The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted
facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are
the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and
doubtful as many important passages of it remain--in vexatious contrast
with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data--we have at
least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account
of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though
gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in
public documents,--in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the
Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records--partly of the
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence
of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few
references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate
successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily
forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree
of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with
regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now
accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process
which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour
stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited
number of results has been safely established, and others have at all
events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of
conclusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages; and
even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through
a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to
sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.
A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written. They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately in
view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose services to
the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar,
would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he not
been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date
of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date
Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the
voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at the
desire of Caxton), appears to have merely borne a Latin inscription
without any dates; and the marble monument erected in its stead "in the
name of the Muses" by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th,
1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date
of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed,
promises no more information than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary,
the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as "now in
his days old," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially
as it is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's own birth is placed
as far back as 1320. Still less weight can be attached to the
circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself as
the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accordance with the
common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the
older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In a coloured portrait
carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a manuscript,
Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard; but this could not of
itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age
of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-
evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born more than a century
after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of
undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject. His poem,
the "House of Fame," has been variously dated; but at any period of his
manhood he might have said, as he says there, that he was "too old" to
learn astronomy, and preferred to take his science on faith. In the
curious lines called "L'Envoy de Chaucer a Scogan," the poet, while
blaming his friend for his want of perseverance in a love-suit, classes
himself among "them that be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of
himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty. But there seems no
sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines
to an earlier year than 1393; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer
have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark
might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age "which
dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally
ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the
evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem
of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that
there is no reason for demurring to the only direct external evidence in
existence as to the date of Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause
of chivalry held at Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through
part of a campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness; and
on this occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, recorded as
that of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had borne arms for twenty-
seven years. A careful enquiry into the accuracy of the record as to the
ages of the numerous other witnesses at the same trial has established it
in an overwhelming majority of instances; and it is absurd gratuitously to
charge Chaucer with having understated his age from motives of vanity.
The conclusion, therefore, seems to remain unshaken, that he was born
about the year 1340, or some time between that year and 1345.
Now, we possess a charming poem by Chaucer called the "Assembly of Fowls,"
elaborately courtly in its conception, and in its execution giving proofs
of Italian reading on the part of its author, as well as of a ripe humour
such as is rarely an accompaniment of extreme youth. This poem has been
thought by earlier commentators to allegorise an event known to have
happened in 1358, by later critics another which occurred in 1364.
Clearly, the assumption that the period from 1340 to 1345 includes the
date of Chaucer's birth, suffices of itself to stamp the one of these
conjectures as untenable, and the other as improbable, and (when the style
of the poem and treatment of its subject are taken into account) adds
weight to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in
question. Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in Chaucer's
biography and the question of his works are affected by one another.
Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of the
fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the year of
his death. In other words, it covers rather more than the interval
between the most glorious epoch of Edward III's reign--for Crecy was
fought in 1346--and the downfall, in 1399, of his unfortunate successor
Richard II.
The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be the test
of greatness--but in Edward III's time as in that of Henry V, who
inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory,
there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. It is only of a small
population that the author of the "Vision concerning Piers Plowman" could
have gathered the representatives into a single field, or that Chaucer
himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though
not altogether exhausting, the chief national character-types. In the
year of King Richard II's accession (1377), according to a trustworthy
calculation based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total
number of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and a
half. A quarter of a century earlier--in the days of Chaucer's boyhood--
their numbers had been perhaps twice as large. For not less than four
great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6) had swept over the
land, and at least one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the
inhabitants of the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the
obstinate epidemic--"the foul death of England," as it was called in a
formula of execration in use among the people. In this year 1377, London,
where Chaucer was doubtless born as well as bred, where the greater part
of his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the historic
river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently numbered not more than
35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the case, no place was more
exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was any
other so likely elastically to recover from them. For the reign of Edward
III had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital,--
an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the
same period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had grown
larger as its houses had grown higher; and mediaeval London, such as we
are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those leading
features which it so long retained, from the days when Chaucer, with
downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its streets between
Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in England the
remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which have ever
befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been
said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly
scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the
Plague:--once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of
French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages
of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a
thousand slain this pestilence,"--
he hath slain this year
Hence over a mile, within a great village
Both men and women, child and hind and page.
The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the
description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple
surcoat and blue white-furred hood; nor, by the way, may this portrait
itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the
helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. For though in all the
world there was none like this doctor to SPEAK of physic and of surgery;--
though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a loss for telling
the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient with the appropriate
drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful friends the apothecaries;--
though he was well versed in all the authorities from Aesculapius to the
writer of the "Rosa Anglica" (who cures inflammation homeopathically by
the use of red draperies);--though like a truly wise physician he began at
home by caring anxiously for his own digestion and for his peace of mind
("his study was but little in the Bible"):--yet the basis of his
scientific knowledge was "astronomy," i.e. astrology, "the better part of
medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it; together with that "natural magic" by
which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells us, the famous among the learned have
known how to make men whole or sick. And there was one specific which,
from a double point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very
highly, and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts. He was but easy
(i.e. slack) of "dispence":--
He kepte that he won in pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.
Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart by
these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first smitten
the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if the Plague of
1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck down among others
Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chaucer's Duchess Blanche).
Calamities such as these would assuredly have been treated as warnings
sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a Church better braced for
the due performance of its never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful
ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in
spirit by the self-searching morality of Puritanism. But from the sorely-
tried third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of
Langland cries, as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, that
"these pestilences" are the penalty of sin and of naught else. It is
assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the fullest proof, to
accuse another of thoughtlessness or heartlessness; and though the classes
for which Chaucer mainly wrote and with which he mainly felt, were in all
probability as little inclined to improve the occasions of the Black Death
as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on their knees
after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the
later years of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not
unfrequently spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth
moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed
lamentation in Latin; and at different dates in King Richard's reign the
poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and
in English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption
and sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant
insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain
deaf.
A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes. On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of Edward
III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from the period
of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the king's
unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the overburdened and
enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the King himself to
renounce the proud position of a conquering power. In 1363 he had
celebrated the completion of his fiftieth year; and three suppliant kings
had at that time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success.
By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained by
himself and the valiant Prince of Wales; and during the years remaining to
him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed his favourites. From
being a conquering power the English monarchy was fast sinking into an
island which found it difficult to defend its own shores. There were
times towards the close of Edward's and early in his successor's reign
when matters would have gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous
of having their money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage,
and anxious, like their type the "Merchant" in Chaucer, that "the sea were
kept for anything" between Middelburgh and Harwich, had not some of them,
such as the Londoner John Philpot, occasionally armed and manned a
squadron of ships on their own account, in defiance of red tape and its
censures. But in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which he
grew up were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in
the land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the
burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a
civilised people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time when
the decline in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is evident
from the answer given to the application from Rome for the arrears of
thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or rather from
what must unmistakeably have been the drift of that answer. Its terms are
unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated.
The power of England in the period of an ascendancy to which she so
tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of
her arms. Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most
others in Europe. Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer for
a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed
proprietors, and of the "worthy vavasours" (smaller landowners) who, like
Chaucer's "Franklin"--a very Saint Julian or pattern of hospitality--knew
not what it was to be "without baked meat in the house," where their
tables dormant in the hall alway
Stood ready covered all the longe day.
From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders came the
laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did so much to
consolidate national feeling in England. The foreign companies of
merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the banking business
and export trade assigned to them by the short-sighted commercial policy
of Edward III, and the weaving and fishing industries of Hanseatic and
Flemish immigrants had established an almost unbearable competition in our
own ports and towns. But the active import trade, which already connected
England with both nearer and remoter parts of Christendom, must have been
largely in native hands; and English chivalry, diplomacy, and literature
followed in the lines of the trade-routes to the Baltic and the
Mediterranean. Our mariners, like their type the "Shipman" in Chaucer (an
anticipation of the "Venturer" of later days, with the pirate as yet,
perhaps, more strongly marked in him than the patriot),--
knew well all the havens, as they were
From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre,
And every creek in Brittany and Spain.
Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on the part
of our shipmen in this period to self-help in offence as well as in
defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently
employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized or
impressed for the purpose by order of the Crown. On one of these
occasions the port of Dartmouth, whence Chaucer at a venture ("for aught I
wot") makes his "Shipman" hail, is found contributing a larger total of
ships and men than any other port in England. For the rest, Flanders was
certainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth, and in mercantile
and industrial activity; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and
in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the German Hansa.
Chaucer's "Merchant" characteristically wears a "Flandrish beaver hat;"
and it is no accident that the scene of the "Pardoner's Tale," which
begins with a description of "superfluity abominable," is laid in
Flanders. In England, indeed the towns never came to domineer as they did
in the Netherlands. Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be
ruled by the landed interest only, so in proportion as the English towns,
and London especially, grew richer, their voices were listened to in the
settlement of the affairs of the nation. It might be very well for
Chaucer to close the description of his "Merchant" with what looks very
much like a fashionable writer's half sneer:--
Forsooth, he was a worthy man withal;
But, truly, I wot not how men him call.
Yet not only was high political and social rank reached by individual
"merchant princes," such as the wealthy William de la Pole, a descendant
of whom is said (though on unsatisfactory evidence) to have been Chaucer's
grand-daughter, but the government of the country came to be very
perceptibly influenced by the class from which they sprang. On the
accession of Richard II, two London citizens were appointed controllers of
the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a
committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a
merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the
smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great
merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his
quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new
Troy," he was welcomed, according to the Friar who has commemorated the
event in Latin verse, by the trades in an array resembling an angelic
host; and among the crafts enumerated we recognise several of those
represented in Chaucer's company of pilgrims--by the "Carpenter," the
"Webbe" (Weaver), and the "Dyer," all clothed
in one livery
Of a solemn and great fraternity.
The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up its head, collectively
and individually. The historical original of Chaucer's "Host"--the actual
Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark,
was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of
himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its
fictitious reproduction. And he and his fellows, the "poor and simple
Commons"--for so humble was the style they were wont to assume in their
addresses to the sovereign,--began to look upon themselves, and to be
looked upon, as a power in the State. The London traders and
handicraftsmen knew what it was to be well-to-do citizens, and if they had
failed to understand it, home monition would have helped to make it clear
to them:--
Well seemed each of them a fair burgess,
For sitting in a guildhall on a dais.
And each one for the wisdom that he can
Was shapely for to be an alderman.
They had enough of chattels and of rent,
And very gladly would their wives assent;
And, truly, else they had been much to blame.
It is full fair to be yclept madame,
And fair to go to vigils all before,
And have a mantle royally y-bore.
The English State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy --the ramification
of contributory courts and camps--of the crude days of William the
Conqueror and his successors. The Norman lords and their English
dependants no longer formed two separate elements in the body politic. In
the great French wars of Edward III, the English armies had no longer
mainly consisted of the baronial levies. The nobles had indeed, as of
old, ridden into battle at the head of their vassals and retainers; but
the body of the force had been made up of Englishmen serving for pay, and
armed with their national implement, the bow--such as Chaucer's "Yeoman"
carried with him on the ride to Canterbury:--
A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bare full thriftily.
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows drooped not with feathers low,
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.
The use of the bow was specially favoured by both Edward III and his
successor; and when early in the next century the chivalrous Scottish
king, James I (of whom mention will be made among Chaucer's poetic
disciples) returned from his long English captivity to his native land, he
had no more eager care than that his subjects should learn to emulate the
English in the handling of their favourite weapon. Chaucer seems to be
unable to picture an army without it, and we find him relating how, from
ancient Troy,--
Hector and many a worthy wight out went
With spear in hand, and with their big bows bent.
No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, and when
the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed by its self-
imposed contributions, the Scottish and French campaigns should have
called forth that national enthusiasm which found an echo in the songs of
Lawrence Minot, as hearty war-poetry as has been composed in any age of
our literature. They were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual
popularity they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they
may have reached Chaucer's ears in his boyhood.
Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his death in a
dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the proudest hope of both
dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, and the Black Prince had
preceded his father to the tomb. The good ship England (so sang a
contemporary poet) was left without rudder or helm; and in a kingdom full
of faction and discontent the future of the Plantagenet throne depended on
a child. While the young king's ambitious uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of
Lancaster (Chaucer's patron), was in nominal retirement, and his
academical ally, Wyclif, was gaining popularity as the mouthpiece of the
resistance to the papal demands, there were fermenting beneath the surface
elements of popular agitation, which had been but little taken into
account by the political factions of Edward the Third's reign, and by that
part of its society with which Chaucer was more especially connected. But
the multitude, whose turn in truth comes but rarely in the history of a
nation, must every now and then make itself heard, although poets may seem
all but blind and deaf to the tempest as it rises, and bursts, and passes
away. Many causes had concurred to excite the insurrection which
temporarily destroyed the influence of John of Gaunt, and which for long
cast a deep shade upon the effects of the teaching of Wyclif. The
acquisition of a measure of rights and power by the middle classes had
caused a general swaying upwards; and throughout the peoples of Europe
floated those dreams and speculations concerning the equality and
fraternity of all men, which needed but a stimulus and an opportunity to
assume the practical shape of a revolution. The melancholy thought which
pervades Langland's "Vision" is still that of the helplessness of the
poor; and the remedy to which he looks against the corruption of the
governing classes is the advent of a superhuman king, whom he identifies
with the ploughman himself, the representative of suffering humility. But
about the same time as that of the composition of this poem--or not long
afterwards--Wyclif had sent forth among the people his "simple priests,"
who illustrated by contrast the conflict which his teaching exposed
between the existing practice of the Church and the original documents of
her faith. The connexion between Wyclif's teaching and the peasants'
insurrection under Richard II is as undeniable as that between Luther's
doctrines and the great social uprising in Germany a century and a half
afterwards. When, upon the declaration of the Papal Schism, Wyclif
abandoned all hope of a reform of the Church from within, and, defying the
injunctions of foe and friend alike, entered upon a course of theological
opposition, the popular influence of his followers must have tended to
spread a theory admitting of very easy application ad hominem--the theory,
namely, that the tenure of all offices, whether spiritual or temporal, is
justified only by the personal fitness of their occupants. With such
levelling doctrine, the Socialism of popular preachers like John Balle
might seem to coincide with sufficient closeness; and since worthiness was
not to be found in the holders of either spiritual or temporal authority,
of either ecclesiastical or lay wealth, the time had palpably come for the
poor man to enjoy his own again. Then, the advent of a weak government,
over which a powerful kinsman of the king and unconcealed adversary of the
Church was really seeking to recover the control, and the imposition of a
tax coming home to all men except actual beggars, and filling serfdom's
cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the opportunity, and the
insurrection broke out. Its violence fell short of that of the French
Jacquerie a quarter of a century earlier; but no doubt could exist as to
its critical importance. As it happened, the revolt turned with special
fury against the possessions of the Duke of Lancaster, whose sympathies
with the cause of ecclesiastical reform it definitively extinguished.
After the suppression of this appalling movement by a party of Order
comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction
ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the
ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have
originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse
than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the
death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the
absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; and
Lollardry came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form
of dissent from the existing system. Finally, Henry of Lancaster, John of
Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as a sort of saviour of society,--a
favourite character for usurpers to pose in before the applauding
assemblage of those who claim "a stake in the country." Chaucer's
contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the kind which goes with the
times, who was in turn a flatterer of Richard and (by the simple expedient
of a revised second edition of his magnum opus) a flatterer of Henry,
offers better testimony than Chaucer to the conservatism of the upper
classes of his age, and to the single-minded anxiety for the good times
when
Justice of law is held;
The privilege of royalty
Is safe, and all the barony
Worshipped is in its estate.
The people stands in obeisance
Under the rule of governance.
Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician by
nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental
remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room
for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity,
untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of
putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens
one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by
a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion:--
So hideous was the noise, ah bencite!
That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie
Not made never shoutes half so shrill,
When that they any Fleming meant to kill.
Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakably conservative tone in the
"Ballad" purporting to have been sent by him "to King Richard," with its
refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and its
admonition to its sovereign to
...shew forth the sword of castigation.
On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the passage, at
once powerful and touching, in the so-called "Parson's Tale" (the sermon
which closes the "Canterbury Tales" as Chaucer left them), in which
certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen amercements,
"which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements," while
lords in general are commanded to be good to their thralls (serfs),
because "those that they clept thralls, be God's people; for humble folks
be Christ's friends; they be contubernially with the Lord." The solitary
type, however, of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest
remembrance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful and
affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that
things are as they should be. This is--not of course the "Parson"
himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but--the
"Parson's" brother, the "Ploughman". He is a true labourer and a good,
religious and charitable in his life,--and always ready to pay his tithes.
In short, he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather
than the prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man.
Such were some, though of course some only, of the general currents of
English public life in the latter half--Chaucer's half--of the fourteenth
century. Its social features were naturally in accordance with the course
of the national history. In the first place, the slow and painful process
of amalgamation between the Normans and the English was still unfinished,
though the reign of Edward III went far towards completing what had
rapidly advanced since the reigns of John and Henry III. By the middle of
the fourteenth century English had become, or was just becoming, the
common tongue of the whole nation. Among the political poems and songs
preserved from the days of Edward III and Richard II, not a single one
composed on English soil is written in French. Parliament was opened by
an English speech in the year 1363, and in the previous year the
proceedings in the law courts were ordered to be conducted in the native
tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his "Canterbury Tales," it seems still to
have continued the pedantic affectation of a profession for its members,
like Chaucer's "Man of Law," to introduce French law-terms into common
conversation; so that it is natural enough to find the "Summoner"
following suit, and interlarding his "Tale" with the Latin scraps picked
up by him from the decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts.
Meanwhile, manifold difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion
between the two races, before the victory of the English language showed
this fusion to have been in substance accomplished. One of these
difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has
doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it
existed is not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character
and temperament of French and English differed largely from one another;
though the reasons why they so differed, remain a matter of argument. In
a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the French
interlocutor attributes this difference to the respective national
beverages: "WE are nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while
naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything for
liquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely greater politeness
by a living French critic of high repute, according to whom the English,
still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were drunken gluttons, agitated at
intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the Normans, on the other hand,
lightened by their transplantation, and by the admixture of a variety of
elements, already found the claims of esprit developing themselves within
them. This is an explanation which explains nothing--least of all, the
problem: why the lively strangers should have required the contact with
insular phlegm in order to receive the creative impulse--why, in other
words, Norman-French literature should have derived so enormous an
advantage from the transplantation of Normans to English ground. But the
evil days when the literary labours of Englishmen had been little better
than bond-service to the tastes of their foreign masters had passed away,
since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons of
England to take a share with them in the national councils. After this,
the question of the relations between the two languages, and the wider one
of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be decided by
the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the one side upon
the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the expression they found in
forms of life and literature, had henceforth, so to speak, to stand on
their merits; the days of their dominion as a matter of course had passed
away.
Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles of
Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order.
Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a
difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in these
degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the Holy
Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against the
pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English
knight--in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, fought
there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV, did forty years later--
yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the great mediaeval
companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the century, perished
under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul fictions, but at the
same time were only too much in accord with facts betokening an
unmistakable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before the century
closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the Templars by
the Thames. Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet ended, its
supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing dim. In the
history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III is memorable, not only
for the foundation of our most illustrious order of knighthood, but
likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and courtesy, as well on
the part of the King when in his better days, as on that of his heroic
son. Yet it cannot be by accident that an undefinable air of the old-
fashioned clings to that most delightful of all Chaucer's character-
sketches, the "Knight" of the "Canterbury Tales." His warlike deeds at
Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere, may be illustrated from those of
more than one actual knight of the times; and the whole description of him
seems founded on one by a French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at
least the external features of a knight of the old school. The chivalry,
however, which was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly
far removed from the sturdy simplicity of Chaucer's "Knight," and inwardly
often rotten in more than one vital part. In show and splendour a higher
point was probably reached in Edward III's than in any preceding reign.
The extravagance in dress which prevailed in this period is too well known
a characteristic of it to need dwelling upon. Sumptuary laws in vain
sought to restrain this foible; and it rose to such a pitch as even to
oblige men, lest they should be precluded from indulging in gorgeous
raiment, to abandon hospitality, a far more amiable species of excess.
When the kinds of clothing respectively worn by the different classes
served as distinctions of rank, the display of splendour in one class
could hardly fail to provoke emulation in the others. The long-lived
English love for "crying" colours shows itself amusingly enough in the
early pictorial representations of several of Chaucer's Canterbury
pilgrims, though in floridity of apparel, as of speech, the youthful
"Squire" bears away the bell:--
Embroidered was he, as it were a mead
All full of freshest flowers, white and red.
But of the artificiality and extravagance of the costumes of these times
we have direct contemporary evidence, and loud contemporary complaints.
Now, it is the jagged cut of the garments, punched and shredded by the
man-milliner; now, the wide and high collars and the long-pointed boots,
which attract the indignation of the moralist; at one time he inveighs
against the "horrible disordinate scantness" of the clothing worn by
gallants, at another against the "outrageous array" in which ladies love
to exhibit their charms. The knights' horses are decked out with not less
finery than are the knights themselves, with "curious harness, as in
saddles and bridles, cruppers, and breast-plates, covered with precious
clothing, and with bars and plates of gold and silver." And though it is
hazardous to stigmatize the fashions of any one period as specially
grotesque, yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court
beauty appearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun; while even a
lady from a manufacturing district, the "Wife of Bath," makes the most of
her opportunities to be seen as well as to see. Her "kerchiefs" were
"full fine" of texture, and weighed, one might be sworn, ten pound--
That on a Sunday were upon her head.
Her hosen too were of fine scarlet red,
Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new.
...
Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,
As broad as is a buckler or a targe.
So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her
feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of any period.
It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than
fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and
moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares
itself in what we know concerning the social life of the nobility, as, for
instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of Froissart, whose
counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves,
nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The "Vows of the
Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward III's reign, contains a
choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths; and in a humbler way the
rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their
rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale," "dismembered Christ by
soul, heart, bones, and body."
But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the
social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely
replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted. The
relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history as well
as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and incontestably
its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment
belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The
highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of
woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally
dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin, King Edward III dedicated his
principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his
opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of
ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost
Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the "Praise of Women," in which
she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of
her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison
to the Holy Virgin," beginning
Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,
seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in
"Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by him
from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in
twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the
alphabet arranged in proper succession. Nor, apart from this religious
sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly
love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time,
until at last the "Mort d'Arthure" was the favourite literary nourishment
of the minions and mistresses of Edward IV's degenerate days. In his
"Book of the Duchess" Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly love,
together with one of true maiden purity. The lady celebrated in this poem
was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting with their exploits, to send
her knights upon errands of chivalry--
into Walachy,
To Prussia, and to Tartary,
To Alexandria or Turkey.
And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might have
been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's "Troilus
and Cressid" of her lover, and of that which attracted her in him:--
For trust ye well that your estate royal,
Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness
Of you in war or tourney martial,
Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches,
Of these none made me rue on your distress,
But moral virtue, grounded upon truth,
That was the cause I first had on you Ruth.
And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had,
And that ye had (as methought) in despite
Everything that tended unto bad,
As rudeness, and as popular appetite,
And that your reason bridled your delight,
'Twas these did make 'bove every creature,
That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure.
And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the
better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon
female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their
conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the companies which in
the "House of Fame" sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer vigorously
satirises the would-be-lady-killers, who were content with the REPUTATION
of accomplished seducers; and in "Troilus and Cressid" a shrewd observer
exclaims with the utmost vivacity against
Such sort of folk,--what shall I clepe them? what?
That vaunt themselves of women, and by name,
That yet to them ne'er promised this or that,
Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat.
The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes, that the harm
which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice. But a
deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the Prologue
to the "Legend of Good Women," that among men the betrayal of women is now
"held a game." So indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too
close an accordance with examples set in the highest places in the land.
If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the
amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of John of
Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law with a
nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married one of his own
daughters! But nowhere was the deterioration of sentiment on this head
more strongly typified than in Edward III himself. The King, who (if the
pleasing tale be true which gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old
English drama) had in his early days royally renounced an unlawful passion
for the fair Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once
violating his conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake
of strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter--the
device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct-
-died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in
France, the ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation
between the sexes,--a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed
a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the
most influential class of any nation, the social health of that nation
must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the
artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the
fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of
sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies,
likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree. Here
the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic
literature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and
worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's
"Legend of Good Women," and in the "Flower and the Leaf," a most pleasing
poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfortunately no longer
possible to number among his genuine works. The poem of the "Court of
Love," which was likewise long erroneously attributed to him, may be the
original work of an English author; but in any case its main contents are
a mere adaptation of a peculiar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions
common to chivalry in general.
Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry (though
not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would certainly be
rash to assert that its day was passing away in the latter half of the
fourteenth century. It has indeed been pointed out that the date at which
Wyclif's career as a reformer may be said to have begun almost coincides
with that of the climax and first decline of feudal chivalry in England.
But, without seeking to interpret coincidences, we know that, though the
influence of the Christian Church and that of its Roman branch in
particular, has asserted and reasserted itself in various ways and degrees
in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch of its moral
omnipotence had come to an end many generations before the disruption of
its external framework. In the fourteenth century men had long ceased to
look for the mediation of the Church between an overbearing Crown and a
baronage and commonalty eager for the maintenance of their rights or for
the assertion of their claims. On the other hand, the conflicts which
still recurred between the temporal power and the Church had as little
reference as ever to spiritual concerns. Undoubtedly, the authority of
the Church over the minds of the people still depended in the main upon
the spiritual influence she exercised over them; and the desire for a
reformation of the Church, which was already making itself felt in a
gradually widening sphere, was by the great majority of those who
cherished it held perfectly compatible with a recognition of her
authority. The world, it has been well said, needed an enquiry extending
over three centuries, in order to learn to walk without the aid of the
Church of Rome. Wyclif, who sought to emancipate the human conscience
from reliance upon any earthly authority intermediate between the soul and
its Maker, reckoned without his generation; and few, except those with
whom audacity took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme
results of his speculations. The Great Schism rather stayed than promoted
the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was now no longer
necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the henchman of the arch-foe
across the narrow seas.
But although the progress of English sentiment towards the desire for
liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a long and seemingly
decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth as in the sixteenth century the
most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church was the
conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves. The Reformation
has most appropriately retained in history a name at first unsuspiciously
applied to the removal of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and
in the life of the clergy. What aid could be derived by those who really
hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the
thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the most
common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages?
Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders of English benefices, who
left their flocks to be tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of
the most offensive kind of tax-gatherers, the native clergy included many
species, but among them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a
high ideal of religious life. The times had by no means come to an end
when many of the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in warlike
prowess. Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting
the heretics at home, had commanded in army of crusaders in Flanders,
levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI against the anti-Pope Clement VII and
his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while
the law is ruled so,
That clerks unto the war intend,
I wot not how they should amend
The woeful world in other things,
And so make peace between the kings
After the law of charity,
Which is the duty properly
Belonging unto the priesthood.
A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself against the
extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy indulged.
The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates had ample means
for defraying in the revenues of their sees; while lesser dignitaries had
to be active in levying their dues or the fines of their courts, lest
everything should flow into the receptacles of their superiors. So in
Chaucer's "Friar's Tale" an unfriendly Regular says of an archdeacon,--
For small tithes and for small offering
He made the people piteously to sing.
For ere the bishop caught them on his hook,
They were down in the archdeacons book.
As a matter of course, the worthy who filled the office of "Summoner" to
the court of the archdeacon in question, had a keen eye for the profitable
improprieties subject to its penalties, and was aided in his efforts by
the professional abettors of vice whom he kept "ready to his hand." Nor
is it strange that the undisguised worldliness of many members of the
clerical profession should have reproduced itself in other lay
subordinates, even in the parish clerks, at all times apt to copy their
betters, though we would fain hope such was not the case with the parish
clerk, in "the jolly Absalom" of the "Miller's Tale." The love of gold
had corrupted the acknowledged chief guardians of incorruptible treasures,
even though few may have avowed this love as openly as the "idle" "Canon,"
whose "Yeoman" had so strange a tale to tell to the Canterbury pilgrims
concerning his master's absorbing devotion to the problem of the
multiplication of gold. To what a point the popular discontent with the
vices of the higher secular clergy had advanced in the last decennium of
the century, may be seen from the poem called the "Complaint of the
Ploughman"--a production pretending to be by the same hand which in the
"Vision" had dwelt on the sufferings of the people and on the sinfulness
of the ruling classes. Justly or unjustly, the indictment was brought
against the priests of being the agents of every evil influence among the
people, the soldiers of an army of which the true head was not God, but
Belial.
In earlier days the Church had known how to compensate the people for the
secular clergy's neglect, or imperfect performance, of its duties. But in
no respect had the ecclesiastical world more changed than in this. The
older monastic Orders had long since lost themselves in unconcealed
worldliness; how, for instance, had the Benedictines changed their
character since the remote times when their Order had been the principal
agent in revivifying the religion of the land! Now, they were taunted
with their very name, as having been bestowed upon them "by antiphrasis,"
i.e. by contraries. From many of their monasteries, and from the inmates
who dwelt in these comfortable halls, had vanished even all pretence of
disguise. Chaucer's "Monk" paid no attention to the rule of St. Benedict,
and of his disciple St. Maur,
Because that it was old and somewhat strait;
and preferred to fall in with the notions of later times. He was an
"outrider, that loved venery," and whom his tastes and capabilities would
have well qualified for the dignified post of abbot. He had "full many a
dainty horse" in his stable, and the swiftest of greyhounds to boot; and
rode forth gaily, clad in superfine furs and a hood elegantly fastened
with a gold pin, and tied into a love-knot at the "greater end," while the
bridle of his steed jingled as if its rider had been as good a knight as
any of them--this last, by the way, a mark of ostentation against which
Wyclif takes occasion specially to inveigh. This Monk (and Chaucer must
say that he was wise in his generation) could not understand why he should
study books and unhinge his mind by the effort; life was not worth having
at the price; and no one knew better to what use to put the pleasing gift
of existence. Hence mine host of the Tabard, a very competent critic, had
reason for the opinion which he communicated to the Monk:--
It is a noble pasture where thou go'st;
Thou art not like a penitent or ghost.
In the Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becoming usual.
But little in the way of religious guidance could fall to the lot of a
sisterhood presided over by such a "Prioress" as Chaucer's Madame
Eglantine, whose mind--possibly because her nunnery fulfilled the
functions of a finishing school for young ladies--was mainly devoted to
French and deportment, or by such a one as the historical Lady Juliana
Berners, of a rather later date, whose leisure hours produced treatises on
hunting and hawking, and who would probably have on behalf of her own sex
echoed the "Monk's" contempt for the prejudice against the participation
of the Religious in field-sports:--
He gave not for that text a pulled hen
That saith, that hunters be no holy men.
On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at a later
date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as the secular
clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, any longer satisfy
the reason of their being. In the fourteenth century the Dominicans or
Black Friars, who at London dwelt in such magnificence that king and
Parliament often preferred a sojourn with them to abiding at Westminster,
had in general grown accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the
spiritual direction of the higher classes. But though they counted among
them Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the
philosophical Strode"), they in truth never played a more than secondary
part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the
Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never
congenial. Of far greater importance for the population of England at
large was the Order of the Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call
themselves or to be called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor
had habitually looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring
and consoling eloquence of the pulpit; and they had carried their labours
into the midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with
that poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or
of contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing from the
short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a
learned, as well as a ministering and preaching Order; and it was
precisely from among them that, at Oxford and elsewhere, sprang a
succession of learned monks, whose names are inseparably connected with
some of the earliest English growths of philosophical speculation and
scientific research. Nor is it possible to doubt that in the middle of
the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised an
appreciable influence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of
unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But in
the Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change, which may
be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which they had been
honourably distinguished; and in England, as elsewhere, the spirit of the
words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Francis of Assisi was being
verified by his degenerate Children:--
So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth
A good beginning doth no longer last
Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth.
Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what their
predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over the
unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to
represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations;
"Preach not," says Chaucer's "Host,"
"as friars do in Lent,
That they for our old sins may make us weep,
Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep."
But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well as to
deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying against St.
Francis, and to desiderate for them an actual abode of fire, resembling
that of which in their favourite religious shows they were wont to present
the mimic semblance to the multitude. It was they who became in England
as elsewhere the purveyors of charms and the organisers of pious frauds,
while the learning for which their Order had been famous was withering
away into the yellow leaf of scholasticism. The Friar in general became
the common butt of literary satire; and though the populace still remained
true to its favourite guides, a reaction was taking place in favour of the
secular as against the regular clergy in the sympathies of the higher
classes, and in the spheres of society most open to intellectual
influences. The monks and the London multitude were at one time united
against John of Gaunt, but it was from the ranks of the secular clergy
that Wyclif came forth to challenge the ascendancy of Franciscan
scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor
Parson of the Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister--simple,
poor, and devoted to his holy work,--has nothing but contempt for the
friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete,
and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that
accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled
with fairies--NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam
of the sun. Among them there is the "Pardoner," i.e. seller of pardons
(indulgences)--with his "haughty" sermons, delivered "by rote" to
congregation after congregation in the self-same words, and everywhere
accompanied by the self-same tricks of anecdotes and jokes,--with his
Papal credentials, and with the pardons he has brought from Rome "all
hot,"--and with precious relics to rejoice the hearts of the faithful, and
to fill his own pockets with the proceeds: to wit, a pillowcase covered
with the veil of Our Lady, and a piece of the sail of the ship in which
St. Peter went out fishing on the Lake of Gennesareth. This worthy, who
lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is
manifestly drawn from the life;--or the portrait could not have been
accepted which was presented alike by Chaucer, and by his contemporary
Langland, and (a century and a half later) in the plagiarism of the
orthodox Catholic John Heywood. There, again, is the "Limitour," a friar
licensed to beg, and to hear confession and grant absolution, within the
LIMITS of a certain district. He is described by Chaucer with so much
humour, that one can hardly suspect much exaggeration in the sketch. In
him we have the truly popular ecclesiastic who springs from the people,
lives among the people, and feels with the people. He is the true friend
of the poor, and being such, has, as one might say, his finger in every
pie: for "a fly and a friar will fall in every dish and every business."
His readily-proffered arbitration settles the differences of the humbler
classes at the "love-days," a favourite popular practice noted already in
the "Vision" of Langland; nor is he a niggard of the mercies which he is
privileged to dispense:--
Full sweetly did he hear confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an easy man to give penance,
Whereso wist to have a good pittance;
For unto a poor Order for to give,
Is signe that a man is well y-shrive;
For if he gave, he durste make a vaunt
He wiste that a man was repentant.
For many a man so hard is of his heart
He can not weep although he sorely smart.
Therefore instead of weeping and of prayers
Men must give silver to the poore Freres.
Already in the French "Roman de la Rose" the rivalry between the Friars
and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, evidently unfavourable
to the former and favourable to the latter; but in England, where Langland
likewise dwells upon the jealousy between them, it was specially
accentuated by the assaults of Wyclif upon the Mendicant Orders. Wyclif's
Simple Priests, who at first ministered with the approval of the Bishops,
differed from the Mendicants, first by not being beggars, and secondly by
being poor. They might perhaps have themselves ultimately played the part
of a new Order in England, had not Wyclif himself by rejecting the
cardinal dogma of the Church severed these followers of his from its
organism and brought about their suppression. The question as to
Chaucer's own attitude towards the Wycliffite movement will be more
conveniently touched upon below; but the tone is unmistakable of the
references or allusions to Lollardry which he occasionally introduces into
the mouth of his "Host," whose voice is that vox populi which the upper
and middle classes so often arrogate to themselves. Whatever those
classes might desire, it was not to have "cockle sown" by unauthorised
intruders "in the corn" of their ordinary instruction. Thus there is a
tone of genuine attachment to the "vested interest" principle, and of
aversion from all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the
"Host's" exclamation, uttered after the "Reeve," has been (in his own
style) "sermoning" on the topic of old age:--
What availeth all this wit?
What? should we speak all day of Holy Writ?
The devil surely made a reeve to preach;
for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning mariner
or physician!
Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the Church still in
possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power and privileges,--as
well as of means for enforcing unity of profession which the legislation
of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated by the prevailing fears of heresy,
was still further to increase. On the other hand, we find the influence
of the clergy over the minds of the people diminished though not
extinguished. This was, in the case of the higher secular clergy, partly
attributable to their self-indulgence or neglect of their functions,
partly to their having been largely superseded by the Regulars in the
control of the religious life of the people. The Orders we find no longer
at the height of their influence, but still powerful by their wealth,
their numbers, their traditional hold upon the lower classes, and their
determination to retain this hold even by habitually resorting to the most
dubious of methods. Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, and
doubtless may also assume it to have lingered among some of the regular,
some of the salt left whose savour consists in a single-minded and humble
resolution to maintain the highest standard of a religious life. But such
"clerks" as these are at no times the most easily found, because it is not
they who are always running it "unto London, unto St. Paul's" on urgent
private affairs. What wonder, that the real teaching of Wyclif, of which
the full significance could hardly be understood, but by a select few,
should have virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which the
various agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious reform
with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in character
and alike to require suppression! In truth, of course, these movements
and their agents were often very different from one another in their ends,
and were not to be suppressed by the same processes.
It should not be forgotten that in this century learning was, though only
very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy alone. Much
doubt remains as to the extent of education--if a little reading, and less
writing deserve the name--among the higher classes in this period of our
national life. A cheering sign appears in the circumstance that the legal
deeds of this age begin to bear signatures, and a reference to John of
Trevisa would bear out Hallam's conjecture, that in the year 1400 "the
average instruction of an English gentleman of the first class would
comprehend common reading and writing, a considerable knowledge of French,
and a slight tincture of Latin." Certain it is that in this century the
barren teaching of the Universities advanced but little towards the true
end of all academical teaching--the encouragement and spread of the
highest forms of national culture. To what use could a gentleman of
Edward III's or Richard II's day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of
Oxenford" in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of
Priscian, and the rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however
much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may
commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in
which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means with
which to purchase more of his beloved books. Probably no trustworthier
conclusions as to the literary learning and studies of those days are to
be derived from any other source than from a comparison of the few
catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to us; and these help to
show that the century was approaching its close before a few sparse rays
of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence reached England. But this ray
was communicated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities;
and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind, was
directly due to profane poets,--men of the world, who like Chaucer quoted
authorities even more abundantly than they used them, and made some of
their happiest discoveries after the fashion in which the "Oxford Clerk"
came across Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel: as
it were by accident. There is only too ample a justification for leaving
aside the records of the history of learning in England during the latter
half of the fourteenth century in any sketch of the main influences which
in that period determined or affected the national progress. It was not
by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living contact
with the current of popular thought and feeling. The Universities were
thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of previous ages; but the
ascendancy was passing away to which Oxford had attained over Paris--
during the earlier middle ages, and again in the fifteenth century until
the advent of the Renascence, the central university of Europe in the
favourite study of scholastic philosophy and theology.
But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to the whole
body of the population, exclusively of that great section of it which
unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very few writers--
whether poets or historians. In the people at large we may, indeed,
easily discern in this period the signs of an advance towards that self-
government which is the true foundation of our national greatness. But on
the other hand it is impossible not to observe how, while the moral ideas
of the people wore still under the control of the Church, the State in its
turn still ubiquitously interfered in the settlement of the conditions of
social existence, fixing prices, controlling personal expenditure,
regulating wages. Not until England had fully attained to the character
of a commercial country, which it was coming gradually to assume, did its
inhabitants begin to understand the value of that which has gradually come
to distinguish ours among the nations of Europe, viz. the right of
individual Englishmen, as well as of the English people, to manage their
own affairs for themselves. This may help to explain what can hardly fail
to strike a reader of Chaucer and of the few contemporary remains of our
literature. About our national life in this period, both in its virtues
and in its vices, there is something--it matters little whether we call
it--childlike or childish; in its "apert" if not in its privy sides it
lacks the seriousness belonging to men and to generations, who have learnt
to control themselves, instead of relying on the control of others.
In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several of the
most salient features in the social life of the period. The extravagant
expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of various kinds
encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has been already referred to;
it was by no means distinctive of any one class of the population. Among
the friars who went about preaching homilies on the people's favourite
vices some humorous rogues may, like the "Pardoner" of the "Canterbury
Tales," have made a point of treating their own favourite vice as their
one and unchangeable text:--
My theme is always one, and ever was:
Radix malorum est cupiditas.
But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins; and these
moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on dress the
impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting in their ignorance of political
economy and defiance of common sense, that this result was really due to
the endless foreign wars. Yet in contrast with the pomp and ceremony of
life, upon which so great an amount of money and time and thought was
wasted, are noticeable shortcomings by no means uncommon in the case of
undeveloped civilisations (as for instance among the most typically
childish or childlike nationalities of the Europe of our own day), viz.
discomfort and uncleanliness of all sorts. To this may be added the
excessive fondness for sports and pastimes of all kinds, in which nations
are aptest to indulge before or after the era of their highest efforts,--
the desire to make life one long holiday, dividing it between tournaments
and the dalliance of courts of love, or between archery-meetings
(skilfully substituted by royal command for less useful exercises), and
the seductive company of "tumblers," "fruiterers," and "waferers."
Furthermore, one may notice in all classes a far from eradicated
inclination to superstitions of every kind,--whether those encouraged or
those discouraged by the Church
(For holy Church's faith, in our belief,
Suffereth no illusion us to grieve.
"The Franklin's Tale."),
--an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the
uncertain gropings of contemporary science. Hence, the credulous
acceptance of relics like those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends
like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the
numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the
"Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the
other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy,
notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class
represented by Chaucer's "Franklin" towards
such folly
As in our days is not held worth a fly,
and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened
accomplices, such as the gold-making "Canon's Yeoman." Hence, again, the
vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of which
miraculous instrument the "Squire's" "half-told story" describes a
specimen, referring to the incontestable authority of Aristotle and
others, who write "in their lives" concerning quaint mirrors and
perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have "heard the books"
of these sages. Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to eschew the
consideration of serious religious questions, and to leave them to clerks,
as if they were crabbed problems of theology. For in truth, while the
most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or
were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms
of the doctrines of the Church--even of the most stimulative as well as of
the most solemn among them,--had grown hard and stiff. To those who
received if not to those who taught these doctrines they seemed alike
lifeless, unless translated into the terms of the merest earthly
transactions or the language of purely human relations. And thus,
paradoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and conscientious rulers of the
Church thought themselves on occasion called upon to restrain rather than
to stimulate the religious ardour of the multitude--fed as the flame was
by very various materials. Perhaps no more characteristic narrative has
come down to us from the age of the Poet of the "Canterbury Tales," than
the story of Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury
Pilgrims. In the year 1370 the land was agitated through its length and
breadth, on the occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint,
Thomas the Martyr. The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the
familiar Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their
companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London. They demanded his
blessing; but to their astonishment and indignation he seized the occasion
to read a lesson to the crowd on the uselessness to unrepentant sinners of
the plenary indulgences, for the sake of which they were wending their way
to the Martyr's shrine. The rage of the multitude found a mouthpiece in a
soldier, who loudly upbraided the Bishop for stirring up the people
against St. Thomas, and warned him that a shameful death would befall him
in consequence. The multitude shouted Amen--and one is left to wonder
whether any of the pious pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's manly
truthfulness, swelled the mob which eleven years later butchered "the
plunderer" as it called him, "of the Commons." It is such glimpses as
this which show us how important the Church had become towards the people.
Worse was to ensue before the better came; in the meantime, the nation was
in that stage of its existence when the innocence of the child was fast
losing itself, without the self-control of the man having yet taken its
place.
But the heart of England was sound the while. The national spirit of
enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to shipman; and
faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed the highest though
not the universal virtues of her sex. The value of such evidence as the
mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes for a knowledge of
the times to which he belongs is inestimable. For it shows us what has
survived, as well as what was doomed to decay, in the life of the nation
with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy. And it therefore seemed
not inappropriate to approach, in the first instance, from this point of
view the subject of this biographical essay,--Chaucer, "the poet of the
dawn." For in him there are many things significant of the age of
transition in which he lived; in him the mixture of Frenchman and
Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in
the diction of his poems. His gaiety of heart is hardly English; nor is
his willing (though, to be sure, not invariably unquestioning) acceptance
of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul
by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of
helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he
is, or is not, an immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he
has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts
unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately
made characteristic of Englishmen. But he IS English in his freedom and
frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the
good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his
loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement which was to
mould the national character for at least a long series of generations he
displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements already preparing
to affect the course of that movement he shows a very incomplete
consciousness. But of the health and strength which, after struggles many
and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, he, more
than any one of his contemporaries, is the living type and the speaking
witness. Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he stands half in and
half out of the Middle Ages, half in and half out of a phase of our
national life, which we can never hope to understand more than partially
and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is
the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished
not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them
in vernal freshness,--which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the
gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest
so inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.
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