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CHAUCER AND HIS
ENGLAND
BY
G. G. COULTON M.A,
AUTHOR OF
"FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE," ETC.
WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published . . September toth 1908
Second Edition 1909
Richer Hall,
Library
PA URL
185
PREFACE
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 be-
holden to the writings of M. Jusserand, whose rare
b
vi CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
correcting for this Second Edition a few
obscure sentences or too unqualified statements
which I have to thank my reviewers for noting, I must
also, in the light of more far-reaching criticisms, explain
my main purpose more clearly. This is hardly the
place to argue with a critic who brands me with anti-
clericalism for emphasizing essential facts too often
distorted or ignored by clerical historians, or who
laments my imperfect artistic sense because I abstain
from summarizing, for the hundredth time, the judgments
of Ruskin and Morris, thinking it more useful to qualify
than to repeat their well-known words, and holding
with them that life is more than art. But Mr. G. K.
Chesterton, in a generous review, has given such
brilliant expression to more serious objections which I
had already felt in the air, that I welcome this oppor-
tunity of meeting them.* He points out and 1 am
grateful to him as the first of my reviewers who has
put this into words that " every criticism of the four-
teenth century ought to be also a criticism of the
twentieth." He contends, however, that my favourable
conclusions encourage modern 'pharisaism, and are in
fact too indulgent to our own century.
The first I entirely deny, except so far as all con-
sciousness of improvement must carry with it a
corresponding temptation to pride. There is no more
essential pharisaism in thanking God that our lot has
been cast in this and no earlier age, than in the memor-
* Daily News, Oct. i6th, 1908.
viii CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
able, There, but for the grace of God, goes Richard Baxter !
It is simply to recognize that the world is not an over-
ripe apple rotting to its fall, but a living organism, part
and parcel of an infinitely marvellous universe, and
most marvellous itself in its eternal youth. To
emphasize the superiority of our century is to boast
not our own righteousness, but the righteous and
enduring work of eighteen honest generations work
which we in our turn must strenuously urge forward,
or be branded as sluggards and cowards. Christ blamed
the Pharisee not for presuming to make true com-
parisons, but for ignoring inconvenient facts. Mr.
Chesterton, however, assures me that I do ignore the
world in which I live. If so, it is certainly not for want
of knocking about in it during the past fifty years ; but
I assumed in my readers some knowledge of General
Booth's and Mr. Rowntree's revelations ; nor w r as it my
business to supplement these from personal experiences
among colliers in South Wales, and refugee Jews in
Whitechapel. In comparing modern heroes with their
medieval forefathers I take account of backstairs gossip
in both cases, though I do not always quote it. Mr.
Chesterton makes the common but fatal mistake of
supposing that, because medieval chroniclers tell us
very queer things, they therefore tell us all* The
fallacy is specious, but so acute a critic might well have
remembered Lady Mary Wortley Montague's famous
Ah ! 57 I'ons pouviez voir nics picds ! Simeon Luce, who
knew Froissart's text and contemporary official docu-
ments probably better than any man before or since,
and who certainly did not undervalue medieval civiliza-
tion, was yet constrained to point out how dark a side
there is behind the chronicler's revelations, t
* " In short, the other great merit of the Middle Ages, as compared
with to-day, is that its chroniclers had a habit of telling the truth ; and
that (like all really truthful men) they thought telling ' the whole truth '
more important even than telling 'nothing but the truth." 1
t Hist, dc licit rand Du Gitcsclin, 1882, p. 139. Luce ends, " Voila lc
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION ix
Again, Mr. Chesterton so completely misunderstands
an expression of mine on p. 258 that I fear it may have
misled other readers. I never dreamed of saying that
the modern tramp does not envy, or ought not to envy,
the millionaire : I simply doubt whether it is possible
to envy him appreciably more than the medieval poor
envied an upstart merchant ; a man who had more ready
money than any duke, and probably wore a duke's ran-
som visibly on his person. To accept Mr. Chesterton's
own illustration and press it to its logical conclusion, I
should say that if one man were " putting away pate-de-
foie-gras and champagne " on a raft filled with starving
castaways, while another man enjoyed beefsteak and
porter under similar circumstances, it is scarcely pos-
sible in human nature that the one should excite more
envy than the other. If the modern poor are more
discontented than their fathers, this is generally not
because they are worse off, but because they have
already enjoyed a real improvement and therefore
struggle, naturally enough, for more.
Finally, Mr. Chesterton presses upon me, in con-
nexion with p. 256, an argument which might seem mere
paradox to any one who could believe him capable of
letting off such dangerous fireworks. " One of the sins
of our time is that the classes have been sundered by
something ivorse than hatred shyness, which is a shame-
ful fear." These words which I have italicized are so
essential to his contention, and yet seem to me to
falsify so fatally a very true sentence, that I venture to
ask seriously (even though he may smile at my naivete
in taking him so literally): Is it possible in human nature
to pass from open hate to sincere love without a long
intervening period of shyness ? " Chaucer's Knight
talks and laughs with every class in England, not only
without embarrassment but without condescension, as
if it were quite natural that they should mix. A modern
vilain revers de cette chevalerie aftblee de luxe, de tournois, de parade
dont Froissart n'a voulu voir que les prouesses et les elegances."
x CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
gentleman would feel as a modern gentleman feels alone
with a housemaid." This is only an. infinitely wittier
statement of a truth which I had tried to express else-
where ; but there is a whole world between this and
the conclusions Mr. Chesterton would draw from it. If,
on the whole, mankind has gone forward in the last five
hundred years and it is strange that the men who
claim to speak for Christendom should seem to doubt
most desperately of this world which Christ died to
save if, on the whole we have gone forward, then we
can afford to be less impatient of our own very imperfect
age, remembering that the Apostle collocates patience
with perfect work. Pending the discovery of a North-
West Passage to the abolition of class distinctions and
poverty, it really does seem worth while to point out
that the problems which we blame each successive
generation for not solving have in fact become a few
degrees less hopeless since the days of " Merrie
England;" and that we may truly apply to different
generations what Professor James' wise carpenter said
about man and man : therms very little difference between
one and another ; but that little difference is very important.
It is probable that, in condemning our modern shyness as
worse than the old hate, Mr. Chesterton only means that
the former is more trying to the temper. This may well
be : shyness is indeed the very devil ; but courage, I' ami,
le diable est mort ! and if liberty and equality are indeed
growing, then true fraternity cannot fail to grow with
them. Let us therefore possess our souls, even though
the modern Marquis of Carabas may refuse to rub
shoulders with us on a Canterbury Pilgrimage, fearing
lest this condescension might encourage us to beg for a
day among his pheasants. Sufficient to the clay is the
good thereof; it is something that we may now drive
the peer's pigeons from our crops without desperate
risk of life or limb; or that he and his foresters are
no longer tempted to flesh their arrows in our quiver-
ing bodies. There is much sound philosophy in
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi
Figaro's je me cms trop heurenx den etre oublie ; persuade
qiCun grand nous fait assez de bien, quand il ne nous fait
pas de mat.
I am told that some readers have been puzzled by the frequent
marginal notes in square brackets (as on p. 37). These are added to
explain the obsolete words in certain quotations: e.g. went = glade ;
fele = man}', etc., etc.
Two important references have come to hand too late for insertion in
the body of this Second Edition.
(1) The reader who wishes to follow all that is known about Chaucer's
ancestry and relations must now refer to the exhaustive and most
interesting article on pp. 243, foil., of Mr. V. B. Redstone's " Memorials of
Old Suffolk," just published by Bemrose & Son.
(2) Nicolas held that the town of " Retters," before which Chaucer
testified to having seen Sir Richard Scrope during his unlucky campaign
(see p. 26 of this book), was Rdtiers in Brittany ; but modern biographers
have preferred to identify it with Re'thel in the Ardennes. The truth of
this last conjecture is put beyond doubt by the account of that campaign
in Sir Thomas Gray's Scalacronica (Maitland Club, 1836, p. 188), which
mentions that the Black Prince's column was beaten off from " Retieris, ;)
but forced a passage at Chateau-Porcien, which is in fact close by
Re'thel. Chaucer therefore served in the Black Prince's column.
EASTBOURNE
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE V
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvii
CHAPTER I
YOUNG ENGLAND I
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 12
CHAPTER III
THE KING'S SQUIRE 25
CHAPTER IV
THE AMBASSADOR 36
CHAPTER V
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 51
CHAPTER VI
LAST DAYS 64
CHAPTER VII
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 76
CHAPTER VIII
ALDGATE TOWER 93
xiv CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
CHAPTER IX ,
PAGE
TOWN AND COUNTRY . 104
CHAPTER X
THE LAWS OF LONDON 119
CHAPTER XI
"CANTERBURY TALES" THE DRAMATIS PERSON.*: . . .137
CHAPTER XII
"CANTERBURY TALES" FIRST AND SECOND DAYS . . .151
CHAPTER XIII
"CANTERBURY TALES" THIRD AND FOURTH DAYS . . . 160
CHAPTER XIV
KING AND QUEEN 173
CHAPTER XV
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 1 88
CHAPTER XVI
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 2O2
CHAPTER XVII
THE GAY SCIENCE 217
CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREAT WAR 332
CHAPTER XIX
THE RURDEN OF THE WAR 745
CHAPTER XX
THK POOR . ir 7
CONTENTS xv
CHAPTER XXI
PAGE
MERRY ENGLAND 272
CHAPTER XXII
THE KING'S PEACE 282
CHAPTER XXIII
PRIESTS AND PEOPLE 294
CHAPTER XXIV
CONCLUSION 304
INDEX 317
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
PAGE
MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL . . 18
From Strut? s "Sports and Pastimes "
PLANS OF MEDIEVAL DWELLINGS 97
MEDIEVAL MUMMERS IIO
From Straffs "Sports and Pastimes "
PILGRIMS IN BED AT INN 139
From T. Wright's " Homes of other Days "
THE SQUIRE OF THE "CANTERBURY TALES" .... 146
From the Ellesmere MS. (i$th century)
THE MILLER . 150
From the Ellesmere MS.
THE WIFE OF BATH 162
From the Ellesmere MS.
THE FRIAR 165
From the Ellesmere MS.
PEACOCK FEAST OF LYNN 177
From Stot hard's Facsimile of the Original Brass
A KNIGHT AND HIS LADY 203
From Boutell's " Monumental Brasses "
A BEVY OF LADIES 22O
From T. Wright's" Womankind in Western Europe"
xviii CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
LIST OF PLATES
THE HOCCLEVE PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER . . . Frontispiece
From the Painting in " The Regement of Princes "
FACING PAGE
LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE l6TH CENTURY . . . 15
From Vert lie's Engraving of Aggas's Map
WESTMINSTER HALL . 32
From a Photograph by J. Valentine & Suns
A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE 35
From tlie Louterell Psalter
WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE l6TH CENTURY . 72
From Vertue's Engraving of Aggas's Map
WESTMINSTER ABBEY 73
Front a Photograph by S. B. Bolas r> Co,
THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND. . 82
From MS. Roy. 16 F. ii.f. 73
A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE I4TH CENTURY 92
From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6, f. 5036
ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS, AS RECONSTITUTED IN
w. NEWTON'S "LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME" . . . 101
A PARTY OF PILGRIMS 148
From MS, Roy. 18 D. ii.J. 148
CANTERBURY 170
From IV. Smith's Drawing 0/1588. (Sloanc MS. 2596)
EDWARD III 173
From his Tomb in Westminster Abbey
PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT l8l
From her Tomb in Westminster Abbey
SIR GEOFFREY LOUTERELL, WITH HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER . 194
From the Ijjuterell Psalter (Early i^th Century)
SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL 2l6
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A I4TH CENTURY CLASSROOM . . 2l6
From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6. /. 214
WILLIAM OF HATFIELD, SON OF EDWARD III. AND PHILIPPA . 224
From his Tomb in York Minster (1336)
LIST OF PLATES xix
FACING PAGE
BODIAM CASTLE, KENT 245
THE PLOUGHMAN 268
From the Louterell Psalter {Early i^th Century}
THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSSEX, BEFORE ITS RECENT
RESTORATION 298
WESTMINSTER ABBEY VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER'S TOMB . 313
From a Photograph by S. B. Solas 6* Co.
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
YOUNG ENGLAND
" O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames ! "
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 2oth 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 holida3's ;
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 propor-
tion as present-day realities dwindle to even less than
their real significance in the long perspective of history.
2 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 I4th 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 Re-
vival ; 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
YOUNG ENGLAND 3
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 by quitting the world in which
our own daily work has to be done, and entering
another peopled by a race of men so unlike the modern
English, 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." *
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 am-
bassadors 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
* See Jusserand, " Hist. Litt," L. III., ch. i., and the Preface to his
" Vie Nomade " ; also chap. xix. of Prof. Tout's volume in the " Political
Hist, of Engd." It is nearly one hundred and fifty years since Tyrwhitt
showed, by abundant quotations, the stages by which English fought its
way to final recognition as the national language.
4 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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."* But Acts of
Parliament are not omnipotent even in the 2Oth century ;
and in the i4th 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 PVench
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
* Froissart, ed. Luce, i., 359, 402. There was in 1444 a similar
attempt to keep up Latin and French among the Benedictine monks,
since from ignorance of one or the other language " they frequently fall
into shame." Reynerus, " De Antiq. Benedict," p. 129.
YOUNG ENGLAND 5
English ; * 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
atte Bowe." t 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 J 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, as in modern
Germany a foreigner who speaks fluently, however incor-
rectly, passes easily for a German of some remote and bar-
barous province. Indeed, English unity in Chaucer's time
was in some ways as incomplete as that of the modern
* " He chalenged in Englyssh tunge " (" Chronicles of London,"
ed. Kingsford, p. 43, where the exact form of words used by Henry is
recorded ; cf. Dymock's challenge, ibid., p. 49).
t It is difficult to go altogether with Prof. Skeat in his repudiation
of the sense commonly attached to this phrase (note on Prologue, 126).
Chaucer seems to say that the Prioress (a] knew French, but () only
French of Stratford, just as he explains that the parish clerk (a) could
dance, but (8) only after the School of Oxenford. Chaucer could scarcely
have claimed that the Norman-French of England was as pure as the
French of Paris.
t For the most interesting account of this fusion, see Jusserand,
" Hist. Litt.," p. 236. (Bk. III., ch. i.)
"English Garner," I5th century, ed. A. W. Pollard, p. 240; J. R.
Green's "Short History," p. 291. "And one of them named Sheffield,
a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat, and especially he asked
after eggs ; and the goodwife answered that she could speak no French,
and the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but
would have had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last
another said, that he would have ' eyren ' ; then the goodwife said that
she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now
write, eggs or eyren ? "
6 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 there-
fore 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 con-
tinental 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.*
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.f 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
* See the cases given in full by Thorold Rogers, " Oxford City
Documents," pp. 168, 170, 173, and H. Kashclall's "Universities of
Europe," ii., 363, 369, 403.
t See the articles by Prof. Maitland and Mr. A. L. Smith in vol. ii.
of " Social England."
YOUNG ENGLAND 7
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. More-
over, 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. Pro-
fessor Maitland has well described the "omnicom-
petence " 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 juris-
prudence 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
8 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 pro-
tection 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 i/j.th 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.* 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
* Cf. Reyncrus, " De Antiq. Benedict," pp. 107, 136, 4-- r >, '/' ; <S 595-
The pages in italics contain startling lists of defaulting abbeys and
priories.
YOUNG ENGLAND 9
culture overflowed to laymen like Chaucer and Gower.*
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 f
* See Gower's "Vox Clamantis," Bk. III., c. 28, for a description of
the worldly aims of the 14th-century universities.
t It seems extremely probable, to say the least, that the poem of
Piers Plowman was by more than one hand ; but, in any case, the
authors were contemporaries, and seem to have held very much the same
views ; so that it is still possible for most purposes of historical argument
to quote the poem under the traditional name of Langland.
10 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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. England's claim to the lordship of the seas was
at least a century old ; but Sluys, our first decisive
maritime victory, "the Trafalgar of the Middle Ages,"
was won in the same year in which the poet was
probably born ; six years later, Calais became in a
sense 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 philo-
sophy 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
YOUNG ENGLAND 11
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, arid his own
land a particularly privileged spot. The England of
Chaucer is that of which one of his most noted pre-
decessors 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." *
* Bartholomasus Anglicus (Steele, "Mediaeval Lore," 1905), p. 86.
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
" Jeunes amours, si vite epanouies,
Vous etes 1'aube et le matin du cceur.
Charmez 1'enfant, extases inou'ies
Et, quand le soir vient avec la douleur,
Charmez encor nos ames eblouies,
Jeunes amours, si vite eVanouies ! "
VICTOR HUGO
THE name Chaucer was in some cases a corruption
of chaiiffecire, i.e. " chafewax," or clerk in the
Chancery, whose duty it was to help in the elaborate
"operation of sealing royal documents.* 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 1 3th and i4th centuries it seems to have thriven
mainly in London and East Anglia, and recent re-
search has definitely traced the poet's immediate
ancestry to Ipswich.f His grandfather, Robert Malyn,
surnamed le Chaucer, came from the Suffolk village
* Besant quotes accounts recording (inter alia} a gift of wine to the
"Chaucer" on the occasion of a mayoral procession, but apparently
without realizing its significance. ("Mediaeval London," i., 303.)
t Mr. V. B. Redstone, in Athcnccum, No. 4087, p. 233, and East
Anglian Daily Times, April 8, 1908, p. 5, col. 7. It is not my aim, in this
chapter, to trouble the reader with discussions of doubtful points, but
rather to present what is certainly known, or may safely be inferred
about Chaucer's life.
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 13
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 justifi-
cation 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 " ; * but he was very heavily fined
for his breach of the peace. We learn from the plead-
ings 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 sub-
stantial 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 distin-
guished 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 detail of this journey, f 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
* At Wycombe, too, " every citizen from twelve years old could serve
on juries for the town business." Mrs. Green, "Town Life," i., 184. I
shall have occasion in the next chapter to note how early men began
life in those days.
t Pauli, " Pictures of Old England," chap, v
14 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 15
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.
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."* 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," creep-
ing between overhanging houses, are still frequent
enough in little continental towns, and survive here
and there even in England.* Stow, writing in Queen
Elizabeth's reign, describes how the lower part of Wal-
brook 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 Bishops-
gate, washed St. Margaret's, Lothbury, and ran under
* " Life Records," iv., 232. The industry of Mr. Walter Rye has
collected a large number of documentary notices which establish a
probable connection of some kind between Chaucer and Norfolk ; but
the evidence seems insufficient as yet to prove Mr. Rye's thesis that the
poet was born at Lynn ; and in default of such definite evidence, it is
safer to presume that he was born in the Thames Street house.
(Athenceum, March 7, 1908 ; cf. "Life Records," iii., 131.)
f At Rouen, Caudebec, and Gisors, for instance, are very exact
counterparts of the Walbrook, except that the overhanging houses are
a century or two later, and proportionately larger.
16 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
the kitchen of Grocer's Hall, and again under St. Mil-
dred'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, how-
ever, 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 recon-
stitute 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.,
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 17
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.* 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."
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 ;f 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
* The illustration on page 177 represents a similar royal banquet the
celebrated Peacock Feast of Lynn. Robert Braunche, mayor, entertained
Edward there circa 1350, and caused the event to be immortalized on his
funeral monument. Henry Picard himself was King's Butler at Lynn
in 1350 (Rye, /. c.).
t Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, an. i |lo ; Rashdall, /. c. 1 1. 670,
c
18
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AM) METAnioRICAI.
(From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")
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
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 19
itself against the time of war." * 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 river-
side 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 con-
tinuous 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 Fitz-
stephen, 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 Llibeck, Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.1
Chief among the Easterlings at this time were the
* Fitzstephen, in Stow, p. 119.
t See "The Hanseatic Steelyard," in Pauli's " Pictures," chap. vi.
20 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 lips 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 \vere
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
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 21
down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to
go and tumble with them again."* 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 con-
temporaries, 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
* " CEuvres," ed. Buchon, vol. iii., pp. 479 ff. ; cf. Lydgate's account
of his own schooldays, in " Babees Book," E.E.T.S., p. xliii.
22 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th,
1358), at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions
in the Tower." *
Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life
was said to have begun even before his birth, f was the
tallest and handsomest of all the King's sons. As the
chronicler Hardyng says
"In all the world was then no prince hym like,
Of his stature and of all semelynesse
Above all men within his hole kyngrike
By the shulders he might be seen doutlesse,
[And] as a mayde in halle of gentilnesse."
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 Chau-
cer'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
* Prof. Hales, in "Diet. Nat. Biog."
t See the Queen's vow before the outbreak of the Hundred Years'
War, in Wright's " Political Poems," R.S., p. 23.
" Alors dit la reine : ' Je sais bien que piecha [il y a longtemps
Oue suis grosse d'enfant, que mon corps scntit la,
Encore n'a t-il guere qu'en mon corps se tourna ;
Et je voue et promets a Dieu qui me cre"a. . . .
Que jamais fruit de moi de mon corps n'istcra, [sortira
Si m'cn aurcz mencc au pays par clela.' "
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 25
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 Saintre 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
I hold it to be a sickness
That I have suffered this eight year,
And yet my boote is never the nere ;
For there is physician but one
That may me heal ; but that is done.
Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty,
Beauty, and Pleasance ; but her surname is Fair-Ruth-
less. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity with his
complaints of Love's tyranny ; but, alas !
I found her dead, and buried in an heart. . . .
And no wight wot that she is dead but I.
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
24 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
Have mercy on me, thou serenest queen,
That you have sought so tenderly and yore,
Let some stream of your light on me be seen,
That love and dread you ever longer the more ;
For, soothly for to say, I bear the sore,
And though I be not cunning for to plain,
For Goddes love, have mercy on my pain !
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." * 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
But ye lovdres, that bathen in gladness,
If any drop of pity in you be,
Remembreth you on passdd heaviness
That ye have felt, and on th' adversitie
Of other folk, and thinketh how that yc
Have felt that Love durstc you displease,
Or ye have won him with too great an ease.
And prayeth for them that be in the case
Of Troilus, as ye may after hear,
That Love them bring in heaven to solace ;
And eke for me prayeth to God so dear. . . .
And biddeth eke for them that be despaired
In love, that never will recovered be. . . .
And biddeth eke for them that be at case,
That God them grant aye good persdverance,
And send them might their ladies so to please
That it to Love be worship and pleasance.
For so hope I my soule best t' advance,
To pray for them that Love's servants be,
And write their woe, and live in charitie.
* " P. Plowman," B., x , 157, and xi., 402.
CHAPTER III
THE KING'S SQUIRE
For I, that God of Love's servants serve,
Dare not to Love for mine unlikeliness
Prayen for speed, though I should therefore sterve,
So far am I from this help in darkness !
"Troilus and Criseyde," i., 15
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." *
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 con-
vents that crown the heights round Reims, and watched
* " Chronicles of London," ed. Kingsford, p. 13.
26 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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.* 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
6 135. Afd. "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." f Geoffrey appears to have inherited little
property from either of them ; but it must be remem-
bered 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 i4th
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 affec-
tion towards their children that "after having kept them
at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine
* These sums should be multiplied by about fifteen to bring them
into terms of modern currency.
t The poet's grandmother was married at least thrice. Did he find
hints for the '' Wife of Bath " in his own family?
THE KING'S SQUIRE 27
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.* From this
source (proceeds the Italian) springs that greed of gain
and that omnipotence of mone}^, 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 house-
hold 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," f "for the making
of a corset for Philippa and for the fur-work," "for
XLVIII great buttons of ... [unfortunate gap in the
* Quoted by Dr. Furnivall on p. xv. of his introduction to " Manners
and Meals" (E.E.T.S., 1868).
t This tunic would, no doubt, be a cote-hardie, or close-fitting bodice
and flowing skirt in one line from neck to feet ; it may be seen, buttons
and all, on the statuette of Edward III.'s eldest daughter which adorns
his tomb in Westminster Abbey.
28 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 Leon 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 ; *
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
* " La Chcvalerie," Nouvelle Edition, pp. 342, 345 flf.
THE KING'S SQUIRE 29
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 homoeopathic
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.""
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
* See the author's " From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., pp. 350 ft".
30 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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* 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.f
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
* That tales like these were read before ladies appears even from
Bddier's judicial remarks in Petit de Juleville's " Hist. Litt.," vol. ii., p. 93 ;
and I have shown elsewhere that these represent rather less than the
facts. (" From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., pp. 358, 359.) For girls'
behaviour, see T. Wright's "Womankind in Western Europe," pp. 158,
159 ; " Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour," chap. 124. ff. ; or " La Tour
Landry," E.E.T.S., pp. 2, 175 ff
t "House of Fame," Bk. II., 1. 108 ; "Troilus," Bk. III., 1. 41 ; Prof.
Hales, in "Diet. Nat. Biog."
THE KING'S SQUIRE 31
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.* 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.
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 darref of bread, one gallon of beer, a uiesse de gros%
from the kitchen, and yearly a robe in cloth or a mark
in money; and for shoes 45. 8d., at two seasons in the
year. And if any of them be sent out of the Court
in the King's business, by his commandment, he shall
have 4<f. 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
* " Life Records," IV., Doc. No. 286.
t "Dole," "ration."
t " Mess of great meat," i.e. from one of the staple dishes, excluding
such special dishes as would naturally be reserved for the King or his
guests.
The legal tariff in the City of London at this time for shoes of
cordwain (Cordova morocco) was 6d., and for boots $s. 6d. Cowhide
shoes were fixed at 5c/., and boots at 3^-. Riley, " Liber Albus," p. xc.
32 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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;* his wages were raised to j\d. per day, and he
received yearly " two robes of cloth, or 405. 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
* This was exactly the commons of a chaplain of the King's chapel
("Life Records," ii., 15). The Dean of the Chapel was dignified with
" two darres of bread, one pitcher of wine, two messes de grosse from
the kitchen, and one mess of roast." Some of this, no doubt, would go
to his servant. All the King's household, from the High Steward down-
wards (who might be a knight banneret), were allowed these messes
from the kitchen as well as their dinners in hall.
THE KING'S SQUIRE 33
underlay even his Royal cousin's extravagances.* 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
* "This same year [1359] the King held royally St. George Feast at
Windsor, there being King John of France, the which King John said
in scorn that he never saw so royal a feast, and so costly, made with
tallies of tree, without paying of gold and silver " (" Chronicles of
London," ed. 1827, p. 63). Queen Philippa received for this tournament
a dress allowance of ^3000 modern money (Nicolas, " Order of the
Garter," p. 41).
D
34 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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." * 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 I4th 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."t 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
" Truly I herd Robert IrcUJfe say,
Clcrke of the grene cloth, that to the household
Came every daye, for moost partie alwaye,
* Froissart, ed. Luce, vol. v., p. 289, ff. Walsingham (" Hist. Ang.,"
an. 1389) bears equally emphatic testimony to the good natural feeling
existing between the English and French gentry.
t " Knight of La Tour-Landry," E.E.T.S., p. 30 (written in 1371-2).
THE KING'S SQUIRE 35
Ten thousand folke, by his messes tould,
That followed the hous, aye, as thei would ;
And in the kechin three hundred servitours,
And in eche office many occupiours.
" And ladies faire with their gentilwomen,
Chamberers also and lavenders,
Three hundred of them were occupied then :
Ther was greate pride among the officers,
And of al menne far passyng their compeers,
Of riche araye, and muche more costious
Than was before or sith, and more precious."
And he adds a description of Court morals which
may well suggest further reflections on Chaucer's
married life.*
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 sup-
pressed 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 Card Corpes le Roy. And
therefore the King journied not passing ten or twelve
miles a day." Ruskin traces much of his store of obser-
vation 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.
* Eustache Deschamps, whose life and writings often throw so much
light on Chaucer's, shows us the difficulties of married men at court, and
says outright
" Dix et sept ans ai au Satan servi
Au monde aussi et a la chair pourrie,
Oublie Dieu, et mon corps asservi
A cette cour, de tout vice nourrie."
(Sarradin, " Eustache Deschamps," pp. 92 ff., 104, 160.)
CHAPTER IV
THE AMBASSADOR
" Adieu, mol lit, adieu, piteux regards ;
Adieu, pain frais que Ton soulait trouver ;
II me convient porter honneur aux lards ;
II convient ail et biscuit avaler,
Et chevaucher un pdrilleux cheval."
EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS
A LTHOUGH we have nothing important dating
AV 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 Ship-
man, 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
THE AMBASSADOR 37
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 afoct 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.
It came and crept to me as low
Right as it hadde me y-knowe,
Held down his head and joined his ears,
And laid all smoothe down his hairs.
I would have caught it, and anon
It fled, and was from me gone ;
And I him followed, and it forth went
Down by a flowery greene went [glade *
Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet
With flowercs fele, fair under feet. [many
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 goode faire 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
* See Preface to Second Edition, ad fin.
38 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
For every hair upon her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red ;
Nor neither yellow nor brown it was,
Me thoughte most like gold it was.
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 prece-
dent) a little too like some modern sportsman's enume-
ration of his horse's points. The course of true love
did not run too smoothly here. On the knight's first
proposal, "she saide '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. More-
over, 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
THE AMBASSADOR 39
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 origin-
ality 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 recon-
naissance which would have been infinitely better
carried out by a trained scout. Similarly, the poets of
the i4th 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 clair-
voyance at times when common sense was at fault, and
40 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 com-
mercial establishment."* 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,
* Quoted by Nicolas from Rymer's " Fuxlern,'' new ed., iii., 964.
THE AMBASSADOR 41
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
" Bestow the boat, boatswain, anon,
That our pilgrims may play thereon ;
For some are like to cough and groan . . .
This meanewhile the pilgrims lie
And have their bowle's fast them by
And cry after hot Malvoisie . . .
Some laid their bookes on their knee,
And read so long they might not see :
'Alas ! mine head will cleave in three ! '" *
Worse passages still were matters of common
history; Froissart tells us how Herve de Leon "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 Herve of Leon was so sore
troubled that he had never health after." King John of
France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross the
* E.E.T.S., " Stacions of Rome," etc., p. 37. (The whole English
poem describes a journey to Spain ; but as yet the pilgrims are not out
of the Channel.)
42 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
Channel, * and Edward III. had one passage so painful
that he was reduced to explain it by the arts of " necro-
mancers 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."t But, after
all these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable
as the approaches had been inhospitable :
" II fait bien bon demeurer
Au doux chateau de Pavie."J
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 Reisc 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 fresh-
ness, with thousands more which have long since
* Froissart (Globe ed.), pp. 83, 134; " Eulog. Hist.," iii., 206, 213.
t Dante, " Purg.," iii., 49.
$ Sarmdin, " Deschamps," pp. 67, 69.
THE AMBASSADOR 43
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
^Eneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole
population of great artists vied with each other in every
department of human skill
" Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura
Exercet sub sole labor "
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 con-
fessedly adulterous Cunizza among the blessed, and cast
down so many popes to hell, he was only following
with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval prece-
dent. 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 correspond-
ing independence of expression, he gave an impetus
44
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 i4th 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."*
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 peril-
ously near to Mariolatry than this " Almighty and
all-merciable Queen " ! Another poem of the same period
* " Hist, of Eti. Lit.," vol. ii., p. 57, trans. \V. C. Robinson.
THE AMBASSADOR 45
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
Now help, thou meek and blissful faire maid
Me fleme'd wretch in this desert of gall ; [banished
Think on the woman Canaanee, that said
That whelpes eaten some of the crumbes all
That from their lordes table been y-fall ;
And though that I, unworthy son of Eve
Be sinful, yet accept now my believe. . . .
And of thy light my soul in prison light,
That troubled is by the contagion
Of my body, and also by the weight
Of earthly lust, and false affection :
O haven of refuge, O salvation
Of them that be in sorrow and in distress
Now help, for to my work I will me dress.*
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 Floren-
tine'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
* "Cant. Tales," G., 57 ff. It will be noted how ill the phrase "son
of Eve" suits the Nun's mouth. In this, as in other cases, Chaucer
simply worked one of his earlier poems into the framework of the
" Canterbury Tales."
46 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
after him until the i6th 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. Jusse-
rand 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 Arqua, 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 un-
expected information of Petrarch's whereabouts as
might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal
intercourse.* This is admirably illustrated by the story
* Sec a correspondence in the Athcnicum, Sept. 17 to Nov. 26, 1898
(Mr. C. H. Bromby and Mr. St. Clair Baddeley), and Mr. F. J. Mather's
two articles in "Modern Language Notes" (Baltimore), vol. xi., p. 210,
and vol. xii., p. i.
THE AMBASSADOR 47
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.* 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 figures 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 anony-
mous 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
* See Dr. Koch's paper in "Chaucer Society Essays," Pt. IV.
48 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
his own fancy.* 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 im-
possible. In 1371 the King's Ministers imagined that
England contained 40,000 parishes, while in fact there
were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well in-
formed, 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 i4th 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
* Froissart's great poem of Mdliador thus became anonymous for
nearly five centuries, and was only identified by the most romantic
chance in our own generation. Darmesteter, " Froissart," chap. xiii.
THE AMBASSADOR 49
researches have reopened the possibility of the old
tradition.* 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
... for little heaviness
Is right enough to many folk, I guess.
I say for me it is a great dis-ease,
Where as men have been in great wealth and ease,
To hearen of their sudden fall, alas !
Few weddings have been more tragic than that of
Chaucer's old master. The Duke, tallest and hand-
somest 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.f
* Athenceum, as above.
t Froissart, ed. Buchon, i. 546, 555 ; Darmesteter, p. 32.
E
50 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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." * 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
* C. L. Kingsford, " Chronicles of London," p. 63.
52 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 condotticre 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"
Of Milan greate Barnabo Viscount,
God of delight and scourge of Lombardye.
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 diplo-
matic missions.
It would take us too far afield to consider all the
attendant circumstances of these later embassies, im-
portant 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 "Canter-
bury 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 coun-
sellors 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 Violantc 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 MAN OF BUSINESS 53
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 England
and the greatest literature of the Middle Ages. More-
over, in him she possessed the poet whom, if we measure
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
54 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 finan-
cial 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 " dc raptn inco" Raptns
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,
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 55
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 dis-
covered by Dr. Sharpe.* 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 renuncia-
tion 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.t
But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked,
were rather pious aspirations than strict rules of con-
duct; 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.^
During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer
* Chaucer Soc., " Life Records," iv., p. xxx.
t " Eulog. Hist.," iii. ? 357 : Statutes of Parliament, Ric. II., an. 6, c. 6.
The preamble complains that such " malefactors and raptors of women
grow more violent, and are in these days more rife than ever in almost
every part of the kingdom," and it implies that married women were
sometimes so carried off. Cf. Jusserand, "Vie Nomade," p. 85, and
" Piers Plowman," B. iv., 47
" Then came Peace into Parliament, and put forth a bill,
How wrong against his will had his wife taken,
And how he ravished Rose, Reginald's love," etc., etc.
J " Life Records," iv., p. xxxv.
56 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 philo-
sophical "Consolations" he was so soon to stand in
bitter need. Here he wrote from French, Latin, and
Itajian 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 suffi-
ciently 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,
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 57
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
T 337> though the main theme was still that of the French
War, into which the nation had plunged so light-
heartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crecy 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 ; *
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
* Riley, " Memorials," pp. 410, 445.
58 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
fellow-members assembled on October i, "it 'had still
seemed possible that any morning might see the French
fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of the Thames." '
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." f 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 proteges 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."}
Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls of this Par-
liament that the commission was issued " for inquiring,
among other alleged abuses, into the state of the
* Oman, "England, 1377-1485," p. 100.
t " Eulog. Hist.," iii. 359.
J Ibid., 360.
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 59
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 comp-
trollerships 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 i, 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.* At Midsummer, 1387,
she received her quarter's pension as usual, but not at
* That is, they contributed to maintain the Minster, and were
admitted to a share of the spiritual benefits earned by " all prayers, fast-
ings, pilgrimages, almsdeeds, and works of mercy " connected therewith.
Edward III., and at least three of his sons, were already of the fraternity
of Lincoln, and Richard II., with his queen, were admitted the year after
Philippa Chaucer.
60 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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, Byflcet, Chiltern Langley,
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 61
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." *
* Riley, "Memorials," pp. 071, 285, 321. The Masons' regulations
given on p. 281 of the same book are interesting in connection with
Chaucer's work ; but still more so are the documents in " York Fabric
Rolls" (Surtees Soc.), pp. 172, 181.
62 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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." * 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.f 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 Slury
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 in-
estimable 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.^
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 \ve find one single mischance break-
* " Life Records," iv. 282, 283.
t A well-to-do youth could be boarded at Oxford for 2s. a week,
and it was reckoned that the whole expenses of a Doctor of Divinity
could be defrayed for thrice that sum. or half Chaucer's salary. (Riley,
" Memorials," p. 379 ; Reyncrus, "dc Antiq. Benedict," pp. 200, 596.)
I A. 3907. " Lo Grcncwych, thcr many a shrewe is inne."
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 63
ing 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 Irish-
man, 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 com-
plicity 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
" I strove with none, for none was worth my strife :
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life :
It sinks ; and I am ready to depart."
W. S. LANDOR
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.* 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
" Little Lowys my son, I apcrccive well by certain evidences thine
ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions ; and as well
consider I thy busy prayer in special to learn the treatise of the Astrelabie."
Excusing himself for having omitted sonic problems ordinarily found in
such treatises, Chaucer says, " Some of them be too hard to thy tender
age of X. year to conceive."
LAST DAYS 65
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 is. nd. 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
: 3> 1 39%> an d 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
1 3th 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
66 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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.*
"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, de-
manded 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
* " Life Records," iv., Nos. 250, 270, 277. The great significance of
this fact is obscured even by such excellent authorities as Prof. Skeat,
Prof. Hales, and Mr. Pollard, who all follow Sir Harris Nicolas in
misinterpreting the last of these three documents. Chaucer had not lost,
as they represent, Henry's own letters patent of only five days before,
but Richard's patents for the yearly 20 and the tun of wine. It is
quite possible that Chaucer may have been obliged to leave them in
pledge somewhere, or that they were momentarily mislaid ; but it is
natural to suspect that the poet would not so lightly have reported them
as lost unless it had been to his obvious interest to do so. We must
remember the trouble and expense constantly taken by public bodies, for
instance, to get their charters ratified by a new king.
LAST DAYS 67
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."*] 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. "f 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, t 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.
* Globe ed., p. 464 ; Buchon, iii., 349.
f " Complaint to his Purse," last stanza.
J "Life Records," iv., p. xlv. In 1395 or 1396 Chaucer received .10
from the clerk of Henry's great wardrobe, to be paid into Henry's hands.
68 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 } r oung beauty
whom he must be content to admire now from afar, yet
upon whom he dotes even so .
Was never pike wallowed in galantine
As I in love am wallowed and y-bound.
Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most
uncomplimentary in the outspoken triumph-note of its
close
Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never think to be in his prison lean ;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean.
He may answer, and saye this or that ;
I do no force, I speak right as I mean [I care no whit
Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never think to be in his prison lean.
Love hath my name y-struck out of his slate,
And he is struck out my bookes clean
For evermore ; there is none other mean.
Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never tJiink to be in his prison lean ;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean /
Then we have "The Former Age" a sigh for the
Golden Past, and a tear for the ungrateful Present
Alas, alas ! now may men weep and cry !
For in our days is nought but covetise
And doubleness, and treason, and envy,
Prison, manslaughter, and murder in sundry wise.*
Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning
"This wretched worldcs transmutacioun " ; a "Com-
plaint 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
* Though the subject-matter of this poem is mainly taken from
Boethius, yet it evidently has the translator's hearty approval, and is in
tune with many more of his later verses.
LAST DAYS 69
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
Flee from the press, and dwell with Soothfastness . . .
That thee is sent, receive in buxomness [obedience
The wrestling for this world asketh a fall [requires, implies
Here is no home, here is but wilderness :
Forth, Pilgrim, forth ! Forth, beast, out of thy stall !
Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all ;
Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead,
And Truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.
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 Kenan's " pauvre ame
develoutee de soixante ans." All through life this shy,
dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed remarkable de-
tachment 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 contempo-
rary 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,
70 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
But, lord Christ ! when that it remembreth me
Upon my youth, and on my jollity,
It tickleth me about mine hearte-root.
Unto this day it doth mine heart I s boot
That I have had my world as in my time !
But Age, alas !
well, even Age has its consolations
The flour is gone, there is no more to tell,
The bran, as I best can, now must I sell !
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 i4th 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 Kmpcror Wenceslas
was a shameless drunkard, and Charles VI. of France a
raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy,
even to his own supporters.* The Great Pestilence and
* Michclct, " Hist, de France," Liv. VI., ad fin. A cardinal explained
the extreme violence of Urban Vl.'s words and actions by the report
" that he could not avoid one of two things, lunacy or total collapse ; for
LAST DAYS 71
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* 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 with-
stand, under medieval conditions, the terrors of the
Unknown and the constant visitations of the clergy.
he never ceased drinking, yet ate nothing." Baluze, "Vit. Pap. Aven.,"
vol. i., col. 1270. Compare Walsirgham's tone with regard to the Pope,
" Hist. Angl.," an. 1385.
* Chaucer's religious belief will be more fully discussed in Chapter
XXIV.
72 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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."* "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
* W. R. Lcthaby, " \Vcbtininstcr Abbey," 1906, p. 2.
ii-: -in-, cii si. M
LAST DAYS 73
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.* 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.
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 protege 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 dis-
tinguished marriages ; and her grandson was that Earl
of Lincoln whom Richard III. declared his heir-apparent.
Eor 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
* Stow (Routledge, 1893, p. 414) seems to imply that the poet was
first buried in the cloister, but this is an obvious error. Dr. Furnivall
has pointed out a line of Hoccleve's which certainly seems to imply that
the younger poet was present at his master Chaucer's death-bed. We
may also gather from Hoccleve's account of his own youth many glimpses
which tend to throw interesting sidelights on that of Chaucer (Hoccleve's
Works, E.E.T.S., vol. i., pp. xii., xxxi.).
74 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
brief glimpse of his boyhood ; and Elizabeth Chaucy,
the only other person whom we can with any proba-
bility claim as Chaucer's child, was entered as a nun at
Barking in 1381, John of Gaunt paying 51 8s. 2(t. 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
LAST DAYS 75
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 re-
maining 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
" Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town ;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green ;
Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves
Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves,
Cut from the yew wood on the burnt-up hill,
And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill,
And treasured scanty spice from some far sea,
Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery,
And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne ;
While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen
Moves over bills of lading "
W. MORRIS
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 inter-
ruptions 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
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 77
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.* 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 f 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. J
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
* This was occasionally the case even in Normandy until the English
invasion. The great city of Caen, for instance, was still unwalled in
1346. (" Froissart," ed. Buchon, p. 223.) A piece of London Wall may
still be found near the Tower at the bottom of a small passage called
Trinity Place, leading out of Trinity Square. It rises about twenty-five
feet from the present ground-level.
t Riley, "Memorials," p. 79. This was in 1310.
J See pp. 50, 59, 79, 95, 115, 127, 136, 377, 387, 388, 489. My
frequent references to this book will be simply to the name of Riley.
78 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 Eliza-
beth'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." * Stow found a build-
ing 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
* Ed. Morlcy, pp. 154-157.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 79
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." * 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
How richly, down the rocky dell,
The torrent vineyard streaming fell
To meet the sun and sunny waters
That only heaved with a summer swell ! f
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 boat-
man 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 mer-
chandise ; a " solar," or upper chamber, for a counting-
house; and above this yet another solar, 38 by 2i\ 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 sub-
stitute, 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
* Riley, p. 270.
t From his first Italian journey Chaucer returned on May 23, 1373 ;
but his second was during the summer and early autumn of 1378. (May
28 to Sept. 19.)
80 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
abroad at least five times on the King's service during
his term of office; and the two original rolls which sur-
vive 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.*
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." t
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
* " Cant. Talcs," Prol. i., 400.
t Walsinyham, "Hist. Angl.," an. 1406, ad fin.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 81
exaggerate the contrast between modern and medieval
London, if only by leaving out of account those subtle
attractions which kept even William Morris from tear-
ing 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 ex-
penditure 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 advertise-
ments, 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. Corn-
hill 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
Barons and burgesses and bondmen also . . .
Baxters and brewsters and butchers many,
Woolwebsters and weavers of linen,
Tailors and tinkers and tollers in markets.
82 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
Masons and miners and many other crafts . . .
Of all-kind living labourers leapt forth some,
As dykers and delvers that do their deeds ill,
And drive forth the long day with Dieu vous sateve, Dame Emme
Cooks and their knaves cried " Hot pies, hot !
Good griskin and geese ! go dine, go ! "
Taverners unto them told the same [tale]
" White wine of Alsace and red wine of Gascoyne,
Of the Rhine and of Rochelle, the roast to defye ! " [digest.*
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 em-
phasizes 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 magni-
ficence beyond all reason. f 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 docu-
ments; 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
* "P. Plowman," P>. Prol., 216. The French words in italics were
the first line of a popular song. Cower has an equally picturesque
description in his " Mirour de POmme," 25,285 ff.
f " London was, in very truth, a city of Palaces. There were, in
London itself, more palaces than in Venice and Florence and Verona
and Genoa all together." " Medieval London," i., 244, where the context
shows that the author refers not only to royal residences, but still more
to noblemen's houses.
THE TOWKR. WITH LONDON I5R1DGE IN THE ]',. \CKC.KOU N I)
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 83
of fires.* 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 " seller "
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 con-
tained only sixteen feet of glass altogether.! Mean-
while 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, t Moreover, in
* This was at least the theoretical provision of the regulation of 1189,
known as Fitz Alwyne's Assize, which is fully summarized and annotated
in the "Liber Albus," ed. Riley (R.S.), pp. xxx. ff. We know, however,
that similar decrees against roofs of thatch or wooden shingles were not
always obeyed.
t " Menagier de Paris," i., 173 ; Addy, " Evolution of English House,"
p. 1 08 ; cf. " Piers Plowman's Creed," i., 214.
t An earthen wall is mentioned in Riley, p. 30. The slight structure
of the ordinary house appears from the fact that the rioters of 1381 tore
so many down, and that the great storm of 1362 unroofed them whole-
sale. (Walsingham, an. 1381, and Riley, p. 308.) Compare the hook
with wooden handle and two ropes which was kept in each ward for the
pulling down of burning houses. (" Liber Albus," p. xxxiv.)
84 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
those unlighted streets, much that was most picturesque
by day was most dangerous at night, from the project-
ing 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.*
But to return to the inside of the houses. The con-
tract 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
* Cooper, "Annals of Cambridge," an. 1445 ; Rashdall, " Universities
of Europe," ii., 413. Cf. the "common nighbvalkers " and "roarers" in
Riley, pp. 86 ff.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 85
de Hanigtone acknowledged that he was bound to pay
to Simon before-mentioned, for the work aforesaid, the
sum of g 55. ^d. 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."* 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.f 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 45.; 6 blankets and
one serge, 135. 6d. ; one green carpet, 2s. ; one torn
coverlet, with shields of sendal, 45. ; ... 7 linen sheets,
55. ; one table-cloth, 2s. ; 3 table-cloths, i8d. ; . . . one
canvas, Sd. ; 3 feather beds, 8s. ; 5 cushions, 6d. ; . . . 3
brass pots, 125.; one brass pot, 65.; 2 pairs of brass
pots, 25. 6d. ; one brass pot, broken, 2s. 6d. ; one candle-
stick of latten, and one plate, with one small brass
plate, 25. ; 2 pieces of lead, 6d. ; one grate, ^d. ; 2 and-
irons, iSd.; 2 basins, with one washing vessel, 55.;
one iron grating, i2d. ; one tripod, 2d.;. . . one iron
spit, ^d. ; one frying-pan, id ; ... one funnel, id. ;
one small canvas bag, id. ; . . . one old linen sheet,
id. ; 2 pillows, $d. ; . . . one counter, 45. ; 2 coffers,
Sd. ; 2 curtains, 8d. ; 2 remnants of cloth, id. ; 6 chests,
IQS. lod. ; one folding table, \2d.\ 2 chairs, 8d. ; one
* Riley, p. 65. See the specifications for some three-storied houses
of a century later quoted by Besant. " Medieval London," i., 250. The
furs here specified may well have come to ^3 or 4 more (see Rogers,
"Agriculture and Prices," pp. 536 ff.). The fur for an Oxford warden's
gown varied from 26s. 8d. to 83^.
t Besant, loc. cit.^ i., 257, mistakenly calls Hugh a "craftsman," and
gives from his imagination a quite untrustworthy description of the
inquest, the house, and the shop. He had evidently not seen the supple-
mentary notice in Sharpe's " Letter Book," F.
86 CHAUCER AND HIS EN 7 GLAND
portable cupboard, 6d. ; 2 tubs, 2s. ; also firewood,
sold for 35. ; one mazer cup, 6s. ; ... one cup called
"note" (i.e. cocoanut) with a foot and cover of silver,
value 305. ; 6 silver spoons, 65." '
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, t 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 dc clmmbre 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." J 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.
* Riley, p. 199 ; cf. Sharpc, " Letter Books," F, pp. 19, 1 13. A list of
furniture left by a richer citizen, apparently incomplete, is given in Riley,
p. 123, and another on p. 283, but this is difficult to separate with certainty
from his stock-in-trade. The inventory of a well-to-do Norman peasant-
farmer is given by S. Luce, "Du Guesclin," p. 51. Here the strictly
domestic items are only " four frying-pans, two metal pots, four chests,
three caskets, two feather-beds, three tables, a bedstead, an iron shovel,
a gridiron, a [trough?], and a lantern." This was in 1333.
t Addy, "Evolution of English House," pp. 112 ff. "A chamber
with a chimney "was the acme of medieval comfort. "P. Plowman''
B., x., p. 98, and " Crede," 209.
% "CEuvrcs," cd. Buchon, p. 646. A century later, Thomas Elwood's
Memoirs show that an English squire's family needed their warm caps as
much indoors as outside.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 87
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'." * We have seen that,
even as a King's squire, Chaucer had not a bed to him-
self; 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."!
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 1 377, complains of these
new and unsociable ways (x., 94).
"Ailing is the Hall each day in the week,
Where the lord nor the lady liketh not to sit.
Now hath each rich man a rule to eaten by himself
In a privy parlour, for poor men's sake,
Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief Hall,
That was made for meals, and men to eaten in."
* Cf. the affair in the hall of Wolsingham Rectory in 1370. Raine,
" Auckland Castle," p. 38.
t A. F. Leach, " English Schools before the Reformation," p. 10 ;
" Dame Alice Kyteler " (Camden Soc.), introd., p. xxxix. The choir-boys,
it may be noted in passing, had only half an hour of playtime daily.
88 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 tourna-
ments at Smithfield, Cheapside, and Westminster, or
"trials by battle " in those same lists, when one gentle-
man had accused another of treachery, and London
citizens might see the quarrel decided by God's judg-
ment* 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
* It is interesting to note that, when Chaucer was Clerk of the Works
to Richard II., he superintended the erection of scaffolds for the King
and Queen on the occasion of one of these Smithfield tournaments.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 89
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."* 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
Have ye not seen some time a pale face
Among a press, of him that hath been led
Toward his death, where as him gat no grace,
And such a colour in his face hath had,
Men mighte know his face that was bestead
Amonges all the faces in that rout ? t
What modern Londoner has witnessed this, or anything
* " French Chron. of London" (Camden Soc.), p. 52 ; cf. Walsingham,
an. 1326.
t "C.T.,B.,645.
90 CHAUCER AND HIS EN 7 GLAND
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
Erode.' " * 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." f 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
So hideous was the noise, benedicitc !
Certcs, he Jacke Straw, and his mcinie
Ne made never shouUis half so shrill,
When that they woulden any Fleming kill . . . J
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
* " Chronicles of London," ed. Kingsford, p. 15.
t VValsingham, an. 1381.
\ "C.T.,"B., 4583-
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 91
face shown to the people," that they might know he
was really dead*
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 aqd 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."f 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 intro-
ducing us to his tavern company, it is a priest and a
parish clerk whom he shows us cheek-by-jowl with the
* "Eulog. Hist.," in-, 387.
t Walsingham, an. 1382 ; Riley, p. 464-
92 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
Then goeth Glutton in, and great oaths after.
Ciss the seamstress sat on the bench,
Wat the warrener, and his wife drunk,
Tim the tinker, and twain of his knaves,
Hick the hackneyman and Hugh the needier ;
Clarice of Cock's Lane, the clerk of the church,
Sir Piers of Prydie and Pernel of Flanders ;
An hayward and an hermit, the hangman of Tyburn,
Daw the dyker, with a dozen harlots [rascals
Of porters and pickpurses and pilled tooth-drawers ; [bald
A ribiber and a ratter, a raker and his knave [lute-player, scavenger,
A roper and a ridingking, and Rose the disher, [mercenary trooper
Godfrey the garlicmonger and Griffin the Welshman,
And upholders an heap, early by the morrow [furniture-brokers
Give Glutton with glad cheer good ale to hansel.* [try
* "P. Plowman," C, vii., 352 ff. For Clarice and Peronel, see Prof.
Skeat's notes, ad loc., and cf. Riley, pp. 484, 566, and note 3.
A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THH 14TH CEXTURY, WITH A WRKATH
OF PAST TROPHIES OVER HIS SHOULDER
(KKIIM MS. ROY. vi. H. 6 f. 50; b)
CHAPTER VIII
" 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 i4th 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 Cripple-
gate ; and we have curious evidence of the keen com-
petition 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 135. ^d. a
year besides repairs. The City promised to keep no
prisoners in the tower during Chaucer's tenancy,* but
* Newgate, Ludgate, and Cripplegate were regular prisons at this
time ; but Besant is quite mistaken in saying that all gate-leases provide
94 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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."* 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
" that they may be taken over as prisons if they are wanted " (" Medieval
London," i., 163). A Cripplegatc lease (Riley, p. 387) has naturally such
a proTision ; the others are silent or (like Chaucer's) definitely promise
the contrary.
* P. 489; cf. "Life Records," IV., xxxiv. Michaelmas Day fell in
1386 on a Saturday.
ALDGATE TOWER 95
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 suc-
cessor to Enoch and Elias, is presently quieted by the
Eagle's assurance that this temporary apotheosis is his
reward as the Clerk of Love
Love holdeth it great humbleness,
And virtue eke, that thou wilt make
A-night full oft thy head to ache,
In thy study so thou writest
And ever more of Love enditest.
The Ruler of the Gods, therefore, has taken pity on the
poet's lonely life
That is, that thou hast no tidings
Of Love's folk, if they be glad,
Nor of nothing elles that God made :
And not only from far countree,
Whence no tiding cometh to thee,
But of thy very neighebores
That dwellen almost at thy doors,
Thou hearest neither that nor this ;
For, when thy labour done all is,
And hast y-made thy reckonings,
Instead of rest and newe things
Thou go'st home to thy house anon,
And, all so dumb as any stone,
Thou sittest at another book
Till fully dazed is thy look,
And livest thus as an heremite,
Although thy abstinence is lite.* [little
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"?
* Bk. II., lines 122 ff.
96 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
And sooth to say my chamber was
Full well depainted, and with glass
Were all the windows well y-glazed
Full clear, and not one hole y-crazed, [cracked
That to behold it was great joy ;
For wholly all the story of Troy
Was in the glazing y-wrought thus . . .
And all the walls with colours fine
Were painted, bothe text and glose, [commentary
And all the Romance of the Rose.
My windows weren shut each one
And through the glass the sunne shone
Upon my bed with brighte beams. . . .
Those lines were written before the Aldgate days ; and
the hints which can be gathered from surviving inven-
tories 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 \ve 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 eight-
pence ; 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
ALDGATE TOWER
97
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
Ground Plan
(WITH B6DR
KITCHEN & BUTTERY
OOM ABOVE;
HALL
(QPEN TO THE ROOF)
STORE ROOM
WITH ROOM ABOVE)
SCALE OF FEET.
10 20 30 40 50 60 TO 80
Plan of Upper Story of Aldgate
(FROM SYMONS' GROUND PLAN, C 1592.)
Section
1. GROUND PLAN AND SECTION OF THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON
A TYPICAL TIMBER HOUSE OF THE I4TH CENTURY. (For the Hall, see
Chaucer's " Miller's Tale ")
2. PLAN OF ALDGATE TOWER AS IT WAS IN CHAUCER'S TIME
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 ;
98 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 tav-
erners of Lestinnes have had a good five hundred
more." * 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 !"
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 i4th century. This was indeed grossly
* Darmcstetcr, " Froissart," p. 112.
ALDGATE TOWER 99
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. * 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 i4th
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
* Riley, pp. 194, 285, 338 ; cf. Mr. W. Hudson's " Parish of St. Peter
Permountergate " (Norwich, 1889), pp. 21, 45, 60.
100 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 ex-
aggeration 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.*
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." f Twenty-nine
years after Chaucer's death, the celebrated Whittington
did indeed found a library ; yet this was placed not at
* Cf. the present writer's " From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed.,
pp. 6, 160, 167, 380, where proof is adduced from episcopal registers that
even large and rich monasteries had often no scriptorium, and many
monks could not write their own names.
t " Town Life," ii., 84.
I
ALDGATE TOWER 101
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.
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." * 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
* Riley, p. 226. Cf. the similar complaint of a poet against black-
smiths in " Reliquiae Antiqune," i., 240.
102 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through.
The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers every-
thing; 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.* 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
The day go'th fast, and after that com'th eve
And yet came not to Troilus Criseyde.
He looketh forth by hedge, by tree, by greve, [grove
And far his head over the wall he laid . . .
" Have here my truth, I see her ! Yond she is !
Have up thine eyen, man ! May'st thou not see?"
Pandarus answered, " Nay, so mote I the !
All wrong, by God ! What say'st thou, man ? Where art ?
That I see yond is but a fare-cart."
The warden of the gates gan to call
The folk which that without the gates were,
And bade them driven in their beastos all,
Or all the night they musten bleven there ; [remain
And far within the night, with many a tear,
This Troilus gan homeward for to ride,
For well he seeth it helpeth nought t' abide.
* Nominally, the great gate was shut at the hour of sunset, and only
the wicket-gate left open till curfew ; but regulations of this kind were
generally interpreted with a good deal of laxity.
ALDGATE TOWER 103
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 legendes
and lives than be of goode 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 prac-
tical 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 some-
times 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
At the last to me he spake
In marine's voice, and said "Awake !
And be not so aghast, for shame ! "
And called me then by my name
And, for I should the better abraid [rouse
Me dreamed, "Awake ! " to me he said
Right in the same voice and Steven [tone
That useth one I coulde neven ; [name
And with that voice, sooth for to say'n
My minde came to me again ;
For it was goodly said to me,
So it was never wont to be.
" House of Fame," ii., 47.
CHAPTER IX
TOWN AND COUNTRY
" For never to my mind was evening yet
But was far beautifuller than its day."
BROWNING
" Wherefore is the sun red at even ? For he goeth toward hell."
(" The Master of Oxford's Catechism " (XV. cent.) ;
" Reliquiae Antique," i., 232.)
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 con-
temporaries 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
TOWN AND COUNTRY 105
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 com-
ment 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 theo-
logical 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 Suite, 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
Burgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our con-
vent 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 fore-
fathers to have been right in " noting fertile and pleasant
places as a hindrance to stronger minds."* 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 won der Vogelweide sang in his
* Busch, "Lib. Ref.," p. 408; Gilleberti Abbatis, "Tract. Ascet.,"
VII., ii., 3.
106 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
repentant old age had long been a commonplace
with moralists
" The world is fair to gaze on, white and green and red,
But inly foul and black of hue, and dismal as the dead."
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.* 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.f 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 after-
glow. And if Douglas thus outranges even Dante, he
leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The fresh-
ness 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
* See Oskar Dolch, "The Love of Nature in Early English Poetry ;"
Dresden, 1882.
t "Purg.," xxvi., 4 ; viii., I ; iii., 25 ; cf. xvii., 8, 12.
TOWN AND COUNTRY 107
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
On bookes for to read I me delight,
And to them give I faith and full credence,
And in mine heart have them in reverence
So heartily, that there is game none
That from my bookes maketh me to go'n
But it be seldom on the holyday ;
Save, certainly, when that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the fowle's sing,
And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring,
Farewell my book and my devotion ! *
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 neigh-
bouring row of houses until the Reformation, and
what happened to it then, the reader must find in the
pages of Stow.t These May-day festivities, which out-
did 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
* " Legend of Good Women," Prol., 30 ff.
f " Survey," ed. Morley, 1893, p. 163.
108 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 propor-
tionate 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. Fenelon 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.*
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 disre-
garded similar attempts to regulate their dress, their
earnings, and their relations with women. Much excuse
can indeed be found for this intolerance in the rough-
ness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only
the Church, but even the civic authorities found them-
selves obliged to regulate the disorders common at
London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted
to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions
* " Monsieur le curd, . . . ne dansons pas ; mais permettons ;\ ces
pauvres gens de danser. Pourqoui les empecher d'oublier un moment
qu'ils sont malheureux ? "
TOWN AND COUNTRY 109
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 for-
bidden to attend either weddings or dances.* 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
" Go not to the wrestling, nor to shooting at the cock
As it were a strumpet, or a giggelot,
Stay at home, daughter."
"When thou goest into town or to church," says the
author of the " Menagier 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
She hath full oftentimes sick her feigned,
For that she woulde flee the companye
Where likely was to treaten of follye
As is at feastes, revels, and at dances,
That be occasions of dalliances.f
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
* Riley, 571. I have dealt fully with this subject in my " Medieval
Studies," Nos. 3 and 4.
t "Babees Book," E.E.T.S., p. 40; " Mdnagier de Paris," i., 15;
"C. T.,"C., 62.
110 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
football in the streets, against the game of "taking off
the hoods of people, or laying hands on them," and
TOWN AND COUNTRY 111
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."* 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 com-
monest, 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."
* Sharpe's " Letter Book" G., pp. 274, 303 ; Riley, pp. 269, 534, 561,
571,669. In the country, "hocking "was often resorted to for raising
church funds. See Sir John Phear's " Molland Accounts" (Devonshire
Assn., 1903), pp. 198 ff.
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 towns-
folk 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 legges 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 pro-
bably 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 thou-
sand like-minded giggelots, 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
Upon the smalle softc sweete grass,
That was with flowres sweet embroidered all.
At another time we listen with him to the leaves
rustling in undertone with the birds
A wind, so small it scarcely might be less,
Made in the leaves green a noise soft,
Accordant to the fowlcs' song aloft.
Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun
Right as the freshe, redde rose new
Against the Summer sunne coloured is !
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
... of all the flowers in the mead
Then love I most these flowers white and red
TOWN AND COUNTRY 113
Such as men callen daisies in our town.
To them I have so great affectioun,
As I said erst, when comen is the May,
That in my bed there dawneth me no day
But I am up and walking in the mead,
To see this flower against the sunne spread ; . . .
As she that is of alle flowers flower,
Fulfilled of all virtue and honour,
And ever y-like fair and fresh of hue.
And I love it, and ever y-like new,
And ever shall, till that mine hearte die. . . .
I fell asleep ; within an hour or two
Me dreamed how I lay in the meadow tho [then
To see this flower that I love so and dread ;
And from afar came walking in the mead
The God of Love, and in his hand a Queen,
And she was clad in royal habit green ;
A fret of gold she hadde next her hair,
And upon that a white crown she bare
With fleurons smalle, and I shall not lie,
For all the world right as a day'sye
Y-crowned is with white leaves lite,
So were the fleurons of her coroune white ;
For of one pearle, fine, oriental
Her white coroune was y-maked all.
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
114 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
common things.* Here he has no equal until Words-
worth ; 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 ?
His voice was merrier than the merry orgon
On masse-days that in the churche go'n . . .
His comb was redder than the fine coral,
Embattled as it were a castle wall ;
His bill was black, and like the jet it shone,
Like azure were his legge's and his toen ;
His nailes whiter than the lily flower,
And like the burnished gold was his colour !
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
* Cf. "C. T.," E., 2029; F., 908; "Parl. Foules," 121. For his
personal love of trees, etc., see " C. T.," A., 2920 ; "Parl. Foules," 175,
201, 442.
TOWN AND COUNTRY 115
medieval city life. Even towns like Oxford and
Cambridge were rather collections of agriculturalists
co-operating for trade and protection than a con-
glomeration 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 com-
parison with other English cities, there was as yet no
real divorce between town and country. Her popula-
tion 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 South-
wark shore was green with trees ; not only monasteries
but often private houses had their gardens, and sur-
viving records mention fruit trees as a matter of course.*
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.
* Cf. Riley, pp. 7, 116, 228, 280, 382, 487, 498.
116 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 fre-
quented 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. East-
ward 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 * 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,
* " Herbarium," green and shady spot.
TOWN AND COUNTRY 117
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 them-
selves 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.f There is no obvious reason to
dissociate the city lawyer from the Oxford scholar, who
has also been suggested with some probability as the
* Matthew Browne's " Chaucer's England," vol. ii., pp. 248, 252.
t Riley, 388, and passim.
118 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
author of " Pearl" and other 14th-century poems second
only to Chaucer's. However that may be, "the philo-
sophical 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
O younge freshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love upgroweth with your age,
Repair ye home from worldly vanitie,
And of your heart upcast ye the visage
To that same God that after His image
You made ; and think that all is but a fair,
This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair.
But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the
realm of mere suppositions. With or without philo-
sophical converse in the fields, the long day wanes at
last ; and now
When that the sun out of the south 'gan west
And that this flower 'gan close, and go to rest,
For darkness of the night, the which she dread,
Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped
To go to rest, and early for to rise.
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 drink-
ing of fools, and the frequency of fires."
" Del un Marchant au jour present
L'en parle molt communement,
II ad noun Triche plein de guile,
Qe pour sercher del orient
Jusques au fin del Occident,
N'y ad cite ne bonne vile
U Triche son avoir ne pile.
Triche en Bourdeaux, Triche en Civile,
Triche en Paris achat et vent ;
Triche ad ses niefs et sa famile,
Et du richesce plus nobile
Triche ad disz foitz plus q'autre gent.
Triche a Florence et a Venise
Ad son recet et sa franchise,
Si ad a Brugges et a Gant ;
A son agard auci s'est mise
La noble Cite" sur Tamise,
La quelle Brutus fuist fondant ;
Mais Triche la vait confondant."
GOWER, " Mirour," 25273 ff
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 i4th century for the sake of its Gothic archi-
tecture, Chaucer in his retrospective mood is not
120 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet uncorrupted
by architects of any description whatever
No trumpes for the warres folk ne knew,
Nor towers high and walles round or square . . .
Yet were no palace chambers, nor no halls ;
In caves and in woodes soft and sweet
Slepten this blessed folk withouten walls.*
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 to-
gether, 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 sell-
ing 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
* " Aetas Prima," 1. 23 ff.
THE LAWS OF LONDON 121
London, which claimed over other cities a superiority
symbolized by the legend of its origin : Brut, the son of
^Eneas, 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 ^Ethelred and even of his father, had
brought the wines of the south to London. The [Ger-
man] emperor's men had already established their stafel-
hof, 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 East-
erling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong
to the 'Gildhalda Theutonicorum,' as it was called in
the i3th century, settled in the city beside the Normans
of the Conquest, the Frenchmen mentioned in the char-
ter, and the old English stock of law-worthy citizens." *
The example of generosity set by William was
followed more or less closely by all his successors
except Matilda, who offended the citizens by suppress-
ing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure
mainly to the steady support which they therefore gave
* Loftie, p. 26.
122 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
to Stephen. The prosperity of London reacted on
many other cities, which were gradually enabled to buy
themselves charters after her model. Writing before
1 200 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 sove-
reigns 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
THE LAWS OF LONDON 123
were welcome to the English Government, it was not
always so with the English people. Chaucer's grand-
father, 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.* 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 them-
selves and really beneficial to the community.! 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
* " Letter Book," G., pp. iii. fif., where there is a very interesting case
of a Florentine merchant.
f It is easy to understand how Jews themselves came back to
England under the guise of Lombards. We know enough, from many
other sources, of the evils which followed from the inconsistent efforts
to outlaw all takers of interest, to appreciate the truth which underlay
the obvious exaggerations of the Commons in their petition to the King
in 1376. "There are in our land a very great multitude of Lombards,
both brokers and merchants, who serve no purpose but that of ill-doing :
moreover, several of those which pass for Lombards are Jews and Saracens
and privy spies ; and of late they have brought into our land a most
grievous vice which it beseems us not to name' 1 ("Rot. Parl.," vol. ii.,
P. 352, 58).
124 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 com-
pounded 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
" Then came there a confessor, coped as a Friar . . .
Then he absolved her soon, and sithen he said
' We have a window a-working, will cost us full high ;
Wouldst thou glaze that gable, and grave therein thy name,
Sure should thy soul be heaven to have.'" *
In other words, the Canon Law practically com-
pelled 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.! " 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
* Benvenuto da Imola, " Comentum," vol. i., p. 579; Etienne de
Bourbon, p. 254; Nicole Bozon, pp. 35, 226; "Piers Plowman,"
B., iii., 38 ; cf. Gower, " Mirour," 21409.
f "Mirour," 25429 ff., 25237 fF, 25915. Mr. Macaulay remarks that
Gower seems to deal more tenderly with his own merchant-class than
with other classes of society ; but his blame, even with this allowance, is
severe.
THE LAWS OF LONDON 125
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 com-
plicated money transactions, involving considerable
speculation on credit. Gower complains that merchants
talked of "many thousands" where their fathers had
126 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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.* 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 possi-
bilities 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
i3th and i4th 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 compara-
* "Mirour," 25813. The emphasis which he lays on carpets and
curtains shows how great a luxury they were then considered.
THE LAWS OF LONDON 127
lively 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 posses-
sion 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 com-
pelled each citizen,* 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 pre-
texts ; 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 ordi-
nances 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,
* " In justice, however, to these centuries, it must be remarked, that
they received the institutions of Frankpledge as an inheritance from
Saxon times " (Riley).
128 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 legis-
lation 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 pre-
caution 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. ; * but the most serious
* "To these writs return was made [in 1354] to the effect that the
civic authorities had given orders for butchers to carry the entrails of
slaughtered beasts to the Fletc and there clean them in the tidal waters
of the Thames, instead of throwing them on the pavement by the house
of the Grey Friars." Again : " Although this order [of 1369] was carried
out and the bridge destroyed, butchers continued to curry offal from the
THE LAWS OF LONDON 129
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." * 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
shambles to the riverside ; and this nuisance had to be suppressed in
1370." But the whole passage should be read in full.
* Vol. I., cxxxviii. ff, and 365 ff.
K
130 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
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 con-
ditions 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 25. He paid 6d., the rest is excused. He
is quit.' Sometimes an entry is marked 'vad,' i.e.vadiat,
or vadiahtr, '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.
debct, '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 amerce-
ments entered is 72 i8s. lod. 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 os. 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
THE LAWS OF LONDON 131
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 tfye town."* 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, f 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
" Brevvsters and bakers, butchers and cooks ;
For these are men on this mould that most harm worken
To the poor people that piece-meal buyen :
For they poison the people privily and oft . . ."
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
* Mrs. Green, "Town Life," ii., 55.
f Between 1347 and 1375, for instance, there are only 23 cases of
pillory in all.
132 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
sell in Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs,
unfit for human bodies." *
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 con-
stitution 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 blood-
shed 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, t 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.
* It is pertinent to note in this connection the medieval custom of
giving condemned meat to hospitals. Mr. Wheatley (" London," p.
196) quotes from a Scottish Act of Parliament in 1386, " Gif ony man
brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sail be
taken by the bailie, and incontinent, without ony question, sail be sent to
the leper folke ; and, gif there be na lepper folke, they sail be destroyed
all uttcrlie." At Oxford in the 1 5th century, there was a similar regulation
providing that putrid or unfit meat and fish should be sent to St. John's
Hospital. (" Munimenta Academica" (R.S.), PP- 51, 52). Here is a
probable clue to the tradition that medieval apprentices struck against
salmon more than twice a week. See Athenceum, August 27 and
September 3, 1898.
t Besant insists very justly on the blood-kinship between the leading
citizens and the country gentry. ("Medieval London," i., 218 ff.) He
shows that a very large majority of Mayors, Aldermen, etc., were country-
born, and of good family.
THE LAWS OF LONDON 133
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 Crecy and Poitiers lies in
the merchants' counting-houses of London, Bordeaux,
and Bruges."* Apart from those habits and qualities
which successful commerce implies, the amount of
direct supplies in me-n 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 com-
mand 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
He would the sea were kept, for any thing,
Betwixtii Middelburgh and Ore well.
During those fifteen years the ports of the south
coast were constantly harried by privateers. The Isle
of Wight was taken and plundered. The Prior of
Lewes, heading a hastily raised force against the
invaders, was taken prisoner at Rottingdean ; and such
efforts to clear the seas as were made on our part were
not public, but merely civic, or even private. The men
of Winchelsea and Rye burned a couple of Norman
ports, after plundering the very churches ; and the
sailors of Portsmouth and Dartmouth collected a fleet
* Michelet, " Hist, de France," 1. i., ch. i.
134 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
which for a short while swept the Channel. This may
be the reason why Chaucer, writing two years later,
makes his bold Shipman hail from Dartmouth. But,
seven years before this raid, a single London merchant
had done still more. A Scottish pirate named Mercer,
reinforced by French and Spanish ships, infested the
North Sea until "God raised up against him one of the
citizens of Troynovant." "John Philpot, citizen of
London, a man of great wit, wealth and power, nar-
rowly considering the default or treachery of the Duke
of Lancaster and the other Lords who ought to have
defended the realm, and pitying his oppressed country-
men, hired with his own money a thousand armed men.
. . . And it came to pass that the Almighty, who ever
helpeth pious vows, gave success to him and his, so
that his men presently took the said Mercer, with all
that he had taken by force from Scarborough, and
fifteen more Spanish ships laden with much riches.
Whereat the whole people exulted . . . and now John
Philpot alone was praised in all men's mouths and held
in admiration, while they spake opprobriously and with
bitter blame of our princes and the host which had long
ago been raised, as is the wont of the common herd in
their changing moods." *
Walsingham's final moral here is, after all, that of
Chaucer: "O stormy people, unsad and ever untrue,
Aye indiscreet, and changing as a vane!"t English
writers seem, indeed, to speak of their countrymen as
especially fickle and inconstant; and there was no
doubt more reason for the charge in those days, when
men in general were far more swayed by impulse and
less by reflexion when indeed the fundamental in-
security of the social and political fabric was such as to
thwart even the ripest reflexion at every turn. It is
striking how short-lived were the London trading
* John Philpot, it may be noted, was at this very time one of the
Collectors of Customs under Chaucer's Comptrollership.
t " C. T.," E, 995.
THE LAWS OF LONDON 135
families until after Chaucer's time : no such succession
as the Rothschilds and Barings was as yet possible.
Moreover, in civic as in national politics, it was still
possible to lose one's head for the crime of having
shown too much zeal in a losing cause, as the career of
Chaucer's colleague Brembre may testify.* Walsingham
loses no opportunity of jeering at the inconstancy of the
London citizens ; he portrays their panic during the
invasion scare of 1386, and during the King's suppres-
sion of their liberties in 1389-92, with all the superiority
of a monk whose own skin was safe enough in the
cloister of St. Alban's. On this latter occasion the
citizens had to pay Richard the enormous fine of 20,000
or, according to a Malmesbury monk, 40,000 for
the restoration of their privileges ; and even then they
were glad to welcome him on his first gracious visit " as
an angel of God."t But they bided their time, and
Richard was to learn, like other sovereigns before and
since, how heavy a sword the Londoners could throw
into the political scale. Froissart noted that "they ever
have been, are, and will be so long as the City stands,
the most powerful of all England " ; that what London
thought was also what England thought ; and that even
a king might find he had gained but a Pyrrhic victory
over them. " For where the men of London are at
accord and fully agreed, no man dare gainsay them.
They are of more weight than all the rest of England,
nor dare any man drive them to bay, for they are most
mighty in wealth and in men." J
However little Chaucer may have interested himself
in his neighbours, here were things which no poet could
help seeing. The real history of Medieval London is
* The violent scenes of the years 1381-1391 are summarized in
Wheatley's "London" (Medieval Towns), pp. 236-9. Among the
victims of an unsuccessful cause were even Sir William Walworth and
Sir John Philpot.
f Walsingham, an. 1392 ; " Eulog. Hist.," iii., 368.
J Ed. Luce, vol. i., pp. 224, 243, 249.
136 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
yet to be written ; it will be a story of strange con-
trasts, gold and brass and iron and clay. But there was
a greatness in the very disquiet and inconstancy of the
city ; some ideals were already fermenting there which,
realized only after centuries of conflict, have made
modern England what we are proud to see her; and
other ideals of which we, like our forefathers, can only
say that we trust in their future realization.
CHAPTER XI
"CANTERBURY TALES" THE DRAMATIS
PERSONS
' " Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together
To seek St. James, and saints in Rome.
They went forth in their way with many wise tales,
And had leave to lie all their life after . . .
Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves,
Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after ;
Great lubbers and long, that loth were to labour,
Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other,
And shaped themselves as hermits, their ease to have."
" Piers Plowman," B., Prol. 46
DURING those twelve years in Aldgate Tower,
Chaucer's genius fought its way through the
literary conventions of his time to the full assertion of
its native originality. He had begun with allegory and
moralization, after the model of the " Roman de la
Rose"; shreds of these conventions clung to him even
to the end of the Aldgate period ; but they were already
outworn. In "Troilus and Cressida " we have real men
and women under all the classical machinery : they think
and act as men thought and acted in Chaucer's time ;
and Pandarus especially is so lifelike and individual that
Shakespeare will transfer him almost bodily to his own
canvas. In the " House of Fame" and the " Legend of
Good Women " the form indeed is again allegorical, but
the poet's individuality breaks through this narrow
mask; his self-revelations are franker and more direct
than at any previous time ; and in each case he wearied
of the poem and broke off long before the end. With
the humility of a true artist, he had practised his hand
for years to draw carefully after the old acknowledged
138 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
models; but these now satisfied him less and less. His
mind was stored with images which could not be forced
into the narrow framework of a dream ; he must find a
canvas broad enough for all the life of his time ; for the
cream of all that he had seen and heard in Flanders and
France and Italy, in the streets of London and on the
open highways of a dozen English counties. Boccaccio,
for a similar scheme, had brought together a company
of young Florentines of the upper class, and of both
sexes, in a villa-garden. Chaucer's plan of a pilgrim
cavalcade gave him a variety of character as much
greater as the company in a third-class carriage is more
various than that in a West-end club.
In earlier ages, a pilgrimage had of course been a very
solemn matter, involving the certainty of great labour
and heavy privations, and with very considerable risk to
life or limb. The crusades themselves were pilgrimages
en masse, as contemporary chroniclers often remind us.
At the commencement of an undertaking so serious, the
pilgrims naturally sought the blessing of the Church ;
and there was a special service for their use. It is
probable, however, that Chaucer's pilgrims troubled
themselves as little about this service as about the
special pilgrim's dress, the absence of which appears
very plainly from his descriptions of their costume.
For a century at least before he wrote, pilgrimages had
been gradually becoming journeys rather of pleasure
than of duty, for those who could afford the necessary
expense which they entailed. Travelling indeed was
not always safe ; but when the pilgrim went alone and
on foot he could always protect himself from most evil-
doers by taking the traditional scrip and staff and gown
which marked him as sacred ; and often, as in Chaucer's
case, a caravan was formed which might well defy all
the ordinary perils of the road. The " mire " and
" slough," which Chaucer more than once mentions,
had always been as much a matter of common routine
to everybody, even on his journey from farm to farm or
"CANTERBURY TALES"
139
village to village, as a puncture is to the modern cyclist,
or occasional external traction to the motorist. * More-
over, though the inns might not be what we should call
luxurious, they offered abundant good cheer and good
A HOSTELRY AT NIGHT
(From a 15th-century MS. of " Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles" in the
Hunterian Library at Glasgow)
fellowship to all who could pay the price. A certain
Count of Poitou went about in disguise to find
* Cf. Mrs. Green, loc. cit., ii., 31. " In 1499 a glover from Leighton
Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before
Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose,
finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig
clay 'called Ramming clay' for him on the highway, and was in no
way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in
the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep,
which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy
glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden
with panniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and
horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was
acquitted by the court on the ground that he had had no malicious
intent, and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really
did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save
the highroad."
140 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
what class of his subjects led the happiest life ; he
judged at last "that the merchants at fair-time, who go
to taverns and find all the delicacies they can desire
ready prepared, would lead the most delightful life
of all, but for this one drawback, that they must at last
settle the score for all that they have consumed."* If,
at these inns, the pilgrims often found themselves
packed into great dormitories fitted with berths like
a ship's cabin, this was far less of a change from their
ordinary habits than are those hardships to which
modern mountain tourists cheerfully submit on occa-
sion, f Any great change from the ordinary routine
marks a bright spot in most men's minds, even in these
days of many amusements and much locomotion ; so
that, in proportion as the King's peace grew more
effectual in England, and places of pilgrimage multi-
plied, and the middle classes could better afford the
expense of time or money, it became as natural to
many people to go to Walsingham or Canterbury for
the sake of the pleasant society as it was to choose a
church for the sake of gossip or flirtation.^ This is
already complained of about 1250 A.D. by Berthold of
Regensburg, one of the greatest mission-preachers of
the i3th century. "Men talk nowadays in church as if
it were at market. . . . One tells what he has seen
on his pilgrimage to Palestine or Rome or Compostella:
thou mayst easily say so much in church of these same
pilgrimages, that God or St. James will give thee no
* Etienne de Bourbon, p. 411.
f T. Wright, " Homes of other Days," pp. 345 ft"., whence I borrow the
accompanying illustration from a MS. of the i5th century, representing
the outside and inside of an inn. Incidentally, it illustrates also the
common medieval phrase "naked in bed." Mrs. Green ("Town Life,"
ii-i 33) quotes the grateful entry of a citizen in his public accounts " Paid
for curbed there (and it was well worth it, witness, a featherbed) id."
\ There were seventy places of pilgrimage in Norfolk alone (Cults,
" Middle Ages," p. 162). For churches as trysting-places for lovers or
gossips we have evidence on many sides, e.g. the lovers of the
"Decameron" (Prologue and Epilogue), and the custom of "Paul's
Walk " which lasted long after the Reformation.
"CANTERBURY TALES 1 ' 141
reward therefore." Again, " Many a man journeys hence
to St. James of Compostella, and never hears a single
mass on the way out or back, and then they go with
sport and laughter, and some seldom say even their
Paternoster! This I say not to turn pilgrims aside
from Compostella; I am not strong enough for that;
but thou mightest earn more grace by a few masses than
for all thy journey to Compostella and back. Now, what
dost thou find at Compostella? St. James's head. Well
and good : that is a dead skull : the better part is in
heaven. Now, what findest thou at home, at thy yard-
gate ? When thou goest to church in the morning, thou
findest the true God and Man, body and soul, as truly as
on that day wherein He was born of our Lady St. Mary,
the ever-Virgin, whose holiness is greater than all saints.
. . . Thou mayst earn more reward at one mass than
another man in his six weeks out to St. Jacob and six
weeks back again : that makes twelve weeks." " Ye run
to St. James, and sell so much at home that sometimes
your wives and children must ever be the poorer for it,
or thou thyself in need and debt all thy life long. Such
a man crams himself so that he comes back far fatter
than he went, and has much to say of what he has seen,
and lets no man listen to the service or the sermon in
church." Two other great preachers, Cardinal Jacques
de Vitry shortly before Berthold, and Etienne de
Bourbon shortly after him, speak of the debaucheries
which were not unusual on pilgrimages : the latter tells
how pilgrims sometimes sang obscene songs in chorus,
and joined in dissolute dances with the lewd village folk
over the very graves in the churchyard ; he seems to
speak of the German pilgrims as exceptional in singing
religious songs. All this was a century before Chaucer's
journey; and during those hundred years the institution
had steadily lost in grace as it gained in popularity.
The author of " Piers Plowman " not only notes how
many rascals were to be found on pilgrimages, but
would apparently have been glad to see them almost
142 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
entirely superseded. His professional pilgrim comes
hung round with tokens from a hundred shrines ; he
has been at Rome, Compostella, Jerusalem, Sinai,
Bethlehem, Babylon, and even in Armenia; but of
"Saint Truth" he has never heard, and can give no
help to those who are in real distress about their souls.
An ideal society would be one in which St. James was
sought only by the sick-beds of the poor, and pilgrims
resorted no longer to Rome but to " prisons and poor
cottages " instead. Seventeen years before Chaucer's
journey, even a prelate of the Church dared to raise a
similar protest. Archbishop Sudbury(then only Bishop
of London) was met by a band of pilgrims on their
way to Becket's Jubilee. They asked for his blessing;
he told them plainly that the promised Plenary
Indulgence would be useless to them unless they
went in a more reverent spirit ; and many simple
souls were rather pained than surprised when Wat
Tyler's mob, eleven years later, hacked off the head
of so free-thinking an Archbishop on Tower Hill.*
If this was what orthodox folk said already, then
we need not wonder at Wycliffe's outspoken con-
demnation, or that a citizen of Nottingham, as early
as 1395, was compelled under pain of the stake to
promise (among other articles) " I shall never more
despise pilgrimage."
Ten years after Chaucer, again, the Lollard Thorpe
was tried before Archbishop Arundel, and painted pil-
grimages exactly as Chaucer's Poor Parson would have
described them. "Such fond people waste blamefully
God's goods on their vain pilgrimages, spending their
goods upon vicious hostelries, which are oft unclean
women of their bodies. . . . Also, sir, I knowe well that
when divers men and women will goe thus after their
own willes, and finding out one pilgrimage, they will
* Berthold v. Regensburg, " Prcdigten," ed. Pfeiffer, i., 448, 459,
493 ; Et. de Bourbon, p. 167 ; " Piers Plowman," B., v., 527, C, v., 123 ;
Wharton, " Anglia Sacra," i., 49, 50.
"CANTERBURY TALES"
ordaine with them before, to have with them both men
and women that can well sing wanton songes, and some
other pilgrimes will have with them bagge pipes ; so
that everie towne that they come through, what with
the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their
piping, and with the jangling of their Canterburie bels,
and with the barking out of dogges after them, that they
make more noise, then if the king came there away,
with all his clarions, and many other minstrels. And if
these men and women be a moneth out in their pil-
grimage, many of them shall be an halfe yeare after,
great janglers, tale-tellers, and Hers." * A century later,
we find Archbishop Warham and the Pope negotiating
privately about Becket's Jubilee in a frankly commercial
spirit, while Erasmus publicly held up the Canterbury
Pilgrimage to ridicule ; and a few years later again
St. Thomas was declared a traitor, his shrine was
plundered, and the pilgrimages ceased. It may indeed
be said that the Canterbury Pilgrimage would not have
been so proper for our poet's dramatic purpose but
that most of its religious earnestness had long since
evaporated.
But what a canvas it was in 1387, and how frankly
Chaucer utilized all its possibilities ! The opportunity
of bringing in any tale which lay nearest to his heart
for what tale in the world was there that might not
come naturally from one or other of this party ? was
only a part of all that this subject offered, as the poet
realized from the very first. Even more delightful than
any of the tales told by Chaucer's pilgrims, is the tale
which he tells us about them all : the story of their
journey to Canterbury. Nowhere within so brief a
compass can we realize either the life of the i4th century
on one hand, or on the other that dramatic power in
which Chaucer stands second only to Shakespeare
* " Wyclifs Works," ed. Arnold, i., 83 ; cf. other quotations in
Lechler ; " Wiclif," Section x., notes 286, 288 ; Jusserand, " Vie Nomade,"
p. 296 ; Foxe (Parker Soc.), vol. iii., p. 268.
144 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
among English poets. Forget for a while the separate
tales of the pilgrims many of which were patched up
by fits and starts during such broken leisure as this
man of the world could afford for indulging his poetical
fancies; while many others (like the Monk's and the
Parson's) are tedious to modern readers in strict pro-
portion to their dramatic propriety at the moment-
forget for once all but the Prologue and the end-links,
and read these through at one sitting, from the first
stirrup-cup at Southwark Tabard to that final crest of
Harbledown where the weary travellers look down at
last upon the sacred city of their pilgrimage. There is
no such story as this in all medieval literature ; no
such wonderful gallery of finished portraits, nor any
drama so true both to common life and to perfect art.
The dramatis pcrsoncc of the " Decameron " are mere
puppets in comparison ; their occasional talk seems to
us insipid to the last degree of old-world fashion ;
Boccaccio's preface and interludes are as much less
dramatic than Chaucer's as their natural background is
more picturesque, with its Great Plague in Florence
and its glimpses of the Val d'Arno from that sweet hill-
garden of cypress and stone-pine and olive. Boccaccio
wrote for a society that was in many ways over-refined
already ; it is fortunate for us that Chaucer's public was
not yet at that point of literary development at which
art is too often tempted into artifice. He took the
living men day by day, each in his simplest and most
striking characteristics ; and from all these motley
figures, under the artist's hand, grew a mosaic in which
each stands out with all the glow of his own native
colour, and with all the added glory of the jewelled hues
around him. The sharp contrasts of medieval society
gave the poet here a splendid opportunity. In days
when the distinctions of rank were so marked and so
unforgettable, even to the smallest details of costume,
the Knight's dignity risked nothing by unbending to
familiar jest with the Host ; and the variety of characters
"CANTERBURY TALES" 145
which Chaucer has brought together in this single
cavalcade is as probable in nature as it is artistically
effective. All moods, from the most exalted piety down
to the coarsest buffoonery, were possible and natural
on a journey religious indeed in essential conception,
but which had by this time become so common and
worldly a function that few pilgrims dreamed of putting
off the old Adam until the white walls of Canterbury
came in sight. The plot has in it all the charm of
spring, of open-air travel, and of passing good-fellow-
ship without afterthought ; the rich fields of Kent, the
trees budding into their first green, mine ease in mine
inn at night, and over all the journey a far-off halo of
sanctity.
On the evening of Tuesday, April 16, 1387, twenty-
nine pilgrims found themselves together in the Tabard
at Southwark.* This hostelry lay almost within a
stone's throw of Chaucer's birthplace, and within sight
of many most notable London landmarks. Behind lay
the priory of St. Mary Overy, where Gower was now
lodging among the friendly and not too ascetic monks,
and where he still lies carved in stone, with his three
great books for a pillow to his head. A few yards
further in the background stood London Bridge, the
eighth marvel of the world, with its twenty arches, its
two chapels, its double row of houses, and its great
tower bristling with rebel skulls. Wat Tyler's head
was among the newest there on that spring evening ;
and in five years the head of Chaucer's Earl of
Worcester was to attain the same bad eminence.
Beyond the bridge rose the walls and guard-towers of
the city, the open quays and nodding wooden houses,
and a hundred and fifty church steeples, seldom indeed
of any great architectural pretensions individually, but
most picturesque in their variety, and dominated by
* Chaucer himself tells us the day in the " Man of Lawe's Prologue " ;
Prof. Skeat has accumulated highly probable evidence for the year 1387
(vol. iii., p. 373, and vol. v., p. 75).
L
146 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
the loftiest of all existing European structures the
wooden spire of old St. Paul's.*
Nor were the pilgrims themselves less picturesque
than the background of their journey. At the head of
the first group the Knight, so fresh from the holy wars
that the grease of his armour still stains his leather
Short was his gown, with sleeves long and wide.
Well could he sit on horse, and faire ride
THE SQUIRE OF THE "CANTERBURY TALES "
(From the Ellesmere MS. (I5th century) )
doublet, and that we guess his rank only from the
excellence of his steed and his own high breeding
And though that he were worthy, he was wise,
And of his port as meek as is a maid.
He never yet no villainy ne said
In all his life, unto no manner wight.
He was a very perfect gentle knight.
* About 520 feet from the ground, according to Hollar, but more
probably a little short of 500 feet. (H. B. \Vheatley, " London," p. 333.)
It must be remembered also how high the cathedral site rises above the
river.
"CANTERBURY TALES" 147
Then his son, the Squire, a model of youthful beauty
and strength, who had already struck many a good blow
in France for his lady's grace, but who shows here his
gentler side, with yellow curls falling upon the shortest
of fashionable jackets and the longest of sleeves-
Embroidered was he, as it were a mead
All full of freshe flowrcs, white and red.
Singing he was, or fluting, all the day ;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
And lastly their single attendant, the nut-headed
yeoman forester, with his suit of Lincoln green, his
peacock arrows, and his mighty bow.
After chivalry comes the Church ; and first the fine
black cloth and snowy linen of Madam Eglantine and
her fellow nun, clean and dainty and demure, like a pair
of aristocratic pussy-cats on a drawing-room hearthrug.
Their male escort, the Nuns' Priest, commands no
great reverence from mine Host, who, however, will
presently doff his cap before the Prioress, and address
her with a studied deference even beyond the courtesy
which he renders to the Knight. Her dignified reserve,
her natural anxiety to set off a fine person with more
elaboration of costume than the strict Rule permitted,
her French of Stratford atte Bowe, her tenderness to
lapdogs and even to marauding mice, her faultless
refinement of behaviour under the ticklish conditions
of a 14th-century dinner-table all these pardonable
luxuries of a fastidious nature are described with
Chaucer's most delicate irony, and stand in artistic
contrast to the grosser indiscipline of the Monk. This
"manly man, to be an abbot able," contemptuously
repudiated the traditional restraints of the cloister, and
even the comparatively mild discipline of those smaller
and therefore less rigorous " cells " which the fiery
zeal of St. Bernard stigmatized as " Synagogues of
Satan." * He scoffed at the Benedictine prohibition of
* Bern. Ep. 25 ; cf. "Liber Guillelmi Majoris," p. 478.
148 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
field sports and of extravagant dress, and at the old-
fashioned theory of subduing the flesh by hard brain-
work or field labour ; yet at bottom he seems to have
been a good fellow enough, with a certain real dignity
of character; and the discipline which he so uncere-
moniously rejected had by this time (as we may see
from the official records of his Order) grown very
generally obsolete. But still more strange to the earlier
ideals of his Order was the next cleric on Chaucer's
list, the Friar. Father Hubert is one of those jovial
sinners for whom old Adam has always a lurking
sympathy even when the new Adam feels most bound
to condemn them. Essentially irreligious even in his
most effective religious discourse ; greedy, unabashed,
as ubiquitous and intrusive as a bluebottle fly, he is
yet always supple and ingratiating; a favourite boon-
companion of the country squires, but still more popular
with many women ; equally free and easy with barmaids
at a tavern or with wife and daughter in a citizen's
hall. The Summoner and the Pardoner, parasites that
crawled on the skirts of the Church and plied under
her broad mantle their dubious trade in sacred things,
had not even the Friar's redeeming features; yet we
see at a glance their common humanity, and even
recognize in our modern world many of the follies on
which they were tempted to trade. Two figures alone
among this company go far to redeem the Church the
Scholar and the Poor Parson. The former's disin-
terested devotion to scholarship has passed into a
proverb : " gladly would he learn, and gladly teach "
an ideal which then, as always, went too often hand
in hand with leanness and poverty. The Parson, con-
tentedly poor himself and full of compassion for his
still poorer neighbours, equally ready at time of need
to help the struggling sinner or to "snib" the im-
penitent rich man, has often tempted earlier com-
mentators to read their own religious prepossessions
into Chaucer's verse. One party has assumed that so
! 1v %; 'f^
. -v,-:-'
''CANTERBURY TALES 11 149
good a priest must have been a Lollard, or WyclifFe
himself; while others have contended (with even less
show of evidence, as we shall presently see) that he
represents the typical orthodox rector or vicar of
Chaucer's time. The one thing of which we may be
certain is that Chaucer knew and reverenced goodness
when he saw it, and that he would willingly have
subscribed to Thackeray's humble words, " For myself,
I am a heathen and a publican, but I can't help thinking
that those men are in the right." In the Tales them-
selves, as on the pilgrimage, a multitude of sins are
covered by this ploughman's brother, of whom it is
written that
Christes lore, and His apostles' twelve,
He taught, and first he followed it him-selve.
To summarize even briefly the appearance and
character of the remaining eighteen pilgrims would be
too long a task ; but it must be noticed how infallible
an eye Chaucer had for just the touch which makes a
portrait live. The Country Squire, looking like a daisy
with his fiery face and white beard ; the Sailor, em-
barrassed with his horse; the Wife of Bath, "somedeal
deaf," and therefore as loud in her voice as in her dress ;
the Summoner's scurvy eczema under his thick black
eyebrows ; the Pardoner's smooth yellow hair and eyes
starting out of his head ; the thick-set Miller, with a
red-bristled wart on the end of his nose, and a bullet
head with which he could burst in a door at one charge ;
and his rival the slender, choleric Reeve
Full longe were his legges and full lean,
Y-like a staff; there was no calf y-seen !
A goodly company, indeed, and much to the taste of
Harry Bailey, mine host of the Tabard, whom we may
pretty safely identify with an actual contemporary and
fellow M.P. of Chaucer's.* He proposes, therefore, to
* Skeat, v., p. 129. "In the subsidy Rolls (1380-1) for Southwark,
occurs the entry ' Henri Bayliff, Ostyler . . . 2s.' In the Parliament held
150 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
be their guide and master of the ceremonies on the
road to Canterbury and back. The pilgrims themselves
shall tell tales to shorten the journey, " drawing cut "
A white coat and a blue hood weare'd lie,
A bagpipe well coulde he blow and sound,
And therewithal he brought us out of town.
THE MILLER
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
for their order ; and the teller of the best tale shall, on
their return, enjoy a supper at the expense of the rest-
By one assent
We be accorded to his judgement ;
And thereupon the wine was set anon ;
We drunken, and to restij went each one
Withouten any longer tarrying.
A-morrow, when the day began to spring,
Up rose the host, and was our aller cock, [for all of us
And gathered us together in a flock. . . .
at Westminster (1376-7) Henry Bailly was one of the representatives for
that borough, and again, in the Parliament at Gloucester, 2, Rich. II.,
the name occurs."
CHAPTER XII
"CANTERBURY TALES" FIRST AND
SECOND DAYS
" For lo ! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone ; the flowers
appear on the earth ; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
voice of the turtle is heard in our land." SOLOMON'S SONG
HERE, then, they are assembled on a perfect morn-
ing of English spring, with London streets
awakening to life behind them, and the open road in
front Think of the dayspring from on high, the good
brown earth and tender foliage, smoke curling up from
cottage chimneys, pawing steeds, barking dogs, the
cheerful stirrup - cup ; every rider's face set to the
journey after his individual mood, when at last the Host
had successfully gathered his flock
And forth we ride, a little more than pace,
Unto the watering of Saint Thomas.
That is, to the little brook which now runs underground
near the second milestone on the Old Kent Road,
remembered only in the name of St. Thomas' Road and
the Thomas a Becket Tavern. Up to this point the
party had been enlivened by the Miller's bagpipe, and
Professor Raleigh has justly pointed out how many
musicians there are in Chaucer's company : the Squire;
the Prioress with her psalms, "entuned in her nose full
seemely " ; the Friar, who could sing so well to his own
harp; the Pardoner, with his "Come hither, love, to
me," and the Summoner, who accompanied him in so
"stiff" a bass. By St. Thomas' watering, however,
either the Miller is out of breath or the party are out of
patience, for here the Host reins up, and reminds them
152 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
of their promise to tell tales on the way. They draw
cuts, and the longest straw (whether by chance or by
Boniface's sleight of hand) falls to the one man with
whom none other would have disputed for precedence.
The Knight, with ready courtesy, welcomed the choice
"in God's name," and rode on, bidding the company
"hearken what I say." Let us not inquire too closely
how far every word was audible to the whole thirty, as
they clattered and splashed along. We may always be
sure that enough was heard to keep the general interest
alive, and it may be charitably hoped that the two nuns
were among those who caught least.
The Knight's tale was worthy of his reputation
chivalrous, dignified, with some delicate irony and many
flights of lofty poetry. The Host laughed aloud for joy
of this excellent beginning, and called upon the Monk for
the next turn ; but here suddenly broke in
The Miller, that for-dronken was all pale
So that unnethe upon his horse he sat ... [scarcely
And swore by armcs and by blood and bones
' I can a noble talc for the nonce
With which I will now quit the Knightes tale.'
Our Hosto saw that he was drunk of ale
And said, ' abide, Robin, my lieve brother,
Some better man shall tell us first another ;
Abide, and let us worken thriftily.'
'By Goddes soul,' quoth he, 'that will not I ;
For I will speak, or elles go my way.'
Our Host answered : ' Tell on, a devil way !
Thou art a fool ; thy wit is overcome.'
' Now hearken,' quoth the Miller, ' all and some !
But first I make a protestatioun
That I am drunk, I know it by my soun ; [sound
And therefore, if that I misspeak or say,
Wite it the ale of Southwark, I you pray ; [blame
For I will tell a legend and a life
Both of a carpenter and of his wife. . . .'
The Reeve (who is himself a carpenter also) protests
in vain against such slander of honest folk and their
wives. Robin Miller has the bit between his teeth, and
"CANTERBURY TALES" 153
plunges now headlong into his tale as he had run in old
times against the door a " churles tale," but told with
consummate dramatic effect, and recorded by Chaucer
with a half-ironical apology
And therefore every gentle wight I pray
For Godde's love, deem ye not that I say
Of evil intent, but that I must rehearse
Their tales alle, be they better or worse,
Or elles falsen some of my matere.
And therefore, whoso list it not to hear,
Turn over the leaf and choose another tale.
The Miller's story proved an apple of discord in its
small way, but poetically effective in the variety which
it and its fellows lent to the journey
Diverse folk diversely they said,
But for the moste part they laughed and played ;
Nor at this tale I saw no man him grieve,
But it were only *Ose wold the Reeve,"
who, though chiefly sensible to the slur upon his own
profession, lays special stress on the indecorum of the
Miller's proceeding. Some men (he says) are like
medlars, never ripe till they be rotten, and with all
the follies of youth under their grizzling hairs
When that our host had heard this sermoning,
He gan to speak as lordly as a King :
He saide ' What amounteth all this wit ?
What shall we speak all day of holy writ ? [why
The devil made a Reeve for to preach,
And of a cobbler a shipman or a leech !
Say forth thy tale, and tarry not the time,
Lo, Depeford, and it is halfway prime.
Lo Greenewich, there many a shrew is in ;
It were all time thy tale to begin.'
The story records, by way of natural revenge, the
domestic misfortunes of a Miller ; and, for all the Reeve's
moral indignation, it is as essentially "churlish" as its
predecessor, and as popular with at least one section of
the party
154 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
The Cook of London, while the Reeve spake,
For joy, him thought, he clawed him on the back,
' Ha, ha ! ' quoth he, ' for Christes passioun,
This Miller had a sharp conclusion . . .
But God forbidde that we stinten here ;
And therefore, if that ye vouchsafe to hear
A tale of me, that am a poore man,
I will you tell as well as ever I can
A little jape that fell in our citie." [jest
The Host gives leave on the one condition that the
tale shall be fresher and wholesomer than the Cook's
victuals sometimes are
' For many a pasty hast thou letten blood,
And many a Jack of Dover hast thou sold [meat pie
That hath been twyes hot and twyes cold !
Of many a pilgrim hast thcu Christes curse,
For of thy parsley yet they fare the worse
That they have eaten with thy stubble-goose ;
For in thy shop is many a flye loose ! '
The Cook's "little jape," however, to judge by its com-
mencement, was even more fly-blown than his stubble-
goose. The Miller seemed to have let loose every
riotous element, and to have started the company upon
a downward slope of accelerating impropriety. But
this to Chaucer would have been more than a sin, it
would have been an obvious artistic blunder; and when
the ribaldry begins in earnest, the best manuscripts
break off with " of this Cook's tale maked Chaucer no
more." In other MSS. the Cook himself breaks off
in disgust at his own story, and tells the heroic tale of
Gamelyn, which Chaucer may possibly have meant to
rewrite for the series. Here end the tales of the first
day ; incomplete enough, as indeed the whole book is
only a fragment of Chaucer's mighty plan. The pilgrims
probably slept at Dartford, fifteen miles from London.
Next morning the Host seems to have found it hard
to keep his team together ; it is ten o'clock when he
begins to bewail the time already wasted, and prays the
Man of Law to tell a tale. The lawyer assents in a
"CANTERBURY TALES" 155
speech interlarded with legal French and legal meta-
phors, and referring at some length to Chaucer's other
poems. He then launches into a formal prologue, and
finally tells the pious Custance's strange adventures by
land and sea. This, if not so generally popular with
the company as other less decorous tales before and
after it, enjoyed at least a genuine succes destime. There-
upon followed one of the liveliest of all Chaucer's
Dialogues. The Host called upon the Parish Priest for
a tale, adjuring him "for Godde's bones" and "by
Godde's dignitie." " Benedicite ! " replied the Parson;
"what aileth the man, so sinfully to swear?" upon
which the Host promptly scents "a Lollard in the
wind," and ironically bids his companions prepare for
a sermon.* The Shipman, professionally indifferent
to oaths of whatever description, and bold in conscious
innocence of all puritanical taint, here interposes an
emphatic veto
' Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,'
Saide the Shipman ; ' here he shall not preach.
He shall no gospel glosen here nor teach. [expound
We believe all in the great God,' quoth he,
' He woulde sowen some difficultee,
Or springen cockle in our cleane corn ;
And therefore, Host, I warne thee beforn,
My jolly body shal a tale tell,
And I shall clinken you so merry a bell
That I shall waken all this companye ;
But it shall not be of philosophye,
Nor pkysices, nor termes quaint of law,
There is but little Latin in my maw.'
The bluff skipper is as good as his word; his tale is
frankly unprofessional, and its infectious jollity must
almost have appealed to the Parson himself, even though
it reeked with the most orthodox profanity, and showed
no point of contact with puritanism except a low estimate
of average monastic morals.
* The too strict avoidance of oaths had long been authoritatively
noted as suggesting a presumption of heresy ; here (as in so many other
places) Chaucer admirably illustrates formal and official documents.
156 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
'Well said, by Corpus Dominus] quoth our Host,
'Now longii mayest thou sailc by the coast,
Sir gentle master, gentle mariner ! . . .
Draw ye no monkes more unto your inn !
But now pass on, and let us seek about
Who shall now telle first, of all this rout,
Another tale ; ' and with that word he said,
As courteously as it had been a maid,
' My lady Prioresse, by your leave,
So that I wist I shouldc you not grieve,
I woulde deemen that ye tellen should
A tale next, if so were that ye would.
Now will ye vouchesafe, my lady dear ? '
' Gladly,' quoth she, and said as ye shall hear.
The gentle lady tells that charming tale which Burne-
Jones so loved and adorned, of the little scholar murdered
by Jews for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and
sustained miraculously by her power. Chaucer loved
the Prioress ; and he makes us feel the reverent hush
which followed upon her tale
When said was all this miracle, every man
So sober was, that wonder was to see,
Till that our Hoste japen then began,
And then at erst he looked upon me,
And saidc thus : ' What man art thou ? ' quoth he ;
' Thou lookest as thou wouldest find an hare,
For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
Approache near, and look up merrily.
Now ware you, sirs, and let this man have place !
He in the waist is shape as well as I ;
This were a puppet in an arm to embrace
For any woman, small and fair of face !
He seemeth elvish by his countenance,
For unto no wight doth he dalliance.
Say now somewhat, since other folk have said ;
Tell us a tale of mirth, and that anon. . . .'
Chaucer executes himself as willingly as the rest,
and enters upon a long-winded tale of knight-errantry,
parodied from the romances in vogue ; but the Age of
Chivalry is already half past. Before the poet has
"CANTERBURY TALES" 157
even finished the preliminary catalogue of his hero's
accomplishments
' No more of this, for Goddes dignitee,'
Quoth our Hoste, 'for thou makest me
So weary of thy very lewedness [folly
That (all so wisely God my soulc bless)
Mine care's achen of thy drasty speech [trashy
Now, such a rhyme the devil I biteche ! [commit to
This may well be rhyme doggerel,' quoth he.
Chaucer suffers the interruption with only the
mildest of protests, and proceeds to tell instead "a lytel
thing in prose," a translation of a French translation of
a long- winded moral allegory by an Italian friar-preacher.
The monumental dulness of this "Tale of Melibee and
of his wife Prudence " is no doubt a further stroke of
satire, and Chaucer must have felt himself amply avenged
in recounting this story to the bitter end. Yet there
was a moral in it which appealed to the Host, who
burst out
... as I am a faithful man
And by that precious corpus Madrian [St. Mathurin
I haddii liever than a barrel ale
That goode lief my wife had heard this tale.
For she is nothing of such patience
As was this Melibeus' wife Prudence.
By Goddes bones, when I beat my knaves,
She bringeth me forth the greate clubbed staves,
And crieth ' Slay the dogge's every one.
And break them, bothe back and every bone ! '
And if that any neighebour of mine,
Will not in churche to my wife incline,
Or be so hardy to her to trespass,
When she com'th home she rampeth in my face
And crieth ' False coward, wreak thy wife !
By corpus bones ! I will have thy knife,
And thou shalt have my distaff and go spin ! '
The Host has plenty more to say on this theme ; but
presently he remembers his duties, and calls upon the
Monk for a tale, though not without another long
digression on monastic comforts and monastic morals,
158 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
from the point of view of the man in the street. The
Monk takes all his broad jesting with the good humour
of a man who is used to it, and offers to tell some
tragedies, "of which I have an hundred in my cell."
After a few harmless pedantries by way of prologue, he
proceeds to reel off instalments of his hundred tragedies
with the steady, self-satisfied, merciless drone of a man
whose office and cloth generally assure him of a patient
hearing. Here, however, we are no longer in the
minster, but in God's own sunlight and fresh air; the
Pilgrim's Way is Liberty Hall; and while Dan Piers
is yet moralizing with damnable iteration over the ninth
of his fallen heroes, the Knight suddenly interrupts
him the Knight himself, who never yet no villainy ne
said, in all his life, unto no manner wight!
' Ho ! ' quoth the Knight, ' good sir, no more of this !
What ye have said is right enough, ywis [certainly
And muckle more ; for little heaviness
Is right enough to many folk, I guess.
I say for me it is a great dis-ease,
Where as men have been in great wealth and ease
To hearen of their sudden fall, alas !
And the contrary is joy and great solace . . .
And of such thing were goodly for to tell.'
'Yea^' quoth our Host, 'by Sainte Panics Bell ! . . .
Sir Monk, no more of this, so God you bless,
Your tale annoyeth all this companye ;
Such talking is not worth a butterflye,
For therein is there no desport nor game.
Wherefore, sire Monk, or Dan Piers by your name,
I pray you heartily, tell us somewhat else ;
For surely, but for clinking of your bells .
That on your bridle hang on every side,
By Heaven's King, that for us alle died,
I should ere this have fallen down for sleep,
Although the slough had never been so deep . . .
Sir, say somewhat of hunting, I you pray.'
' Nay,' quoth this Monk, ' I have no lust to play ;
Now let another tell, as I have told.'
Then spake our Host with rude speech and bold,
And said unto the Nunne's Priest anon,
' Come near, thou Priest, come hither, thou Sir John !
Tell us such thing as may our heartcs glad ;
"CANTERBURY TALES" 159
Be blithe, though thou ride upon a jade.
What though thine horse be bothe foul and lean ?
If it will serve thee, reck thou not a bean ;
Look that thine heart be merry evermo ! '
The domestic confessor of stately Madame Eglantine
is possibly accustomed to sudden and peremptory com-
mands ; in any case, he obeys readily enough here.
"'Yes, sir/ quoth he, 'yes, Host'" . . . and proceeds
to recount that tragi-comedy of Reynard and Chanti-
cleer which, well-worn as the plot is, shows off to
perfection many of Chaucer's rarest artistic qualities.
The tale is told, and the Host shows his appreciation
by saluting the Nuns' Priest with the same broad gibes
and innuendoes with which he had already greeted
the Monk. Here probably ends the second day; the
Pilgrims would sleep at Rochester, which was in sight
when the Monk began his Tale.
CHAPTER XIII
"CANTERBURY TALES" THIRD AND FOURTH
DAYS
"... quasi peregrin, che si ricrea
Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
E spera gia ridir com' ello stea."
" Paradise," xxxi., 43
ON the morning of the third day we find the
Physician speaking ; he tells the tragedy of
Virginia, not straight from Livy, whom Chaucer had
probably never had a chance of reading, but from its
feebler echo in the " Roman de la Rose." Even so,
however, the pity of it comes home to his hearers.
Our Hoste gan to swear as he were wood ; [mad
' Harrow ! ' quoth he, ' by nailes and by blood !
This was a false churl and a false justice ! . . .
By Corpus bones ! but I have triacle [medicinal syrup
Or else a draught of moist and corny ale,
Or but I hear anon a merry tale,
Mine heart is lost, for pity of this maid.
Thou bel ami, thou Pardoner,' he said
' Tell us some mirth, or japes, right anon ! '
' It shall be done,' quoth he, ' by saint Ronyon !
But first ' (quoth he) ' here at this ale stake
I will both drink and eaten of a cake.'
And right anon the gentles gan to cry
' Nay ! let him tell us of no ribaldry. . . .'
' I grant, ywis, quoth he ; 'but I must think
Upon some honest thing, the while I drink.'
The suspicion of the "gentles" might seem prema-
ture ; but they evidently suspected this pardon-monger
of too copious morning-draughts already, and the tenor
of his whole prologue must have confirmed their fears.
With the cake in his mouth, and the froth of the pot
"CANTERBURY TALES" 1G1
on his lips, he takes as his text, Radix malorum est
cupiditas, " Covetousness is the root of all evil," and
exposes with cynical frankness the tricks of his trade.
By a judicious use of "my longe crystal stones, y-
crammed full of cloutes and of bones," I make (says
he) my round 100 marks a year;* and, when the people
have offered, then I mount the pulpit, nod east and west
upon the congregation like a dove on a barn-gable, and
preach such tales as this. . . . Hereupon follows his
tale of the three thieves who all murdered each other
for the same treasure. It is told with admirable spirit ;
and now the Pardoner, carried away by sheer force of
habit, calls upon the company to kiss his relics, make
their offerings, and earn his indulgences piping-hot
from Rome. Might not a horse stumble here, at this
very moment, and break the neck of some unlucky
pilgrim, who would then bitterly regret his lost oppor-
tunities in hell or purgatory? Strike, then, while the
iron is hot
I counsel that our Host here shall begin,
For he is most enveloped in sin !
. . . Come forth, sir Host, and offer first anon,
And thou shall kiss my relics every one . . .
Yea, for a groat ! unbuckle anon thy purse.
' Nay, nay,' quoth he, ' then have I Christe's curse . . .
The Host, as his opening words may suggest,
answers to the purpose, easy words to understand, but
not so easy to print here in the broad nakedness of
their scorn for the Pardoner and all his works
This Pardoner answered not a word ;
So wroth he was, no worde would he say.
' Now,' quoth our Host, ' I will no longer play
With thee, nor with none other angry man.'
But right anon the worthy Knight began
(When that he saw that all the people lough) [laughed
' No more of this, for it is right enough ! [quite
Sir Pardoner, be glad and merry of cheer ;
And ye, sir Host, that be to me so dear,
* About ,1000 in modern money.
M
162 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
I pray now that ye kiss the Pardoner ;
And, Pardoner, I pray thee draw thee near,
And, as we diden, let us laugh and play.'
Anon they kist, and riden forth their way.
The thread of the tales here breaks off; and then
suddenly we find the Wife of Bath talking, talking,
talking, almost without end as she was without begin-
ning. Her prologue is half a dozen tales in itself, longer
Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Y-wimplecl well, and on her head an hat
As broad as is a buckler or a targe ;
A foot-mantle about her hippes large,
And on her feet a pair of spurres sharp.
THK WIFE OF BATH
'From the Ellesmere MS.)
almost, and certainly wittier, than all the other pro-
logues put together. The theme is marriage, and her
mouth speaks from the abundance of her heart. Here,
indeed, we have God's plenty : fish, flesh, and fowl are
set before us in one dish, not to speak of creeping
things : it is in truth a strong mess, savoury to those
that have the stomach for it, but reeking of garlic,
"CANTERBURY TALES" 163
crammed with oaths like the Shipman's talk ; a sample
of the Eternal Feminine undisguised and unrefined, in
its most glaring contrast with the only other two women
of the party, the Prioress and her fellow-nun
Men may divine, and glosen up and down,
But well I wot, express, withouten lie,
God bade us for to wax and multiply ;
That gentle text can I well understand.
Eke, well I wot, he said that mine husband
Should leave father and mother, and take me ;
But of no number mention made he
Of bigamy or of octogamy,
Why shoulde men speak of it villainy ?
The good wife tells how she has outlived five
husbands, and proclaims her readiness for a sixth. The
five martyrs are sketched with a master-touch, and are
divided into categories according to their obedience or
disobedience. But, with all their variety of disposition,
time and matrimony had tamed even the most stubborn
of them ; even that clerk of Oxford whose earlier wont
had been to read aloud nightly by the fire from a Book
of Bad Women
. . . And when I saw he woulde never fine [finish
To readen on this cursed book all night,
All suddenly three leaves have I plight [plucked
Out of his book, right as he read ; and eke
I with my fist so took him on the cheek
That in our fire he fell backward adown ;
And up he start as doth a wood lioun [mad
And with his fist he smote me on the head,
That in the floor I lay as I were dead . . .
But the quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love
and when the husband had been brought, half by
violence and half by cajolery, to give his wife her own
way in everything, then
After that day we never had debate.
God help me so, I was to him as kind
As any wife from Denmark unto Ind.
For all social purposes, as we have said, this was
364 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
the only woman of the company ; and where there is
one woman there are always two men as ready to
quarrel over her as if she were Helen of Troy. More-
over, in this case, professional jealousies were also at
work. Already in the middle of her prologue the
Summoner had fallen into familiar dialogue with this
merry wife; and now, at the end
The Friar laughed when he had heard all this ;
' Now, dame,' quoth he, ' so have I joy or bliss,
This is a long preamble of a tale ! '
And when the Summoner heard the Friar gale [cry out
' Lo,' quoth the Summoner, Goddes armes two !
A friar will intermit him ever-mo. [interfere
Lo, goode men, a fly, and eke a frere
Will fall in every dishii and matere.
What speak'st thou of a " preambulation "?
What ? amble, or trot, or peace, or go sit down !
Thou lettest our disport in this manere.'
' Yea, wilt thou so, sir Summoner ? ' quoth the Frere ;
' Now, by my faith, I shall, ere that I go,
Tell of a Summoner such a tale or two
That all the folk shall laughen in this place.'
' Now elle's, Friar, I beshrew thy face,' [curse
Quoth this Summoner, ' and I beshrewe me,
But if I telle tales, two or three,
Of friars, ere I come to Sittingbourne,
That I shall make thine hearte for to mourn,
For well I wot thy patience is gone.'
Our Hoste cried ' Peace ! and that anon ; '
And saide : ' Let the woman tell her tale ;
Ye fare as folk that drunken be of ale.
Do, dame, tell forth your tale, and that is best.'
' All ready, sir,' quoth she, ' right as you list,
If I have licence of this worthy Frere.'
' Yes, dame,' quoth he, ' tell forth, and I will hear.'
The lady, having thus definitely notified her choice
between the rivals (on quite other grounds, as the next
few lines show, than those of religion or morality),
proceeds to tell her tale on the theme that nothing is
so dear to the female heart as " sovereignty " or
" master}'-." Then the quarrel blazes up afresh, and
the Friar (after an insulting prologue for which the
"CANTERBURY TALES 11 165
Host calls him to order) tells a story which is, from
first to last, a bitter satire on the whole tribe of
Summoners. Then the Summoner, "quaking like an
aspen leaf for ire," stands up in his stirrups and claims
to be heard in turn. His prologue, which by itself
might suffice to turn the tables on his enemy, is a
broad parody of those revelations to devout Religious
which announced how the blessed souls of their par-
ticular Order (for the Friars were not alone in this
egotism) enjoyed for their exclusive use some choice
and peculiar mansion in heaven under the skirts of
the Virgin's mantle, for instance, or even within the
His eyen twinkled in his head aright
As do the starres in a frosty night.
THE FRIAR
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
wound of their Saviour's side. Then begins the tale
itself of a Franciscan Stiggins on his daily rounds,
and of the " olde churl, with lockes hoar," who at one
stroke blasphemed the whole convent, and took ample
change out of Friar John for many a good penny or
fat meal given in the past, and for much friction in his
conjugal relations. The whole is told with inimitable
humour, and it is to be regretted that we hear nothing
of the comments with which it was received. At this
point comes another gap in Chaucer's plan.
166 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
Then suddenly our Host calls upon the Clerk of
Oxford
Ye ride as still and coy as doth a maid,
Were newly spoused, sitting at the board ;
This day ne heard I of your tongue a word . . .
For Goddes sake, as be of better cheer !
It is no time for to study here.
The Clerk, thus rudely shaken from his meditations,
tells the story of Patient Griselda, which he had "learned
at Padua, of a worthy clerk . . . Francis Petrarch, the
laureate poet." The good Clerk softens down much of
that which most shocks the modern mind in this truly
medieval conception of wifely obedience ; and, as a con-
firmed bachelor, he adds an ironical postscript which is
as clever as anything Chaucer ever wrote.* We must
revere the heroine, but despair of finding her peer
Griseld' is dead, and eke her patience,
And both at once buried in Itayle.
So begins this satirical ballad, and goes on to bid the
wife of the present day to enjoy herself at her husband's
expense
Be aye of cheer as light as leaf on lind, [lime-tree
And let him care and weep, and wring and wail !
The last line rouses a sad echo in one heart at least,
for the Merchant had been wedded but two months
'Weeping and wailing, care and other sorro\v, .
I know enough, on even and a-morrow '
Ouoth the Merchant, 'and so do other more
That wedded be . . .'
His tale turns accordingly on the misadventures of an
old knight who had been foolish enough to marry a
girl in her teens. Upon this the Host congratulates
* " Its unsuitablcness to the Clerk has often been noticed," writes Mr.
Pollard ; but surely those who find fault here have forgotten the obvious
truth voiced by the Wife of Bath, " For trust ye well, it is impossible that
any clerk will speake good of wives."
"CANTERBURY TALES 1 ' I6t
himself that his wife, with all her shrewishness and
other vices more, is "as true as any steel." Here
ends the third day; the travellers probably slept at
the Pilgrim's House at Ospringe, parts of which stand
still as Chaucer saw it.
Next morning the Squire is first called upon to
... say somewhat of love ; for certes ye
Do ken thereon as much as any man.
He modestly disclaims the compliment, and tells (or
rather leaves half told) the story of Cambuscan, with
the magic ring and mirror and horse of brass. Chaucer
had evidently intended to finish the story ; for the
Franklin is loud in praise of the young man's eloquence,
and sighs to mark the contrast with his own son, who,
in spite of constant paternal "snybbings," haunts dice
and low company, and shows no ambition to learn of
"gentillesse." "Straw for your 'gentillesse,' quoth our
Host," and forthwith demands a tale from the Franklin,
who, with many apologies for his want of rhetoric, tells
admirably a Breton legend of chivalry and magic.
Another gap brings us to the Second Nun, who tells
the tale of St. Cecilia from the Golden Legend, with
a prefatory invocation to the Virgin translated from
Dante. By the time this is ended the pilgrims are five
miles further on, at Boughton-under-Blee. Here, at the
foot of the hilly forest of Blean, with only eight more
miles before them to Canterbury, they are startled by
the clattering of horse-hoofs behind them. It was a
Canon Regular with a Yeoman at his heels.* The man
had seen the pilgrims at daybreak, and warned his
master; and the two had ridden hard to overtake so
merry a company. While the Canon greeted the
pilgrims, our Host questioned his Yeoman, who first
obscurely hinted, and then began openly to relate, such
* This highly dramatic addition of the Canon and his Yeoman is
probably an afterthought of Chaucer's, who had very likely himself
suffered at the hands of some such impostor.
168 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
things as made the Canon set spurs to his horse and
"flee away for very sorrow and shame." The Yeoman
is now only too glad to make a clean breast of it. He
has been seven years with this monastic alchemist, who
has falkn meanwhile from one degree of poverty to
another ; half-cheat, half-dupe, with a thousand tricks
for cozening folk of their money, but always wasting
his own on the search for the philosopher's stone.
Meanwhile, after ruinous expenses and painful care,
every experiment ends in the same way : " the pot to-
breaketh, and farewell, all is go!" The experimenters
pick themselves up, look round on the mass of splinters
and the dinted walls, and begin to quarrel over the cause
Some said it was along on the fire making,
Some saide Nay, it was on the blowing,
(Then was I feared, for that was mine office,)
' Straw ! ' quoth the third, ' ye be lewed and nice [ignorant and foolish
It was not tempered as it ought to be.'
' Nay,' quoth the fourthe, ' stint and hearken me ;
Because our fire ne was not made of beech,
That is the cause, and other none, so I theech ! ' [so may I thrive !
At last the mess is swept up, the few recognizable
fragments of metal are put aside for further use, another
furnace is built, and the indefatigable Canon concocts
a fresh hell- broth, sweeping away all past failures
with the incurable optimism of a monomaniac, " There
was defect in somewhat, well I wot." Many of the
fraternity, however, are arrant knaves, without the
least redeeming leaven of folly ; and the Yeoman goes
on to tell the tricks by which such an one beguiled
a " sotted priest " who had set his heart on this unlawful
gain.
By this time the company was come to " Bob Up and
Down," which was probably the pilgrims' nickname for
Upper Harbledown. Here our Host found the Cook
straggling behind, asleep on his nag in broad daylight
'Awake, thou Cook,' quoth he, ' God give thee sorrow !
What aileth thee to sleepc by the morrow ?
Hast thou had fleas all night, or art thou drunk ? '
"CANTERBURY TALES 11 169
The Cook opens his mouth, and at once compels his
neighbours to adopt the latter and less charitable theory.
He is evidently in no state for story-telling; so the
Manciple offers himself instead, not without a few broad
jests at his fellow's infirmity
And with this speech the Cook was wroth and wraw, [indignant
And on the manciple he 'gan nodde fast
For lack of speech ; and down the horse him cast,
Where as he lay till that men up him took !
The Manciple, fearing lest the Cook's resentment
should prompt some future revenge in the way of
business, pulled out a gourd of wine, coaxed another
draught into the drunken man, and earned his half-
articulate gratitude. Then he told the fable of the crow
from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The tale was ended, and the sun began to sink, for
it was four o'clock.* The cavalcade began to "enter at
a thorpe's end " no doubt the village of Harbledown,
the last before Canterbury, famous for the Black Prince's
Well and for the relics of St. Thomas at its leper
hospital. Here at last the pilgrims remember the real
object of their journey. The Host lays aside his oaths
(all but one, " Cokkes bones ! " which slips out unawares)
and looks round now for the hitherto neglected Parson,
upon whom he calls for a "fable."
This Parson answered all at once
' Thou gettest fable none y-told for me,
For Paul, that writeth unto Timothee,
Reproveth them that weyven soothfastness [depart from
And tellen fables and such wretchedness . . .
I cannot geste " rum, ram, ruf" by letter,!
Nor, God wot, rhyme hold I but little better ;
And therefore if you list I will not glose
I will you tell a merry tale in prose
* There is, as Prof. Skeat points out, an inconsistency here in the
text. We can see from Group H., 1. 16 that Chaucer had at one time
meant the Manciple's tale to be told in the morning ; yet now when it is
ended he tells us plainly that it is four in the afternoon (Group I., 5).
t An allusion to the alliterative verse popular among the common
folk, like that of " Piers Plowman."
170 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
To knit up all this feast, and make an end ;
And Jesu, for His grace, wit me send
To shewe you the way, in this voyage,
Of thilke perfect, glorious pilgrimage
That hight Jerusalem celestial . . .'
Upon this word we have assented soon,
For as us seemed, it was for to doon [right to do
To enden in some virtuous sentence,
And for to give him space and audience.
The Host voices the common consent, reinforcing
his speech for once with a prayer instead of an oath.
The Parson then launches out into a treatise on the
Seven Deadly Sins and their remedies, translated from
the French of a 13th-century friar. The treatise (like
Chaucer's other prose writings) lacks the style of his
verse ; but it contains one lively and amusing chapter
of his own insertion, satirizing the extravagance of
costume in his day (lines 407 ff.).
Long before the Parson had ended, the city must
have been in full view below white-walled, red-roofed
amid its orchards and green meadows, but lacking that
perfect bell-tower which, from far and near, is now the
fairest sight of all. At this point an anonymous and
far inferior poet has continued Chaucer's narrative in
the "Tale of Beryn." The prologue to that tale shows
us the pilgrims putting up at the Chequers Inn, "that
many a man doth know," fragments of which may still
be seen close to the Cathedral at the corner of Mercery
Lane.* Travelling as they did in force and especially
with such redoubtable champions among their party
they would no doubt have been able to choose this
desirable hostel without too great molestation ; but in
favour of less able-bodied pilgrims the city authorities
were obliged to pass a law that no hosteler should
* It was mostly destroyed by fire in 1865. Most writers on Canterbury,
misled by the ancient spelling, call the inn " Chequers of the Hope."
Hope, as Prof. Skcat has long ago pointed out, is simply Hoop, a part of
the inn sign. Cf. Riley, "Memorials of London," pp. 497, 524; and
" Hist. MSS. Commission," Report v., pt. i., p. 448.
CAN TE: R B VRY.
"CANTERBURY TALES" 171
"disturb no manner of strange man coming to the city
for to take his inn ; but it shall be lawful to take his
inn at his own lust without disturbance of any hosteler." *
In the Cathedral itself
The Pardoner and the Miller, and other lewd sots,
Sought themselves in the church right as lewd goats,
Peered fast and pored high upon the glass,
Counterfeiting gentlemen, the armes for to blase, [blazon
till the Host bade them show better manners, and go
offer at the shrine. "Then passed they forth boister-
ously, goggling with their heads," kissed the relics
dutifully, saw the different holy places, and presently
sat down to dinner. How the Miller (being accustomed
to such sleight of hand) stole afterwards a bosom-full
of "Canterbury brooches"; how uproarious was the
merriment after supper, and how the Pardoner became
the hero of a scandalous adventure this and much
more may be read at length in the prologue to the "Tale
of Beryn." It will already have been noted, however,
that the anonymous poet entirely agrees with Chaucer
in laying stress on what may be called the bank-holiday
side of the pilgrimage. That side does indeed come out
with rather more than its due prominence when we thus
skip the separate tales and run straight through the
plot of the pilgrims' journey; but, when all allowances
have been made, Chaucer enables us to understand why
orthodox preachers spoke on this subject almost as
strongly as the heresiarch Wycliffe ; and, on the other
hand, how great a gap was made in the life of the
common folk by the abolition of pilgrimages.
The very fidelity with which the poet paints his
own time shows us the Reformation in embryo. We
have in fact here, within the six hundred pages of the
" Canterbury Tales," one of the most vivid and signi-
ficant of all scenes in the great Legend of the Ages ;
and his pilgrims, so intent upon the present, so exactly
* Mrs. Green, " Town Life," ii., 33.
172 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
mirrored by Chaucer as they moved and spoke in their
own time, tell us nevertheless both of another age
that was almost past and of a future time which was
not yet ripe for reality. The Knight is still of course
the most respected figure in such a company; and he
brings into the book a pale afterglow of the real
crusades ; but the Host now treads close upon his
heels, big with the importance of a prosperous citizen
who has twice sat in Parliament side by side with
knights of the shire. The good Prioress recalls faintly
the heroic age of monasticism ; yet St. Benedict and
St. Francis would have recognized their truest son in
the poor Parson, whose puritanism brought him into
such vehement suspicion of heresy, and upon whom
the pilgrims called only in the last resort* The Monk
and the Friar, the Summoner and the Pardoner, do
indeed remind us how large a share the Church claimed
in every department of daily life; but they make us
ask at the same time "how long can it last?" Extremes
meet; and the "lewd sots" who went "goggling with
their heads," gaping and disputing at the painted
windows on their way to the shrine, were lineal
ancestors to the notorious "Blue Dick" of 250 years
later, who made ai merit of having mounted on a lofty
ladder, pike in hand, to "rattle down proud Becket's
glassie bones."
* It was actually one of the counts in 1405 against the priest Richard
Wyche, sometime Vicar of Deptford, who was finally burned on Tower
Hill in 1440, that he had maintained "men and women on pilgrimage
should always converse with each other concerning Holy Scripture" : a
sentiment which Chaucer's Parson might well have uttered. Another of
Wyche's condemned expressions was practically identical with that of
Berthold v. Regensburg, quoted above on p. 141 (Fasc. Zizaniorum, R.S.
p. 502).
CHAPTER XIV
KING AND QUEEN
" Then came there a King ; knighthood him led ;
Might of the Commons made him to reign."
"Piers Plowman," B., Prol. 112
WE have traced the main course of the poet's life,
followed him at work and at play, and con-
sidered his immediate environment. Let us now try
to roam more at large through the England of his day,
and note the more salient features of that society, high
and low, from which he drew his characters.
In this age, Chaucer could scarcely have had a
better introduction to Court life than that which fell to
his lot. The King whom he served, when we have
made all possible deductions, was still the most imposing
sovereign of the time. Adam Murimuth, a contem-
porary chronicler not often given to rhetoric, has drawn
Edward' II I. 's portrait with no more exaggeration than
we must take for granted in a contemporary, and with
such brilliancy that his more picturesque successor,
Walsingham, has transferred the paragraph almost
bodily into his own pages. "This King Edward,"
writes Adam, "was of infinite goodness, and glorious
among all the great ones of the world, being entitled
The Glorious par excellence, for that by virtue of grace
from heaven he outshone in excellence all his pre-
decessors, renowned and noble as they were. He was
so great-hearted that he never blenched or changed the
fashion of his countenance at any ill-hap or trouble
soever that came upon him ; a renowned and fortunate
warrior, who triumphed gloriously in battles by sea
174 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
and land ; clement and benign, familiar and gentle even
to all men, both strangers and his own subjects or
dependents ; devoted to God, for he held God's Church
and His ministers in the greatest reverence. In
temporal matters he was not too unyielding, prudent
and discreet in counsel, affable and gentle in courtesy
of speech, composed and measured in gesture and
manners, pitiful to the afflicted, and profuse in largesse.
In times of wealth he was not immoderate; his love
of building was great and discriminating; he bore losses
with moderation ; devoted to hawking, he spent much
pains on that art. His body was comely, and his face
like the face of a god, wherefrom so marvellous grace
shone forth that whosoever openly considered his
countenance, or dreamed thereof by night, conceived
a sure and certain hope of pleasant solace and good-
fortune that day. He* ruled his realm strictly even to
his old age; he was liberal in giving and lavish in
spending ; for he was excellent in all honour of manners,
so that to live under him was to reign ; since his fame
was so spread abroad among barbarous nations that,
extolling his honour, they averred that no land under
the sun had ever produced a King so noble, so generous,
or so fortunate ; and that, after his death, none such
would perchance ever be raised up for future times.
Yet he controlled not, even in old age, the dissolute
lusts of the flesh; and, as is believed, this intemperance
shortened his life." Hereupon follows a painfully in-
volved sentence in which the chronicler draws a moral
from Edward's brilliant youth, the full midday of his
manhood, and the degradation of his declining years.*
If the praise of Edward's clemency seems overdrawn
to those who remember the story of the citizens of
Calais, we must bear in mind that the chronicler com-
pares him here with other sovereigns of the time
with his rival Philippe de Valois, who was scarcely
* A. Murimuth, ed. Hog., p. 225.
KING AND QUEEN 175
dissuaded from executing Sir Walter de Mauny in cold
blood, despite his safe conduct from the Dauphin ; with
Gaston de Foix, who with a penknife in his hand struck
at his only son and killed him ; with Richard II., who
smote the Earl of Arundel in the face during the
Queen's funeral, and " polluted Westminster Abbey
with his blood " ; with Charles the Bad of Navarre,
and Pedro the Cruel of Spain. What even the cleric
Murimuth saw, and what Chaucer and his friend
Hoccleve saw still more intimately, was the Haroun
al-Raschid who went about "in simple array alone" to
hear what his people said of him ; the " mighty victor,
mighty lord" of Sluys, Crecy and Calais; the King
who in war would freely hazard his own person,
" raging like a wild boar, and crying ' Ha Saint
Edward! Ha Saint George!'"* and who in peace
would lead the revels at Windsor, clad in white and
silver, and embroidered with his motto
Hay, hay, the white swan !
By Goddes soul I am thy man !
If Edward and his sons were renowned for their uniform
success in battle, it was not because they had feared to
look defeat in the face. Every one knows how much
was risked and all but lost at Crecy and Poitiers ; the
great sea-fight of '' Les Espagnols sur Mer" is less
known. Froissart excels himself in this story.t We
see Edward sailing out gaily, in spite of the superior
numbers of the Spaniards, and bidding his minstrels
pipe the brand-new air which Sir John Chandos had
Drought back from Germany, while Chandos himself
sang the words. Then, when the enemy came sailing
down upon him with their great embattled ships, the
King bade his steersman tilt straight at the first Spanish
vessel, in spite of the disparity of weight. The English
boat cracked under the shock; her seams opened; and,
* Walsingham, an. 1349 ; Hoccleve, E.E.T.S., vol. iii., p. 93.
t Ed. Buchon, i., 286 ; ed. Luce, iv., 327.
176 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
by the time that Edward had captured the next ship,
his own was beginning to sink. The Black Prince had
even a narrower escape ; it became evident that his
ship would go down before he could board the enemy ;
only the timely arrival of the Earl of Derby saved him ;
the deck sank almost under his feet as he climbed the
sides of the Spaniard ; " and all the enemy were put
overboard without taking any to mercy." The Queen
prayed all day at some abbey probably Battle in
anguish of heart for the news which came from time to
time through watchers on the far-off Downs. Although
Edward and his sons took horse at once upon their
landing, not until two o'clock in the morning did they
find her, apparently in her own castle at Pevensey : "so
the lords and ladies passed that night in great revel,
speaking of war and of love."
Arms and love were equally commemorated in a
foundation which was one of the glories of Edward's
reign the Round Tower of Windsor. Dying chivalry,
like other moribund institutions, broke out now and
then into fantastic revivals of the past. Edward re-
solved to hold a Round Table at his palace, and to
build a great tower for the purpose. Warrants were
sent out to impress the unhappy labourers throughout
six counties ; for a short time as many as 722 men were
employed on the work, and the whole Round Tower
was built in ten months of the year 1344.* Froissart
connects this, probably too closely, with the Order of
the Garter, which seems not to have been actually
founded until 1349, when every household in the
country was saddened by the Great Pestilence. We
have here one of the typical contrasts of those times ;
both sides of the shield are seen in those memories of
love and war which cling round the Round Tower of
Windsor. Lavish profusion side by side with dirt and
squalor; the minstrels clad in rich cloths taken from
* Longman, " Edward III.," i., 225, 413.
KING AND QUEEN
THE PEACOCK FEAST
(From the sepulchral brass of Robert Braunche, twice Mayor of Lynn, who died
in 1364. Braunche had the honour of entertaining Edward III., here dis-
tinguished by his crown on the extreme left of the guests. Observe the
attitude of the attendant squire on the extreme right.)
178 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
the Spaniards ; bright eyes and careless merriment at
the Royal board, while the hawks scream down from
their perches, and noble hounds fight for bones among
the rushes; silken trains, stiff with gold, trailing over
the nameless defilements of the floor; a King and his
sons, more stately and warlike than any other Royal
family ; but their crowns are in pawn with foreign mer-
chants, and they themselves have been obliged to leave
four earls behind as hostages to their Flemish creditors.*
Royalty has always its memento mori, no doubt, but
not always under the same forms.
If Chaucer the poet was fortunate in his Royal master,
still more fortunate was Philippa Chaucer in her name-
sake, "the good Queen." The wooing of Edward and
Philippa of Hainault is painted lovingly by Froissart,
who was the lady's compatriot and a clerk in her ser-
vice. In 1326 Queen Isabella of England, who had
broken more or less definitely with her husband, was
staying with her eldest boy at her brother's Court in
Paris. But the King of France had no wish to encour-
age open rebellion; and Isabella avoided extradition
only by fleeing to her cousin, the Count of Hainault, at
Valenciennes. " In those days had Count William four
daughters, Margaret, Philippa,- Joan, and Isabel; among
whom young Edward devoted himself most, and inclined
with eyes of love to Philippa rather than to the rest;
and the maiden knew him better and kept closer com-
pany with him than any of her sisters. So have I since
heard from the mouth of the good Lady herself, who
was Queen of England, and in whose court and service
I dwelt." It was agreed, in reward for the count's hos-
pitality, that Edward should marry one of the girls; and
when Isabella went home to conquer England in her
son's name, the main body of her army consisted of
Hainaulters, and most of the prepaid dowry of the
future bride was consumed by the expenses of the
* Longman, "Edward II I., "vol. i,, pp. 147, 157, 178,
KING AND QUEEN 179
expedition. Then, in 1327, when the wretched Edward II.
had bitterly expiated his follies and crimes in the dun-
geon of Berkeley, and the "she-wolf of France" already
ruled England in her son's name, she went through the
form of asking whether he would marry one of the
young countesses. "And when they asked him, he
began to laugh, and said, ' Yes, I am better pleased to
marry there than elsewhere; and rather to Philippa, for
she and I accorded excellently well together; and she
wept, I know well, when I took leave of her at my
departure.'" All that was needed now was a papal dis-
pensation ; for the parties were second cousins. This
was, of course, a mere matter of form or, rather, of
money. Towards the end of the year Philippa was
married by proxy at Valenciennes; and on December 23
she arrived in London, where there were "great rejoic-
ings and noble show of lords, earls, barons, knights,
highborn ladies and noble damsels, with rich display of
dress and jewels, with jousts too and tourneys for the
ladies' love, with dancing and carolling, and with great
and rich feasts day by day ; and these rejoicings endured
for the space of 3 weeks." Edward was at York, resting
after his first Scottish campaign; so "the young queen
and her meinie journeyed northwards until they came to
York, where she was received with great solemnity.
And all the lords of England who were in the city came
forth in fair array to meet her, and with them the young
king, mounted on an excellently-paced hackney, magni-
ficently clad and arrayed ; and he took her by the hand,
and then embraced and kissed her; and so riding side
by side, with great plenty of minstrels and honours,
they entered the city and came to the Queen's lodgings.
. . . So there the young King Edward wedded Philippa
of Hainault in the cathedral church of St. William [s/c].
. . . And the king was seventeen years of age, and the
young queen was on the point of fourteen years. . . . Thus
came the said queen Philippa to England at so happy a
time that the whole kingdom might well rejoice thereat,
J80 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
and did indeed rejoice ; for since the days of queen
Guinevere, who was wife to King Arthur and queen of
England (which men called Great Britain in those days),
so good a queen never came to that land, nor any who
had so much honour, or such fair offspring ; for in her
time, by King Edward her spouse, she had seven sons
and five daughters. And, so long as she lived, the
realm of England enjoyed grace, prosperity, honour,
and all good fortune ; nor was there ever enduring
famine or dearth in the land while she reigned there.
. . . Tall and straight she was ; wise, gladsome, humble,
devout, free-handed, and courteous; and in her time
she was richly adorned with all noble virtues, and well
beloved of God and men."*
So far Froissart, recording events which happened
some ten years before his birth, from the mouths of the
actors themselves; writing lovingly, in his extreme old
age, of his first and noblest patroness, and proudly as a
Dane might write thirty years hence of the princess
who had come from his own home to win all hearts
in England.f From other chroniclers, and from dry
official documents, we may throw interesting sidelights
on these more living memorials. One such document,
however, is as living as a page from Froissart himself,
in spite of or shall we say, because of ? its essentially
business character and the legal caution of phrase in
which the writer has wrapped up his direct personal
impressions. The official register of the ill-fated Bishop
Stapledon, of Exeter, so soon to expiate at the hands
of a London mob his loyal ministerial service to
* Ed. Buchon, i., 12, 34 ; ed. Luce, i., 284-287.
t Cf. Darmesteter, " Froissart," p. 16, and Froissart, ed. Buchon,
p. 512. "The good queen 1'hilippa was in my youth my queen and
sovereign. I was five years at the court of the King and Queen of
England. In my youth I was her clerk, serving her with fair ditties and
treatises of love ; and, for the love of the noble and worthy lady my
mistress, all other great lords king, dukes, earls, barons and knights,
of whatsoever country they might be loved me and saw me gladly and
gave me much profit."
I'll ll.ll'l' \ <H II \l.\ \l I/] . I ROM HKK 'lOMl: IN
KING AND QUEEN 181
Edward II., is in the main like other episcopal registers
a record of ordinations, institutions, dispensations, law-
suits, and more or less unsuccessful attempts to reduce
his clergy to canonical discipline.* But it contains,
under the date of 1319 (p. 169), an entry which has, so
far as I know, been strangely overlooked hitherto by
historians. The Latin title runs, " Inspection and
Description of the Daughter of the Count of Hainault,
Philippa by name." To this a later hand, probably that
of the succeeding bishop, has added : "She was Queen
of England, Wife to Edward III." The document itself,
which is in Norman-French, runs as follows: "The
lady whom we saw has not uncomely hair, betwixt
blue-black and brown. Her head is clean-shaped ; her
forehead high and broad, and standing somewhat for-
ward. Her face narrows between the eyes, and the
lower part of her face still more narrow and slender
than the forehead. Her eyes are blackish-brown and
deep. Her nose is fairly smooth and even, save that it
is somewhat broad at the tip and also flattened, yet it is
no snub-nose. Her nostrils are also broad, her mouth
fairly wide. Her lips somewhat full, and especially the
lower lip. Her teeth which have fallen and grown
again are white enough, but the rest are not so white.
The lower teeth project a little beyond the upper ; yet
this is but little seen. Her ears and chin are comely
enough. Her neck, shoulders, and all her body and
lower limbs are reasonably well shapen ; all her limbs
are well set and unmaimed ; and nought is amiss so far
as a man may see. Moreover, she is brown of skin all
over, and much like her father; and in all things she is
pleasant enough, as it seems to us. And the damsel
will be of the age of nine years on St. John's day next
* I cannot refrain here from calling attention to the extraordinary
historical value of the eight volumes of Exeter registers published by
Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph, who in this department has done more
for historical students, during the last twenty-five years, than all the
learned societies of the kingdom put together.
182 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
to come, as her mother saith. She is neither too tall
nor too short for such an age ; she is of fair carriage,
and well taught in all that becometh her rank, and
highly esteemed and well beloved of her father and
mother and of all her meinie, in so far as we could
inquire and learn the truth." Cannot we here see,
through the bishop's dry and measured phrases, a
figure scarcely less living and attractive than Froissart
shows us?
But the register corrects the historian just where we
should expect to find him at fault. " The noble and
worthy lady my mistress" would scarcely have told
Froissart how much State policy there had been in the
marriage, true love-match as it had been in spite of all.
The old bishop, before whose face she had trembled,
and laughed again behind his back with her sisters; his
invidious comparisons between her first and second
teeth; his business-like collection of backstairs gossip,
which some more confidential maid-of-honour must
surely have whispered to her mistress of all this the
noble lady naturally breathed no syllable to her devoted
clerk. But, apart from the official record in the secret
archives of Exeter diocese, a vague memory of it all was
kept alive in men's minds by that most efficacious of
historical preservatives a broad jest. The rhyming
chronicler Hardyng, whose life overlapped Froissart's
and Chaucer's by several years, records a good deal of
Court gossip, especially about Edward lil.'s family.
He writes*
" Me sent forth then to Hainault for a wife
A bishop and other lordes temporal,
Where, in chamber privy and secret
At discovered, dishevelled also in all,
As seeming was to estate virginal.
Among themselves our lords, for his prudence
Of the bishop asked counsel and sentence.
* Ed. 1812, p. 317. The text of this book is frequently corrupt ; but
the evident sense of these ungrammatical lines 3-5 is that the envoys
were allowed to watch the unsuspecting damsels from some hidden coign
KING AND QUEEN 183
"Which daughter of the five should be the queen.
Who counselled thus, with sad avisement
' We will have her with good hippe's, I mean,
For she will bear good sons, to mine intent.'
To which they all accorded by assent,
And chose Philippa that was full feminine,
As the bishop most wise did determine.
" But then among themselves they laughed fast ay ;
The lords then said [that] the bishop couth
Full mickle skill of a woman alway, [was a good judge
That so could choose a lady that was uncouth ; [unknown
And, for the merry words that came of his mouth,
They trowed he had right great experience
Of woman's rule and their convenience."
Later on again, after enumerating the titles and
virtues of the sons that were born of this union,
Hardyng continues
" So high and large they were of all stature,
The least of them was of [his] person able
To have foughten with any creature
Single battaile in actes merciable ;
The bishop's wit me thinketh commendable,
So well could choose the princess that them bore,
For by practice he knew it, or by lore."
We need find no difficulty in reconciling Froissart
with these other documents ; Edward's was a love-
match, but, like all Royal love-matches, subject to pos-
sible considerations of State. The first negotiations for
a papal dispensation carefully avoid exact specification ;
the request is simply for leave to marry "one of the
daughters" of Hainault ; only two months before the
actual marriage does the final document bear Philippa's
name.
The Queen's public life the scene before Calais,
and her (somewhat doubtful) presence at the battle of
Nevile's Cross belongs rather to the general history of
England ; of her private life, as of Chaucer's, a great
deal only flashes out here and there, meteor-wise, from
of vantage. It will be noted that Hardyng speaks of five daughters ;
there had been five, but the eldest was now dead.
184 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
account-books and similar business documents. We
find, for instance, what gifts were given to the
messengers who announced the births of her successive
children to the King; and Beltz, in his "Memorials of
the Garter," has unearthed the name of the lady who
nursed the Black Prince.* We find Edward building
for his young consort the castle since called Queen-
borough, the master-mason on this occasion being John
Gibbon, ancestor to the great historian. At another
moment we see the Earl of Oxford, as Chamberlain,
claiming for his perquisites after the coronation
Philippa's bed, shoes, and three silver basins; but
Edward redeemed the bed for ^looo.f This redemp-
tion is explained by divers entries in the Royal accounts;
in 1335-6 the King owed John of Cologne 3000 for a
bed made "against the confinement of the Lady Philippa
... of green velvet, embroidered in gold, with red
sirens, bearing a shield with the arms of England and
Hainault." The infant on this occasion was the short-
lived William of Hatfield, whose child-tomb may be
seen in York Cathedral. Her carpets for a later con-
finement cost 900, but her bed only ^"1250. And so on
to the latest entries of all the carving of her tomb
at Westminster ; the wrought-iron hearse which the
canons of St. Paul's obligingly took from the tomb of
Bishop Northbrooke and sold for that of the Queen at
the price of 600; J lastly, the rich "mortuary" accruing
* Ed. 1841, p. 206. She was Katherine, daughter to Sir Adam
Banastre. Miss Strickland asserts that the Queen, contrary to the
custom of medieval ladies in high life, nursed the infant herself. She
gives no reference, and her authority is possibly Joshua Barnes's " Life
of Edward III." (1688), p. 44, where, however, references arc again
withheld. The Black Prince was born June 15, 1330, when the King
would have been 19 and the Queen just on 16 years old according to
Froissart ; but Edward was in fact only 17, and Bishop Stapledon's
reckoning would make the Queen about the same age.
t Throughout this chapter I multiply the ancient money by fifteen, to
bring it to modern value.
J Such acts of vandalism were far more common in the Middle Ages
than is generally imagined ; a good many instances are noted in the
index of my " From St. Francis to Dante."
KING AND QUEEN 185
to the Chapter of York Minster, who got for their per-
quisite the bed on which Philippa had breathed her
last, and had its rich hangings cut up into "thirteen
copes, six tunics and one chasuble." *
But here let us turn back to Froissart, who, under
the year 1369, turns suddenly aside from his chronicle
of battles and sieges, to pay a heartfelt tribute to his
first benefactress. " Now let us speak of the death of
the gentlest queen, the most liberal and courteous of all
who reigned in her time, my Lady Philippa of Hainault,
queen of England and Ireland : God pardon her and all
others ! In these days . . . there came to pass in
England a thing common enough, but exceedingly
pitiful this time for the king and her children and the
whole land ; for the good lady the Queen of England,
who had done so much good in her lifetime and suc-
coured so many knights, ladies, and damsels, and given
and distributed so freely among all people, and who
had ever loved so naturally those of her own native
land of Hainault, lay grievously sick in the castle of
Windsor; and her sickness lay so hard upon her that
it waxed more and more grievous, and her last end drew
near. When therefore this good lady and queen knew
that she must die, she sent for the king her husband;
and, when he was come into her presence, she drew her
right hand from under the coverlet and put it into the
right hand of the king, who was sore grieved in his
heart ; and thus spake the good lady : ' My Lord, heaven
be thanked that we have spent our days in peace and
joy and prosperity ; wherefore I pray that you will
grant me three boons at this my departure.' The King,
weeping and sobbing, answered and said, ' Ask, Lady,
for they are granted.' ' My Lord, I pray for all sorts of
good folk with whom in time past I have dealt for their
* Devon, "Issues of the Exchequer," pp. 144, 153, 155, 199; "York
Fabric Rolls," p. 125 ; cf. 154. It was one ot the privileges of the
Archbishops of York to crown the Queen. For the mortuary system, see
my " Priests and People in Medieval England." (Simpkins. u\)
186 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
merchandize, both on this and on that side of the sea,
that ye will easily trust their word for that wherein I
am bound to them, and pay full quittance for me. Next,
that ye will keep and accomplish all ordinances which I
have made, and all legacies which I have bequeathed,
both to churches on either side of the sea where I have
paid my devotions, and to the squires and damsels who
have served me. Thirdly, my Lord, I pray that ye will
choose no other sepulture than to lie by my side in the
Abbey of Westminster, when God's will shall be done
on you.' The King answered weeping, ' Lady, I grant
it you.' Then made the Queen the sign of the true
cross on him, and commended the King to God, and
likewise the lord Thomas her youngest son,. who was
by her side; and then within a brief space she yielded
up her ghost, which (as I firmly believe) the holy angels
of paradise seized and carried with great joy to the
glory of heaven ; for never in her life did she nor
thought she any thing whereby she might lose it."
As the good Queen's beloved bed-hangings were
dispersed in fragments among the Canons of York, so
her dying benedictions would seem to have been
scattered no less widely to the winds. One of the
servants so tenderly commended to the King's care was
Chaucer's wife ; but another was Alice Ferrers, whom
Edward had already noted with favour, and who now
took more or less openly the dead Queen's place. Men
aged rapidly in those days ; and, as Edward trod the
descending slope of life, his manly will weakened and
left little but the animal behind. Philippa was scarcely
cold in her grave when Alice Ferrers, decked in her
mistress's jewels, was masquerading at royal tour-
naments as the Lady of the Sun. Fresently she was
sitting openly at the judge's side in the law courts; the
King's shame was the common talk of his subjects ; and
even the formal protests of Parliament failed to separate
her from the doting old King, from whom on his death-
bed she kept the clergy away until his speech was gone.
KING AND QUEEN 187
Then, having stolen the very rings from his fingers, she
left him to a priest who could only infer repentance
from his groans and tears. Thomas of Woodstock, the
Queen's Benjamin, fared not much better. He became
the selfish and overbearing leader of the opposition to
Richard II., and was at last secretly murdered by order
of the royal nephew whom he had bullied more or less
successfully for twenty years.
CHAPTER XV
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES
" ' But teach me,' quoth the Knight ; ' and, by Christ, I will assay ! '
' By St. Paul,' quoth Perkin, ' ye proffer you so fair
That I shall work and sweat, and sow for us both,
And other labours do for thy love, all my lifetime,
In covenant that thou keep Holy Church and myself
From wasters and from wicked men, that this world destroy ;
And go hunt hardily to hares and foxes,
To boars and to badgers that break down my hedges ;
And go train thy falcons wild-fowl to kill,
For such come to my croft and crop my wheat.' "
" Piers Plowman," B., vi., 24
THE theory of chivalry, which itself owes much to
pre-Christian morality, lies at the roots of the
modern conception of gentility. The essence of perfect
knighthood was fearless strength, softened by charity
and consecrated by faith. A certain small and select
class had (it was held) a hereditary right to all the
best things of this world, and the concomitant duty of
'using with moderation for themselves and giving freely
to others. Essentially exclusive and jealous of its privi-
leges, the chivalric ideal was yet the highest possible
in a society whose very foundations rested on caste
distinctions, and where bondmen were more numerous
than freemen. The world will always be the richer
for it ; but we must not forget that, like the finest
flower of Greek and Roman culture, it postulated a
servile class; the many must needs toil and groan
and bleed in order that the few might have grace
and freedom to grow to their individual perfection. In
its finest products it may extort unwilling admiration
even from the most convinced democrat
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 189
" Often I find myself saying, old faith and doctrine abjuring, . . .
Were it not well that the stem should be naked of leaf and of tendril,
Poverty-stricken, the barest, the dismallest stick of the garden ;
Flowerless, leafless, unlovely, for ninety-and-nine long summers,
So in the hundredth, at last, were bloom for one day at the summit,
So but that fleeting flower were lovely as Lady Maria ? " *
When, however, we look closer into the system, and
turn from theory to practice, then we find again those
glaring inconsistencies which meet us nearly every-
where in medieval society. A close study even of
such a panegyrist as Froissart compels us to look to
some other age than his for the spirit of perfect
chivalry ; and many writers would place the palmy
days of knighthood in the age of St. Louis. Here
again, however, we find the same difficulty ; for in
Joinville himself there are many jarring notes, and
other records of the period are still less flattering to
knightly society. The most learned of modern apolo-
gists for the Middle Ages, Leon Gautier, is driven to
put back the Golden Age one century further, thus
implying that Francis and Dominic, Aquinas and Dante,
the glories of Westminster and Amiens, the saintly
King who dealt justice under the oak of Vincennes, and
twice led his armies oversea against the heathen, all
belonged to an age of decadence in chivalry. Yet, even
at this sacrifice, the Golden Age escapes us. When we
go back to the middle of the i2th century we find
St. Bernard's contemporaries branding the chivalry of
their times as shamelessly untrue to its traditional
code. "The Order of Knighthood" (writes Peter of
Blois in his 94th Epistle) "is nowadays mere disorder.
. . . Knights of old bound themselves by an oath to
stand by the state, not to flee from battle, and to
prefer the public welfare to their own lives. Nay
even in these present days candidates for knighthood
take their swords from the altar as a confession that
they are sons of the Church, and that the blade is
* Clough, " Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich."
190 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
given to them for the honour of the priesthood, the
defence of the poor, the chastisement of evil-doers,
and the deliverance of their country. But all goes by
contraries ; for nowadays, from the moment when they
are honoured with the knightly belt, they rise up
against the Lord's anointed and rage against the patri-
mony of the Crucified. They rob and despoil Christ's
poor, afflicting the wretched miserably and without
mercy, that from other men's pain they may gratify
their unlawful appetites and their wanton pleasures.
. . . They who should have used their strength against
Christ's enemies fight now in their cups and drunken-
ness, waste their time in sloth, moulder in debauchery,
and dishonour the name and office of Knighthood by
their degenerate lives." This was about 1 1 70. A couple
of generations earlier we get an equally unfavourable
impression from the learned and virtuous abbot, Guibert
of Nogent. Further back, again, the evidence is still
more damning; and nobody would seriously seek the
golden age of chivalry in the nth century. It is indeed
a mirage ; and Peter of Blois in 1170, Cardinal Jacques
de Vitry in 1220, who so disadvantageous!}' contrasted
the knighthood of their own time with that of the past,
were simply victims of a common delusion. They
despaired too lightly of the actual world, and sought
refuge too credulously in an imaginary past. Even if,
in medieval fashion, we trace this institution back to
Romulus, to David, to Joshua, or to Adam himself, we
shall, after all, find it nowhere more flourishing than in
the first half of the i3th century, imperfectly as its code
was kept even then.
By the end of that century, however, two great
causes were at work which made for the decay of
chivalry. Before Dante had begun to write, the real
Crusades were over or, indeed, even before Dante
was born for the two expeditions led by St. Louis
were small compared with others in the past. In 1229
the Emperor Frederick II. had recovered from the infidel
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 191
by treaty those holy places which Coeur-de-Lion had
in vain attempted to storm ; and this had dealt a severe
blow to the old traditions. Again, during the years
that followed, the Pope did not hesitate to attack his
enemy the Emperor, even in the Holy Land ; so that,
while Christian fought against Christian over Christ's
grave, the Turk stepped in and reconquered Jerusalem
(1244). Lastly, his successors, while they regularly
raised enormous taxes and contributions for the re-
conquest of Palestine, systematically spent them on
their own private ambitions or personal pleasures.
Before the i3th century was out the last Christian
fortress had been taken, and there was nothing now
to show for two centuries of bloodshed. Under these
repeated shocks men began to lose faith in the crusading
principle. A couple of generations before Chaucer's
birth, Etienne de Bourbon complained that the upper
classes " not only did not take the cross, but scoffed
at the lower orders when they did so" (p. 174). In
France, after the disastrous failure of St. Louis's first
expedition, the rabble said that Mahomet was now
stronger than Christ* Edward III. and his rival,
Philippe de Valois, did for a moment propose to go
and free the Holy Land in concert, but hardly seriously.
Chaucer's Knight had indeed fought in Asia Minor, but
mainly against European pagans in Spain and on the
shores of the Baltic ; and, irreproachable as his motives
were in this particular instance, Gower shows scant
sympathy for those which commonly prompted crusades
of this kind.f
A still more fatal cause of the decay of chivalry,
perhaps, lay in the growing prosperity of the merchant
class. Even distinguished historians have written mis-
leadingly concerning the ideal of material prosperity and
middle-class comfort, as though it had been born only
with the Reformation. It seems in fact an inseparable
* " Mon, Germ, Scriptt.," xxxii., 444, + ' Mirour," 23893 ft".
192 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
bye-product of civilization : whether healthy or un-
healthy need not be discussed here. As the Dark
Ages brightened into the Middle Ages, as mere club-
law grew weaker and weaker, so the longing for material
comforts grew stronger and stronger. The great mon-
asteries were among the leaders in this as in so many
other respects. In 12th-century England, the nearest
approach to the comfort of a modern household would
probably have been found either in rich Jews' houses or
in the more favoured parts of abbeys like Bury and St.
Albans. Already in the isth century the merchant
class begins to come definitely to the fore. As the early
14th-century Rcnart Ic Contrcfait complains
" Bourgeois du roi est pair et comte ;
De tous dtats portent 1'honneur.
Riches bourgeois sont bien seigneurs ! " *
Italy and the south of France were particularly advanced
in this respect ; and Dante's paternal house was probably
richer in material comforts than any castle or palace in
England, as his surroundings were in many other ways
more civilized. Even the feudal aristocracy, as will
presently be seen, learned much in these ways from the
citizen-class : and, meanwhile, a slow but sure inter-
mingling process began between the two classes them-
selves. First only by way of abuse, but presently by
open procedure of law, the rich plebeian began to buy
for himself the sacred rank of Knighthood. Long before
the end of the 1 3th century, there were districts of France
in which rich citizens claimed knighthood as their in-
alienable right. In England, the order was cheapened by
Edward I.'s statute of Distraint of Knightliood (1278), in
which some have seen a deliberate purpose to undermine
the feudal nobility. By this law, all freeholders possess-
ing an estate of 20 a year were not only permitted, but
compelled to become knights; and the superficiality of
the strict chivalric ideal is shown clearly by the facts
* Ldnient, " Satire en France" (1859), p. 202.
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 193
that such a law could ever be passed, and that men tried
so persistently to evade it. If knighthood had been in
reality, even at the end of the i2th century, a'nything
like what its formal codes represent, then no such
attempt as this could have been made in 1235 by a King
humbly devoted to the Church for, as early as that
year, Henry III. had anticipated his son's enactments.
Where Royal statutes and popular tendencies work
together against an ancient institution, it soon begins to
crumble away; and the knighthood which Chaucer knew
was far removed from that of a few generations before.
We read in "Piers Plowman" that, while "poor gentle
blood " is refused, "soapsellers and their sons for silver
have been knights." An Italian contemporary, Sac-
chetti, complains that he has seen knighthood conferred
on " mechanics, artisans, even bakers ; nay, worse still,
on woolcarders, usurers, and cozening ribalds " ; and
Eustache Deschamps speaks scarcely less strongly. *
Several 14th-century mayors of London were knighted,
including John Chaucer's fellow-vintner Picard, and
Geoffrey's colleagues at the Customs, Walworth,
Brembre, and Philipot.
But Brembre and Philipot, Sir Walter Besant has
reminded us, were probably members of old country
families, who had come to seek their fortunes in
London, t True ; but this only shows us the decay of
chivalry on another side. Nothing could be more
honourable, or better in the long run for the country,
than that there should be such a double current of
circulation, fresh healthy blood flowing from the country
manor to the London counting-house, and hard cash
trickling back again from the city to the somewhat
impoverished manor. It was magnificent, but it was
not chivalry, at any rate in the medieval sense. Gower
* Sacchetti, " Novelle," cliii. ; Ste-Palaye, " Chevalerie," ii., 80.
f Mr. Rye (/. c.} points out how frequent was the interchange between
London and Lynn. Another colleague of John Chaucer's, John de Stodey,
Mayor and Sheriff of London, had been formerly a taverner at Lynn.
O
194 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
reminded his readers that even civil law forbade the
knight to become merchant or trader; but the move-
ment was far too strong to be checked by law. The
old families had lost heavily by the crusades, by the
natural subdivision of estates, and by their own extrava-
gance. Moreover, the growing luxury of the times
made them feel still more acutely the limitation of
their incomes ; and the moneylenders of Chaucer's day
found their best customers among country magnates.
" The city usurer," writes Gower, " keeps on hire his
brokers and procurers, who search for knights, vava-
sours and squires. When these have mortgaged their
lands, and are driven by need to borrow, then these
rascals lead them to the usurers ; and presently that
trick will be played which in modern jargon is called
the chevisancc of money. . . . Ah ! what a bargain, which
thus enriches the creditor and will ruin the debtor!"*
In an age which knew knight-errantry no longer, nothing
but the most careful husbandry could secure the old
families in their former pre-eminence; and well it
was for England that these were early forced by bitter
experience to recognise the essential dignity of honest
commerce. Edward I., under the financial pressure of
his great wars, insisted that he was " free to buy and
sell like any other." All the Kings were obliged to
travel from one Royal manor to another, as M. Jusserand
has pointed out, from sheer motives of economy.f We
have already seen how Edward III., even in his pleasures,
kept business accounts with a regularity which earned
him a sneer from King John of France. The Cistercians,
who were probably the richest religious body in England,
owed their wealth mainly to their success in the wool
* "Mirour," 7225 : Cf. "Piers Plowman," C, vii., 248. Readers of
Chaucer's " Prologue " will remember this mysterious word " chevisance "
in connection with the Merchant. Its proper meaning was simply
bargain : the slang sense will be best understood from a Royal ordinance
of 1365 against those who lived by usury ; " which kind of contract, the
more subtly to deceive the people, they cull exchange, or chcvisance"
t " Vie Nomade," pp. 33, 46.
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 195
trade. But perhaps the most curious evidence of this
kind may be found in the invaluable collections from
the Berkeley papers made in the i7th century by John
Smyth of Nibley, and published by the Bristol and
Gloucester Archaeological Society. We there find a
series of great barons, often holding distinguished
offices in peace or war, but always exploiting their
estates with a dogged unity of purpose which a Lom-
bard might have envied. Thomas L, who held the
barony from 1220 to 1243, showed his business foresight
by letting a great deal of land on copyhold. His son
(1243-1281) was "a careful husband, and strict in all his
bargains." This Thomas II., who served with distinc-
tion in twenty-eight campaigns, kept in his own hands
from thirteen to twenty manors, farming them with the
most meticulous care. His accounts show that " when
this lord was free from foreign employment, he went
often in progress from one of his manors and farm-
houses to another, scarce two miles asunder, making his
stay at each of them for one or two nights, overseeing
and directing the above-mentioned husbandries." Lady
Berkeley went on similar rounds from manor to manor
in order to inspect the dairies. Smyth gives amusing
instances of the baron's frugalities, side by side with
his generosity. He followed a policy of sub-letting land
in tail to tenants, calculating "that the heirs of such
donees being within age should be in ward to him, . . .
and so the profit of the land to become his own again,
and the value of the marriage also to boot " : a calcula-
tion which the reader will presently be in a better
position to understand. He " would not permit any
freeman's widow to marry again unless she first made
fine with him " (one poor creature who protested
against this rule was fined 20 in modern money) ;
and he fixed a custom, which survived for centuries
on his manors, of seizing into his own hands the estates
of all copyholders' widows who re-married, or were
guilty of incontinence. He vowed a crusade, but never
196 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
performed it; his grandson paid a knight 100 to go
instead of the dead baron. Lady Berkeley's " elder
years were weak and sickly, part of whose physic was
sawing of billets and sticks, for which cause she had
before her death yearly bought certain fine hand-saws,
which she used in her chamber, and which commonly
cost twopence a piece."
Maurice III. (1321-1326) continued, or rather im-
proved upon, his father's exact methods. Thomas III.
(1326-1361) was almost as great a warrior as his grand-
father, though less fortunate. Froissart tells in his own
picturesque style how he pressed so far forward at
Poitiers as to get himself badly wounded and taken
prisoner, and how the squire who took him bought
himself a knighthood out of the ransom. (Globe ed.,
p. 127). Even more significant, perhaps, are the Royal
commissions by which this lord was deputed to raise
men for the great war, and to which I shall have occasion
to refer later on. But, amidst all this public business,
Thomas found time to farm himself about eighty
manors ! Like his grandfather, he was blessed with an
equally business-like helpmeet, for when he was abroad
on business or war, "his good and frugal lady withdrew
herself for the most part to her houses of least resort
and receipt, whether for her retirement or frugality, I
determine not." The doubt here expressed must be
merely rhetorical, for Smyth later on records how she
had a new gown made for herself "of cloth furred
throughout with coney-skins out of the kitchen." In-
deed, most of the cloth and fur for the robes of this great
household came from the estate itself. " In each manor,
and almost upon each farmhouse, he had a pigeon-house,
and in divers manors two, and in Hame and a few others
three; from each house he drew yearly great numbers,
as 1300, 1 200, 1000, 850, 700, 650 from an house; and
from Hame in one year 2151 young pigeons." These
figures serve to explain how the baronial pigeons, prey-
ing on the crops, and so sacred that no man might touch
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 197
them on pain of life or limb, became one of the chief
causes which precipitated the French Revolution. Like
his grandfather and indeed like all feudal lords, from
the King downwards he found justice a profitable
business. He "often held in one year four leets or
views of frankpledge in Berkeley borough, wherefrom,
imposing fourpence and sixpence upon a brewing of
ale, and renting out the toll or profit of the wharfage
and market there to the lord of the town, he drew
yearly from that art more than the rent of the borough." *
Again, he dealt in wardships, buying of Edward III.
"for 1000 marks . . . the marriage of the heir of John
de la Ware, with the profits of his lands, until the full
age of the heir." He carried his business habits into
every department of life. In founding a chantry at
Newport he provided expressly by deed that the priest
" should live chastely and honestly, and not come to
markets, ale-houses, or taverns, neither should frequent
plays or unlawful games ; in a word, he made this his
priest by these ordinances to be one of those honest
men whom we mistakenly call puritans in these our
days." The accounts of his tournaments are most
interesting, and throw a still clearer light on King
John's sneer. Smyth notes that this lord was a most
enthusiastic jouster, and gives two years as examples
from the accounts (ist and 2nd Ed. III.). Yet, in all the
six tournaments which Lord Thomas attended in those
two years, he spent only go iSs., or 15 35. per tourna-
ment ; and this at a time when he was saving money at
the rate of 450 a year, an economy which he nearly
trebled later on.f He evidently knew, however, that
a heavy outlay upon occasion will repay itself with
* These were, of course, fines for breaches of the assize of ale, as in
the Norwich cases already mentioned.
f In 1347 his total income was ^2460, out of which he saved ^1150.
In the two other years given by Smyth he saved ,659 and 977. Some
knights even made a living by pot-hunting at tournaments. See Ch.-V.
Langlois, " La Vie en France au M. A.," 1908, p. 163.
198 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
interest, for we find him paying 108 for a tower in
his castle ; and, whereas the park fence had hitherto
been of thorn, new-made every three years, Lord Thomas
went to the expense of an oaken paling.
Maurice IV. (1361-1368), "in husbandry his father's
true apprentice," not only made considerable quantities
of wine, cider, and perry from his gardens at Berkeley,
but turned an honest penny by selling the apples which
had grown under the castle windows. Warned by
failing health, he tried to secure the fortune of his eldest
son, aged fourteen, by marrying him to the heiress of
Lord Lisle. The girl was then only seven, so it was
provided that she should live on in her father's house
for four years after the wedding. Maurice soon died,
and Lord Lisle bought from the King the wardship of
his youthful son-in-law for ,400 a year that is, for
about a sixth of the whole revenue of the estates. This
young Thomas IV., having at last become his own
master (1368-1417), "fell into the old course of his
father's and grandfather's husbandries." Among other
thrifty bargains, he " bought of Henry Talbot twenty-
four Scottish prisoners, taken by him upon the land by
the seaside, in way of war, as the King's enemies." *
He left an only heiress, the broad lands were divided,
and the long series of exact stewards' accounts breaks
suddenly off. The heir to the peerage, Lord James
Berkeley, being involved in perpetual lawsuits, became
"a continual borrower, and often of small sums; yea,
of church vestments and altar-goods." Not until 1481
did the good husbandry begin again.
It is probable that these Berkeleys were an excep-
tionally business-like family ; but there is similar
evidence for other great households, and the intimate
history of our noble families is far from justifying that
particular view of chivalry which has lately found its
most brilliant exponent in William Morris. The custom
of modern Florence, where you may ring at a marble
* Cf. a similar instance in Riley, p. 392.
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 199
palace and buy from the porter a bottle of the marquis's
own wine, is simply a legacy of the Middle Ages.* The
English nobles of Chaucer's day were of course far
behind their Florentine brethren in this particular
direction ; but that current was already flowing strongly
which, a century later, was to create a new nobility of
commerce and wealth in England.
The direct effect of the great French war on chivalry
must be reserved for discussion in another chapter;
but it is pertinent to point out here one indirect, though
very potent, influence. Apart from the business-like
way in which towns were pillaged, the custom of
ransoming prisoners imported a very definite commer-
cial element into knightly life. In the wars of the i2th
and early i3th centuries, when the knights and their
mounted retainers formed the backbone of the army on
both sides, and were sometimes almost the only com-
batants, it is astounding to note how few were killed
even in decisive battles. At Tinchebrai (1106), which
gave Henry I. the whole duchy of Normandy, " the
Knights were mostly admitted to quarter ; only a few
escaped ; the rest, 400 in all, were taken prisoners. . . .
Not a single knight on Henry's side had been slain."
At. the " crushing defeat" of Brenville, three years later,
" 140 knights were captured, but only three slain in
the battle." At Bouvines, one of the greatest and most
decisive battles of the Middle Ages (1214), even the
vanquished lost only 170 knights out of 1500. At Lin-
coln, in 1217, the victors lost but one knight, and the
vanquished apparently only two, though 400 were
captured ; and even at Lewes (1264) the captives were
far more numerous than the slain.f It was, in fact,
difficult to kill a fully-armed man except by cutting his
throat as he lay on the ground, and from this the victors
were generally deterred not only by the freemasonry
* The Shillingford Letters show us the Bishop and Canons of
Exeter selling wine in the same way at their own houses (p. 91).
t Oman, " Art of War in the Middle Ages," 380 ff.
200 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
which reigned among knights and squires of all nations,
but still more by the wicked waste of money involved
in such a proceeding. "Many a good prisoner" is a
common phrase from Froissart's pen ; and, in recount-
ing the battle of Poitiers, he laments that the archers
"slew in that affray many men who could not come to
ransom or mercy." Though both this and the parallel
phrase which he uses at Crecy leave us in doubt which
thought was uppermost in his mind, yet he speaks with
unequivocal frankness about the slaughter of Aljubar-
rota : " Lo ! behold the great evil adventure that befel
that Saturday; for they slew as many prisoners as
would well have been worth, one with another, four
hundred thousand franks!"* In the days when the
great chronicler of chivalry wrote thus, why should not
Lord Berkeley deal in Scottish prisoners as his modern
descendant might deal in Canadian Pacifies?
It is, indeed, a fatal misapprehension to assume that
a society in which coin was necessarily scarce was
therefore more indifferent to money than our own age
of millionaires and multi-millionaires. The underlying
fallacy is scarcely less patent than that which prompted
a disappointed mistress to say of her cook, " I did
think she was honest, for she couldn't even read or
write !" Chaucer's contemporaries blamed the prevalent
mammon-worship even more loudly and frequently
than men do now, with as much sincerity perhaps, and
certainly with even more cause. Bribery was rampant
in every part of 14th-century society, especially among
the highest officials and in the Church. -Chaucer's satire
on the Archdeacon's itching palm is more than borne
out by official documents ; and his contemporaries speak
even more bitterly of the venality of justice in general.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise, in an age when the
right of holding courts was notoriously sought mainly
for its pecuniary advantages? In "Piers Plowman,"
Lady Meed (or, in modern slang, the Almighty Dollar)
Buchon, i., 349, 431 ; Globe, 349.
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 201
rules everywhere, and not least in the law courts.
Gower speaks no less plainly. The Judges (he says)
are commonly swayed by gifts and personal considera-
tions : " men say, and I believe it, that justice nowadays
is in the balance of gold, which hath so great virtue ;
for, if I give more than thou, thy right is not worth a
straw. Right without gifts is of no avail with Judges." *
What Gower recorded in the most pointed Latin and
French he could muster, the people whose voice he
claimed to echo wrote after their own rough fashion
in blood. The peasants who rose in 1381 fastened first
of all upon what seemed their worst enemies. "Then
began they to show forth in deeds part of their inmost
purpose, and to behead in revenge all and every lawyer
in the land, from the half-fledged pleader to the aged
justice, together with all the jurors of the country whom
they could catch. For they said that all such must first
be slain before the land could enjoy true freedom. "f
* " Mirour," 24625. Cf, the corresponding passage in the "Vox
Clamantis," Bk. VI. According to Hoccleve, " Law is nye fleme'd
[= banished] out of this cuntre ; " it is a web which catches the small
flys and gnats, but lets the great flies go (Works, E.E.T.S., iii., 101 ff.).
f Walsingham, an. 1381. The evil repute of jurors is fully explained
by Gower, " Mirour," 25033. According to him, perjury had become
almost a recognized profession.
CHAPTER XVI
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR
" Io ho uno grandissimo dubbio di voi, ch'io mi credo che se ne salvino
tanti pochi di quegli che sono in istato di matrimonio, che de' mille, nove-
cento novantanove credo che sia matrimonio del diavolo."
ST. BERNARDINO OF SIENA, Sermon xix
BUT we have as yet considered only one side of
chivalry. While blushing, like Gibbon, to unite
such discordant names, let us yet remember that the
knight was "the champion of God and the ladies" and
may therefore fairly claim to be judged in this latter
capacity also.
Even here, however, we find him in practice just as
far below either his avowed ideal or the too favourable
pictures of later romance. The feudal system, with
which knighthood was in fact bound up, precluded
chivalry to women in its full modern sense. Land
was necessarily held by personal service ; therefore the
woman, useless in war, must necessarily be given with
her land to some man able to defend it and her. As
even Gautier admits, the woman was too often a mere
appendage of the fief; and he quotes from a chanson de
gcstCj in which the emperor says to a favoured knight
" Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs ;
Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner,
Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez." [femme
Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time
went on, the compulsion was rather less barefaced than
this, he is still compelled sadly to acknowledge of the
average medieval match in high life that "after all,
whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of
xatet
055
in
mj
-TOIL' ffl?
BRASS OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK
(From Southacre Church, Norfolk (1384))
(For the lady's cote-bardie and buttons, see p. 27, note 2. Her dress
is here embroidered with her own arms and Sir John's.)
204 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
a truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly
Christian one." From this initial defect two others
followed almost as a matter of course : the extreme
haste with which marriages were concluded, and the
indecently early age at which children were bound for
life to partners whom they had very likely never seen.
Gautier quotes from another chanson de gestc, where a
heroine, within a month of her first husband's death,
remarries again on the very day on which her second
bridegroom is proposed and introduced to her for the
first time; and the poet adds, "Great was the joy and
laughter that day!" The extreme promptitude with
which the Wife of Bath provided herself with a new
husband or, for the matter of that, Chaucer's own
mother is characteristically medieval.
But child-marriages were the real curse of medieval
home-life in high society. The immaturity of the
parents could not fail to tell often upon the children ;
and when Berthold of Regensburg pointed out how
brief was the average of life among the 13th-century
nobility, and ascribed this to God's vengeance for their
heartlessness towards the poor, he might more truly
have traced the cause much further back. " In days
of old," wrote a tronvcre of the i2th century, "nobles
married at a mature age; faith and loyalty then reigned
everywhere. But nowadays avarice and luxury are
rampant, and two infants of twelve years old are
wedded together : take heed lest they breed children ! " *
The Church did, indeed, refuse to recognize the bond
of marriage if contracted before both parties had turned
seven ; and she further forbade the making of such
contracts until the age of twelve for the girl and fifteen
for the boy, though without daring, in this case, to
impugn the validity of the marriage once contracted.
That the weaker should be allowed to marry three
years earlier than the stronger sex is justified by at
least one great canon lawyer on the principle that
* Gautier, loc. cit., p. 352.
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 205
"ill weeds grow apace"; a decision on which one
would gladly have heard the comments of the Wife of
Bath.* But "people let the Church protest, and married
at any age they pleased " ; for it was seldom indeed
that the ecclesiastical prohibition was enforced against
influence or wealth, and the Church herself, theory
apart, was directly responsible for many of the worst
abuses in this matter. Her determination to keep the
whole marriage-law in her own hands, combined with
her readiness to sell dispensations from her own regu-
lations, resulted in a state of things almost incredible.
On the one hand, a marriage was nullified by cousin-
ship to the fourth degree, and even by the fact of the
contracting parties having ever stood as sponsors to
the same child, unless a papal dispensation had been
bought; and this absurd severity not only nullified in
theory half the peasants' marriages (since nearly every-
body is more or less related in a small village), but
gave rise to all sorts of tricks for obtaining fraudulent
divorces. To quote again from Gautier, w T ho tries all
through to put the best possible face on the matter:
" After a few years of marriage, a husband who had
wearied of his wife could suddenly discover that they
were related . . . and here was a revival, under canonical
and pious forms, of the ancient practice of divorce."
It is the greatest mistake to suppose that divorce was
a difficult matter in the Middle Ages ; it was simply
a question of money, as honest men frequently com-
plained. The Church courts were ready to " make and
unmake matrimony for money"; and "for a mantle of
miniver" a man might get rid of his lawful wife.f An
actual instance is worth many generalities. In the first
quarter of the i4th century a Pope allowed the King
and Queen of France to separate because they had once
been godparents to the same child ; and at the same
time sold a dispensation to a rich citizen who had twice
* Lyndwood, " Provinciale," ed. Oxon., p. 272.
t " Piers Plowman," B., xv., 237, and xx., 137.
206 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
contracted the same relationship to the lady whom he
now wished to marry. The collocation, in this case,
was piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which
was chalked up at street corners in Paris. John XXII.
probably laughed with the rest, and went on as before.
On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theo-
retically of the utmost strictness, though only to the
poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of the most
incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve
might, at any time and in any place, not only without
leave of parents, but against all their wishes, contract
an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal promise, with-
out any priestly intervention whatever. In other words,
the whole world in Chaucer's time was a vaster and
more commodious Gretna Green.* Moreover, not only
the civil power, but apparently even the Church, some-
times hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions
as existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock
case is quoted at length in the contemporary " Life of
St. Hugh of Lincoln" (R.S., pp. 170-177), and fully
corroborated by official documents. A wretched child
who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress;
a great noble took her to wife. He died two years
later; she was at once snapped up by a second noble;
and on his death, when she was apparently still only
eleven, and certainly not much older, she was bought
for 300 marks by a third knightly bridegroom. The
bishop, though he excommunicated the first husband,
and deprived the priest who had openly married him
"in the face of the church," apparently made no attempt
to declare the marriage null ; and the third husband was
still enjoying her estate twenty years after his wedding-
* Pollock and Maitland, "History of English Law," vol. i., p. 387;
Lyndwood, " Provinciale," pp. 271 ff. It is the more necessary to insist
on this, because of a serious error, based on a misreading of Bishop
Quivil's injunctions. The bishop does, indeed, proclaim his right and
duty of punishing the parties to a clandestine marriage ; but, so far from
flying in the face of Canon Law by threatening to dissolve the contract,
he expressly admits, in the same breath, its binding force. Wilkins, ii., 135.
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 207
day. In the face of instances like this (for another,
scarcely less startling, may be found in Luce's " Du
Guesclin," p. 139), we need no longer wonder that our
poet's father was carried off in his earliest teens to be
married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or
that in Chaucer's own time, when the middle classes
were rapidly gaining more power in the state, Parlia-
ment legislated expressly against the frequent offences
of this kind.
But the real root of the evil remained ; so long as
two children might, in a moment and without any
religious ceremony whatever, pledge their persons and
their properties for life, no legislation could be per-
manently effectual. From the moral side, we find Church
councils fulminating desperately against the celebration
of marriages in private houses or taverns, sometimes
even after midnight, and with the natural concomitants
of riot and excess. From the purely civil side, again,
apart from runaway or irregular matches, there was
also the scandalous frequency of formal child-marriages
which were often the only security for the transmission
of property; and here even the Church admitted the
thin end of the wedge by permitting espousals " of
children in their cradles," by way of exception, " for
the sake of peace." * Let me quote here again from
Smyth's " Lives of the Berkeleys." We there find,
between 1288 and 1500, five marriages in which the ten
contracting parties averaged less than eleven years.
Maurice the Third, born in 1281, was only eight years
old when he married a wife apparently of the same age ;
their eldest child was born before the father was fifteen ;
and the loyal Smyth comforts himself by reciting from
Holy Scripture the still more precocious examples of
Josiah and Solomon. It would be idle to multiply
instances of so notorious a fact ; but let us take one
more case which touched all England, and must have
come directly under Chaucer's notice. When the good
* Wilkins, " Concilia," i., 478.
208 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
Queen Anne of Bohemia was dead, for whose sake
Richard II. would never afterwards live in his palace
of Shene, it was yet necessary for his policy to take
another wife. He chose the little daughter of the
French King, then only seven years old, in spite of the
remonstrances of his subjects. The pair were affianced
by proxy in 1395; "and then (as I have been told) it
was pretty to see her, young as she was ; for she very
well knew already how to play the queen." Next year,
the two Kings met personally between Guines and
Ardres, the later " Field of the Cloth of Gold," and sat
down to meat together. " Then said the Due de Bourbon
man}^ joyous and merry words to make the kings laugh.
. . . And he spake aloud, addressing himself to the King
of England, 'My Lord King of England, you should
make good cheer; you have all that you desire and ask ;
you have your wife, or shall have ; she shall be delivered
to you!' Then said the King of France, 'Cousin of
Bourbon, we would that our daughter were as old as
our cousin the lady de St. Pol. She would bear the
more love to our son the King of England, and it would
have cost us a heavy dowry.' The King of England
heard and understood this speech ; wherefore he
answered, inclining himself towards the King of France
(though, indeed, the word had been addressed to the
Duke, since the King had made the comparison of the
daughter of the Comte de St. Pol), ' Fair father, we are
well pleased with the present age of our wife, and we
love not so much that she should be of great age as we
take account of the love and alliance of our own selves
and our kingdoms; for when we shall be at one accord
and alliance together, there is no king in Christendom
or elsewhere who could gainsay us.'" * The Royal pair
proceeded at once to Calais, and the formal wedding took
place three days later in the old church of St. Nicholas,
which to Ruskin was a perpetual type of "the links
unbroken between the past and present."
* Froissart, Buchon, iii., 235, 258.
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 209
What kings were obliged to do at one time for
political purposes, they would do at other times for
money ; and their subjects followed suit. As one of the
authors of " Piers Plowman " puts it, the marriage choice
should depend on personal qualities, and Christ will
then bless it with sufficient prosperity.
" But few folk now follow this ; for they give their children
For covetise of chattels and cunning chapmen ;
Of kin nor of kindred account men but little . . .
Let her be unlovely, unlovesome abed,
A bastard, a bondmaid, a beggar's daughter,
That no courtesy can ; but let her be known
For rich or well-rented, though she be wrinkled for elde,
There is no squire nor knight in country about,
But will bow to that bondmaid, to bid her an husband,
And wedden her for her wealth ; and wish on the morrow
That his wife were wax, or a wallet-full of nobles !" *
Moreover, this picture is abundantly borne out by
plain facts and plain speech from other quarters.
Richard II.'s first marriage, which turned out so
happily when the boy of sixteen and the girl of
fifteen had grown to know each other, was, in its
essence, a bargain of pounds, shillings, and pence. A
contemporary chronicler, recording how Richard offered
an immense sum for her in order to outbid his Royal
brother of France, heads his whole account of the
transaction with the plain words, "The king buys
himself a wife."t Gaston, Count of Foix, whom Frois-
sart celebrates as a mirror of courtesy among con-
temporary princes, had a little ward of twelve whose
hand was coveted by the great Due de Berri, verging
on his fiftieth year. But Gaston came most unwillingly
* " Piers Plowman," C, xi., 256. Gower speaks still more strongly
if possible, " Mirour," 17245 ff. Chaucer's friend Hoccleve makes the
same complaint (E.E.T.S., vol. iii., p. 60), and these practices outlasted
the Reformation. The curious reader should consult Dr. FurnivalPs
" Child Marriages and Divorces " (E.E.T.S., 1897).
t "Adam of Usk," p. 3 ; cf. " Eulog. Hist.," iii., 355 (where the price
is given as 22,000 marks), and 237, where the negotiations for another
Royal marriage are described with equally brutal frankness,
p
210 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
to the point: "Yet was he not unwilling to suffer that
the marriage should take place, but he intended to have
a good sum of florins ; not that he put forward that he
meant to sell the lady, but he wished to be rewarded for
his wardship, since he had had and nourished her for
some nine years and a half, wherefore he required
thirty thousand francs for her."* Dr. Gairdner has
cited equally plain language used - in the following
century by a member of the noble family of Scrope,
whose estate had become much impoverished. " ' For
very need,' he writes, ' I was fain to sell a little
daughter I have for much less than I should have
done by possibility' a considerable point in his com-
plaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got
for his own child." Down to the very lowest rung of
the social ladder, marriage was to a great extent a
matter of money ; and if we could look into the manor-
rolls of Chaucer's perfect gentle Knight, we should
find that one source of his income was a tax on each
poor serf for leave to take a fellow-bondmaid to his
bosom. f If, on the other hand, the pair dispensed
with any marriage ceremony, then they must pay a
heavy fine to the archdeacon. Yet, even so, marriage
was not business-like enough for some satirists.
Chaucer's fellow-poet, Eustache Deschamps, echoes the
complaint, already voiced in the " Roman de la Rose,"
that one never buys a horse or other beast without
full knowledge of all its points, whereas one takes a
wife like a pig in a poke.} The complaint has, of course,
been made before and since ; but Bishop Stapledon's
Froissart, Buchon, ii., 758.
t " Paston Letters," 1901, Introd., p. clxxvi. ; cf. for example, Thorold
Rogers' " Hist, of Ag. and Prices," ii., 608. " Megge, the daughter of
John, son of Utting," pays only is. for her marriage; but "Alice's
daughter" pays 6s. 8ti. ; and so on to "Will, the son of John," and
" Roger the Reeve," who pay each 2os., or something like 20 in modern
value. The merchet was directly chargeable to the father ; but the
bridegroom must often have had to pay it.
J Sarradin, " Deschamps," p. 256.
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 211
register may testify that it was seldom less justified
than in Chaucer's time.
Such was one side of marriage in the days of
chivalry. A woman could inherit property, but seldom
defend it. The situation was too tempting to man's
cupidity ; and no less temptation was offered by the
equally helpless class of orphans. A wardship, which
in our days is generally an honourable and thankless
burden, was in Chaucer's time a lucrative and coveted
windfall. In London the city customs granted a guardian,
for his trouble, ten per cent, of the ward's property
every year.* This was an open bargain which, in the
hands of an honourable citizen, restored to the ward
his patrimony with increase, but gave the guardian
enough profit to make such wardships a coveted privi-
lege even among well-to-do citizens. Elsewhere, where
the customs were probably less precisely marked and
certainly the legal checks were fewer wardships were
treated even more definitely as profitable windfalls.
We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley paid 10,000
in modern money for a single ward ; Chaucer, as we
know from a contemporary document, made some
1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a proportionately
greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not
blush to buy and sell wardships, from the King down-
wards. The above-quoted Stephen Scrope, who sold
his own daughter as a matter of course, is indignant
with his guardian, Sir John Fastolf, who had sold him
to the virtuous Chief Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks,
* Riley, p. 379. It must, however, be remembered that the
ordinary rate of interest then was twenty per cent. Thus Robert de
Brynkeleye receives the wardship of Thomas atte Boure, who had a-
patrimony of ,300 (14th-century standard). With this Robert trades,
paying his twenty per cent, for the use of it, so that he has to account for
.1080 at the heir's majority. Of this he takes ,120 for keep and out-of-
pocket expenses, and ^390 for his trouble, so that the ward receives ^570.
The Royal Household Ordinances of Edward II.'s reign provide for the
maintenance of wards until " they have their lands, or the king have
given or sold them." " Life Records," ii., p. 19.
218 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
"through which sale I took a sickness that kept me
a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing; whereby I am
disfigured in my person, and shall be whilst I live."
Gascoigne had purchased Scrope for one of his own
daughters. Fastolf bought him back again to avoid
such a mesalliance; but the costs of each transfer, and
something more, came out of the hapless ward's estate.
" He bought and sold me as a beast, against all right
and law, to mine own hurt more than a thousand
marks." Moreover, the means that were taken to avoid
such disastrous wardships became themselves one of
the most active of the many forces which undermined
the strict code of chivalry. A knight, in theory, was
capable of looking after himself; therefore careful and
influential parents like the Berkeleys sought to protect
their heirs by knighthood from falling into wardships
as minors, in defiance of the rule which placed the
earliest limit at twenty-one. Thus Maurice de Berkeley
(IV.) was knighted in 1339 at the age of seven, and
one of his descendants in 1476 at the age of five ; and
Eustache Deschamps complains of the practice as one
of the open sores of contemporary chivalry
" Et encore plus me confond,
Ce que Chevaliers se font
Plusieurs trop petitement,
Qui dix ou qui sept ans n'ont." *
The practice shows equally clearly how hollow the
dignity was becoming, and how little an unprotected
child could count upon chivalric consideration, in the
proper sense of the word.
Nor can these bargains in women and orphans be
treated as a mere accident ; they formed an integral
part of medieval life, and influenced deeply all social
* Stc-Palaye, he. cit., i., 64 ft". ; ii., 90. This rule of age, like all others,
had, however, been broken from the first. As early as 1060, Geoffrey
of Anjou knighted his nephew Fulk at the age of 17 ; and such inci-
dents are common in epics. Princes of the blood were knighted in their
cradles.
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR
relations. The men who bought their wives like
chattels were only too likely to treat them accordingly.
Take from the i4th and early i5th centuries two well-
known instances, which would be utterly inconceivable
in this unchivalrous age of ours. Edward I. hung up
the Countess of Buchan in a wooden cage on the walls
of Berwick "that passers-by might gaze on her"; and
when a woman accused a Franciscan friar of treason-
able speeches, the King's justiciar decided that the two
should proceed to wager of battle, the friar having one
hand tied behind his back. At the best, the knight's
oath provided no greater safeguard for women than
the unsworn but inbred courtesy of a modern gentle-
man. When the peasant rebels of 1381 broke into the
Tower, and some miscreants invited the Queen Mother
to kiss them, "yet (strange to relate) the many knights
and squires dared not rebuke one of the rioters for
acts so indecent, or lay hold of them to stop them, or
even murmur under their breath." *
But the strangest fact to modern minds is the
prevalence of wife-beating, sister-beating, daughter-
beating. The full evidence would fill a volume; but
no picture of medieval life can be even approximately
complete without more quotations than are commonly
given on this subject. In the great epics, when the
hero loses his temper, the ladies of his house too often
suffer in face or limb. Gautier, in a chapter already
referred to, quotes a large number of instances ; but
the words of contemporary law-givers and moralists
are even more significant. The theory was based, of
course, on Biblical texts ; if God had meant woman for
a position of superiority, he would have taken her from
Adam's head rather than from his side.f Her inferiority
is thus proclaimed almost on the first page of Holy
Scripture; and inferiority, in an age of violence,
* Walsingham, ann. 1307, 1381 ; " Eulog. Hist.," iii., 189, 389. The
woman avoided the battle only by withdrawing her accusation,
t Gower, " Mirour," 17521.
214 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
necessarily involves subjection to corporal punishment.
Gautier admits that it was already a real forward step
when the 13th-century "Coutumes du Beauvoisis " en-
acted that a man must beat his wife " only in reason." A
very interesting theological dictionary of early i4th
century date, preserved in the British Museum (6 E.
VI. 2i4A), expresses the ordinary views of cultured
ecclesiastics. " Moreover a man may chastise his wife
and beat her by way of correction, for she forms part
of his household ; so that he, the master, may chastise
that which is his, as it is written in the Gloss [to Canon
Law]." Not long after Chaucer's death, St. Bernardino
of Siena grants the same permission, even while re-
buking the immoderate abuse of marital authority.
" There are men who can bear more patiently with a
hen that lays a fresh egg every day, than with their
own wives ; and sometimes when the hen breaks a
pipkin or a cup he will spare it a beating, simply for
love of the fresh egg which he is unwilling to lose.
O raving madmen I who cannot bear a word from their
own wives, though they bear them such fair fruit ; but
when the woman speaks a word more than they like,
then they catch up a stick and begin to cudgel her ;
while the hen, that cackles all day and gives you no
rest, you take patience with her for the sake of her
miserable egg and sometimes she will break more in
your house than she herself is worth, yet you bear it
in patience for the egg's sake ! Many fidgetty fellows
who sometimes see their wives turn out less neat and
dainty than they would like, smite them forthwith ;
and meanwhile the hen may make a mess on the table,
and you suffer her. . . . Don't you see the pig too,
always squeaking and squealing and making your house
filthy; yet you suffer him until the time for slaughter-
ing, and your patience is only for the sake of his flesh
to eat! Consider, rascal, consider the noble fruit of
thy wife, and have patience; it is not right to beat her
for every cause, no!" In another sermon, speaking
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 215
of the extravagant and sometimes immodest fashions
of the day, he says to the over-dressed woman in his
congregation, " Oh, if it were my business, if I were
your husband, I would give you such a drubbing with
feet and fists, that I would make you remember for
a while ! " * Lastly, let us take the manual which
Chaucer's contemporary, the Knight of La Tour Landry,
wrote for the education of his daughters, and which
became at once one of the most popular books of the
Middle Ages.f The good knight relates quite naturally
several cases of assault and battery, of which the first
may suffice. A man had a scolding wife, who railed
ungovernably upon him before strangers. " And he,
that was angry of her governance, smote her with his
fist down to the earth ; and then with his foot he struck
her in the visage and brake her nose, and all her life
after she had her nose crooked, the which shent and
disfigured her visage after, that she might not for shame
show her visage, it was so foul blemished : [for the nose
is the fairest member that man or woman hath, and
sitteth in the middle of the visage]. And this she had
for her evil and great language that she was wont to
say to her husband. And therefore the wife ought to
suffer and let the husband have the words, and to be
master. . . ."
What was sauce for women was, of course, sauce
for children also. Uppingham is far from being the
only English school which has for its seal a picture of
the pedagogue dominating with his enormous birch
over a group of tiny urchins. At the Universities,
when a student took a degree in grammar, he " received
as a symbol of his office, not a book like Masters of the
other Faculties, but two to him far more important
* " Prediche Volgari," ii., 115, and Hi., 176.
t I quote from the 15th-century English translation published by the
E.E.T.S. (pp. 25, 27, 81 ; cf. 23, 95 ; the square bracket is transferred
from p. 23). Between 1484 and 1538 there were at least eight editions
printed in French, English, and German.
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
academical instruments a ' palmer ' and a birch, and
thereupon entered upon the discharge of the most
fundamental and characteristic part of his official duties
by flogging a boy ' openlye in the Scolys.' Having
paid a groat to the Bedel for the birch, and a similar
sum to the boy ' for hys labour,' the Inceptor became a
fully accredited Master in Grammar." * At home, girls
and boys were beaten indiscriminately. One of the
earliest books of household conduct, " How the Good
Wife taught her Daughter," puts the matter in a
nutshell
" And if thy children be rebel, and*will not them low,
If any of them misdoeth, neither ban them nor blow [curse nor cuff
But take a smart rod, and beat them on a row
Till they cry mercy, and be of their guilt aknow." [acknowledge
* Rashdall, " Universities of Europe," ii., 599.
SKA1. ()!' l'1'l'IXCHAM SCIIOOI,
CHAPTER XVII
THE GAY SCIENCE
" Madame, whilom I was one
That to my father had a king ;
But I was slow, and for nothing
Me liste not to Love obey ;
And that I now full sore abey. . . .
Among the gentle nation
Love is an occupation
Which, for to keep his lustes save,
Should every gentle hearte have."
GOWER, "Confessio Amantis," Bk. IV
THE facts given in the foregoing chapter may explain
a good deal in the Wife of Bath's Prologue that
might otherwise be ascribed to wide poetical licence ;
but they may seem strangely at variance with the
"Knight's Tale" or the "Book of the Duchess." The
contradiction, however, lies only on the surface.
Neither flesh nor spirit can suffer extreme starvation.
When the facts of life are particularly sordid, then that
"large and liberal discontent," which is more or less
rooted in every human breast, builds itself an ideal
world out of those very materials which are most
conspicuously and most painfully lacking in the un-
grateful reality. The conventional platonism and self-
sacrifice of love, according to the knightly theory, was in
strict proportion to its rarity in knightly practice. We
must, of course, beware of the facile assumption that
these medieval manages de convenance were so much
less happy than ours ; nothing in human nature is more
marvellous than its adaptability; and Richard II., for
instance, seems to have bought himself with hard
218 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
cash as great a treasure as that which Tennyson's
Lord of Burleigh won with more subtle discrimination.
But at least the conditions of actual marriage were
generally far less romantic then than now; and,
at a time when the supposed formal judgment of a
Court of Love, "that no married pair can really be in
love with each other," was accepted even as ben trovato,
it was natural that highly imaginative pictures of love
par amours should be extremely popular.
Let us consider again for a moment the conditions
of life in a medieval castle. In spite of a good deal of
ceremonial which has long gone out of fashion, the
actual daily intercourse between man and woman was
closer there than at present, in proportion as artificial
distances were greater. The lady might stand as high
above the squire as the heaven is in comparison with
the earth ; but she had scarcely more privacy than on
board a modern ship. They were constantly in each
other's sight, yet could never by any possibility ex-
change a couple of confidential sentences except by a
secret and dangerous rendezvous in some private room,
or by such stray chances as some meeting on the stairs,
some accident which dispersed the hunting-party and
left them alone in the forest, or similar incidents conse-
crated to romance. The three great excitements of man's
life war, physical exercise, and carousing touched the
ladies far less nearly, and left them ordinarily to a life
which their modern sisters would condemn as hopelessly
dull. The daily-suppressed craving for excitement, the
nervous irritability generated by artificial constraint,
explain many contrasts which are conspicuous in
medieval manners. Moreover, there were men always
at hand, and always on the watch to seize the smallest
chance. The Knight of La Tour Landry is not the only
medieval writer who describes his own society in very
much the same downright words as the Prophet
Jeremiah (ch. v., v. 8). The very raison d'etre of his
book was the recollection how, in younger days, " my
THE GAY SCIENCE 219
fellows communed with ladies and gentlewomen, the
which [fellows] prayed them of love ; for there was
none of them that they might find, lady or gentlewoman,
but they would pray her ; and if that one would not
intend to that, other would anon pray. And whether
they had good answer or evil, they recked never, for they
had in them no shame nor dread by the cause that
they were so used. And thereto they had fair language
and words ; for in every place they would have had
their sports and their might. And so they did both
deceive ladies and gentlewomen, and bear forth divers
languages on them, some true and some false, of the
which there came to divers great defames and slanders
without cause and reason. . . . And I asked them why
they foreswore them, saying that they loved every
woman best that they spake to : for I said unto them,
' Sirs, ye should love nor be about to have but one.'
But what I said unto them, it was never the better.
And therefore because I saw at that time the governance
of them, the which I doubted that time yet reigneth, and
there be such fellows now or worse, and therefore I
purposed to make a little book ... to the intent that
my daughters should take ensample of fair continuance
and good manners." The tenor of the whole book
more than bears out the promise of this introduction :
and the good knight significantly recommends his
daughters to fast thrice a week as a sovereign specific
against such dangers (pp. 2, 10, 14).
We have seen how often women were forbidden
attendance at all sorts of public dances, and even
weddings ; and how demurely they were bidden to
pace the streets. The accompanying illustration from
a 15th-century miniature given by Thomas Wright
("Womankind in Western Europe," p. 157) shows on
the one hand the formal way in which girls were
expected to cross their hands on their laps as they sat,
and on the other hand the licence which naturally
followed by reaction from so much formality. Both
220
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
sides come out fully in the Knight's book. We see a girl
losing a husband through a freedom of speech with her
prospective fiance which seems to us most natural and
innocent ; while the coarsest words and actions were per-
mitted to patterns of chivalry in the presence of ladies. A
stifling conventionality oppressed the model young lady,
while the less wise virgin rushed into the other extreme
of " rere-suppers " after bedtime with like-minded com-
panions of both sexes, and other liberties more startling
WISE AND UNWISE VIRGINS
still.* In every generation moralists noted with pain
the gradual emancipation of ladies from a restraint
which had always been excessive, and had often been
merely theoretical, though those who regretted this
most bitterly in their own time believed also most
implicitly in the strict virtues of a golden past. Guibert
of Nogent contrasts the charming picture of his own
chaste mother with what he sees (or thinks he sees)
around him in St. Bernard's days. "Lord, thou knowest
* Pp. 8, 1 8, 33, 36, 156, 207, 217, 218, and passim.
THE GAY SCIENCE 221
how hardly nay, almost how impossibly that virtue
[of chastity] is kept by women of our time : whereas
of old there was such modesty that scarce any marriage
was branded even by common gossip ! Alas, how
miserably, between those days and ours, maidenly
modesty and honour have fallen off, and the mother's
guardianship has decayed both in appearance and in
fact ; so that in all their behaviour nothing can be noted
but unseemly mirth, wherein are no sounds but of jest,
with winking eyes and babbling tongues, and wanton
gait. . . . Each thinks that she has touched the lowest
step of misery if she lack the regard of lovers ; and she
measures her glory of nobility and courtliness by the
ampler numbers of such suitors." Men were more
modest of old than women are now : the present man
can talk of nothing but his bonnes fortunes. " By these
modern fashions, and others like them, this age of ours
is corrupted and spreads further corruption." In short,
it is the familiar philippic of well-meaning orators in
every age against the sins of society, and the familiar
regret of the good old times. The Knight of La Tour
Landry, again, would place the age of real modesty
about the time of his own and Chaucer's father, a
date by which, according to Guibert's calculations, the
growing shamelessness of the world ought long ago
to have worn God's patience threadbare.
Each was of course so far right that he lived (as we
all do) in a time of transition, and that he saw, as we
too see, much that might certainly be changed for the
better. These things were even more glaring in the
Middle Ages than now. We must not look for too much
refinement of outward manners at this early date ; but
even in essential morality the girl-heroines of medieval
romance must be placed, on the whole, even below those
of the average French novel.* In both cases we must,
* " Most of the girls in our ' Chansons de Geste ' are represented by
our poets as horrible little monsters, . . . shameless, worse than impudent,
caring little whether the whole world watches them, and obeying at all
222 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
of course, make the same allowance ; it would be equally
unfair to judge Chaucer's contemporaries and modern
Parisian society strictly according to the novelist's or
the poet's pictures. But in either case the popularity
of the type points to a real underlying truth ; and we
should err less in taking the early romances literally
than in accepting Ivanhoe, for instance, as a typical
picture of medieval love. No one poet represents that
love so fully as Chaucer, in both its aspects. I say in
both, and not in all, for such love as lent itself to
picturesque treatment had then practically only two
aspects, the most ideal and the most material. The
maiden whose purity of heart and freedom of manners
are equally natural was not only non-existent at that
stage of society, but inconceivable. Emelye is, within
her limits, as beautiful and touching a figure as any in
poetry ; but her limits are those of a figure in a stained-
glass window compared with a portrait of Titian's.
Chaucer himself could not have made her a Die Vernon
or an Ethel Newcome ; with fuller modelling and more
freedom of action in the story, she could at best have
become a sort of Beatrix Esmond. But of heavenly
love and earthly love, as they were understood in his
time, our poet gives us ample choice. It has long ago
been noted how large a proportion of his whole work
turns on this one passion.* As he said of himself, he
had " told of lovers up and down more than Ovid maketh
of mention " : he was " Love's clerk." His earthly love
we may here neglect, only remembering that it is never
merely wicked, but always relieved by wit and humour-
indeed, by wit and humour of his very best. But his
hazards the mere brutality of their instincts. Their forwardness is not
only beyond all conception, but contrary to all probability and all sincere
observation of human nature." Gautier, I.e., p. 378.
* There is a very interesting essay on "Chaucer's Love Poetry" in
the Cornhill, vol. xxxv., p. 280. It is, however, a good deal spoiled
by the author's inclusion of many works once attributed to the poet, but
now known to be spurious.
THE GAY SCIENCE 223
heavenly love, the ideal service of chivalry, deserves
looking into more closely ; the more so as his notions
are so exactly those of his time, except so far as they
are chastened by his rare sense of humour.
Amor, che al gentil cuor ratio s'apprende so sings
Francesca in Dante's " Inferno." Love is to every
"gentle" heart to any one who has not a mere money-
bag or clod of clay in his breast not only an unavoid-
able fate but a paramount duty. As Chaucer's Arcite
says, "A man must needes love, maugre his head; he
may not flee it, though he should be dead." Troilus,
again, who had come to years of discretion, and earned
great distinction in war without ever having felt the
tender passion, is so far justly treated as a heathen and
a publican even by the frivolous Pandarus, who welcomes
his conversion as unctuously as Mr. Stiggins might
have accepted Mr. Weller's
Love, of his goodness,
Hath thee converted out of wickedness.
But perhaps the best instance is that afforded by the
famous medieval romance of "Petit Jean de Saintre"
(chaps, i.-iv.). Jean, at the age of thirteen, became page
to the chivalrous King John of France; as nearly as
possible at the same time as Chaucer was serving the
Duchess of Clarence in the same capacity. One of the
ladies-in-waiting at the same Court was a young widow,
who for her own amusement brought Petit Jean formally
into her room. "Madame, seated at the foot of the
little bed, made him stand between her and her women,
and then laid it on his faith to tell her the truth of
whatsoever she should ask. The poor boy, who little
guessed her drift, gave the promise, thinking 'Alas,
what have I done? what can this mean?' And while
he thus wondered, Madame said, smiling upon her
women, ' Tell me, master, upon the faith which you have
pledged me; tell me first of all how long it is since you
saw your lady par amours ?' So when he heard speech
224 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
of lady par amours, as one who had never thought
thereon, the tears came to his eyes, and his heart beat
and his face grew pale, for he knew not how to speak
a single word. . . . And they pressed him so hard that
he said, ' Madam, I have none.' ' What, you have none ! '
said the lady: 'ha! how happy would she be who had
such a lover! It may well be that you have none, and
well I believe it ; but tell me, how long is it since you
saw her whom you most love, and would fain have for
your lady ? ' ' The poor boy could say nothing, but knelt
there twisting the end of his belt between his fingers
until the waiting-women pitied him and advised him
to answer the lady's question. " ' Tell without more ado '
(said they), ' whom you love best.' ' Whom I love best ? '
(said he), 'that is my lady mother, and then my sister
Jacqueline.' Then said the lady, ' Sir boy, I intend not
of your mother or sister, for the love of mother and
sister and kinsfolk is utterly different from that of lady
par amours ; but I ask you of such ladies as are none
of your kin.' ' Of them ? ' (said he), ' by my faith, lady,
I love none.' Then said the lady, 'What! you love
none? Ha! craven gentleman, you say that you love
none? Thereby know I well that you will never be
worth a straw. . . . Whence came the great valiance
and exploits of Lancelot, Gawayne, Tristram, Biron
the Courteous, and other Champions of the Round
Table? . . ." The sermon was unmercifully long, and
it left the culprit in helpless tears ; at the women's
intercession, he was granted another day's respite.
Boylike, he succeeded in shirking day after day until
he hoped he was forgotten. But the inexorable lady
caught him soon after, and tormented him until "as he
thought within himself whom he should name, then
(as nature desires and attracts like to like), he bethought
himself of a little maiden of the court who was ten
years of age. Then he said, ' Lady, it is Matheline de
Coucy.' And when the lady heard this name, she
thought well that this was but childish fondness and
THE GAY SCIENCE 225
ignorance; yet she made more ado than before, and
said, ' Now I see well that you are a most craven squire
to have chosen Matheline for your service ; not but that
she is a most comely maiden, and of good house and
better lineage than your own; but what good, what
profit, what honour, what gain, what advantage, what
comfort, what help, and what counsel can come there-
from to your own person, to make you a valiant man ?
What are the advantages which you can draw from
Matheline, who is yet but a child? Sir, you should
choose a Lady who . . .'" In short, the lady whom she
finally commends to his notice is her own self. Little
by little she teaches the stripling all that she knows of
love; and later on, when she is cloyed with possession
and weary of his absence at the wars, much that he had
never guessed before of falsehood. The story is an
admirable commentary on the well-known lines in
Chaucer's " Book of the Duchess," where the Black
Knight says of himself
. . . since first I couth
Have any manner wit from youth
Or kindely understanding [natural
To comprehend in any thing
What love was in mine owne wit,
Dreadeless I have ever yet [certainly
Been tributary and given rent
To love, wholly with good intent,
And through pleasaunce become his thrall
With good will body, heart, and all.
All this I put in his servage
As to my lord, and did homage,
And full devoutly prayed him-to,
He should beset mine hearte so
That it plesaunce to him were,
And worship to my lady dear.
And this was long, and many a year
Ere that mine heart was set aught-where,
That I did thus, and knew not why ;
I trow, it came me kindely.
If death comes at this moment, then "J'aurai passe par
la terre, n'ayant rien aime que 1'amour." But instead
Q
226 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
of death comes something not less sudden and over-
mastering. To the Black Knight, as to Dante, the Lady
of his Life is revealed between two throbs of the
heart
It happed that I came on a day
Into a place where I say [saw
Truly the fairest company
Of ladies, that ever man with eye
Had seen together in one place . . .
Sooth to sayen, I saw one
That was like none of the rout . . .
I saw her dance so comelily,
Carol and sing so sweetely,
Laugh and play so womanly,
And look so debonairely,
So goodly speak, and so friendly,
That certes, I trow that nevermore
Was seen so blissful a tresore.
Here at last the goddess of his hopes is revealed in the
flesh; no longer the vague Not Impossible She, but
henceforward She of the Golden Hair. The revelation
commands the gratitude of a lifetime. Having crystal-
lized upon herself his fluid and floating worship, she is
henceforth conventionally divine; he demands no more
than to be allowed to gaze on her, and in gazing he
swoons.
As yet, then, she is his idol, his goddess, on an
unapproachable pedestal. She may be pretty patently
the work of his own hands he has gone about dream-
ing of love until his dreams have taken sufficient
consistency to be visible and tangible but as yet his
worship must be as far-off as Pygmalion's, and he
thirsts in vain for a word or a look. Then comes the
second clause of Francesca's creed Amor, die a nullo
amato amar perdona : true love must needs beget love
in return. The statue warms to life ; the goddess steps
down from her pedestal ; the lover forgets now that he
had meant to subsist for life on half a dozen kind looks
and kind words ; and at this point the matter would end
nowadays or at least would have ended a generation
THE GAY SCIENCE 227
ago in mere prosaic marriage. But here, in the Middle
Ages, it is fifty to one that the fortunes of the pair are
not exactly suitable ; or he, or she, or both may be
married already. Then comes the final clause : Amor
condnsse noi ad una morte. Seldom indeed could the
course of true love run smooth in an age of business-
marriages ; and the poet found his grandest material in
the wreckage of tender passions and high hopes upon
that iron-bound shore.
The large majority of medieval romances, as has
long ago been noted, celebrate illicit love. Therefore
the first commandment of the code is secrecy, absolute
secrecy; and in the songs of the Troubadors and Minne-
singers, a personage almost as prominent as the two
lovers themselves, is the "envious," the "spier" the
person from whom it is impossible to escape for more
than a minute at a time, amid the cheek-by-jowl of castle
intercourse a disappointed rival perhaps, or a mere
malicious busybody, but, in any case, a perpetual
skeleton at the feast. " Troilus and Criseyde," for
instance, is full of such allusions, and perhaps no poem
exemplifies more clearly the common divorce between
romantic love and marriage in medieval literature. It
is a comparatively small thing that the first three books
of the poem should contain no hint of matrimony,
though Criseyde is a widow, and of noble blood. It
would, after all, have been less of a mesalliance than
John of Gaunt's marriage ; but of course it was perfectly
natural for Chaucer to take the line of least poetical
resistance, and make Troilus enjoy her love in secret,
without thought of consecration by the rites of the
Church. So far, the poem runs parallel with Goethe's
" Faust." But when we come to the last two books, the
behaviour of the pair is absolutely inexplicable to any
one who has not realized the usual conventions of
medieval romance. The Trojan prince Antenor is taken
prisoner by the Greeks, who offer to exchange him
against Criseyde a fighting man against a mere
228 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
woman. Hector does indeed protest in open Parlia-
ment
But on my part ye may eft-soon them tell
We usen here no women for to sell.
But the political utility of the exchange is so obvious
that Parliament determines to send the unwilling
Criseyde away. What, it may be asked, is Troilus
doing all this time? As Priam's son, he would have
had a voice in the council second only to Hector's, and
he "well-nigh died" to hear the proposition. Yet all
through this critical discussion he kept silence, " lest
men should his affection espy ! " The separation, he
knows, will kill him ; but among all the measures he
debates with Criseyde or Pandarus even among the
desperate acts which he threatens to commit nothing
so desperate as plain marriage seems to occur to any of
the three. The first thought of Troilus is "how to
save her honour," but only in the technical sense of
medieval chivalry, by feigning indifference to her. He
sheds floods of tears ; he tells Fortune that if only he
may keep his lady, he is reckless of all else in the
world ; but, when for a moment he thinks of begging
Criseyde's freedom from the King his father, it is only
to thrust the thought aside at once. The step would be
not only useless, but necessarily involve " slander to
her name." * And all this was written for readers who
knew very well that the parties had only to swear,
first that they had plighted troth before witnesses, and
secondly, that they had lived together as man and wife,
in order to prove an indissoluble marriage contract.
Nor can we ascribe this to any failure in Chaucer's art.
In the delineation of feelings, their natural development
and their finer shades, he is second to no medieval poet,
and these qualities come out especially in the "Troilus."
But, while he boldly changed so much in Boccaccio's
conception of the poem, he saw no reason to change
* Bk. IV., 11. 152, 158, 367, 519, 554, 564.
THE GAY SCIENCE 229
this particular point, for it was thoroughly in accord
with those conventions of his time for which he kept
some respect even through his frequent irony.
To show clearly how the fault here is not in the
poet but in the false point d'honneur of the chivalric
love-code, let us compare it with a romance in real life
from the " Paston Letters." Sir John Paston's steward,
Richard Calle, fell in love with his master's sister
Margery. The Pastons, who not only were great
gentlefolk in a small way, but were struggling hard
also to become great gentlefolk in a big way, took up
the natural position that " he should never have my
good will for to make my sister sell candle and mustard
in Framlingham." But the pair had already plighted
their mutual troth; and, therefore, though not yet
absolutely married, they were so far engaged that
neither could marry any one else without a Papal
dispensation. Calle urged Margery to acknowledge
this openly to her family : " I suppose, an ye tell them
sadly the truth, they would not damn their souls for
us." She at last confessed, and the matter came up
before the Bishop of Norwich for judgment. In spite
of all the bullying of the family, and the flagrant
partiality of the Bishop, the girl's mother has to write
and tell Sir John how "Your sister . . . rehearsed
what she had said [when she plighted her troth to
Calle], and said, if those words made it not sure, she
said boldly that she would make that surer ere that
she went thence, for she said she thought in her con-
science she was bound, whatsoever the words weren.
These lewd words grieved me and her grandam as
much as all the remnant." The Bishop still delayed
judgment on the chance of finding " other things against
[Calle] that might cause the letting thereof;" and
meanwhile the mother turned Margery out into the
street; so that the Bishop himself had to find her a
decent lodging while he kept her waiting for his
decision. But to annul this plain contract needed
230 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
grosser methods of injustice than the Fastens had
influence to compass, and Calle not only got his wife
at last, but was taken back into the family service.*
Troilus and Criseyde, having political forces arrayed
against them, might indeed have failed tragically of
their marriage in the end; but there was at least no
reason why they should not fight for it as stoutly as
the prosaic Norfolk bailiff did if only the idea had ever
entered into one or other of their heads !
Another tacit assumption of the chivalric love-code
comes out clearly in the Knight's Tale, and even goes
some way to explain the Franklin's ; though this latter
evidently recounts an old Breton lay in which the
perspective is as frankly fantastic as the landscape of
a miniature. The honest commentator Benvenuto da
Imola is at great pains to assure us that Dante's amor,
che a nullo amato amar perdona was not an exhaustive
statement of actual fact ; and that even the kindest
ladies sometimes remained obdurate to the prayers of
the most meritorious suitors. What is to happen,
then? The hero may, of course, sometimes die; but
not always ; that would be too monotonous. The
solution here, as in so many other cases, lies in a poetic
paraphrase of too prosaic facts. The Due de Berri,
who was a great connoisseur and a man of the most
refined tastes, bought at an immense sacrifice of money
the most delicate little countess in the market : she,
of course, had no choice at all in the matter. At an
equal sacrifice of blood, first Arcite and then Palamon
won the equally passive Emelye, who, when Theseus
had set her up as a prize to the better fighter, could
only pray that she might either avoid them both, or at
least fall to him who loved her best in his inmost heart.
At a cost of equal suffering, though in a different way,
Aurclius won the unwilling Dorigen for his subse-
quent generosity is beside the present purpose. The
reader's sympathy, in medieval romance, is nearly
* "Paston Letters '' (ed. Gairdncr, 1900), ii., 364 ; iv., ccxc.
THE GAY SCIENCE 231
always enlisted for the pursuing man. If only he can
show sufficient valour, or suffer long enough, he must
have the prize, and the lady is sure to shake down
comfortably enough sooner or later.* The idea is not,
of course, peculiar to medieval poetry, but the frequency
with which it there occurs supplies another answer to
the main question of this chapter. Why, if medieval
marriages were really so business-like, is medieval
love-poetry so transcendental ? It is not, in fact, by any
means so transcendental as it seems on the surface;
neither Palamon nor Arcite, at the bottom of all his
extravagant protestations of humble worship, feels the
least scruple in making Emelye the prize of a series of
swashing blows at best, and possibly of a single lucky
thrust. The chance of Shakespeare's caskets does at
least give Portia to the man whom her heart had already
chosen; but the similar chances and counter-chances
of the Knight's Tale simply play shuttlecock with
a helpless and unwilling girl. Under the spell of
Chaucer's art, we know quite well that Palamon and
Emelye lived very happily ever afterwards ; but the
Knight's Tale gives us no reason to doubt the over-
whelming evidence that, while heroes in poetry con-
quered their wives with their right arm, plain men in
prose openly bargained for them.
* Few tales illustrate more clearly the woman's duty of accepting any
knight who made himself sufficiently miserable about her, than that of
Boccaccio, which Dryden has so finely versified under the name of
Theodore and Honoria; Equally significant is one of the " Gesta
Romanorum" (ed. Swan., No. XXVIII.).
CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREAT WAR
j
Ce voyons bien, qu'au temps present
La guerre si commune e"prend,
Qu'a peine y a nul labourer
Lequel a son me'tier se prend :
Le pretre laist le sacrement, [laisse
Et le vilain le charruer,
Tous vont aux armes travailler.
Si Dieu ne pense a 1'amender,
L'on peut douter prochainement
Que tout le mond doit reverser."
GOWER, " Mirour," 24097
OF all the causes that tended in Chaucer's time to
modify the old ideals of knighthood, none
perhaps was more potent than the Hundred Years'
War. Unjust as it was on both sides for the cause of
Philippe de Valois cannot be separated from certain
inexcusable manoeuvres of his predecessors on the
French throne it was the first thoroughly national war
on so large a scale since the institution of chivalry. No
longer merely feudal levies, but a whole people on
either side is gradually involved in this struggle; and
its military lessons anticipate, to a certain extent, those
of the French Revolutionary Wars. Even in Froissart's
narrative, the greatest heroes of Crecy are the English
archers; and the Welsh knifemen by their side play a
part undreamed of in earlier feudal warfare. " When
the Genoese were assembled together and began to
approach, they made a great cry to abash the English-
men, but they stood still and stirred not for all
that ; then the Genoese again the second time made
THE GREAT WAR 233
another fell cry, and stept forward a little, and the
Englishmen removed not one foot ; thirdly, again they
cried, and went forth till they came within shot; then
they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the
English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their
arrows so wholly together and so thick, that it seemed
snow. . . . And ever still the Englishmen shot whereas
they saw thickest press ; the sharp arrows ran into the
men of arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse
and men. . . . And also among the Englishmen there
were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives,
and they went in among the men of arms, and slew and
murdered many as they lay on the ground, both earls,
barons, knights and squires, whereof the king of England
was after displeased, for he had rather they had been
taken prisoners."
Those "certain rascals" did not only kill certain
knights, they killed also the old idea of Knighthood.
From that time forward the art of war, which had so
long been practised under the frequent restraint of
certain aristocratic conventions, took a great leap in the
direction of modern business methods. The people
were concerned now; and they had grown, as they are
apt to grow, inconveniently in earnest. There is a
peculiarly living interest for modern England in the
story of that army which at Crecy won the first of a
series of victories astounding to all Christendom. Only
a few months after Chaucer's unlucky campaign in
France, Petrarch had travelled across to Paris, and
recorded his impressions in a letter. " The English . . .
have overthrown the ancient glories of France by
victories so numerous and unexpected that this people,
which formerly was inferior to the miserable Scots, has
now (not to speak of that lamentable and undeserved
fall of a great king which I cannot recall without a sigh)
so wasted with fire and sword the whole kingdom of
France that I, when I last crossed the country on
business, could scarce believe it to be the same land
234 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
which I had seen before."* The events which so
startled Petrarch were indeed immediately attributable
to the business qualities and the ambitions of two
English kings ; but their ultimate cause lay far deeper.
During all the first stages of the war, in which the
English superiority was most marked, the conflict was
practically between the French feudal forces and the
English national levies. While French kings ignored
the duty of every man to serve in defence of his own
home, or remembered it only as an excuse for extorting
money instead of personal service, Edward III. brought
the vast latent forces of his whole kingdom, and (what
was perhaps even more important) its full business
energies, to bear against a chivalry which at its best
had been unpractical in its exclusiveness, and was now
already decaying. " Edward I. and III. . . . (and this
makes their reigns a decisive epoch in the history of
the Middle Ages, as well as in that of England) were
the real creators of modern infantry. We must not,
however, ascribe the honour of this creation only to the
military genius of the two English Kings ; they were
driven to it by necessity, the mother of invention. The
device which they used is essentially the same which
has been employed in every age by countries of small
extent and therefore of scanty population, viz. com-
pulsory military service. Although the name of con-
scription is obviously modern, the thing itself is of
ancient use among the very people who know least of
it nowadays ; and it may be proved conclusively that
Edward III., especially, practised it on a great scale.
The documentary evidence for this fact is so plentiful
that to draw up the briefest summary of it would be to
write a whole chapter neither the least interesting nor
the least novel, be it said of English history ; and that
is no part of my plan here." So wrote Simeon Luce,
the greatest French specialist on the period, thirty
* Quoted by S. Luce, " Bertram! du Guesclin," 1882, p. 124.
THE GREAT WAR 235
years ago; but the point which he here makes so
clearly has hardly yet been fully grasped by English
writers.* It may therefore be worth while to bring
forward here some specimens of the mass of evidence
to which Luce alludes. Compulsory service is, of
course, prehistoric and universal ; few nations could
have survived in the past unless all their citizens had
been ready to fight for them in case of need ; and the
decadence of imperial Rome began with the time when
her populace demanded to be fed at the public expense,
and defended by hired troops. In principle, therefore,
even 14th-century France recognized the liability of
every citizen to serve, while England had not only the
principle but the practice. Her old Fyrd, the Anglo-
Saxon militia system, was reorganized by Henry II.
and again by Edward I. By the latter's " Statute of
Winchester" every able-bodied man was bound not
only to possess arms on a scale proportionate to his
wealth, but also to learn their use. A fresh impulse
was given to this military training by Edward I., who
learned from his Welsh enemies that the longbow,
already a well-known weapon among his own subjects,
was far superior in battle to the crossbow. Edward,
therefore, gradually set about training a large force of
English archers. Falkirk (1298) was the first important
battle in which the archery was used in scientific com-
bination with cavalry; Bannockburn (1314) was the last
in which the English repeated the old blunder of relying
on mounted knights and men-at-arms, and allowing the
infantry to act as a more or less disordered mass.
While Philippe de Valois was raising money by the
suicidal expedients of taxing bowstrings and ordaining
general levies from which every one was expected to
redeem himself b}^ a money fine, Edward III. was giving
the strictest orders that archery should take precedence
* The essentially compulsory foundation of Edward III.'s armies, for
at least a great part of his reign, seems to have been overlooked even by
Prof. Oman in his valuable " Art of War in the Middle Ages."
236 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
of all other sports in England, and that the country
should furnish him all the men he needed for his wars.*
Of all the documents to which Luce refers (and which
are even more numerous than he could have guessed
thirty years ago) let us here glance at two or three
which bring the whole system visibly before us. In
this matter, as in several others, the clearest evidence is
to be found among Mr. Hudson's invaluable gleanings
from the Norwich archives.! He has printed and
analyzed a number of documents which show the work-
ing of the militia system in the city between 1355 and
1370 that is, at a time when it is generally asserted
that we were conducting the French wars on the
voluntary system. In these documents we find that the
Statute of Winchester was being worked quite as
strictly as we are entitled to expect of any medieval
statute, and a great deal more strictly than the average.
The city did in fact provide, and periodically review, an
armed force equal in numbers to rather more than one-
tenth of its total population a somewhat larger pro-
portion, that is, than would be furnished by the modern
system of conscription on the Continent. Many of these
men, of course, turned out with no more than the
minimum club and knife ; the next step was to add a
sword or an axe to these primitive weapons, and so on
through the archers to the numerous " half-armed men,"
who had in addition to their offensive weapons a plated
doublet with visor and iron gauntlets, and finally the
"fully-armed," who had in addition a shirt of mail under
the doublet, a neck-piece and arm-plates, and whose
total equipment must have cost some .30 or .40 of
modern money. Mr. Hudson also notes that " it is
plain that the Norwich archers were many of them men
of good standing."
* Froissart, cd. Luce, i., 401. It was at this time that Edward
also proclaimed the duty of teaching French for military purposes, as
noted in Chap. I. of this book.
t " Norwich Militia in the I4th Century " (Norfolk and Norwich Arch.
Soc.), vol. xiv., p. 263.
THE GREAT WAR 237
Moreover, this small amount of compulsion was
found in medieval England, as in modern Switzerland,
to stimulate rather than to repress the volunteer
energies of the nation. Not only did shooting become
the favourite national sport, but many of whom we
might least have expected such self-sacrifice came
forward gladly to fight side by side with their fellow-
citizens for hearth and home. In 1346, when the Scots
invaded England under the misapprehension that none
remained to defend the country but "ploughmen and
shepherds and feeble or broken-down chaplains," they
found among the powerful militia force which met
them many parsons who were neither feeble nor
infirm. Crowds of priests were among those who
trooped out from Beverley and York, and other
northern towns, to a victory of which Englishmen
have more real reason to be proud than of any other
in our early history. Marching with sword and quiver
on their thigh and the good six-foot bow under their
arm, they took off shoes and stockings at the town
gates and started barefoot, with chants and litanies,
upon that righteous campaign. In 1360, again, when
there was a scare of invasion and all men from sixteen
to sixty were called out, then "bishops, abbots, and
priors, rectors, vicars, and chaplains were as ready as
the abbots [sic] had been, some to be men-at-arms and
some to be archers . . . and the beneficed clergy who
could not serve in person hired substitutes." In 1383
priests and monks were fighting even among the so-
called crusaders whom Bishop Despenser led against
the French in Flanders.*
To have so large a proportion of the nation thus
trained for home defence was in itself a most important
military asset, for it freed the hands of the army which
was on foreign service, and enabled it to act without
misgivings as to what might be happening at home.
This was in fact the militia which, while Edward III.
* Knighton (R. S.), ii., 42, 44, 109.
238 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
was with his great army at Crecy and Calais, inflicted
on the Scottish invaders at Neville's Cross one of the
most crushing defeats in their history, and added one
more crowned head to the collection of noble prisoners
in London.* But, more than this, it formed a recruiting-
field which alone enabled English armies, far from their
base, to hold their own against the forces of a country
which at that time had an enormous numerical superiority
in population. It had always been doubtful how far the
militia was bound to serve abroad. Edward III. himself
had twice been forced to grant immunity by statute
(first and twenty-fifth years), but with the all-important
saving clause "except under great urgency." Such
great urgency was in fact constantly pleaded, and the
cities did not care to contest the point. Several calls
were made on Norwich for 120 men at a time, a pro-
portion which, in figures of modern town population,
would be roughly equivalent to 1200 from North-
ampton, 8000 from Birmingham, and 10,000 from
Glasgow. In the year before Crecy the less populous
town of Lynn was assessed at 100 men "of the strongest
and most vigorous of the said town, each armed with
breastplate, helmet, and gauntlets . . . for the defence
and rescue of Our duchy of Aquitaine." The drain on
London at the same time was enormous, as I have
already had occasion to note in Chapter X. The briefest
summary of the evidence contained in Dr. Sharpe's
Letter-Books will suffice here. On the outbreak of war
in 1337, in addition to a considerable tribute of ships,
the city was called upon for a contingent of 500 men
which would be equivalent to the enormous tribute of
50,000 soldiers from modern London. Presently "the
king . . . took occasion to find fault with the city's
dilatoriness in carrying out his orders, and complained
* The Scots themselves had found out long before this who were their
most formidable enemies. Sir James Douglas had been accustomed to
cut off the right hand or put out the right eye of any archer whom he
could catch.
THE GREAT WAR 239
of the want of physique in the men that were being
supplied. At the request of John de Pulteneye, who
was then occupying the Mayoral chair for the fourth
time, he consented to accept 200 able-bodied archers
at once, and to postpone the selection of the remainder
of the force. At the same time he issued letters patent
declaring that the aid furnished by the city should not
become a precedent. The names of the 200 archers
that went to Gascony are set out in the Letter-
Book. . . ." But Royal promises are unstable. Another
contingent of 100 was sent soon after. In 1338 London
was ordered to fit out four ships with 300 men to join
the home defence fleet at Winchelsea; the citizens pro-
tested so strongly that this was reduced by a half. In
1340 the King seized all ships of forty tons' burden
and raised 300 more soldiers from London, who took
part in the glorious victory of Sluys. In 1342 another
levy; in 1344, 400 archers again; in 1346 "the sheriffs
of London were called upon to make proclamation for
all persons between the ages of sixteen and sixty to
take up arms and to be at Portsmouth by March 26th "
a command which, however interpreted with the
usual elasticity, must yet have produced several
hundred recruits for the army which fought at Crecy.
Next year two ships were demanded with 180 armed
men, and two more again later in the year. In 1350
two London ships with 170 armed men were raised
for the battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer. In 1355,
again, 520 soldiers were demanded from the city.
While this was going on in the towns, the Berkeley
papers give us similar evidence of conscription in the
counties, though the documents are not here con-
tinuous. In 1332 the Sheriff of Gloucester was bidden
to raise 100 men for service in Ireland; next year 500
for Scotland. Three years later the country was
obliged to send 2500 to Scotland, besides the Gloucester
city and Bristol contingents. Then comes the FYench
war. In 1337 and 1338 Lord Berkeley spends most of
240 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
his time mustering and arraying soldiers for France.
In the latter year, and again in 1339, Edward com-
missions him to array and arm all the able men in the
country, as others were doing throughout the kingdom ;
563 were thus arrayed in the shire, and Smyth very
plausibly conjectures that the small number is due to
Lord Berkeley's secret favour for his own county.
In 1345, when Edward made the great effort which
culminated at Crecy, the county and the town of Bristol
had to raise and arm 622 men "to be conducted whither
Lord Berkeley should direct." And so on until 1347,
when there is a significant addition of plenary powers
to punish all refractory and rebellious persons, a riot
having apparently broken out on account of these
levies.* From this time forward the scattered notices
never refer to levies for service abroad ; but they are
still frequent for home defence, and Smyth proudly
records in three folio volumes the numbers of trained
and disciplined men in his own time (James I.), with
their "names and several statures," in the single
hundred of Berkeley. The national militia always re-
mained the most valuable recruiting ground, and kept
up that love of archery for which the English were
famous down to Elizabeth's days and beyond ; yet,
for purely foreign wars, Edward's frequent drains
broke the national patience before the end of his
reign. The evidence from London points most plainly
in this direction. In 1369 at last we find the tell-tale
notice : " It was frequently easier for the City to
furnish the King with money than with men. Hence
we find it recorded that at the end of August of this
year the citizens had agreed to raise a sum of 2000
* Compare the interesting- case in Gross, " Office of Coroner," p. 74.
Two conscripts, on their way to join the army, chanced to meet at Cold
Ashby the constable who was responsible for their being selected ; they
ran him through with a lance and then took sanctuary. It is significant
that they were not hanged, but carried off to the army ; the King needed
every stout arm he could muster.
THE GREAT WAR 241
for the king in lieu of furnishing him with a military
contingent." Already by this time the tide had turned
against us in France; not that the few English troops
failed to keep up their superiority in the field, but Du
Guesclin played a waiting game and wore us steadily
out. Castle after castle was surprised ; isolated detach-
ments were crushed one by one; reinforcements were
difficult to raise ; and before Edward's death three sea-
ports alone were left of all his French conquests. He had
at one time wielded an army almost like Napoleon's
a mass of professional soldiers raised from a nation in
arms. But, like Napoleon, he had used it recklessly.
Such material could not be supplied ad infinitum, and
our victories began again only after a period of com-
parative rest, when France was crippled by the madness
of her King and divided by internecine feuds.
Edward's conscription, it will be seen, was some-
what old-fashioned compared with that of modern France
and Germany. Men were enrolled for a campaign partly
by bargain, partly by force ; and, once enrolled, the
wars generally made them into professional soldiers
for life. No doubt Shakespeare's caricature in the
second part of King Henry IV. may help us a little here,
so long as we make due allowance for his comic purpose
and the rustiness of the institution in his time. For
already in Chaucer's lifetime there was a great change
in our system of over-sea service. As the sources of
conscription began to dry up, the King fell back more
and more upon the expedient of hiring troops : he
would get some great captain to contract himself by
indenture to bring so many armed men at a given time,
and the contractor in his turn entered into a number
of sub-contracts with minor leaders to contribute to his
contingent. Under this system a very large proportion
of aliens came into our armies ; but even then we kept
the same organization and principles as in those earlier
hosts which were really contingents of English militia.
An army thus drawn from a people accustomed to
242 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
some real measure of self-government inevitably broke
through many feudal traditions ; and from a very early
stage in the war we find important commands given to
knights and squires who had fought their way up from
the ranks. The most renowned of all these English
soldiers of fortune, Sir John Hawkwood, married the
sister of Clarence's Violante, with a dowry of a million
florins ; yet he is recorded to have begun as a common
archer. He was probably a younger son of a good
Essex house; but this again simply emphasizes the
democratic and business-like organization of the English
army compared with its rivals. Du Guesclin, though
he was the eldest son of one of the smaller French
nobles, found his promotion terribly retarded by his
lack of birth and influence. He was probably the most
distinguished leader in France before he even received
the honour of knighthood. At the date of the battle
of Cocherel he had fought with success for more than
twenty years, and was by far the most distinguished
captain present ; yet he owed the command on that day
only to the rare good fortune that the greatest noble
present recognized his own comparative incapacity, and
that the rest agreed in offering to fight under a man
of less social distinction but incomparably greater
experience than any of themselves. In the English
army there would from the first have been no doubt
about the real commander Hawkwood, perhaps, who
was believed to have begun life as a tailor's apprentice,
or Knolles, whom this war had taken from the weaver's
loom.
Even the magnificent Edward, with all his Round
Table and his Order of the Garter, was forced to
recognize clearly that war is above all things a business.
In the earlier days he did indeed defy Philippe de
Valois to single combat ; but during the campaign of
Crecy he made light of the laws of chivalry. He had
penetrated close to Paris; his army was melting away;
provisions were scarce ; and the French had broken
THE GREAT WAR 243
the bridges in his rear. At this point Philip sent him
a regular chivalric challenge in form to meet him
with his army on a field and a day to be fixed at his
own choice, within certain reasonable limits. Edward
returned a misleading answer, made a corresponding
feint with his troops, rapidly rebuilt the bridge of
Poissy, and had crossed to a place of safety before
Philip realized that a clever piece of strategy had been
executed under his very nose and behind the forms of
chivalry. Then only did Edward throw off the mask,
and declare his intention of choosing his own place and
time for battle. His Royal great-grandson was even
more business-like. When the French nobles asked
Henry V. to give a great tourney in honour of his
marriage, as had always been the custom, he refused in
the bluntest and most soldierly fashion. He and his
men, he replied, would be engaged for the next few
weeks at the siege of Sens ; if any gallant Frenchman
wished to break a lance or two, he might come and
break them there. While this mimic warfare was at
its highest favour in France, the three Edwards had
always kept jealous control over it in England, and
constantly forbidden tournaments without Royal licence.
This policy is, no doubt, partly explained by some
deference to ecclesiastical prohibitions, and partly by
the disorders to which jousts constantly gave rise ; but
we may pretty safely infer (with Luce) that our kings
had little belief in the direct value of the knightly
tournament as a school of warfare, and that here, as on
so many other points, the practical genius of the race
broke even through class prejudices.*
It is impossible better to sum up the results of
* Tournaments not infrequently gave rise to treacherous murders and
vendettas, as in the case of Sir Walter Mauny's father (Froissart,
Buchon., i., 199). Compare also the scandal caused by the women who
used to attend them in men's clothes (Knighton, ii., p. 57). Luce, how-
ever, very much overstates the Royal objections to jousts (pp. 113, 141).
He evidently fails to realize what a large number of authorized tourneys
were held by Edward III.
244 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
English business methods in warfare than in the words,
which are forced reluctantly from M. Luce's impartial
pen. " In my opinion, five or six thousand English
archers, thus drilled and equipped, and supported by
an equal number of knifemen, would always have beaten
even considerably larger forces of the bravest chivalry
in the world at least in a frontal attack and as a matter
of sheer hard fighting. Such, moreover, seems to have
been the opinion of Bertrand du Guesclin, the most
renowned captain of the Middle Ages, who never fought
a great pitched battle against a real English army if he
could possibly help it. At Cocherel his adversaries
were mostly Gascons, and at Pontvallain he crushed
Knolles's rear-guard by one of those startling marches
of which he had the secret ; but he was beaten at Auray
and Navarette." Gower might complain without too
poetical exaggeration that the vortex of war swept away
not only the serf from his plough but the very priest
from his altar; yet even Chaucer's Poor Parson may
well have conceded that, if we must have an army at
all, we might as well have it as efficient and as truly
national as possible.
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR
" [Edward], the first of English nation
That ever had right unto the crown of France
By succession of blood and generation
Of his mother withouten variance,
The which me thinketh should be of most substance ;
For Christ was king by his mother of Judee,
Which surer side is ay, as thinketh me."
HARDYNG, " Chronicle," 335
IT must, however, be admitted that so terrible a
weapon in so rough an age was only too dangerous.
When Edward III. found that his cousin of France not
only meant to deal treacherously with him in Aquitaine,
but had also allied himself with our deadly enemies of
Scotland, he found a very colourable excuse for retalia-
tion by raising a claim to the throne of France. But for
the Salic law, which forbade inheritance through a
female, Edward would undoubtedly be, if not the right-
ful heir, at least nearer than Philippe de Valois, who
now sat on that throne. The Biblical colour which he
gave to his claim by pleading the precedent of "Judee"
was of course the after-thought of some ingenious
theologian ; the real strength of Edward's claim lay in
his army. To appreciate the strength of Edward's
temptations here, we must imagine modern Germany
adding to her other armaments a navy capable of com-
manding the seas, a Kaiser fettered by even less
constitutional checks than at present, and sharing
with his people even greater incitements to cupidity.
Beyond the prospect, always dazzling enough to a
statesman, of an enormous indemnity and a substantial
246 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
increase of territory, medieval warfare offered even to
the meanest English soldier only too probable hopes of
riot and booty. Froissart, though he seldom feels very
deeply for the mere people, describes our first march
through the defenceless districts of Normandy in words
which make us understand why this unhappy, unpre-
pared country could only mark time for the next
hundred years, while we, in spite of all our faults and
follies, went on slowly from strength to strength.
England, with her own four or five millions and a little
help from Aquitaine, rode roughshod again and again
over the disorganized ten millions north of the Loire;
while the French even during those thirty years of
union which elapsed between the recovery of Guienne
and the murder of the Duke of Orleans frequently
enough burned our southern seaports, but never pene-
trated more than a few miles inland in the face of our
shire-levies.
The contrast is in every way characteristic of
Chaucer's England, and Froissart's description is of the
deepest significance, not only to the student of political
and social history, but even to the literary historian. It
has been noted that Chaucer's deepest note of pathos
is for the sorrows of the helpless the irremediable
sufferings of those whose frailty has tempted murder
or oppression, and to whom the poet himself can offer
nothing but a tear on earth and some hope of redress
in heaven. Let us remember, then, that Chaucer fought
in two French campaigns, identical in kind and not
even differing much in degree from the invasion of
1346 which Froissart describes. "They came to a good
port and to a good town called Barfleur, the which
incontinent was won, for they within gave up for fear
of death. Howbeit, for all that the town was robbed,
and much gold and silver there found, and rich jewels ;
there was found so much riches, that the boys and
villains of the host set nothing by good furred gowns ;
they made all the men of the town to issue out and to go
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 247
into the ships, because they would not suffer them to
be behind them for fear of rebelling again. After the
town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed without
brenning, then they spread abroad in the country and
did what they list, for there was none to resist them.
At last they came to a great and a rich town called
Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and
brent part thereof, but into the castle they could not
come, it was so strong and well furnished with men of
war. Then they passed forth and came to Montebourg,
and took it and robbed and brent it clean. In this
manner they brent many other towns in that country
and won so much riches, that it was marvel to reckon
it. Then they came to a great town well closed called
Carentan, where there was also a strong castle and
many soldiers within to keep it. Then the lords came
out of their ships and fiercely made assault; the
burgesses of the town were in great fear of their lives,
wives and children ; they suffered the Englishmen to
enter into the town against the will of all the soldiers
that were there ; they put all their goods to the English-
men's pleasures, they thought that most advantage.
When the soldiers within saw that, they went into the
castle; the Englishmen went into the town, and two
days together they made sore assaults, so that when
they within saw no succour, they yielded up, their lives
and goods saved, and so departed. The Englishmen
had their pleasure of that good town and castle, and
when they saw they might not maintain to keep it, they
set fire therein and brent it, and made the burgesses of
the town to enter into their ships, as they had done
with them of Barfleur, Cherbourg and Montebourg, and
of other towns that they had won on the sea-side. .
The lord Godfrey as marshal rode forth with five
hundred men of arms, and rode off from the king's
battle a six or seven leagues, in brenning and exiling
the country, the which was plentiful of everything the
granges full of corn, the houses full of all riches, rich
248 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
burgesses, carts and chariots, horse, swine, muttons and
other beasts ; they took what them list and brought
into the king's host ; but the soldiers made no count to
the king nor to none of his officers of the gold and silver
that they did get ; they kept that to themselves. . . . Thus
by the Englishmen was brent, exiled, robbed, wasted
and pilled the good, plentiful country of Normandy. . . .
It was no marvel though they of the country were
afraid, for before that time they had never seen men of
war, nor they wist not what war or battle meant. They
fled away as far as they might hear speaking of the
Englishmen, and left their houses well stuffed, and
granges full of corn, they wist not how to save and keep
it." Hitherto Froissart has only deigned to record the
fire and pillage ; but the melancholy catalogue now goes
on to Coutances, Saint-L6, and Caen, where at last the
citizens fought boldly in defence of their unwalled town,
" greater than any city in England except London." In
spite of their numbers, and of an obstinate courage
which extorted the admiration of their adversaries, the
half-armed and untrained citizens were at last hopelessly
beaten, and the town given over to the infuriated
soldiery; though here Sir Thomas Holland, an old
Crusader, who might have sat for Chaucer's Knight,
"rode into the streets and saved many lives of ladies,
damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling, for the soldiers
were without mercy." *
At a later stage, when the horrors of civil war were
added to those of the English invasion, the Norman
chronicler, Thomas Basin, describes the fertile country
between Loire, Seine, and Somme as a mere wilderness,
half overgrown with brambles and thickets. "More-
over, whatsoever husbandry there was in the aforesaid
lands, was only in the neighbourhood and suburbs of
cities, towns, or castles, for so far as a watchman's eye
from some tower or point of vantage could reach to see
robbers coming upon them ; then would the watchman
* Froissart, Globe, 94-97.
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 249
sound the alarm ... on a bell or hunting horn, or other
bugle. Which alarms and incursions were so common
and frequent in very many places, that when the oxen
anC plough-horses were loosed from the plough, hearing
ihe watchman's signal, they took flight and galloped
away forthwith of their own accord, by the force of
habit, to their places of refuge ; nay, the very sheep and
swine had learnt by long use to do the same." The
French Bishop Jean-Jouvenel des Ursins, in 1433, speaks
of the sufferings of his diocese in language too painful
and too direct to be reproduced here.*
To realize the full force of these descriptions, it is
necessary to compare them with those of the good
monk Walsingham, who drily records how Edward
"attacked, took, sacked, and burnt Caen, and many
other cities after it." It is only when Edward comes
back from Calais with his victorious army that
Walsingham waxes eloquent. "Then folk thought that
a new sun was rising over England, for the abundance
of peace, the plenty of possessions, and the glory of
victory. For there was no woman of any name, but
had somewhat of the spoils of Caen, Calais, and other
cities beyond the seas. Furs, feather-beds, or household
utensils, tablecloths and necklaces, cups of gold or
silver, linen and sheets, were to be seen scattered about
England in different houses. Then began the English
ladies to wax wanton in the vesture of the French
women ; and as the latter grieved to have lost their
goods, so the former rejoiced to have obtained them."f
In an age of brute force, when popes hesitated no more
than kings to shed rivers of blood for a few square miles
of territory, when every sailor was a potential pirate
* Denifle, "La Desolation des Eglises," etc., vol. i., pp. 497, 504,
514. Two pages from English chroniclers are almost as bad as any of
the iniquities printed in Father Denifle's book, viz. the sack of Winchelsea
(Knighton, ii., 109) and Sir John Arundel's shipload of nuns from South-
ampton (Walsingham, an. 1379; told briefly in "Social England," illd.
ed., vol. ii. p. 260).
t Cf. Knighton, ii., 102.
250 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
and every baron a potential highwayman * in such an
age as this, no nation could have resisted the lust of
conquest when it had once realized the wealth and
supine helplessness of a neighbour. "The English,"
wrote Froissart, when old age had brought him to
ponder less on feats of arms and more on eternity, "The
English will never love or honour their king but if he
be victorious, and a lover of arms and war against his
neighbours, and especially against such as are greater
and richer than themselves. . . . Their land is more
fulfilled of riches and all manner of goods when they
are at war, than in times of peace ; and therein are they
born and ingrained, nor could a man make them under-
stand the contrary. . . . They take delight and solace in
battles and in slaughter: covetous and envious are they
above measure of other men's wealth." f But when
exhausted France could no longer yield more than a
mere livelihood to the armies which overran her, then
at last things found their proper level, and the nation
wearied of bloodshed. " Universal conscription proved
then as now the great inculcator of peace. To the
burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and
the market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war
was a hard and ungrateful service, where reward and
plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand ; and men
conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which
they had measured all the misery."^:
* Green, "Town Life," i., 130. "At the close of the 1 4th century
a certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of
Stanley, raised eight hundred fighting men ' to destroy and hurt the
commons of Chester ' ; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey,
seized the wine, and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor
and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff. When in 1441
the Archbishop of York determined to light for his privileges in Ripon
Fair, he engaged two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the
Marches at sixpence or a shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman,
Sir John Plumpton, gathered seven hundred men ; and at the battle that
ensued, more than a thousand arrows were discharged by them."
f Ed. Luce, i., 213, 214 ; cf. 312.
t Mrs. Green, /. c., i., 131.
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 251
But, terribly as it might press upon our enemies
in those days, when the private soldier had almost an
unrestricted right of pillage, the Statute of Winchester
was none the less necessary to the full development of
our political freedom. Indeed, it is scarcely a paradox
to say that those civic and Parliamentary liberties which
made such rapid strides during the sixty years of
Chaucer's lifetime owed as much to this burden of
personal service as to anything else. To begin with,
it was a police system also ; and, for by far the greater
part of the country, the only police system. When the
hue and cry was raised after a robber or a murderer,
all were then bound to tumble out of doors and join in
the chase with such arms as they had, just as they were
bound to turn out and take their share in the national
war. When all the disorders of the i4th century have
been counted up in England, they are as dust in the
balance compared with those of foreign countries. The
Peasants' Rising of 1381 astonishes modern historians
in nothing so much as in its sudden rise, its sudden
end when the King had promised redress, and its
comparative orderliness in disorder. But, on second
thoughts, does not this seem natural enough among
a people accustomed to rough military discipline, and
liable any day to be arrayed, as they had laboured, side
by side?* Lastly, we have the repeated testimony
of our most determined enemies to the superiority of
English over French discipline. Bishop des Ursins,
in a letter written to the French Parliament in 1433,
describes the worst horrors of the war as having been
committed by French upon French ; and he expressly
adds, "at present, things are somewhat amended by
the coming of the English." This modified compliment
he repeats again in a letter to Charles VII., adding,
" [the English] did indeed at least keep their assurances
once given, and also their safe conducts"; while the
* This point is treated more fully in the next chapter.
252 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
French (as he complains) often made light of their own
engagements.* Indeed, the whole array of documents
collected by the astounding diligence of the late sub-
prefect of the Vatican Library is calculated we may not
say, to make us read with equanimity the tale of horrors
perpetrated by our countrymen in France but at least
to shift much of the blame from the individuals to the
times in which they lived. The English were not cruel
merely because they were strong ; the weaker French
were on the whole more cruel; nowhere has the bitter
proverb Galhts Gallo lupus been more terribly justified.
The main difference was that, in an age when a man
must needs be hammer or anvil, our national character
and organization, no doubt assisted also by fortune,
enabled us to play the former part. Father Denifle
shows very clearly how even great and good Frenchmen
like Des Ursins, living in Joan of Arc's time, were
ashamed of her because she seemed to have failed. The
impulses of actual chivalry apart from its nominal
code were at best even more capricious in France
than in England. Knightly mercy and forbearance
seldom even professed to include the mere rank and
file of a conquered army. When a place was taken by
storm, it was common to ransom the officers and kill
the rest without mercy. Here and there a knight earns
special praise from Froissart by pleading for the lives
of the unhappy privates who had fought as bravely as
himself; but I remember no case of one who actually
insisted on sharing the fate of his men. The Black
Prince tarnished his fair fame by the massacre of
Limoges; yet in this he did but follow the example of
the saintly Charles de Blois, who thanked God for
victory in the cathedral of Quimper while his men were
making a hell of the captured city. His orisons
finished, Charles stayed the slaughter; and the Black
Prince, after watching the butchery of Limoges from
his litter, and turning his face away from women and
* Denifle, /. c., pp. 497, 504.
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 253
children who knelt to implore his mercy, was at last
appeased by the manly spectacle of three French
warriors fighting boldly for their lives against three
Englishmen.* Their courage saved them, and what
we might now call their conqueror's sporting instincts ;
just as Queen Philippa's timely pleading saved the
citizens of Calais. All honour to the noble impulse
in both cases ; but greater honour still to the manly
independence and discipline which saved our English
commonalty from the need of appealing to a conqueror's
mercy ; which defended them alike from robbers at
home and Frenchmen over the seas, and left us free to
work out our own liberties without foreign interference.
No doubt the Wars of the Roses were partly a legacy
of our unjust aggression in France ; but English civil
wars have been among the least disorderly the world
has known ; in all of them the citizen-levies have fought
stoutly on the side of liberty ; and for centuries after
Chaucer's death the national militia was recognized as
a strong counterpoise to the unconstitutional tendencies
of the standing army.
Of all this Froissart recognized little indeed ; though
we, in the light of a hundred other documents, can see
how all went on under Froissart's eyes. He saw clearly
that this was the most warlike nation in Europe; he saw
also that it was the most democratic ; but he seems
neither to have traced any connection here on the one
hand, nor on the other to have been troubled by any
sense of contrast ; it was not in his genius to look for
causes, but rather to repeat with child-like vivacity
what he saw and heard. Yet for us, to whom nothing
in Chaucer's England can be more interesting than to
watch, under the great trees of the forest, the springing
of that undergrowth which was in time to become the
present British people, it is delightful to turn from
* " More than three thousand men, women, and children were beheaded
that day. God have mercy on their souls, for I trow they were martyrs."
Froissart (Globe), 201.
254 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
pictures of mere successful bloodshed to Froissart's
bitter-sweet judgments on the national character.
" Englishmen suffer indeed for a season, but in the
end they repay so cruelly that it may stand as a great
warning; for no man may mock them; the lord who
governs them rises and lays him down to rest in sore
peril of his life. . . . And specially there is no people
under the sun so perilous in the matter of its common
folk as they are in England. For in England the nature
and condition of the nobles is very far different from
that of the common folk and villeins ; for the gentlefolk
are of loyal and noble condition, and the common
people is of a fell, perilous, proud and disloyal con-
dition : and wheresoever the people would show their
fierceness and their power, the nobles would not last
long after. But now for a long time they have been
at good accord together, for the nobles ask nothing of
the people but what is of full reason ; moreover none
would suffer them to take aught from him without
payment nay, not an egg or a hen. The tradesmen
and labourers of England live by the travail of their
hands, and the nobles live on their own rents and
revenues, and if the kings vex them they are repaid ;
not that the king can tax his people at pleasure, no !
nor the people would not or could not suffer it. There
are certain ordinances and covenants settled upon the
staple of wool, wherefrom the king is assisted beyond
his own rents and revenues ; and when they go to war,
that covenant is doubled. England is best kept of all
lands in the world ; otherwise they could by no means
live together; and it behoveth well that a king who is
their lord should order his ways after them and bow
to their will in many matters ; and if he do the contrary,
so that evil come thereof, bitterly then shall he rue it,
as did this king Edward II." "And men said then in
London and throughout England 'we must reform and
take a new ordinance [with our king] ; for that which
we have had hath brought us sore weariness and travail,
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 255
and this kingdom of ours is not worth a straw without
a good head ; whereas we have had one as bad as a man
can find. . . . We have no use for a sluggish and heavy
king who seeketh too much his own ease and pleasure ;
we would rather slay half a hundred of such, one after
the other, than fail to get a king to our use and liking."
" The King of England must needs obey his people, and
do all their will."*
We with our present liberties must not of course
take these words of Froissart's too literally; but they
must have conveyed a very definite and, on the whole, a
very true impression to his French contemporaries ;
for no language but that of hyperbole could adequately
have described the contrast between their polity and
that of England. Moreover, it must be remembered
that Froissart wrote this with the Peasant's Revolt
not far behind him, and the deposition of Richard II.
fresh in his mind. The truth is that the feudal system
was already slowly but surely breaking down in
England : our lower classes, with recognized constitu-
tional rights on the one hand, and on the other hand
a rough military organization and discipline of their
own, were, in many ways, far more free in 1389 than the
French peasants of 1789. Chaucer and Froissart always
felt at the bottom of their hearts this coming of the
People ; it lends a breadth to their thoughts and colour
to their brush even when they paint the gorgeous
pageantry of overripe feudalism ; labouring the more
earnestly, perhaps, to record these fleeting hues because
of the night which must needs come before the new
day. And how vivid their pictures are ! The prologue
to the " Book of the Duchess," the castle garden and
the tournament in the Knight's Tale, Troilus with his
knights pacing the aisles of the temple to gaze on the
ladies at their prayers, or riding home under Criseyde's
balcony after the victorious fight : Froissart's stories of
the Chaplet of Pearls, the Court of Gaston de Foix,
* Ed. Luce, pp. 214, 249, 337.
256 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
the Dance of the Wild Men, Queen Isabella's entry into
London what an enchanted palace of tapestries and
stained glass we have here, and what a school of stately
manners ! But time, which takes away so much, brings
us still more in compensation ; and without treason to
Chaucer or his age we may frankly admit that his perfect
knight is only younger brother to Colonel Newcome,
and that Froissart himself can show us no figure so
deeply chivalrous as the Lawrences or the Havelocks
of our later Indian Wars.
CHAPTER XX
THE POOH
" Misuse not thy bondman, the better mayst thou speed ;
Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven
That he win a worthier seat, and with more bliss ;
For in charnel at the church churls be evil to know,
Or a knight from a knave there ; know this in thine heart."
" Piers Plowman," B., vi., 46
IT has sometimes been contended in recent years that
the Middle Ages lacked only our smug middle-class
comfort ; and that, as the upper classes were nobler, so
the poor were healthier and happier then. It is probable
that the latter part of this theory is at least as mistaken
as the first : but the question is in itself more complicated,
and we have naturally less detailed evidence in the poor
man's case than in the rich man's. Among the great, we
find many virtues and many vices common to both ages ;
but a careful comparison reveals certain grave faults
which put the earlier state of society, as we might
expect, at a definite and serious disadvantage. No
gentleman of the present day would dream of striking
his wife and daughters, of talking to them like the
Knight of La Tour Landry, or like the Merchant in
the presence of the Nuns, or of selling marriages and
wardships in the open market. All the redeeming
virtues in the world, we should feel, could not put the
man who saw no harm in these things in the front rank
of real gentility. Such plain and decisive methods of
differentiation, however, begin to disappear as we
descend the social scale ; until, at the very bottom, we
find little or no difference in coarseness of moral fibre
between our own contemporaries and Chaucer's. For
258 CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
it stands to reason that the development of the poor
cannot be so rapid as that of the upper classes. In
all human affairs, to him that hath shall be given ;
the superior energy and abilities of one family will
differentiate it more and more, as life becomes more
complicated, from other families which still vegetate
among the mass ; and in proportion as the wealth of
the world increases, the gap must necessarily widen
between the man who has most and the man who has
least ; since there have always been a certain number
who possess, and are capable of possessing or keeping,
virtually nothing. In that sense, the terrible contrast
between wealth and poverty is undoubtedly worse in
our days ; but this fact in itself is as insignificant as
it is unavoidable. The tramp on the highroad is not
appreciably unhappier for knowing that his nothingness
is contrasted nowadays with Mr. Carnegie's millions
instead of de la Pole's thousands; and again, until we
can find some means of distributing the accumulations
of the rich among the poor without doing far more
harm than good, the community loses no more by
allowing a selfish man to lock up his millions, than
formerly when they were only hundreds or thousands.
The securities afforded by modern society for possession
and accumulation of wealth do indeed often permit the
capitalist to sweat his workmen deplorably ; but these
are the same securities which allow the workman to
sleep in certain possession of his own little savings.
While the capitalist is accumulating money, the fore-
sight and self-restraint of the workmen enables them to
accumulate votes, which in the long run are worth even
more. Much may no doubt be done in detail by keeping
in eye the simpler methods of our ancestors ; but no
sound principle can be modelled on an age when nothing
prevented capitalists from hoarding but lack of decent
security, when strikes were rare only because of penal
laws against all combinations of workmen, and when the
peasant was partly kept from starving by his recognized
THE POOR 259
market value as the domestic animal of his master. We
could easily remedy many desperate social difficulties
for the moment at least if we might reduce half the
population of England again to the status of serfs.
"The social questions of the period cannot be
understood, unless we remember that in 1381 more
than half the people of England did not possess the
privileges which Magna Charta secured to every
'freeman.' " * The English serf was indeed some degrees
better off than his French brother, to whose lord the
legist Pierre de Fontaines could write in the i3th
century "by our custom there is between thee and thy
villein no judge but only God."f The English serf
could not be evicted, but neither could he leave his
holding ; he was transferred with the estate from master
to master as a portion of the live stock. By custom, as
the master had rights to definite services or money dues
from him, so he had definite rights as against his master;
but though in cases of manslaughter or maiming the
serf could appeal to the king's courts, all other cases
must be heard in the manor court, where the lord was
judge in his own cause. Let us hear Chaucer himself
on this subject, in his Parson's Tale: "Through this
cursed sin of avarice and covetise come thes 
