantly empty, and we have seen that the poet’s was seldom full; so we need not be surprised to find him constantly applying for his pension at irregular times during the rest of the reign. Twice he dunned his royal patron for the paltry sum of 6s. 8d. More significant still is a record of the Court of Common Pleas showing that he was sued by Isabella Buckholt for the sum of £14. 1s. 11d. some time between April 24 and May 20, 1398; the Sheriff of Middlesex reported that Chaucer had no possessions in his bailiwick. On May 4 the poet obtained letters of protection, in which the King alludes formally to the “very many arduous and urgent affairs” with which “our beloved esquire” is entrusted, and therefore takes him with “his men, lands, goods, rents, and all his possessions” under the Royal protection, and forbids all pleas or arrests against him for the next two years. The recital of these arduous and urgent affairs is no doubt (like that of Chaucer’s lands and rents) a mere legal form; but the protection was real. Isabella Buckholt pressed her suit, but the Sheriff returned in October, 1398, and June, 1399, that the defendant “could not be found.” Yet all this time Chaucer was visible enough, for he was petitioning the King for formal letters patent to confirm a grant already made by word of mouth in the preceding December, of a yearly butt of wine from the Royal cellars “for God’s sake, and as a work of charity.” This grant, valued at about £75 of modern money, was confirmed on October 13, 1398, and was the last gift from Richard to Chaucer. Before twelve months were gone, the captive King had ravelled out his weaved-up follies before his pitiless accusers in the Tower of London; and on the very 13th of October, year for year, on which Chaucer had received his butt of wine from Richard II., a fresh poetical supplication brought him a still greater favour from the next King. Henry IV. granted on his own account a pension of forty marks in addition to Richard’s; and five days afterwards we find Chaucer pleading that he had “accidentally lost” the late King’s letters patent for the pension and the wine, and begging for their renewal under Henry’s hand. The favour was granted, and Chaucer was thus freed from any uncertainty which might have attached to his former grants from a deposed King, even though one of them was already recognized and renewed in Henry’s letters of October 13.[70]

“King Richard,” writes Froissart, “had a greyhound called Math, who always waited upon the king and would know no man else; for whensoever the king did ride, he that kept the greyhound did let him loose, and he would straight run to the king and fawn upon him and leap with his fore feet upon the king’s shoulders. And as the king and the earl of Derby talked together in the court, the greyhound, who was wont to leap upon the king, left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lancaster, and made to him the same friendly countenance and cheer as he was wont to do to the king. The duke, who knew not the greyhound, demanded of the king what the greyhound would do. ‘Cousin,’ quoth the king, ‘it is a great good token to you and an evil sign to me.’ ‘Sir, how know you that?’ quoth the duke. ‘I know it well,’ quoth the king, ‘the greyhound maketh you cheer this day as king of England, as ye shall be, and I shall be deposed. The greyhound hath this knowledge naturally; therefore take him to you; he will follow you and forsake me.’ The duke understood well those words and cherished the greyhound, who would never after follow king Richard, but followed the duke of Lancaster: [and more than thirty thousand men saw and knew this.”[71]] The fickle hound did but foreshadow the bearing of Richard’s dependents in general. The poem in which Chaucer hastened to salute the new King of a few days breathed no word of pity for his fallen predecessor, but hailed Henry as the saviour of England, “conqueror of Albion,” “very king by lineage and free election.”[72] In the months that followed, while Chaucer enjoyed his wine and his pension, the King who first gave them was starving himself, or being starved by his gaolers, at Pontefract. It must of course be remembered that, while Richard was felt on all hands to have thrown his splendid chances wantonly away, Henry was the son of Chaucer’s best patron; and indeed the poet had recently been in close relations with the future King, if not actually in his service.[73] Still, we know that few were willing to suffer in those days for untimely faith to a fallen sovereign, and we ourselves have less reason to blame the many, than to thank the luckier stars under which such trials of loyalty are spared to our generation. Chaucer’s contemporary and fellow-courtier, Froissart, might indeed write bitterly in his old age about a people which could change its ruler like an old glove; but Froissart was at ease in his fat canonry of Chimay; while Chaucer, with a hundred poets before and since, had chirped like a cricket all through the summer, and was now face to face with cold and starvation in the winter of his life.

His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in the tone of Wamba the Witless: “Wait till you come to forty year!” There is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so—

Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in the outspoken triumph-note of its close—

Then we have “The Former Age”—a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for the ungrateful Present—

Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning “This wretched worldës transmutacioun”; a “Complaint of Venus”; the two begging epistles to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend Bukton; a piteous complaint entitled “Lack of Steadfastness,” and two moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and most resigned—

The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are Chaucer’s own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn again into closer kinship, just as early childhood is much the same in all countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer’s later writings that reminds us of Renan’s “pauvre âme déveloutée de soixante ans.” All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are, in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But, for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions, there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems: and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old man’s disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer’s old age; we see in him what Ruskin calls “a Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”; loyal to monarchy and deeply distrustful of democracy, yet never doubting the King’s ultimate responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He anticipates in effect Heine’s tragi-comic appeal, “Hate me, Ladies, laugh at me, jilt me, but let me live!” For all that we have lost or missed, the world is no mere vale of tears—

well, even Age has its consolations—

There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer’s later years—to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th century drew to its close; Edward III.’s sun had gone down in disgrace; his grandson’s brilliant infancy had passed into a childish manhood, whose wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to his own supporters.[75] The Great Pestilence and the Papal Schism, the Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants’ Revolt in England, had shaken society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.

To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan’s sense; a place of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was rather Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that, when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than “come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out.” But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose last cry is recorded at the end of the “Canterbury Tales.” Everything points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and, though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must beware of exaggerations on this point.[76] Moreover, even if his unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it needed a temper very different from Chaucer’s to withstand, under medieval conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the clergy. Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology for a document which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the dying man’s instinctive call for his mother. “I beseech you meekly of God” (so runs the epilogue to the “Parson’s Tale”) “that ye pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts—and namely [especially] of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved.”

But we are anticipating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had brought Chaucer once again into easy circumstances, and within a few weeks we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey “a tenement, with its appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel,” i.e. somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.’s chapel, sheltered by the south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and “nigh to the White Rose Tavern”; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to be planted “in the herbary between the King’s Chamber and the Church.”[77] “He that plants pears, plants for his heirs,” says the old proverb; and it is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last; but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was paid through the hands of one William Somere; and then the Royal accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the Abbey which has since received the name of Poet’s Corner.[78] It is probable that we owe this fortunate circumstance still more to the fact that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his last years.

[Larger Image]

WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)

WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOWS OF CHAUCER’S HOUSE

(ON EXTREME RIGHT, PART OF HENRY VII’S CHAPEL, BUILT ON THE SITE OF ST. MARY’S CHAPEL)

The industry of Mr. Edward Scott has discovered that this same house in St. Mary’s Chapel garden was let, from at least 1423 until his death in 1434, to Thomas Chaucer, who was probably the poet’s son. This Thomas was a man of considerable wealth and position. He began as a protégé of John of Gaunt, and became Chief Butler to Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V. in succession; Constable of Wallingford Castle, and M.P. for Oxfordshire in nine parliaments between 1402 and 1429. He was many times Speaker, a commissioner for the marriage of Henry V., and an Ambassador to treat for peace with France; fought at Agincourt with a retinue of twelve men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; became a member of the King’s Council, and died a very rich man. His only daughter made two very distinguished marriages; and her grandson was that Earl of Lincoln whom Richard III. declared his heir-apparent. For a while it seemed likely that Geoffrey Chaucer’s descendants would sit on the throne of England, but the Earl died in fight against Henry VII. at Stoke. Of the poet’s “little son Lewis” we hear no more after that brief glimpse of his boyhood; and Elizabeth Chaucy, the only other person whom we can with any probability claim as Chaucer’s child, was entered as a nun at Barking in 1381, John of Gaunt paying £51 8s. 2d. for her expenses. It is just possible, however, that this may be the same Elizabeth Chausier who was received as a nun in St. Helen’s priory four years earlier, at the King’s nomination; in this case the date would point more probably to the poet’s sister.

This is not the place for any literary dissertation on Chaucer’s poetry, which has already been admirably discussed by many modern critics, from Lowell onwards. He did more than any other man to fix the literary English tongue: he was the first real master of style in our language, and retained an undisputed supremacy until the Elizabethan age. This he owes (as has often been pointed out) not only to his natural genius, but also to the happy chances which gave him so wide an experience of society. Living in one of the most brilliant epochs of English history, he was by turns lover, courtier, soldier, man of business, student, ambassador, Justice of the Peace, Member of Parliament, Thames Conservator, and perhaps even something of an architect, if he took his Clerkship of the Works seriously. All these experiences were mirrored in eyes as observant, and treasured in as faithful a memory, as those of any other English poet but one; and to these natural gifts of the born portrait-painter he added the crowning quality of a perfect style. If his writings have been hailed as a “well of English undefiled,” it was because he spoke habitually, and therefore wrote naturally, the best English of his day, the English of the court and of the higher clergy. In this he was even more fortunate than Dante, as he surpassed Dante in variety (though not in intenseness) of experience, and as he knew one more language than he. When we note with astonishment the freshness of Chaucer’s characters across these five centuries, we must always remember that his exceptional experience and powers of observation were combined with an equally extraordinary mastery of expression. It is because Chaucer’s speech ranges with absolute ease from the best talk of the best society, down to the Miller’s broad buffoonery or the north-country jargon of the Cambridge students, that his characters seem to us so modern in spite of the social and political revolutions which separate their world from ours. It will be my aim to portray, in the remaining chapters, the England of that day in those features which throw most light on the peculiarities of Chaucer’s men and women.

CHAPTER VII

LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE

There are two episodes of Chaucer’s life which belong even more properly to Chaucer’s England; in which it may not only be said that our interest is concentrated less on the man than on his surroundings, but even that we can scarcely get a glimpse of the man except through his surroundings. These two episodes are his life in London, and his Canterbury Pilgrimage; and with these we may most fitly begin our survey of the world in which he lived.

The most tranquilly prosperous period of the poet’s life was that space of twelve years, from 1374 to 1386, during which he lived over the tower of Aldgate and worked at the Customs House, with occasional interruptions of foreign travel on the King’s business. The Tower of London, according to popular belief, had its foundations cemented with blood; and this was only too true of Chaucer’s Aldgate. It was a massive structure, double-gated and double-portcullised, and built in part with the stones of Jews’ houses plundered and torn down by the Barons who took London in 1215. But, in spite of similar incidents here and there, England was generally so free from civil war that the townsfolk were very commonly tempted to avoid unnecessary outlay upon fortifications. The traveller in Germany or Switzerland is often surprised to see even villages strongly walled against robber barons; while we may find great and wealthy English towns like Lynn and Cambridge which had little other defence than a ditch and palisade.[79] Even in fortified cities like London, the tendency was to neglect the walls—at one period we find men even pulling them gradually to pieces[80]—and to let the towers or gates for private lodgings. As early as the last year of Edward I., we find Cripplegate thus let out; and such notices are frequent in the “Memorials of London Life,” collected by Mr. Riley from the City archives.[81]

Here Chaucer had only half a mile to go to his daily work, by streets which we may follow still. If he took the stricter view, which held that gentlefolk ought to begin their day with a Mass, and to hear it fasting, then he had at least St. Michael’s, Aldgate, and All Hallows Stonechurch on his direct way, and two others within a few yards of his road. If, however, he was of those who preferred to begin the day with a sop of wine or “a draught of moist and corny ale,” then the noted hostelry of the Saracen’s Head probably stood even then, and had stood since the time of the Crusades, within a few yards of Aldgate Tower. Close by the fork of Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets he would pass a “fair and large-built house,” the town inn of the Prior of Hornchurch. Then, in Fenchurch Street, the mansion and garden of the Earls of Northumberland, and again, at the corner of Mart Lane, the manor and garden of Blanch Apleton. Turning down Mart Lane (now corrupted into Mark), the poet would pass the great chain, ready to be stretched at any moment across the narrow street, which marked the limits of Aldgate and Tower Street wards. He would cross Tower Street a few yards to the eastward of “the quadrant called Galley Row, because galley men dwelt there.” These galley men were “divers strangers, born in Genoa and those parts,” whose settlement in London had probably been the object of Chaucer’s first Italian mission, and who presently prospered sufficiently to fill not only this quadrant, but also part of Minchin Lane, and to possess a quay of their own. But, like their cousins the Lombards, these Genoese soon showed themselves smarter business men even than their hosts. They introduced unauthorized halfpence of Genoa, called “Galley halfpence”; and these, with similar “suskings” from France, and “dodkins” from the Low Countries, survived the strict penalties threatened by two Acts of Parliament, and lasted on at least till Elizabeth’s reign. “In my youth,” writes Stow, “I have seen them pass current, but with some difficulty, for the English halfpence were then, though not so broad, somewhat thicker and stronger.”[82] Stow found a building on the quay which he identified with their hall. “It seemeth that the builders of the hall of this house were shipwrights, and not carpenters;” for it was clinker-built like a boat, “and seemeth as it were a galley, the keel turned upwards.” But this building was probably later than Chaucer’s time. The galley quay almost touched that of the Custom-House; and here our poet had abundant opportunities of keeping up his Italian while sampling the “wines of Crete and other sweet wines in one of the cellars, and red and white wines in the other cellar.”[83] His poems show an appreciation of good vintages, which was no doubt partly hereditary and partly acquired on the London quays, where he could talk with these Mediterranean mariners and drink the juice of their native grapes, remembering all the while how he had once watched them ripening on those southern slopes—

When Chaucer began his work in 1374 there was no regular building for the Customs; the King hired a house for the purpose at £3 a year, and a single boatman watched in the port to prevent smuggling. In 1383, however, one John Churchman built a house, which Richard II. undertook to hire for the rest of the builder’s life; this became the first Custom-House, and lasted until Elizabeth’s reign. The lease gives its modest proportions exactly: a ground floor, in which the King kept his weigh-beams for wool and other merchandise; a “solar,” or upper chamber, for a counting-house; and above this yet another solar, 38 by 21½ feet, partitioned into “two chambers and one garret, as men call it.” For this new house the King paid the somewhat higher rent of £4. Chaucer was bound by the terms of his appointment to do the work personally, without substitute, and to write his “rolls touching the said office with his own hand”; but it is probable that he accepted these terms with the usual medieval licence. He went abroad at least five times on the King’s service during his term of office; and the two original rolls which survive are apparently not written by his hand. His own words in the “House of Fame” show that he took his book-keeping work at the office seriously; but it is not likely that the press of business was such as to keep him always at the counting-house; and he may well have helped his boatman to patrol the port, which extended down-river to Gravesend and Tilbury. It is at least certain that, in 1376, he caught John Kent smuggling a cargo of wool away from London, and so earned prize-money to the value of £1000 in modern currency. It is certain also that his daily work for twelve years must have kept him in close daily contact with sea-faring folk, who, from Homer’s days at least, have always provided the richest food for poetry and romance. The commonest seaman had stirring tales to tell in those days, when every sailor was a potential pirate, and foreign crews dealt with each other by methods still more summary than plank-walking.[85] Moreover, there was even more truth than now in the proverb that “far fowls have fair feathers”; and the Genoese on Galley Quay had sailed many seas unknown even to the tempest-tossed shipman of Dartmouth, whose southern limit was Cape Finisterre. They had passed the Pillars of Hercules, and seen the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, and shuddered from afar at the Great Whirlpool of the Bay of Biscay, which sucked in its floods thrice daily, and thrice belched them forth again; and into which about this time “four vessels of the town of Lynn, steering too incautiously, suddenly fell, and were swallowed up under their comrades’ eyes.”[86]

Moreover, the very streets and markets of London then presented a pageant unquestionably far more inspiring to a man of Chaucer’s temperament than anything that can be seen there to-day. It is easy to exaggerate the contrast between modern and medieval London, if only by leaving out of account those subtle attractions which kept even William Morris from tearing himself away from the much-abused town. It is also undeniable that, however small and white, Chaucer’s London was not clean, even to the outward eye; and that the exclusive passion for Gothic buildings is to some extent a mere modern fashion, as it was the fashion two hundred years ago to consider them a positive eyesore. To some great poet of the future, modern London may well supply a grander canvas still; but to a writer like Chaucer, content to avoid psychological problems and take men and things as they appear on the surface, there was every possible inspiration in this busy capital of some 40,000 souls, where everybody could see everything that went on, and it was almost possible to know all one’s fellow-citizens by sight. Some streets, no doubt, were as crowded as any oriental bazaar; but most of the buying and selling went on in open market, with lavish expenditure of words and gestures; while the shops were open booths in which the passer-by could see master and men at their work, and stop to chat with them on his way. In the absence of catalogues and advertisements, every man spread out his gayest wares in the sun, and commended them to the public with every resource of mother-wit or professional rhetoric. Cornhill and Cheapside were like the Mercato Vecchio at Florence or St. Mark’s Square at Venice. Extremes meet in modern London, and there is theme enough for poetry in the deeper contrasts that underlie our uniformity of architecture and dress. But in Chaucer’s London the crowd was almost as motley to man’s eye as to God’s—

The very sticks and stones had an individuality no less marked. The churches, parish and monastic, stood out as conspicuously as they still stand in Norwich, and were often used for secular purposes, despite the prohibitions of synods and councils. For even London had in Chaucer’s time scarcely any secular public buildings, while at Norwich, one of the four greatest towns in the kingdom, public meetings were sometimes held in the Tolhouse, sometimes in the Chapel of St. Mary’s College, in default of a regular Guildhall. The city houses of noblemen and great churchmen were numerous and often splendid, and Besant rightly emphasizes this feudal aspect of the city; but he seems in his enumeration of the lords’ retainers to allow too little for medieval licence in dealing with figures; and certainly he has exaggerated their architectural magnificence beyond all reason.[88] But at least the ordinary citizens’ and artisans’ dwellings presented the most picturesque variety. Here and there a stone house, rare enough to earn special mention in official documents; but most of the dwellings were of timber and plaster, in front and behind, with only side-gables of masonry for some sort of security against the spreading of fires.[89] The ground floor was generally open to the street, and formed the shop; then, some eight or ten feet above the pavement, came the “solar” or “soller” on its projecting brackets, and sometimes (as in the Custom House) a third storey also. Outside stairs seem to have been common, and sometimes penthouses on pillars or cellar steps further broke the monotony of the street, though frequent enactments strove to regulate these in the public interest. Of comfort or privacy in the modern sense these houses had little to offer. The living rooms were frequently limited to hall and bower (i.e. bedroom); only the better sort had two chambers; glass was rare; in Paris, which was at least as well-built as London, a well-to-do citizen might well have windows of oiled linen for his bedroom, and even in 1575 a good-sized house at Sheffield contained only sixteen feet of glass altogether.[90] Meanwhile the wooden shutters which did duty for casements were naturally full of chinks; and the inhabitants were exposed during dark nights not only to the nuisance and danger of “common listeners at the eaves,” against whom medieval town legislation is deservedly severe, but also to the far greater chances of burglary afforded by the frailty of their habitations. It is not infrequently recorded in medieval inquests that the housebreaker found his line of least resistance not through a window or a door, but through the wall itself.[91] Moreover, in those unlighted streets, much that was most picturesque by day was most dangerous at night, from the projecting staircases and penthouses down to doorways unlawfully opened after curfew, wherein “aspyers” might lurk, “waiting men for to beaten or to slayen.” These and many similar considerations will serve to explain why night-walking was treated in medieval towns as an offence presumptively no less criminal than, in our days, the illegal possession of dynamite. The 15th-century statutes of Oxford condemn the nocturnal wanderer to a fine double that which he would have incurred by shooting at a proctor and his attendants with intent to injure.[92]

THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND
(FROM MS. ROY. 16 F. ii, f. 73: A LATE 15TH CENTURY MS. OF
THE POEMS OF CHARLES D’ORLÉANS)

But to return to the inside of the houses. The contract for a well-to-do citizen’s dwelling of 1308 has been preserved, by a fortunate chance, in one of the city Letter-books. “Simon de Canterbury, carpenter, came before the Mayor and Aldermen ... and acknowledged that he would make at his own proper charges, down to the locks, for William de Hanigtone, skinner, before the Feast of Easter then next ensuing, a hall and a room with a chimney, and one larder between the said hall and room; and one solar over the room and larder; also, one oriel at the end of the hall, beyond the high bench, and one step with a porch from the ground to the door of the hall aforesaid, outside of that hall; and two enclosures as cellars, opposite to each other, beneath the hall; and one enclosure for a sewer, with two pipes leading to the said sewer; and one stable, [blank] in length, between the said hall and the old kitchen, and twelve feet in width, with a solar above such stable, and a garret above the solar aforesaid; and at one end of such solar, there is to be a kitchen with a chimney; and there is to be an oriel between the said hall and the old chamber, eight feet in width.... And the said William de Hanigtone acknowledged that he was bound to pay to Simon before-mentioned, for the work aforesaid, the sum of £9 5s. 4d. sterling, half a hundred of Eastern martenskins, fur for a woman’s head, value five shillings, and fur for a robe of him, the said Simon, etc.”[93] Read side by side with this the list of another fairly well-to-do citizen’s furniture in 1337. Hugh le Benere, a Vintner who owned several tenements, was accused of having murdered Alice his wife.[94] He refused to plead, was condemned to prison for life, and his goods were inventoried. Omitting the stock-in-trade of six casks of wine (valued at six marks), the wearing apparel, and the helmet and quilted doublet in which Hugh had to turn out for the general muster, the whole furniture was as follows: “One mattress, value 4s.; 6 blankets and one serge, 13s. 6d.; one green carpet, 2s.; one torn coverlet, with shields of sendal, 4s.; ... 7 linen sheets, 5s.; one table-cloth, 2s.; 3 table-cloths, 18d.; ... one canvas, 8d.; 3 feather beds, 8s.; 5 cushions, 6d.; ... 3 brass pots, 12s.; one brass pot, 6s.; 2 pairs of brass pots, 2s. 6d.; one brass pot, broken, 2s. 6d.; one candlestick of latten, and one plate, with one small brass plate, 2s.; 2 pieces of lead, 6d.; one grate, 3d.; 2 andirons, 18d.; 2 basins, with one washing vessel, 5s.; one iron grating, 12d.; one tripod, 2d.; ... one iron spit, 3d.; one frying-pan, 1d.; ... one funnel, 1d.; one small canvas bag, 1d.; ... one old linen sheet, 1d.; 2 pillows, 3d.; ... one counter, 4s.; 2 coffers, 8d.; 2 curtains, 8d.; 2 remnants of cloth, 1d.; 6 chests, 10s. 10d.; one folding table, 12d.; 2 chairs, 8d.; one portable cupboard, 6d.; 2 tubs, 2s.; also firewood, sold for 3s.; one mazer cup, 6s.; ... one cup called “note” (i.e. cocoanut) with a foot and cover of silver, value 30s.; 6 silver spoons, 6s.”[95]

This implies no very high standard of domestic comfort. The hall, it must be remembered, had no chimney in the modern sense, but a hole in the roof to which the smoke went up from an open hearth in the centre of the room, more or less assisted in most cases by a funnel-shaped erection of lath and plaster.[96] It is not generally realized what draughts our ancestors were obliged to accept as unavoidable, even when they sat partially screened by their high-backed seats, as in old inn kitchens. A man needed his warmest furs still more for sitting indoors than for walking abroad; and to Montaigne, even in 1580, one of the most remarkable things in Switzerland was the draughtless comfort of the stove-warmed rooms. “One neither burns one’s face nor one’s boots, and one escapes the smoke of French houses. Moreover, whereas we [in France] take our warm and furred robes de chambre when we enter the house, they on the contrary dress in their doublets, with their heads uncovered to the very hair, and put on their warm clothes to walk in the open air.”[97] The important part played by furs of all kinds, and the matter-of-course mention of dirt and vermin, are among the first things that strike us in medieval literature.

But the worst discomfort of the house, to the modern mind, was the want of privacy. There was generally but one bedroom; for most of the household the house meant simply the hall; and some of those with whom the rest were brought into such close contact might indeed be “gey ill to live wi’.”[98] We have seen that, even as a King’s squire, Chaucer had not a bed to himself; and sometimes one bed had to accommodate three occupants. This was so ordered, for instance, by the 15th-century statutes of the choir-school at Wells, which provided minutely for the packing: “two smaller boys with their heads to the head of the bed, and an older one with his head to the foot of the bed and his feet between the others’ heads.” A distinguished theologian of the same century, narrating a ghost-story of his own, begins quite naturally: “When I was a youth, and lay in a square chamber, which had only a single door well shut from within, together with three more companions in the same bed....” One of these, we presently find, “was of greater age, and a man of some experience.”[99] The upper classes of Chaucer’s later days had indeed begun to introduce revolutionary changes into the old-fashioned common life of the hall; a generation of unparalleled success in war and commerce was already making possible, and therefore inevitable, a new cleavage between class and class. The author of the B. text of “Piers Plowman,” writing about 1377, complains of these new and unsociable ways (x., 94).

Few men, however, could afford even these rudiments of privacy; people like Chaucer, of fair income and good social position, still found in their homes many of the discomforts of shipboard; and their daily intercourse with their fellow-men bred the same blunt familiarity, even beneath the most ceremonious outward fashions. It was not only starveling dependents like Lippo Lippi, whose daily life compelled them to study night and day the faces and outward ways of their fellow-men.

But let us get back again into the street, where all the work and play of London was as visible to the passer-by as that of any colony of working ants under the glass cases in a modern exhibition. Often, of course, there were set pageants for edification or distraction—Miracle Plays and solemn church processions twice or thrice in the year,—the Mayor’s annual ride to the palace of Westminster and back,—the King’s return with a new Queen or after a successful campaign, as in 1357, when Edward III. “came over the Bridge and through the City of London, with the King of France and other prisoners of rich ransom in his train. He entered the city about tierce [9 a.m.] and made for Westminster; but at the news of his coming so great a crowd of folk ran together to see this marvellous sight, that for the press of the people he could scarce reach his palace after noonday.” Frequent again were the royal tournaments at Smithfield, Cheapside, and Westminster, or “trials by battle” in those same lists, when one gentleman had accused another of treachery, and London citizens might see the quarrel decided by God’s judgment.[100] Here were welcome contrasts to the monotony of household life; for there was in all these shows a piquant element of personal risk, or at least of possible broken heads for others. Even if the King threw down his truncheon before the bitter end of the duel, even if no bones were broken at the tournament, something at least would happen amongst the crowd. Fountains ran wine in the morning, and blood was pretty sure to be shed somewhere before night. In 1396, when the little French Princess of eight years was brought to her Royal bridegroom at Westminster, nine persons were crushed to death on London Bridge, and the Prior of Tiptree was among the dead. Even the church processions, as episcopal registers show, ended not infrequently in scuffling, blows, and bloodshed; and the frequent holy days enjoyed then, as since, a sad notoriety for crime. Moreover, these things were not, as with us, mere matters of newspaper knowledge; they stared the passer-by in the face. Chaucer must have heard from his father how the unpopular Bishop Stapledon was torn from his horse at the north door of St. Paul’s and beheaded with two of his esquires in Cheapside; how the clergy of the cathedral and of St. Clement’s feared to harbour the corpses, which lay naked by the roadside at Temple Bar until “women and wretched poor folk took the Bishop’s naked corpse, and a woman gave him an old rag to cover his belly, and they buried him in a waste plot called the Lawless Church, with his squires by his side, all naked and without office of priest or clerk.”[101] Chaucer himself must have seen some of the many similar tragedies in 1381, for they are among the few events of contemporary history which we can definitely trace in his poems—

What modern Londoner has witnessed this, or anything like it? Yet to all his living readers Chaucer appealed confidently, “Have ye not seen?” Scores of wretched lawyers and jurors were hunted down in that riot, and hurried through the streets to have their heads hacked off at Tower Hill or Cheapside, “and many Flemings lost their head at that time, and namely [specially] they that could not say ‘Bread and Cheese,’ but ‘Case and Brode.’”[103] It may well have been Simon of Sudbury’s white face that haunted Chaucer, when the mob forgot his archbishopric in the unpopularity of his ministry, forgot the sanctity of the chapel at whose altar he had taken refuge, “paid no reverence even to the Lord’s Body which the priest held up before him, but worse than demons (who fear and flee Christ’s sacrament) dragged him by the arms, by his hood, by different parts of the body towards their fellow-rioters on Tower Hill without the gates. When they had come thither, a most horrible shout arose, not like men’s shouts, but worse beyond all comparison than all human cries, and most like to the yelling of devils in hell. Moreover, they cried thus whensoever they beheaded men or tore down their houses, so long as God permitted them to work their iniquity unpunished.”[104] De Quincey has noted how such cries may make a deeper mark on the soul than any visible scene. And here again Chaucer has brought his own experience, though half in jest, as a parallel to the sack of Ilion and Carthage or the burning of Rome—

Last tragedy of all—but this time, though he may well have seen, the poet could no longer write—Richard II.’s corpse “was brought to St. Paul’s in London, and his face shown to the people,” that they might know he was really dead.[106]

Nor was there less comedy than tragedy in the London streets; the heads grinned down from the spikes of London Bridge on such daily buffooneries as scarcely survive nowadays except in the amenities of cabdrivers and busmen. The hue and cry after a thief in one of these narrow streets, encumbered with show-benches and goods of every description, must at any time have been a Rabelaisian farce; and still more so when it was the thief who had raised the hue and cry after a true man, and had slipped off himself in the confusion. The crowds who gather in modern towns to see a man in handcuffs led from a dingy van up the dingy court steps would have found a far keener relish in the public punishments which Chaucer saw on his way to and from work; fraudulent tradesmen in the pillory, with their putrid wares burning under their noses, or drinking wry-mouthed the corrupt wine which they had palmed off on the public; scolding wives in the somewhat milder “thewe”; sometimes a penitential procession all round the city, as in the case of the quack doctor and astrologer whose story is so vividly told by the good Monk of St. Alban’s. The impostor “was set on a horse [barebacked] with the beast’s tail in his hand for a bridle, and two pots which in the vulgar tongue we call Jordans bound round his neck, with a whetstone in sign that he earned all this by his lies; and thus he was led round the whole city.”[107] A lay chronicler might have given us the reverse of the medal; some priest barelegged in his shirt, with a lighted taper in his hand, doing penance for his sins before the congregation of his own church. The author of “Piers Plowman” knew this well enough; in introducing us to his tavern company, it is a priest and a parish clerk whom he shows us cheek-by-jowl with the two least reputable ladies of the party. The whole passage deserves quoting in full as a picture of low life indeed, but one familiar enough to Chaucer and his friends in their day; for it is a matter of common remark that even the distance which separated different classes in earlier days made it easier for them to mix familiarly in public. The very catalogue of this tavern company is a comedy in itself, and may well conclude our survey of common London sights. Glutton, on his way to morning mass, has passed Bett the brewster’s open door; and her persuasive “I have good ale, gossip” has broken down all his good resolutions—

A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE 14TH CENTURY,
WITH A WREATH OF PAST TROPHIES OVER HIS SHOULDER
(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6 f. 503 b)

CHAPTER VIII

ALDGATE TOWER

“For though the love of books, in a cleric, be honourable in the very nature of the case, yet it hath sorely exposed us to the adverse judgment of many folk, to whom we became an object of wonder, and were blamed at one time for greediness in that matter, or again for seeming vanity, or again, for intemperate delight in letters; yet we cared no more for their revilings than for the barking of curs, contented with His testimony alone to Whom it pertaineth to try the hearts and reins.... Yet perchance they would have praised and been kindly affected towards us if we had spent our time in hunting wild beasts, in playing at dice, or in courting ladies’ favours.”—The “Philobiblon” of Bp. R. de Bury (1287-1345).

Even in the 14th century a man’s house was more truly his castle in England than in any country of equal population; and Chaucer was particularly fortunate in having secured a city castle for his house. The records show that such leases were commonly granted by the authorities to men of influence and good position in the City; in 1367 the Black Prince specially begged the Mayor that Thomas de Kent might have Cripplegate; and we have curious evidence of the keen competition for Aldgate. The Mayor and Aldermen granted to Chaucer in 1374 “the whole dwelling-house above Aldgate Gate, with the chambers thereon built and a certain cellar beneath the said gate, on the eastern side thereof, together with all its appurtenances, for the lifetime of the said Geoffrey.” There was no rent, though of course Chaucer had to keep it in repair; in an earlier lease of 1354, the tenant had paid 13s. 4d. a year besides repairs. The City promised to keep no prisoners in the tower during Chaucer’s tenancy,[109] but naturally stipulated that they might take possession of their gate when necessary for the defence of the City. In 1386, as we have already seen and shall see more fully hereafter, there was a scare of invasion so serious that the authorities can scarcely have failed to take the gates into their own hands for a while. Though this need not necessarily have ended Chaucer’s tenancy altogether, yet he must in fact have given it up then, if not earlier; and a Common Council meeting held on October 4 resolved to grant no such leases in future “by reason of divers damages that have befallen the said city, through grants made to many persons, as well of the Gates and the dwelling-houses above them, as of the gardens and vacant places adjoining the walls, gates, and fosses of the said city, whereby great and divers mischiefs may readily hereafter ensue.” Yet on the very next day (and this is our first notice of the end of Chaucer’s tenancy) a fresh lease of Aldgate tower and house was granted to Chaucer’s friend Richard Forster by another friend of the poet’s, Nicholas Brembre, who was then Mayor. This may very likely have been a pre-arranged job among the three friends; but the flagrant violation of the law may well seem startling even to those who have realized the frequent contrasts between medieval theory and medieval practice; and after this we are quite prepared for Riley’s footnote, “Within a very short period after this enactment was made, it came to be utterly disregarded.”[110] The whole transaction, however, shows clearly that the Aldgate lodging was considered a prize in its way.

That Chaucer loved it, we know from one of the too rare autobiographical passages in his poems, describing his shy seclusion even more plainly than the Host hints at it in the “Canterbury Tales.” The “House of Fame” is a serio-comic poem modelled vaguely on Dante’s “Comedia,” in which a golden eagle carries Chaucer up to heaven, and, like Beatrice, plays the part of Mentor all the while. The poet, who was at first somewhat startled by the sudden rush through the air, and feared lest he might have been chosen as an unworthy successor to Enoch and Elias, is presently quieted by the Eagle’s assurance that this temporary apotheosis is his reward as the Clerk of Love—

The Ruler of the Gods, therefore, has taken pity on the poet’s lonely life—

Here we have the central figure of the Aldgate Chamber, but what was the background? Was his room, as some will have it, such as that to which his eyes opened in the “Book of the Duchess”?

Those lines were written before the Aldgate days; and the hints which can be gathered from surviving inventories and similar sources make it very improbable that the poet was lodged with anything like such outward magnificence. The storied glass and the frescoed wall were far more probably a reminiscence from Windsor, or from Chaucer’s life with one of the royal dukes; and the furniture of the Aldgate dwelling-house is likely to have resembled in quantity that which we have seen recorded of Hugh le Benere, and in quality the similar but more valuable stock of Richard de Blountesham. (Riley, p. 123.) Richard possessed bedding for three beds to the total value of fifty shillings and eightpence; his brass pot weighed sixty-seven pounds; and, over and above his pewter plates, dishes, and salt-cellars, he possessed “three silver cups, ten shillings in weight.” Three better cups than these, at least, stood in the Chaucer cupboard; for on New Year’s Day, 1380, 1381, and 1382, the accounts of the Duchy of Lancaster record presents from John of Gaunt to Philippa Chaucer of silver-gilt cups with covers. The first of these weighed thirty-one shillings, and cost nearly three pounds; the second and third were apparently rather more valuable. We must suppose, therefore, that the Aldgate rooms were handsomely furnished, as a London citizen’s rooms went; but we must beware here of such exaggerations as the genius of William Morris has popularized. The assumption that the poet knew familiarly every book from which he quotes has long been exploded; and it is quite as unsafe to suppose that the artistic glories which he so often describes formed part of his home life. There were tapestries and stained glass in churches for every man to see, and in palaces and castles for the enjoyment of the few; but they become fairly frequent in citizens’ houses only in the century after Chaucer’s death; and it was very easy to spend an income such as his without the aid of artistic extravagance. Froissart, whose circumstances were so nearly the same, and who, though a priest, was just as little given to abstinence, confesses to having spent 2000 livres (or some £8000 modern English money) in twenty-five years, over and above his fat living of Lestinnes. “And yet I hoard no grain in my barns, I build no churches, or clocks, or ships, or galleys, or manor-houses. I spend not my money on furnishing fine rooms.... My chronicles indeed have cost me a good seven hundred livres, at the least, and the taverners of Lestinnes have had a good five hundred more.”[112] Froissart’s confession introduces a witty poetical plea for fresh contributions; and if Chaucer had added a couple of similar stanzas to the “Complaint to his Empty Purse,” it is probable that their tenor would have been much the same: “Books, and the Taverner; and I’ve had my money’s worth from both!”

1. GROUND PLAN AND SECTION OF THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON—A TYPICAL
TIMBER HOUSE OF THE 14TH CENTURY. (For the Hall, see Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”)

2. PLAN OF ALDGATE TOWER AS IT WAS IN CHAUCER’S TIME

Professor Lounsbury (“Studies in Chaucer,” chap. v.) has discoursed exhaustively, and very judicially, on Chaucer’s learning; he shows clearly what books the poet knew only as nodding acquaintances, and how many others he must at one time have possessed, or at least have had at hand for serious study; and it would be impertinent to go back here over the same ground. But Professor Lounsbury is less clear on the subject which most concerns us here—the average price of books; for the three volumes which he instances from the King’s library were no doubt illuminated, and he follows Devon in the obvious slip of describing the French Bible as “written in the Gaelic language.” (II., 196; the reference to Devon should be p. 213, not 218.) But, at the lowest possible estimate, books were certainly an item which would have swelled any budget seriously in the 14th century. This was indeed grossly overstated by Robertson and other writers of a century ago; but Maitland’s “Dark Ages,” while correcting their exaggerations, is itself calculated to mislead in the other direction. A small Bible was cheap at forty shillings, i.e. the equivalent of £30 in modern money; so that the twenty volumes of Aristotle which Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford had at his bed’s head could scarcely have failed to cost him the value of three average citizens’ houses in a great town.[113] Among all the church dignitaries whose wills are recorded in Bishop Stafford’s Register at Exeter (1395-1419) the largest library mentioned is only of fourteen volumes. The sixty testators include a Dean, two Archdeacons, twenty Canons or Prebendaries, thirteen Rectors, six Vicars, and eighteen layfolk, mostly rich people. The whole sixty apparently possessed only two Bibles between them, and only one hundred and thirty-eight books altogether; or, omitting church service-books, only sixty; i.e. exactly one each on an average. Thirteen of the beneficed clergy were altogether bookless, though several of them possessed the baselard or dagger which church councils had forbidden in vain for centuries past; four more had only their Breviary. Of the laity fifteen were bookless, while three had service-books, one of these being a knight, who simply bequeathed them as part of the furniture of his private chapel. Any similar collection of wills and inventories would (I believe) give the same results, which fully agree with the independent evidence of contemporary writers. Bishop Richard de Bury (or possibly the distinguished theologian, Holcot, writing in his name) speaks bitterly of the neglect of books in the 14th century. Not only (he says) is the ardent collector ridiculed, but even education is despised, and money rules the world. Laymen, who do not even care whether books lie straight or upside down, are utterly unworthy of all communion with them; the secular clergy neglect them; the monastic clergy (with honourable exceptions among the friars) pamper their bodies and leave their books amid the dust and rubbish, till they become “corrupt and abominable, breeding-grounds for mice, riddled with worm-holes.” Even when in use, they have a score of deadly enemies—dirty and careless readers (whose various peculiarities the good Bishop describes in language of Biblical directness)—children who cry for and slobber over the illuminated capitals—and careless or slovenly servants. But the deadliest of all such enemies is the priest’s concubine, who finds the neglected volume half-hidden under cobwebs, and barters it for female finery. There is an obvious element of exaggeration in the good Bishop’s satire; but the Oxford Chancellor, Gascoigne, a century later, speaks equally strongly of the neglect of writing and the destruction of literature in the monasteries of his time; and there is abundant official evidence to prove that our ancestors did not atone for natural disadvantages by any excessive zeal in the multiplication, use, or preservation of books.[114]

Chaucer was scarcely born when the “Philobiblon” was written; and already in his day there was a growing number of leisured laymen who did know the top end of a book from the bottom, and who cared to read and write something beyond money accounts. Gower, who probably made money as a London merchant before he became a country squire, was also a well-read man; but systematic readers were still very rare outside the Universities, and Mrs. Green writes, even of a later generation of English citizens, “So far as we know, no trader or burgher possessed a library.”[115] Twenty-nine years after Chaucer’s death, the celebrated Whittington did indeed found a library; yet this was placed not at the Guildhall, to which he was a considerable benefactor, but in the Greyfriars’ convent. The poet’s bookishness would therefore inevitably have made him something of a recluse, and we have no reason to tax his own description with exaggeration.

[Larger Image]

ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS AS RECONSTITUTED IN
W. NEWTON’S “LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME”

12. ST. MICHAEL’S, ALDGATE; 25. BLANCH APPLETON; 26. ST. CATHERINE, COLEMAN STREET;
27. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE; 28. PRIOR OF HORNCHURCH’S LODGING; 29. SARACEN’S HEAD

London has never been a silent city, but Chaucer enjoyed at least one of the quietest spots in it. If (as we have every reason to suppose) the Ordinance of 1345 was far from putting an end to the nuisances which it indicates, then Chaucer must have heaved a sigh of relief when he had seen the Custom-House locked up, and turned his back on Spurrier Lane. The Spurriers were addicted to working after dark for nefarious ends of their own; “and further, many of the said trade are wandering about all day, without working at all at their trade; and then, when they have become drunk and frantic, they take to their work, to the annoyance of the sick and of all their neighbourhood, as well as by reason of the broils that arise between them and the strange folks who are dwelling among them. And then they blow up their fires so vigorously, that their forges begin all at once to blaze, to the great peril of themselves and of all the neighbourhood around. And then too, all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks, which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges.”[116] We may trust that no such offensive handiwork was carried on round Aldgate, whither the poet would arrive about five o’clock in the evening, and sit down forthwith to supper, as the sun began to slant over the open fields. We may hope, at least, that he was wont to sup at home rather than at those alluring cook-shops which alternated with wine-taverns along the river bank; and that, as he “defyed the roast” with his Gascon wine, Philippa sat and sipped with him from one of time-honoured Lancaster’s silver-gilt cups. Even if we accept the most pessimistic theories of Chaucer’s married life, we need scarcely doubt that the pair sat often together at their open window in the twilight—

The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out from Bow steeple.[117] Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in “Troilus and Criseyde,” written during this very Aldgate time. The hero watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the evening shadows leave most to the imagination—

And far within the night, while the “uncunning porters” sing over their liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the “Romance of the Rose.” Does he not also, to poor Philippa’s disgust, “laugh full fast” to himself sometimes over that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains “of wicked wives ... more legendës and lives than be of goodë wives in the Bible”? It is difficult to escape from this conviction. His “Wife of Bath” cites the treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals. Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the belly, like that of the Apocalypse. “Late to bed” suits ill with “early to rise,” and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat unsympathetic “Awake, Geoffrey!” was often the first word he heard in the morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven—

CHAPTER IX

TOWN AND COUNTRY

That which in Chaucer’s day passed for rank “sluggardy a-night” might yet be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he needed Philippa’s shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, “that he had seen the sun rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together.” It is indeed startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night’s dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner’s mood: “the sun, my dear, that’s God!” In the days when a tallow candle cost four times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his “Playground of Europe,” has brought a wealth of illustration and penetrating comment to show how strictly men’s ideas of the picturesque are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sülte, for instance, in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, “who oft-times affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the air.” The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so that “many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the Bürgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity to a herring-barrel.” What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or Tintern was not the beauty of “these steep woods and lofty cliffs,” but their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks’ own labours and those of their servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to listen how “the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of birds,” then they felt their forefathers to have been right in “noting fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds.”[118] After all, the earth was cursed for Adam’s sake, and even its apparent beauty was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists—

Ruskin’s famous passage on this subject (“M. P.,” iii., 14, 15) is, on the whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two remarkable exceptions. The poet of “Pearl,” who probably knew Wales well, describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas anticipated Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also with apparent sympathy.[119] Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil’s tomb.[120] The scenic splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and variety of the sunrises in the “Decameron” is equalled only by the bald brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer; Criseyde’s “Ywis, it will be night as fast,” is quite a characteristic epitaph for the dying day.

On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant conventional repetition; and here Chaucer is at his best. He may well have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard de Bury calls “a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk,” yet no poet was ever farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature—

Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop’s wood within a mile’s walk of Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the “Great Shaft of Cornhill,” the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122] These May-day festivities, which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we consider that even in castles and manor-houses men’s lives differed from this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the monotony of woman’s life under these conditions, doubly bound as she was to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame, with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Mass and gossip with a few neighbours—only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of last year’s fruit—in that position, men watched the first green buds with the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval ideal. Fénelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called interests of religion.[123] It would be difficult to find a single great preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions snow, sawdust, and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124] These and other similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in the streets. “If any man speak to thee,” writes the Good Wife for her Daughter, “swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way”; and again—

“When thou goest into town or to church,” says the author of the “Ménagier de Paris” to his young wife, “walk with thine head high, thine eyelids lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards.” Even Chaucer tells us of his Virginia—

MEDIEVAL MUMMERS.
(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)

These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a series of Christmastide proclamations “that no one shall go in the streets of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of imprisonment.” Similarly severe measures were threatened against football in the streets, against the game of “taking off the hoods of people, or laying hands on them,” and against “hocking” or extorting violent contributions from passers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter. But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly “charging on the King’s behalf and his City, that no man or person ... during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.”[126] Much of this mumming was not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to suppress all natural enjoyment of life—even Madame Eglantyne’s lapdogs were definitely contraband—but the girls were trammelled at every turn with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and unreal “other-worldliness” of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best explain certain of Chaucer’s least edifying tales by referring, on the other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his “A. B. C.”

But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the elvish and retiring poet of the “Canterbury Tales” mentions the sports of the townsfolk only with gentle irony. “Merry Absolon,” the parish clerk, who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well “after the school of Oxenford ... and with his leggës casten to and fro,” and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the ’prentice class to which he essentially belonged—all these small perfections are enumerated only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought by woman’s guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggëlots, around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields—young men and maidens, old men and children—but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun—

At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone with the birds—

Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun—

But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh and blood—

Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that Chaucer’s sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises, than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, “Canterbury Tales,” A., 1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and “Book of Duchess,” 291, where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens, though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed inferiority. Chaucer’s triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun’s Priest’s tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with Chanticleer—all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how glorious a part of God’s creation is even a barn-door cock?

Nothing but Chaucer’s directness of observation and truth of colouring could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.

In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was already becoming in a manner cockneyfied; although she already imported sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food, and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life. Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded quarters, the mass of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul’s was plainly set on a hill, and nobody could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn down the present Gray’s Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued) Boadicea’s chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames, though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only “in parts,” still ran at low tide over native shingle and mud; the Southwark shore was green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country. Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as two miles from the walls, “but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On all sides,” he continues, “without the houses of the suburb, are the citizens’ gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly, and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows, with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise. Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear. Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement’s Well are most famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer evenings, when they walk forth to take the air.” No doubt in Chaucer’s time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop’s Wood in Stepney parish and the fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the “Great Forest” of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley’s “Memorials” contain frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, “a little herber[129] that I have,” in which Chaucer laid the scene of his “Legend of Good Women.” These gardens seem to have made a fairly continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer home, however, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street, Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln’s twenty carefully-tilled acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages which clustered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence in which Becket’s chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the city. “Many citizens,” writes Fitzstephen, “do delight themselves in hawks and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray.” The city huntsman was, in those days, a salaried official of some dignity.

So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a company of nature-poets unsurpassed in any language. May we not hope that his companions in the “little herber,” or on his wider excursions, were sometimes “the moral Gower” or “the philosophical Strode?” And may we not picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer’s friend was probably the Ralph Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability as the author of “Pearl” and other 14th-century poems second only to Chaucer’s. However that may be, “the philosophical Strode” must unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his “Troilus,” and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer’s own reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter—

But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the long day wanes at last; and now—

The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he must surely have read: “The only pests of London are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires.”

CHAPTER X

THE LAWS OF LONDON

But the picturesque side of things was only the smaller half of Chaucer’s life, as it is of ours. We must not be more royalist than the King, or claim more for Chaucer and his England than he himself would ever have dreamed of claiming. That which seems most beautiful and romantic to us was not necessarily so five hundred years ago. The literature of Chivalry, for instance, seems to have touched Chaucer comparatively little: he scarcely mentions it but in more or less open derision. Again, while Ruskin and William Morris seem at times almost tempted to wish themselves back to the 14th century for the sake of its Gothic architecture, Chaucer in his retrospective mood is not ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet uncorrupted by architects of any description whatever—

No doubt he would as little have chosen seriously to go back to hips and haws as Morris would seriously have wished to live in the Middle Ages. But his words may warn us against over-estimating the picturesque side of his age. The most important is commonly what goes on under the surface; and this was eminently true of Chaucer’s native London. When we look closely into the social and political ideals of those motley figures which thronged the streets, we may see there our own modern liberties in the making, and note once more how slowly, yet how surely, the mills of God grind. It was once as hard for a community of a few thousand souls to govern itself as it is now for a nation; and parts of what seem to us the very foundations of civilized society were formerly as uncertain and tentative as Imperial Federation or the International Peace Congress.

The ordinary English town after the Conquest was originally simply part of a feudal estate: a rather denser aggregation than the ordinary village, and therefore rather more conscious of solidarity and power. The householders, by dint of holding more and more together, became increasingly capable of driving collective bargains, and of concentrating their numerical force upon any point at issue. They thus throve better than the isolated peasant; and their growing prosperity made them able to pay heavier dues to their feudal lords, who thus saw a prospect of immediate pecuniary gain in selling fresh liberties to the citizens. This process, which was still in its earlier stages in many towns during Chaucer’s lifetime, was, however, already far advanced in London, which claimed over other cities a superiority symbolized by the legend of its origin: Brut, the son of Æneas, had founded it, and named it Troynovant, or New Troy. But the city had far more tangible claims to supremacy than this: it had obtained from Henry I.—earlier by nearly a century than any other—the right of electing its own sheriff and justiciar; and from a still earlier time than this it had been almost as important politically as it is now. Mr. Loftie, whose “London” in the “Historic Towns” series gives so clear a view of its political development, shows us the city holding out against Canute long after the rest of the kingdom had been conquered; and making, even after Hastings, such terms with the Conqueror as secured to the citizens their traditional liberties. Even thus early, the city fully exemplified the dignity and enduring power of commerce and industry in an age of undisguised physical force. Its foreign trade was considerable, and foreign settlers numerous. “Already there was trade with the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee; and Norman ships, so far back as the days of Æthelred and even of his father, had brought the wines of the south to London. The [German] emperor’s men had already established their stafelhof, or steelyard, and traded under jealous rules and almost monastic discipline, but with such money that to this day ‘sterling’ stands beside ‘real’ as an adjective, for the Royal credit was not better than that of the Easterling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong to the ‘Gildhalda Theutonicorum,’ as it was called in the 13th century, settled in the city beside the Normans of the Conquest, the Frenchmen mentioned in the charter, and the old English stock of law-worthy citizens.”[132]

The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D., Fitzstephen boasted that London traded “with every nation under heaven”; and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing picture of English commerce; “Could the ships of Tharshish” (he exclaims), “so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?” Our fortunate insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer’s birth. French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs, placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time even formally forbade “all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and Provence.” All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; “robbed like a merchant” became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I., though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says, almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent Chaucer’s father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer’s grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King commanded on account of “certain outrages and despites” done to the Gascon merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have seen, were massacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers, and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury—a hateful term, which, in the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of human nature. “He who taketh usury goeth to hell, and he who taketh none, liveth on the verge of beggary”; so wrote an Italian contemporary of Chaucer’s. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly accepted his chance of damnation, and who would point to his big belly and fat cheeks with a scoffing “See how the priest’s curses shrivel me up!” Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been opened, he would have seen how “God had in fact fattened him for everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter”; but there remained many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. “Usurers’ bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred in front of the High Altar in churches”; so writes a great Franciscan preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady Meed in “Piers Plowman”—the incarnation of Illicit Gain—has scarcely come up to London when—

In other words, the Canon Law practically compelled the taker of interest to become a villain, as the old penal laws encouraged the thief to commit murder. Gower, if we make a little obvious allowance for a satirist’s rhetoric, will show us how ordinary citizens regarded the usurious Lombards.[136] “They claim to dwell in our land as freely, and with as warm a welcome, as if they had been born and bred amongst us.... But they meditate in their heart how to rob our silver and gold.” They change (he says) their chaff for our corn; they sweep in our good sterling coin so that there is little left in the country. “To-day I see such Lombards come [to London] as menials in mean attire; and before a year is past, by dint of deceit and intrigue, they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our city.... It is great shame that our Lords, who ought to keep our laws, should treat our merchants as serfs, and quietly free the hands of strange folk to rob us. But Covetise hath dominion over all things: for bribery makes friends and brings success: that is the custom in my country.” Nor “in my country” only, but in other lands too; for the best-known firm of merchants now-a-days is Trick and Co. “Seek from East to the going out of the West, there is no city or good town where Trick does not rob to enrich himself. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and sells; Trick has his ships and servants, and of the noblest riches Trick has ten times more than other folk. At Florence and Venice, Trick has his fortress and freedom of trade; so he has at Bruges and Ghent; under his care too has the noble City on the Thames put herself, which Brutus founded, but which Trick is on the way to confound....” Why not, indeed, in an age in which all the bonds of society are loosed? “One [merchant] told me the other day how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly who, being able to get the delights of this life, should pass them by: for after this life is over, no man knoweth for truth which way or by what path we go. Thus do the merchants of our present days dispute and say and answer for the most part.”

Much of Gower’s complaint about Trick might be equally truly applied to any age or community; but much was due also to the growth of large and complicated money transactions, involving considerable speculation on credit. Gower complains that merchants talked of “many thousands” where their fathers had talked of “scores” or “hundreds”; and he, like Chaucer, describes the dignified trader as affecting considerable outward show to disguise the insecurity of his financial position.[137] Edward III. set here a Royal example by failing for a million florins, or more than £4,000,000 of modern money, and thus ruining two of the greatest European banking firms, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence. Undeterred by similar risks, the de la Poles of Hull undertook to finance the King, and became the first family of great merchant-princes in England. Operations such as these opened a new world of possibilities for commerce—vast stakes on the table, and vast prizes to the winners. Moreover, city politics grew complicated in proportion with city finance. The mass of existing documents shows a continual extension of the Londoner’s civic authorities, until the townsfolk were trammeled by a network of byelaws not indeed so elaborate as those of a modern city, but incomparably more hampering and vexatious. On this subject, which is of capital importance for the comprehension of life in Chaucer’s time, it would be difficult on the whole to put the facts more clearly than they have already been put by Riley on pp. cix. ff. of his introduction to the “Liber Albus.” “Such is a sketch of some few of the leading features of social life within the walls of London in the 13th and 14th centuries. The good old times, whenever else they may have existed, assuredly are not to be looked for in days like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated the lawmakers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these were times, the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws both national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately they created or protected comparatively few real valuable rights, gave birth to many and grievous wrongs. That the favoured and so-called free citizen of London even—despite the extensive privileges in reference to trade which he enjoyed—was in possession of more than the faintest shadow of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance of the pages just submitted to the reader’s notice, filled as they are with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive: laws, for example, which compelled each citizen,[138] whether he would or no, to be bail and surety for a neighbour’s good behaviour, over whom perhaps it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for the King and the great lords of the land had stripped the stalls of all that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pass the city walls for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and artisans; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they permitted ‘genteel dogs’ to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the city officials on various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules, at what hours he was to walk in the streets, and incidentally, what he was to eat and what to drink. Viewed individually, laws and ordinances such as these may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but ‘trifles make life,’ the poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like these, must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man, and a burden hard to be borne. Every dark picture, however, has its reverse, and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too often treated little better than a slave; but, on the other hand, the price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour appear—at times, at least—to have been regulated on a very fair and liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be protected, in their dealings, against the artifices of adulteration, deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity, to some extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present day.”

The words about the purity of the Thames need some modification in the light of such incidents as those recorded (for instance) in Mr. Sharpe’s calendar of “Letter Book” G, pp. xxvii. ff.;[139] but the most serious gap in Riley’s picture is the absence of any clear allusion to the almost incredible gulfs which are frequently to be found between 14th-century theory and practice. We have already seen how openly the city officials broke their own brand-new resolution about lodgings over the city gates; and the surviving records of all medieval cities tell the same tale, for which we might indeed be prepared by the wearisome iteration with which we find the same enactments re-enacted again and again, as if they had never been thought of before. As Dean Colet said, when the world of the Middle Ages was at its last gasp, it was not new laws that England needed, but a new spirit of justice in enforcing the old laws. Seldom, indeed, had these become an absolute dead letter—we find them invoked at times where we should least have expected it—but at the very best they were enforced with a barefaced partiality which cannot be paralleled in modern civilized countries even under the most unfavourable circumstances. From Norwich, one of the greatest towns in the kingdom, and certainly not one of the worst governed, we have fortunately surviving a series of Leet Court Rolls, which have been admirably edited by Mr. Hudson for the Selden Society, and commented on more briefly in his “Records of the City of Norwich.”[140] He shows that, whereas the breach of certain civic regulations should nominally have been punished by a fine for the first offence, pillory for the second, and expulsion for the third, yet in fact there was no pretence, in an ordinary way, of taking the law literally. “The price of ale was fixed according to the price of wheat. Almost every housewife of the leading families brewed ale and sold it to her neighbours, and invariably charged more than the fixed price. The authorities evidently expected and wished this course to be taken, for these ladies were regularly presented and amerced every year for the same offence, paid their amercements and went away to go through the same process in the future as in the past. Much the same course was pursued by other trades and occupations. Fishmongers, tanners, poulterers, cooks, etc., are fined wholesale year after year for breaking every by-law that concerned their business. In short, instead of a trader (as now) taking out a license to do his business on certain conditions which he is expected to keep, he was bound by conditions which he was expected to break and afterwards fined for the breach. The same financial result was attained or aimed at by a different method.” Moreover, the fines themselves were collected with the strangest irregularity. “Some are excused by the Bailiffs without reason assigned; some ‘at the instance’ of certain great people wishing to do a good turn for a friend. Again, others make a bargain with the collector, thus expressed, as for instance, ‘John de Swaffham is not in tithing. Amercement 2s. He paid 6d., the rest is excused. He is quit.’ Sometimes an entry is marked ‘vad,’ i.e. vadiat, or vadiatur, ‘he gives a pledge,’ or, ‘it is pledged.’ The Collector had seized a jug, or basin, or chair. But by far the larger number of entries are marked ‘d,’ i.e. debet, ‘he owes it.’ The Collector had got nothing. At the end of each (great) Leet is a collector’s account of moneys received and paid in to the Bailiffs or the City Chamberlain in three or four or more payments. By drawing out a balance sheet for the whole city in this year it appears that the total amount of all the amercements entered is £72 18s. 10d. This is equivalent to more than £1000 at the present value of money. But all that the Collectors can account for, even after Easter, is £17 0s. 2d. It is clear that however efficient the system was in preventing offences from passing undetected, it did not do much to deter offenders from repeating them.”

The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book; and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman, they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends. Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences; yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe was “out at cockcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Mass, so that by six o’clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town.”[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer’s sarcasm as to the unwholesome fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a reduction in price “because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for these last seven years.” “What!” replied the Cook, “for so long a time, and you are yet alive!” The author of “Piers Plowman” exhorts mayors to apply the pillory more strictly to—

A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. “All the men of Sprowston sell sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human bodies.”[143]

This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and partial as city justice still was in Chaucer’s days, overstrained in theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real self-government and of real apprenticeship to higher things in politics, not only civic but national. The constitution of the city was frankly oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or even at the risk of bloodshed—this in itself was the thin end of the democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed, domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country squires,[144] successfully asserted in Parliament the power of the purse, and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation’s money, before they voted it for his use.

Moreover, it was due enormously to London and the great cities that our national liberties were safeguarded from the foreign invader. The considerable advance in national wealth between 1330 and 1430 was partly due to our success in war. While English cities multiplied, French cities had even in many cases to surrender into their King’s hands those liberties for which they were now too poor to render the correspondent services. Yet, even before the first blow had been struck, those wars were already half-won by English commerce. “The secret of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers lies in the merchants’ counting-houses of London, Bordeaux, and Bruges.”[145] Apart from those habits and qualities which successful commerce implies, the amount of direct supplies in men and money contributed by the English towns during Edward’s wars can only be fully realized by reading Dr. Sharpe’s admirable prefaces to his “Calendars of Letter-Books.” But a single instance is brief and striking enough to be quoted here.

Our crushing defeat by the combined French and Spanish navies off La Rochelle in 1372 lost us the command of the sea until our victory at Cadzand in 1387; and Chaucer’s Merchant rightly voiced the crying need of English commerce during that time—