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LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY
(FROM VERTUE’S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS’S MAP)
THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE RIGHT-HAND COW.THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER
Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father’s London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as “a certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the King’s highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook northwards.”[17]The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields, divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands. Similar streams, or “fleets,” creeping between overhanging houses, are still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and there even in England.[18]Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving it still “a fair brook of sweet water” in its upper course; and he takes pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, “a Roman captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled.” In Chaucer’s time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret’s, Lothbury, and ran underthe kitchen of Grocer’s Hall, and again under St. Mildred’s church; “from thence through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street.” In this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically “stopped up by divers filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city.” The “King’s highway of Thames Street,” though one of the chief arteries of the city, cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted the “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne,” many of whom were mayors of the city; and Stow’s survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First, the headquarters of the wine trade, “a large house built of stone and timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry. There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the town.” Here also “Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363, did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III.,King of England, John, King of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England), Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect.” Picard, as Mr. Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer’s fellow-vintners on Edward III.’s Rhine journey in 1338.[19]Then there were the Vintner’s Hall and almshouses, which were built in Chaucer’s lifetime; the three Guild Halls of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that London was up in arms against him, “and unless he took great heed, that day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made his complaint.”
MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)
Of Chaucer’s childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the serious risk of other people’s windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday, and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of football, or at “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the stone.” In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he would be sure to flock out with the rest to “play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exercisethitself against the time of war.”[20]In spring he would watch the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this. Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet’s Tower flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and between them, close by Chaucer’s own home, the “Tower Royal,” in which the Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler’s revolt. But the Thames itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, “where the merchants of Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels,” and finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the cooks’ shops; “for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that upon the river’s side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks’ row.” Here, then, Chaucer would loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native craft from “far by west,” but broad-sailed vessels from every country of Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone’s throw from his father’s house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21]Chief among the Easterlings at this time were theCologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic, half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of “a Dutch bun and a keg of sturgeon,” or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would pick up easily enough among this colony of “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne”; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul’s lay nearest to Chaucer’s home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great merchant city. “When they put me to school,” writes Froissart, “there were little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring; and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace ... and then would I say to myself, ‘When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be able to love in earnest?’... When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod.... I could not be at rest; I was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw my comrades passdown the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go and tumble with them again.”[22]Is not childhood essentially the same in all countries and in all ages?
The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems by Chaucer’s contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer’s continental journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet. Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess’s movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her train had an equally varied experience. “We may catch glimpses of Chaucer in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost, at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of Queen Isabellaat the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358), at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower.”[23]
Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun even before his birth,[24]was the tallest and handsomest of all the King’s sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says—
His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be Chaucer’s and Wycliffe’s best patron. For all John Chaucer’s favour with the King, the vintner’s son could never have found a place in this great society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like his own squire—singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May; already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under those conditions. Within the narrow compass ofa medieval castle, daily intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more complacently to the page’s love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit Jean de Saintré and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the best possible commentary on Chaucer’s Court life.
Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that (as in Shakespeare’s case) differences of rank added to his despair. It may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no reason to suppose that Chaucer’s affections were less mercurial than those of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369, that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness—
Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty, Beauty, and Pleasance; but her surname is Fair-Ruthless. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity with his complaints of Love’s tyranny; but, alas!
The cruel fair stands high above him, a lady of royal excellence, humble indeed of heart, yet he scarce dares to call himself her servant—
But all is vain, for in the end “Ye recke not whether I float or sink.” Like the contemporary poets of Piers Plowman, Chaucer discovered soon enough that the high road to wisdom lies through “Suffer-both-well-and-woe;” and that, before we can possess our souls, we must “see much and suffer more.”[25]There is more than mere graceful irony in the beautiful lines with which, a few years later, he begins his “Troilus and Criseyde.” He is (he says) the bondservant of Love, one whose own woes help him to comfort others’ pain, or again, to enlist the sympathy of Fortune’s favourite—
THE KING’S SQUIRE
InChaucer’s life, as in the “Seven Ages of Man,” the soldier follows hard upon the lover; he is scarcely out of his ’teens before we find him riding to the Great War, “in hope to stonden in his lady grace.” He fought in that strange campaign of 1359-60, which began with such magnificent preparations, but ended so ineffectually. Edward marched across France from Calais to Reims with a splendid army and an unheard-of baggage train; but the towns closed their gates, the French armies hovered out of his reach, and the weather was such that horses and men died like flies. “The xiii. day of Aprill [1360] King Edward with his Oost lay before the Citee off Parys; the which was a ffoule Derke day of myste, and off haylle, and so bytter colde, that syttyng on horse bak men dyed. Wherefore, unto this day yt ys called blak Monday, and wolle be longe tyme here affter.”[26]Edward felt that the stars fought against him, and was glad to make a less advantageous peace than he might have had before this wasteful raid. Chaucer’s friend and brother-poet, Eustache Deschamps, recalls how the English took up their quarters in the villages and convents that crown the heights round Reims, and watchedforty days for a favourable opportunity of attack. Froissart also tells us how Edward feared to assault so strong a city, and only blockaded it for seven weeks, until “it began to irk him, and his men found nought more to forage, and began to lose their horses, and were at great disease for lack of victuals.” It was probably on one of these foraging parties that Chaucer was cut off with other stragglers by the French skirmishers; and the King paid £16 towards his ransom.[27]The items in the same account range from £50 paid towards the ransom of Richard Stury (a distinguished soldier who was afterwards a fellow-ambassador of Chaucer’s), to £6 13s.4d.“in compensation for the Lord Andrew Lutterell’s dead horse,” and £2 towards an archer’s ransom.
John Chaucer died in 1366, and his thrifty widow hastened to marry Bartholomew Attechapel; “the funeral bakemeats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”[28]Geoffrey appears to have inherited little property from either of them; but it must be remembered that economies were difficult in the Middle Ages, so that men lived far more nearly up to their incomes than in modern times; and, again, that a considerable proportion of a citizen’s legacies often went to the Church. The healthy English and American practice of giving a boy a good start and then leaving him to shift for himself was therefore even more common in the 14th century than now. This is essentially the state of things which we find described with amazement, and doubtless with a good deal of exaggeration, in the “Italian Relation of England” of a century later. The English tradesmen (says the author) show so little affection towards their children that “after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nineyears at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.” Thus the children look more to their masters than to their natural parents, and, “having no hope of their paternal inheritance,” set up on their own account and marry away from home.[29]From this source (proceeds the Italian) springs that greed of gain and that omnipotence of money, even in the moral sphere, which are so characteristic of England. John Chaucer may have left little property to his son, but he had given him an excellent education, and put him in the way of making his own fortune; for in 1367 we find him a yeoman of the King’s chamber, and endowed with a life-pension of twenty marks “of our special grace, and for the good services which our beloved yeoman Geoffrey Chaucer hath rendered us and shall render us for the future.” The phrase makes it probable that he had already been some little time in the King’s service—very likely as early as the unlucky campaign in which Edward had helped towards his ransom—and other indications make it almost certain that he was by this time a married man. Nine years before this, side by side with Chaucer in the Countess of Ulster’s household accounts, we find among the ladies one PhilippaPan’, with a mark of abbreviation, which probably stands forpanetaria, or mistress of the pantry. Just as the Countess bought Chaucer’s red-and-black hosen, so she paid “for the making of Philippa’s trimmings,” “for the fashioning of one tunic for Philippa,”[30]“for the making of a corset for Philippa and for the fur-work,” “for XLVIII great buttons of ... [unfortunate gap in theMS.] ... 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 certainlyPhilippa Chaucerin 1366, and equally certainlyPhilippa, wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1374, was already in 1366 our poet’s wife. The only argument of apparent weight which has been urged against it is in fact of very little account when we consider actual medieval conditions. It has been pleaded that if Chaucer complained in 1366 of an unrequited love which had tortured him for eight years and still overshadowed his life, he could not already be a married man. To urge this is to neglect one of the most characteristic features of good society in the Middle Ages. Even Léon Gautier, the enthusiastic apologist of chivalry, admits sadly that the feudal marriage was too often a loveless compact, except so far as the pair might shake down together afterwards;[31]and conjugal love plays a very secondary part in the great romances of chivalry. However apocryphal may be the alleged solemn verdict of a Court of Love that husband and wife had no right to be in love with each other, the sentence was at least recognized asben 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 awife of his own. Dante’s Beatrice, and probably Petrarch’s Laura, were married women; and, however strongly we may be inclined to urge the exceptional and ethereal nature of these two cases, nothing of the kind can be pleaded for Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and Froissart’s anonymous lady-love. Chaucer, therefore, might well have followed the examples of the four greatest writers of his century. Moreover, in this case we have evidence that he and Philippa not only began, but continued and ended with at least a homœopathic dose of that “little aversion” which Mrs. Malaprop so strongly recommended in matrimony. His allusions to wedded life are predominantly disrespectful, or at best mockingly ironical; and though his own marriage may well have steadied him in some ways—Prof. Skeat points out that his least moral tales were all written after Philippa’s death in 1387—yet the evidence is against his having found in it such companionship as might have chained his too errant fancy. The lives of Burne-Jones and Morris throw unexpected sidelights on that of the master whom they loved so well; and neither of them seems fully to have realized how much his own development owed to modern things for which seventeen generations of men have struggled and suffered since Chaucer’s time. No artist of the Middle Ages—or, indeed, of any but quite recent times—could have earned by his genius a passport into society for wife and family as well as himself; nor could anything but a miracle have unbarred for Chaucer that paradise of splendid work, pure domestic felicity, and social success which attracts us so much in the life of Burne-Jones.[32]His wife was probably rather his social superior, and both would have had in any case a certain status as attendants at Court; but that was in itself an unhealthy life, and so far as Chaucer’s poetry raised him above his fellow yeomen or fellow squires, so far that special favour would tend to separate him from his wife. Acourtly poet’s married life could scarcely be happy in an age compounded of such social licence and such galling restrictions: an age when a man might recite the Miller’s and Reve’s tales in mixed company, yet a girl was expected not to speak till she was addressed, to fold her hands when she sat down, to keep her eyes fixed on the ground as she walked, to assume that all talk of love meant illicit love, and to avoid even the most natural familiarities on pain of scandal.[33]We may very easily exaggerate the want of harmony in the Chaucer household; but everything tends to assure us that his was not altogether an ideal marriage. When, therefore, he tells us he has long been the servant of Love, and that he is the very clerk of Love, we need not suppose any reference here to the lady who had been his wife certainly for some years, and perhaps for nearly twenty. Prof. Hales, however, seems to go a good deal too far in assuming that Philippa was in attendance on Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, while her husband lived snugly in bachelor apartments over Aldgate.[34]
But who, it may be asked, was this Philippa of the Pantry before she became Philippa Chaucer? Here again the indications, though tantalizingly slight, all point towards some connection with John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s great patron. She was probably either a Swynford or a Roet,i.e.sister-in-law or own sister to Katherine Roet, who married Sir Thomas Swynford, and who became in after life first mistress and finally wife to John of Gaunt. From this marriage weredescended the great Beaufort family, of which the most powerful member, the Cardinal Minister of Henry VI., speaks in one of his letters of hiscousin, Thomas Chaucer.[35]This again is complicated by the doubt which has been thrown on a Thomas Chaucer’s sonship to Geoffrey, in spite of the definite assertion by the former’s contemporary, Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University.
WESTMINSTER HALL
(THE GREAT HALL OF THE KING’S PALACE AT WESTMINSTER)
Meanwhile, however, we are certain that Chaucer was in 1367 a Yeoman of Edward III.’s Chamber, and that he was promoted five years later to be a squire in the Royal household. The still existing Household Ordinances of Edward II. on one side, and Edward IV. on the other, agree so closely in their description of the duties of these two offices, that we may infer pretty exactly what they were in Chaucer’s time. The earlier ordinances prescribe that the yeomen “shall serve in the chamber, making beds, holding and carrying torches, and divers other things which [the King] and the chamberlain shall command them. These [yeomen] shall eat in the chamber before the King. And each of them, be he well or ill, shall have for livery one darre[36]of bread, one gallon of beer, amesse de gros[37]from the kitchen, and yearly a robe in cloth or a mark in money; and for shoes 4s.8d., at two seasons in the year.[38]And if any of them be sent out of the Court in the King’s business, by his commandment, he shall have 4d.a day for his expenses.” The later ordinances add to these duties “to attend the Chamber, to watch the King by course, to go messages, etc.” The yeomen were bedded two by two, apparently on the floor ofthe great hall, so that visitors to Westminster Hall may well happen to tread on the spot where Chaucer nightly lay down to sleep. When he became a squire, he might either have found himself still on duty in the King’s chamber, or else an “Esquire for the King’s mouth,” to taste the food for fear of poison, to carve for the King, and to serve his wine on bended knee. He still shared a bed with some fellow squire; but they now shared a servant also and a private room, to which each might bring at night his gallon or half gallon of ale; “and for winter season, each of them two Paris candles, one faggot, or else a half of tallwood.” Besides his mess of great meat, he might now take a mess of roast also;[39]his wages were raised to 7½d.per day, and he received yearly “two robes of cloth, or 40s.in money.” Moreover, as the Household Book of Edward IV. adds, “these esquires of household of old be accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and in evenings to draw to Lords Chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of Chronicles of Kings, and of other policies, or in piping or harping, singing, or other acts martial, to help to occupy the Court, and accompany strangers till the time require of departing.” The same compiler looks back to Edward III.’s time as the crown and glory of English Court life; and indeed that King lived on a higher scale (as things went in those days) than any other medieval English King except his inglorious grandson, Richard II. King John of France might indeed marvel to find himself among a nation of shopkeepers, and laugh at the thrift and order whichunderlay even his Royal cousin’s extravagances.[40]But John’s son, Charles the Wise, was destined to earn that surname by nothing more than by his imitation of English business methods in peace and war; and meanwhile the longest laugh was with Edward, whose Court swarmed with French prisoners and hostages. Among the enforced guests were King John himself, four royal dukes, the flower of the nobility, and thirty-six substantial citizens sent over by the great towns as pledges for the enormous war indemnity, which was in fact never fully paid. All these were probably still at Court when Chaucer first joined it, and few poets have ever feasted their youthful eyes on more splendid sights than this. Palaces and castles were filled to overflowing with the spoils of France; and the prisoners themselves vied with their captors in knightly sports and knightly magnificence. One of the royal princes had sixteen servants with him in his captivity; all moved freely about the country on parole, hawking and hunting, dancing and flouting, rather like guests than prisoners. Indeed, as Mme. Darmesteter truly remarks, there was a natural freemasonry between the French nobility and the French-speaking courtiers of England; and Froissart draws a vivid contrast between our manners and those of the Germans in this respect. “For English and Gascons are of such condition that they put a knight or a squire courteously to ransom; but the custom of the Germans, and their courtesy [to their prisoners] is of no such sort hitherto—I know not how they will do henceforth—for hitherto they have had neither pity nor mercy on Christian gentlemen who fall into their hands as prisoners, but lay on themransoms to the full of their estate and even beyond, and put them in chains, in irons, and in close prison like thieves and murderers; and all to extort the greater ransom.”[41]The French lords added rather to the gaiety of a Court which was already perhaps the gayest in Europe; a society all the merrier because it was spending money that had been so quickly won; and because, in those days of shifting fortune, the shadow of change might already be foreboded on the horizon. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may be captives in our turn. Few of the great leaders on either side escaped without paying ransom at least once in their lives; and the devil-may-care of the camp had its direct influence on Court manners. The extravagant and comparatively inartistic fashions which, at the end of the 14th century, displaced one of the simplest and most beautiful models of dress which have ever reigned, were invented, as a contemporary assures us, by “the unthrifty women that be evil of their body, and chamberers to Englishmen and other men of war that dwellen with them as their lemans; for they were the first that brought up this estate that ye use of great purfles and slit coats.... And as to my wife, she shall not; but the princesses and ladies of England have taken up the said state and guise, and they may well hold it if them list.”[42]Towards the end of Chaucer’s life, when Richard II. had increased his personal expenses in direct proportion to his ill-success in war and politics, the English Court reached its highest pitch of extravagance. The chronicler Hardyng writes—
And he adds a description of Court morals which may well suggest further reflections on Chaucer’s married life.[43]
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A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE(FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER)
But the Court was all that the poet could desire as a school of worldly manners, of human passion and character, and of gorgeous pageantry. The King travelled much with his household; a grievous burden indeed to the poor country folk on whom his purveyors preyed, but to the world in general a glorious sight. He took with him a multitude of officers already suppressed as superfluous in the days of Edward IV., “as well Sergeants of Arms and Messagers many, with the twenty-four Archers before the King, shooting when he rode by the country, calledGard Corpes le Roy. And therefore the King journied not passing ten or twelve miles a day.” Ruskin traces much of his store of observation to the leisurely journeys round England with his father in Mr. Telford’s chaise; and the young Chaucer must have gathered from these Royal progresses a rich harvest of impressions for future use.
THE AMBASSADOR
Althoughwe have nothing important dating from before his thirtieth year, we know from Chaucer’s own words that he wrote many “Balades, Roundels, and Virelays” which are now lost; or, as he puts it in his last rueful Retractation, “many a song and many a lecherous lay.” These were no doubt fugitive pieces, often written for different friends or patrons, and put abroad in their names. Besides these, we know that he translated certain religious works, including the famous “Misery of Human Life” of Pope Innocent the Third. Piety and Profanity, prayers and curses, jostle each other in Chaucer’s early life as in the society round him: we may think of his own Shipman, thoroughly orthodox after his simple fashion, but silencing the too Puritanical parson with a rattling oath at close range, and proceeding to “clynken so mery a belle” that we feel a sort of treachery in pausing to wonder how such a festive tale could be brought forth for a company of pilgrims as a pill to purge heterodoxy!
The first of his early poems which we can date with any certainty is also the best worth dating. This is the“Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse,” in memory of John of Gaunt’s first wife, who died in September, 1369. The poem is obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages, fresh to us even where the critics trace them to some obvious French source. Such, for instance, is the beginning of his dream, where he describes the inevitable May morning—inevitable in medieval verse, but here and there, when he or his fellow-poets are in their happiest mood, as fresh again as Nature herself, who is never tired of harping on the same old themes of sunshine and blue sky and fresh air. He wakes at dawn to hear the birds singing their matins at his eaves; his bedroom walls are painted with scenes from the “Romance of the Rose,” and broad sunlight streams through the storied glass upon his bed. He throws open the casement: “blue, bright, clear was the air, nor in all the welkin was one cloud.” A bugle rings out; he hears the trampling of horse and hounds; the Emperor Octavian’s hunt is afoot—or, in plainer prose, King Edward the Third’s. The poet joins them; a puppy comes up fawning, starting away, fawning again, until it has led him apart from the rest.
Here he finds a young knight all in black, mourning by himself. A little unobtrusive sympathy unlocks the young man’s heart. She was “my hap, my heal, and all my bliss;” “and goodë fairë White she hight.” The first meeting had been as sudden as that of Dante and Beatrice: a medieval garden-party—“the fairest companye of ladies, that ever man with eye had seentogether in one place,” and one among them who “was like none of all the rout,” but who outshone the rest as the sun outshines moon and stars—
Her eyes shone with such simple enjoyment of life that “fools” were apt to read a special welcome in her glance, to their bitter disappointment in course of time. She disdained the “knakkes smale,” the little coquettish tricks of certain other ladies, who send their lovers half round the world, and give them but cold cheer on their return. The rest of the personal description is more commonplace, and (however faithful to medieval precedent) a little too like some modern sportsman’s enumeration of his horse’s points. The course of true love did not run too smoothly here. On the knight’s first proposal, “she saidë ‘nay!’ all utterly.” But “another year,” when she had learned to know him better, she took him to her mercy, and they lived full many a year in bliss, only broken now by her death. The poem, which had rather dragged at the beginning, here ends abruptly, as though Chaucer had tired of it. He has no effectual comfort to offer in such a sorrow; the hunt breaks in upon their dialogue; King and courtiers ride off to a long white-walled castle on a hill, where a bell rings the hour of noon and wakes the poet from his dream.
When we have reckoned up all Chaucer’s debts to his predecessors in this poem—and they are many—there is ample proof left of his own originality. Moreover, we cannot too often remind ourselves that the idea of copyright, either legal or moral, is modern. In the scarcity of books which reigned before the days of printing, the poet who “conveyed” most might well be the greatest benefactor to mankind. The educated public, so far as such a body then existed, ratherencouraged than reprobated the practice of borrowing; and the poet, like the modern schoolboy versifier, was applauded for his skill in weaving classical tags into his own work. Chaucer differed from his predecessors, and most of his successors, less in the amount which he borrowed than in the extraordinary vitality and originality which he infused into the older work. If we had only these fragments of his early works, we should still understand how Deschamps praises him as “King of worldly love in Albion”; we should still feel something of that charm of language which earned the poet his popularity at Court and his promotion to important offices.
It is well known that medieval society had not developed the minute sub-divisions of labour which have often been pushed to excess in modern times. The architect was simply a master-mason; the barber was equally ready to try his hand on your beard or on a malignant tumour; the King might choose for his minister a frankly incapable personal favourite, or send out his most gorgeously accoutred knights on a reconnaissance which would have been infinitely better carried out by a trained scout. Similarly, the poets of the 14th century were very frequently sent abroad as ambassadors; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio had already set Chaucer this example, which his friend Eustache Deschamps was soon to follow. The choice implied, no doubt, a subtle tribute to the power of rhetoric, under which category poetry was often classed. The rarity of book-learning did not indeed give the scholar a higher value in general society than he commands nowadays, or bring more grist to his mill; he and his horse were commonly lean enough, and his only worldly treasures were his score of books at his bed’s head. But the medieval mind, which persistently invested lunatics with the highest prophetic qualities, seems to have had an equally touching faith in poetic clairvoyance at times when common sense was at fault, andto have called upon a Dante or a Chaucer just as, in similar emergencies, it called upon particular saints whose intercession was least invoked in everyday life. Much, of course, is to be explained by the fact that formal and elaborate public speeches were as necessary as spectacular display on these embassies; but, even so, we may wonder that the Ravennati ever entrusted an embassy to Dante, who is recorded to have been so violent a political partisan that he was capable of throwing stones even at women in the excitement of discussion. Chaucer, however, had neither the qualities nor the defects of such headlong fanaticism; and from the frequency with which he was employed we may infer that he showed real talents for diplomacy.
His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had taken part in a second French campaign, he was “abroad in the King’s service” during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and 1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the latter year, when he “was joined in a commission with James Pronam and John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where the Genoese might form a commercial establishment.”[44]This journey lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or about £1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions that Chaucer’s business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest of business documents opens out a vista of things in themselves most romantic.
Of all that makes the traveller’s joy in modern Italy, the greater part was already there for Chaucer to see,with much more that he saw and that we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of these things, and less inclined to find God’s hand in the mountains or the sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of mountain scenery which comes out in the “Pearl” and in early Scottish poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance’s sea-voyages, he expedites them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel passage in the rough little boats of those days, “a perilous horse to ride,” indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant elbow room—
Worse passages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us how Hervé de Léon “took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days, and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Hervé of Léon was so sore troubled that he had never health after.” King John of France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross theChannel,[46]and Edward III. had one passage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the arts of “necromancers and wizards.” Moreover, nearly all Chaucer’s embassies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372, when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, “the most desolate, the most solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia.”[47]But, after all these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches had been inhospitable:
We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least delightful passages of Goethe’sItalienische Reiseare those which describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish brought out of the sea.
For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their first freshness, with thousands more which have long sincedisappeared. Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built, the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new Æneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with each other in every department of human skill—
Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet’s business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy. To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante’s literary personality was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense individualism and the frankness with which he asserted his own personal convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which Dante wielded the keys of heaven and hell is the fundamental independence of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to hell, he was only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent. But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady whom he had loved on earth—in this choice, and in his corresponding independence of expression, he gave an impetusto free thought far beyond what he himself can have intended. Virgil’s parting speech at the end of the “Purgatorio,” “Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I make thee King and High Priest over thyself,” conveyed a licence of which others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked effectually upon a mind which “was going through an intense religious crisis.”[49]Dante’s mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the earliest extant from his pen. “Chaucer’s A. B. C.,” a rapturous hymn to the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach more perilously near to Mariolatry than this—“Almighty and all-merciable Queen”! Another poem of the same periodis the “Life of St. Cecilia,” with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante, and its fervent prayer for help against temptation—
But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the great Florentine’s style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in Chaucer’s later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him, and of noneafter him until the 16th century brought English men of letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.
Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey, of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of the “Clerk’s Tale” would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the former; and most biographers have assumed that it is not only the fictitious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he had just translated into Latin from the “Decameron” during the very year of Chaucer’s visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English poet’s fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready passport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from Petrarch “at Padua,” the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer’s Italian journey at Arquà, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily assumed as a proof of Chaucer’s ignorance, does in fact show that he possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch’s whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal intercourse.[51]This is admirably illustrated by the storyof Chaucer’s relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days, before Boccaccio’s first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious difficulty. Great as are Chaucer’s literary obligations to the author of the “Decameron,” he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio’s.[52]It is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and that Chaucer, while claiming the right of “conveying” from Boccaccio as much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked out with Boccaccio’s true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer’s character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the assumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see that in Dante’s and Petrarch’s cases he proclaims his debt with the most commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval manuscripts were quite commonly written without anything like the modern title-page; and, even when the author’s name was recorded on the first page, the frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a title afterhis own fancy.[53]Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the streets of Boccaccio’s Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of Fiesole under which the lovers of the “Decameron” had sat, and missed by a few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated whole books of his without ever realizing their true authorship. In those days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the King’s Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed, assure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore, that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.
It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of 1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This, however, was taken as disproved by the more recent assertion of Nicholas that Chaucer drew his pension in England “with his own hands” during all this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby’sresearches have reopened the possibility of the old tradition.[54]He ascertained, by a fresh examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to Milan, but the wordsinto his own handsare omitted from this particular entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght’s assertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer’s own silence on the subject may have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the Knight’s mouth in protest against the Monk’s fondness for tragedies—
Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer’s old master. The Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan on the bridegroom’s arrival. But three months after the wedding “my lord Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for that the fashion of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan, and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one accord.” This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55]Why should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters in his life—the Black Death, and Wat Tyler’s revolt. It is still possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of Milan.