THE MAN OF BUSINESS
“Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a ledger.”—Times
TheItalian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer’s last embassy. In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February of next year he was associated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur’s partner at the battle of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer, would have seen his old fellow-envoy’s head grinning down from the spikes of London Bridge side by side with “a quarter of Sir Harry Percy.”[56]In April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d’Angle and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no authority to treat. So the embassy ended only in a very brief extension of the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later, when Richard took to second wife Marie’s niece Isabella, then only in her eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again associated with Sir Guichard d’Angle and two others on a missionto negotiate for Richard’s marriage with one of poor little Marie’s sisters. Here also the discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir Edward Berkeley on a fresh embassy to Italy. This time it was to treat “of certain matters touching the King’s war” with the great EnglishcondottiereSir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate afforded matter for one of the Monk’s “tragedies” in the “Canterbury Tales”—
During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this, so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.
It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant circumstances of these later embassies, important as they are for showing the high estimate put on Chaucer’s business talents, and much as they must have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully matured at last in the poet of the “Canterbury Tales.” But they show us that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate sister of Clarence’s Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins. These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he became no longerthe mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a genius) of French and Italian classics, but a classic himself, master of a style that could express all the accumulated observations of half a century—Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English men and women, and no other man. The analysis and criticism of the works which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough, strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare has been to us ever since.
It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at court. On St. George’s day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of wine daily for life, “to be received in the port of London from the hands of the King’s butler.” Such grants were common enough; but they take us back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition had come down. St. George’s was a day of solemn feasting in the Round Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services rendered during the past year. Butthe grant was already in those days more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was commuted for a life-pension of about £200 modern value.
Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune. Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however, are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household amounted to some £1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wardships and a large share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer’s financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another comptrollership which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollership also; and in this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the Shire for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues. Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years. In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet “de raptu meo.”Raptusoften means simplyabduction, and it may well be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia as had been made upon his own father,who, as it will be remembered, had narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the gratification of other people’s private interests. This is rendered all the more probable by two other documents connected with the same matter which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57]It is, however, possible that theraptuswas a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer’s “little son Lowis” was just ten years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation, have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on Cecilia’s part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pass a law exacting that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pass on to the next of kin.[58]But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into a case ofraptus, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]
During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chauceroccupied those lodgings over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary point of view. Here he studied with an assiduity which would have been impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in his later years of want and sordid shifts. Here he translated Boethius, of whose philosophical “Consolations” he was so soon to stand in bitter need. Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that “Troilus and Cressida” which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In 1382 he composed his “Parliament of Fowls” in honour of Richard II.’s marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the “House of Fame” and the “Legend of Good Women.” These two poems, like most of Chaucer’s work, are unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind ourselves that he was no professionallitterateur, but a courtier, diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their gratitude for what he told them, few in those days would have been inclined to complain of all that Chaucer “left half-told.” So the poet freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness after all these centuries.
This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. His contemporary,Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, “at the palace of Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, nobles, and counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease. And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports, and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin, French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days before in all that he should say.” Chaucer’s Parliament sat more probably in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly passed off with less order and unanimity than Froissart’s of 1337, though the main theme was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crécy and Poitiers and a dozen other victories in pitched battles, our ships had been destroyed off La Rochelle in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60]and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and hisfellow-members assembled on October 1, “it had still seemed possible that any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of the Thames.”[61]The militia of the southern counties was still assembled to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out any longer. As a contemporary puts it, “The King would not come to Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to attend.”[62]The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed preparations.
Meanwhile, however, otherprotégésof his had suffered besides the great men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted from Richard a commission for a month “to receive and dispose of all crown revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and set up others in their stead.”[63]Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls of this Parliament that the commission was issued “for inquiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of theSubsidies and Customs; and as the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed to that investigation.” It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so, and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the poet’s character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then, when Richard’s patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer’s other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile—at such a moment it was almost inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in December both his comptrollerships were in other men’s hands. Even in his best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse would very naturally drive him to desperate shifts. It is not surprising, therefore, that we soon find him assigning his two pensions to one John Scalby (May 1, 1388).
But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV.[64]At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter’s pension as usual, but not atMichaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet’s already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he probably wrote the greater part of the “Canterbury Tales.”
Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain attempt to reassert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer’s old colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world, he struck his blow. In May, 1389, “he suddenly entered the privy council, took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, ‘What age am I?’ They answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am of full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.’” He at once dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John’s factious younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester.
With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was natural that Chaucer’s luck should turn. Two months after this scene in Council he was appointed by Richard II. “Clerk of our Works at our Palace of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern Langley,and Feckenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages.” Our poet had also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the King’s prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back runaways, and “to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the injunctions given in our name.” That these time-honoured clauses were no dead letter, is shown by the still surviving documents in which Chaucer deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen and impounding materials, by the constant petitions of medieval Parliaments against this system of “Purveyance” for the King’s necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short while by “pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of Windsor.”[65]
We have a curious inventory of the “dead stock” which Chaucer took over from his predecessors in the Clerkship, and for which he made himself responsible; the list ranges from “one bronze image, two stone images unpainted, seven images in the likeness of Kings” for Westminster Palace, with considerable fittings for the lists and galleries of a tournament, and 100 stone cannon balls for the Tower, down to “one broken cable ... one dilapidated pitchfork ... three sieves, whereof two are crazy.”[66]For all this, which he was allowed to do by deputy, Chaucer received two shillings a day, or something like £450 a year of modern money.[67]Further commissions of the same kind were granted to him: the supervision of the works at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, which was “threatened with ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground;” and again of a great scaffold in Smithfield for the Royal party on the occasion of the tournament in May, 1390. Two months earlier in this same year he had been associated with his old colleague Sir Richard Stury and others on a commission to repair the dykes and drains of Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich, which were “so broken and ruined that manifold and inestimable damages have happened in times past, and more are feared for the future.” A marginal note on a MS. of his “Envoy to Scogan,” written some three years later, states that the poet was then living at Greenwich; and a casual remark in the “Canterbury Tales” very probably points in the same direction.[68]Either in 1390 or 1391 a Geoffrey Chaucer, who was probably the poet, was appointed Forester of North Petherton Park in Somerset.
But here again we find one single mischance breakingthe even tenour of Chaucer’s new-born prosperity. In September, 1390, while on his journeys as Clerk of the Works, he was the victim of at least two, and just possibly three, highway robberies (of which two were on one day) at Westminster, and near “The Foul Oak” at Hatcham. Two of the robbers were in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the moment by turning King’s evidence. He was, however, accused of another robbery in Hertfordshire, and attempted to save his life by charging Thomas Talbot’s servant with complicity in the crime. This time the accused offered “wager of battle.” Brerelay was vanquished in the duel, and strung up out of hand.
It is difficult to resist the conviction that Chaucer was by this time recognized as an unbusiness-like person; for the King deprived him of his Clerkship in the following June (1391), at a time when we can find nothing in the political situation to account for the dismissal.
LAST DAYS
Fromthis time forward Chaucer seems to have lived from hand to mouth. He had, as will presently be seen, a son, stepson, or foster-son of considerable wealth and position; and no doubt he had other good friends too. We have reason to believe that he was still working at the “Canterbury Tales,” and receiving such stray crumbs from great men’s tables as remained the main reward of literature until modern times. In 1391 (if we may judge from the fact that problems in the book are calculated for that year) he wrote the “Treatise on the Astrolabe” for the instruction of his ten-year-old son Lewis.[69]It was most likely in 1393 that he wrote from Greenwich the “Envoy” to his friend Henry Scogan, who was then with the Court at Windsor, “at the stream’s head of grace.” The poet urges him there to make profitable mention of his friend, “forgot in solitary wilderness” at the lower end of the same river; and it is natural to connect thiswith the fact that, in 1394, Richard granted Chaucer a fresh pension of £20 a year for life. But the King’s exchequer was constantly empty, and we have seen that the poet’s was seldom full; so we need not be surprised to find him constantly applying for his pension at irregular times during the rest of the reign. Twice he dunned his royal patron for the paltry sum of 6s.8d.More significant still is a record of the Court of Common Pleas showing that he was sued by Isabella Buckholt for the sum of £14. 1s.11d.some time between April 24 and May 20, 1398; the Sheriff of Middlesex reported that Chaucer had no possessions in his bailiwick. On May 4 the poet obtained letters of protection, in which the King alludes formally to the “very many arduous and urgent affairs” with which “our beloved esquire” is entrusted, and therefore takes him with “his men, lands, goods, rents, and all his possessions” under the Royal protection, and forbids all pleas or arrests against him for the next two years. The recital of these arduous and urgent affairs is no doubt (like that of Chaucer’s lands and rents) a mere legal form; but the protection was real. Isabella Buckholt pressed her suit, but the Sheriff returned in October, 1398, and June, 1399, that the defendant “could not be found.” Yet all this time Chaucer was visible enough, for he was petitioning the King for formal letters patent to confirm a grant already made by word of mouth in the preceding December, of a yearly butt of wine from the Royal cellars “for God’s sake, and as a work of charity.” This grant, valued at about £75 of modern money, was confirmed on October 13, 1398, and was the last gift from Richard to Chaucer. Before twelve months were gone, the captive King had ravelled out his weaved-up follies before his pitiless accusers in the Tower of London; and on the very 13th of October, year for year, on which Chaucer had received his butt of wine from Richard II., a fresh poetical supplication brought him a still greater favourfrom the next King. Henry IV. granted on his own account a pension of forty marks in addition to Richard’s; and five days afterwards we find Chaucer pleading that he had “accidentally lost” the late King’s letters patent for the pension and the wine, and begging for their renewal under Henry’s hand. The favour was granted, and Chaucer was thus freed from any uncertainty which might have attached to his former grants from a deposed King, even though one of them was already recognized and renewed in Henry’s letters of October 13.[70]
“King Richard,” writes Froissart, “had a greyhound called Math, who always waited upon the king and would know no man else; for whensoever the king did ride, he that kept the greyhound did let him loose, and he would straight run to the king and fawn upon him and leap with his fore feet upon the king’s shoulders. And as the king and the earl of Derby talked together in the court, the greyhound, who was wont to leap upon the king, left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lancaster, and made to him the same friendly countenance and cheer as he was wont to do to the king. The duke, who knew not the greyhound, demanded of the king what the greyhound would do. ‘Cousin,’ quoth the king, ‘it is a great good token to you and an evil sign to me.’ ‘Sir, how know you that?’ quoth the duke. ‘I know it well,’ quoth the king, ‘the greyhound maketh you cheer this day as king ofEngland, as ye shall be, and I shall be deposed. The greyhound hath this knowledge naturally; therefore take him to you; he will follow you and forsake me.’ The duke understood well those words and cherished the greyhound, who would never after follow king Richard, but followed the duke of Lancaster: [and more than thirty thousand men saw and knew this.”[71]] The fickle hound did but foreshadow the bearing of Richard’s dependents in general. The poem in which Chaucer hastened to salute the new King of a few days breathed no word of pity for his fallen predecessor, but hailed Henry as the saviour of England, “conqueror of Albion,” “very king by lineage and free election.”[72]In the months that followed, while Chaucer enjoyed his wine and his pension, the King who first gave them was starving himself, or being starved by his gaolers, at Pontefract. It must of course be remembered that, while Richard was felt on all hands to have thrown his splendid chances wantonly away, Henry was the son of Chaucer’s best patron; and indeed the poet had recently been in close relations with the future King, if not actually in his service.[73]Still, we know that few were willing to suffer in those days for untimely faith to a fallen sovereign, and we ourselves have less reason to blame the many, than to thank the luckier stars under which such trials of loyalty are spared to our generation. Chaucer’s contemporary and fellow-courtier, Froissart, might indeed write bitterly in his old age about a people which could change its ruler like an old glove; but Froissart was at ease in his fat canonry of Chimay; while Chaucer, with a hundred poets before and since, had chirped like a cricket all through the summer, and was now face to face with cold and starvation in the winter of his life.
His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in the tone of Wamba the Witless: “Wait till you come to forty year!” There is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so—
Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in the outspoken triumph-note of its close—
Then we have “The Former Age”—a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for the ungrateful Present—
Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning “This wretched worldës transmutacioun”; a “Complaint of Venus”; the two begging epistles to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend Bukton; a piteous complaint entitled “Lackof Steadfastness,” and two moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and most resigned—
The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are Chaucer’s own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn again into closer kinship, just as early childhood is much the same in all countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer’s later writings that reminds us of Renan’s “pauvre âme déveloutée de soixante ans.” All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are, in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But, for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions, there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems: and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old man’s disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer’s old age; we see in him what Ruskin calls “a Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”; loyal to monarchy and deeply distrustful of democracy,yet never doubting the King’s ultimate responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He anticipates in effect Heine’s tragi-comic appeal, “Hate me, Ladies, laugh at me, jilt me, but let me live!” For all that we have lost or missed, the world is no mere vale of tears—
well, even Age has its consolations—
There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer’s later years—to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th century drew to its close; Edward III.’s sun had gone down in disgrace; his grandson’s brilliant infancy had passed into a childish manhood, whose wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to his own supporters.[75]The Great Pestilence andthe Papal Schism, the Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants’ Revolt in England, had shaken society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.
To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan’s sense; a place of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was rather Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that, when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than “come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out.” But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose last cry is recorded at the end of the “Canterbury Tales.” Everything points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and, though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must beware of exaggerations on this point.[76]Moreover, even if his unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it needed a temper very different from Chaucer’s to withstand, under medieval conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the clergy.Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology for a document which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the dying man’s instinctive call for his mother. “I beseech you meekly of God” (so runs the epilogue to the “Parson’s Tale”) “that ye pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts—and namely [especially] of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved.”
But we are anticipating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had brought Chaucer once again into easy circumstances, and within a few weeks we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey “a tenement, with its appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel,”i.e.somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.’s chapel, sheltered by the south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and “nigh to the White Rose Tavern”; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to be planted “in the herbary between the King’s Chamber and the Church.”[77]“He that plants pears, plants for his heirs,” says the old proverb; and it is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last; but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was paid through the hands of oneWilliam Somere; and then the Royal accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the Abbey which has since received the name of Poet’s Corner.[78]It is probable that we owe this fortunate circumstance still more to the fact that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his last years.
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WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY
(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)
WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOWS OF CHAUCER’S HOUSE
(ON EXTREME RIGHT, PART OF HENRY VII’S CHAPEL, BUILT ON THE SITE OF ST. MARY’S CHAPEL)
The industry of Mr. Edward Scott has discovered that this same house in St. Mary’s Chapel garden was let, from at least 1423 until his death in 1434, to Thomas Chaucer, who was probably the poet’s son. This Thomas was a man of considerable wealth and position. He began as aprotégéof John of Gaunt, and became Chief Butler to Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V. in succession; Constable of Wallingford Castle, and M.P. for Oxfordshire in nine parliaments between 1402 and 1429. He was many times Speaker, a commissioner for the marriage of Henry V., and an Ambassador to treat for peace with France; fought at Agincourt with a retinue of twelve men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; became a member of the King’s Council, and died a very rich man. His only daughter made two very distinguished marriages; and her grandson was that Earl of Lincoln whom Richard III. declared his heir-apparent. For a while it seemed likely that Geoffrey Chaucer’s descendants would sit on the throne of England, but the Earl died in fight against Henry VII. at Stoke. Of the poet’s “little son Lewis” we hear no more after thatbrief glimpse of his boyhood; and Elizabeth Chaucy, the only other person whom we can with any probability claim as Chaucer’s child, was entered as a nun at Barking in 1381, John of Gaunt paying £51 8s.2d.for her expenses. It is just possible, however, that this may be the same Elizabeth Chausier who was received as a nun in St. Helen’s priory four years earlier, at the King’s nomination; in this case the date would point more probably to the poet’s sister.
This is not the place for any literary dissertation on Chaucer’s poetry, which has already been admirably discussed by many modern critics, from Lowell onwards. He did more than any other man to fix the literary English tongue: he was the first real master of style in our language, and retained an undisputed supremacy until the Elizabethan age. This he owes (as has often been pointed out) not only to his natural genius, but also to the happy chances which gave him so wide an experience of society. Living in one of the most brilliant epochs of English history, he was by turns lover, courtier, soldier, man of business, student, ambassador, Justice of the Peace, Member of Parliament, Thames Conservator, and perhaps even something of an architect, if he took his Clerkship of the Works seriously. All these experiences were mirrored in eyes as observant, and treasured in as faithful a memory, as those of any other English poet but one; and to these natural gifts of the born portrait-painter he added the crowning quality of a perfect style. If his writings have been hailed as a “well of English undefiled,” it was because he spoke habitually, and therefore wrote naturally, the best English of his day, the English of the court and of the higher clergy. In this he was even more fortunate than Dante, as he surpassed Dante in variety (though not in intenseness) of experience, and as he knew one more language than he. When we note with astonishment the freshness of Chaucer’s characters across these five centuries, we must always remember that hisexceptional experience and powers of observation were combined with an equally extraordinary mastery of expression. It is because Chaucer’s speech ranges with absolute ease from the best talk of the best society, down to the Miller’s broad buffoonery or the north-country jargon of the Cambridge students, that his characters seem to us so modern in spite of the social and political revolutions which separate their world from ours. It will be my aim to portray, in the remaining chapters, the England of that day in those features which throw most light on the peculiarities of Chaucer’s men and women.
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE
Thereare two episodes of Chaucer’s life which belong even more properly to Chaucer’s England; in which it may not only be said that our interest is concentrated less on the man than on his surroundings, but even that we can scarcely get a glimpse of the man except through his surroundings. These two episodes are his life in London, and his Canterbury Pilgrimage; and with these we may most fitly begin our survey of the world in which he lived.
The most tranquilly prosperous period of the poet’s life was that space of twelve years, from 1374 to 1386, during which he lived over the tower of Aldgate and worked at the Customs House, with occasional interruptions of foreign travel on the King’s business. The Tower of London, according to popular belief, had its foundations cemented with blood; and this was only tootrue of Chaucer’s Aldgate. It was a massive structure, double-gated and double-portcullised, and built in part with the stones of Jews’ houses plundered and torn down by the Barons who took London in 1215. But, in spite of similar incidents here and there, England was generally so free from civil war that the townsfolk were very commonly tempted to avoid unnecessary outlay upon fortifications. The traveller in Germany or Switzerland is often surprised to see even villages strongly walled against robber barons; while we may find great and wealthy English towns like Lynn and Cambridge which had little other defence than a ditch and palisade.[79]Even in fortified cities like London, the tendency was to neglect the walls—at one period we find men even pulling them gradually to pieces[80]—and to let the towers or gates for private lodgings. As early as the last year of Edward I., we find Cripplegate thus let out; and such notices are frequent in the “Memorials of London Life,” collected by Mr. Riley from the City archives.[81]
Here Chaucer had only half a mile to go to his daily work, by streets which we may follow still. If he took the stricter view, which held that gentlefolk ought to begin their day with a Mass, and to hear it fasting, then he had at least St. Michael’s, Aldgate, and All Hallows Stonechurch on his direct way, and two others within a few yards of his road. If, however, he was of those who preferred to begin the day with a sop of wine or “a draught of moist and corny ale,” then the noted hostelry of the Saracen’s Head probably stood eventhen, and had stood since the time of the Crusades, within a few yards of Aldgate Tower. Close by the fork of Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets he would pass a “fair and large-built house,” the town inn of the Prior of Hornchurch. Then, in Fenchurch Street, the mansion and garden of the Earls of Northumberland, and again, at the corner of Mart Lane, the manor and garden of Blanch Apleton. Turning down Mart Lane (now corrupted intoMark), the poet would pass the great chain, ready to be stretched at any moment across the narrow street, which marked the limits of Aldgate and Tower Street wards. He would cross Tower Street a few yards to the eastward of “the quadrant called Galley Row, because galley men dwelt there.” These galley men were “divers strangers, born in Genoa and those parts,” whose settlement in London had probably been the object of Chaucer’s first Italian mission, and who presently prospered sufficiently to fill not only this quadrant, but also part of Minchin Lane, and to possess a quay of their own. But, like their cousins the Lombards, these Genoese soon showed themselves smarter business men even than their hosts. They introduced unauthorized halfpence of Genoa, called “Galley halfpence”; and these, with similar “suskings” from France, and “dodkins” from the Low Countries, survived the strict penalties threatened by two Acts of Parliament, and lasted on at least till Elizabeth’s reign. “In my youth,” writes Stow, “I have seen them pass current, but with some difficulty, for the English halfpence were then, though not so broad, somewhat thicker and stronger.”[82]Stow found a building on the quay which he identified with their hall. “It seemeth that the builders of the hall of this house were shipwrights, and not carpenters;” for it was clinker-built like a boat, “and seemeth as it were a galley, the keel turned upwards.” But this building was probably later than Chaucer’s time. The galley quay almosttouched that of the Custom-House; and here our poet had abundant opportunities of keeping up his Italian while sampling the “wines of Crete and other sweet wines in one of the cellars, and red and white wines in the other cellar.”[83]His poems show an appreciation of good vintages, which was no doubt partly hereditary and partly acquired on the London quays, where he could talk with these Mediterranean mariners and drink the juice of their native grapes, remembering all the while how he had once watched them ripening on those southern slopes—
When Chaucer began his work in 1374 there was no regular building for the Customs; the King hired a house for the purpose at £3 a year, and a single boatman watched in the port to prevent smuggling. In 1383, however, one John Churchman built a house, which Richard II. undertook to hire for the rest of the builder’s life; this became the first Custom-House, and lasted until Elizabeth’s reign. The lease gives its modest proportions exactly: a ground floor, in which the King kept his weigh-beams for wool and other merchandise; a “solar,” or upper chamber, for a counting-house; and above this yet another solar, 38 by 21½ feet, partitioned into “two chambers and onegarret, as men call it.” For this new house the King paid the somewhat higher rent of £4. Chaucer was bound by the terms of his appointment to do the work personally, without substitute, and to write his “rolls touching the said office with his own hand”; but it is probable that he accepted these terms with the usual medieval licence. He wentabroad at least five times on the King’s service during his term of office; and the two original rolls which survive are apparently not written by his hand. His own words in the “House of Fame” show that he took his book-keeping work at the office seriously; but it is not likely that the press of business was such as to keep him always at the counting-house; and he may well have helped his boatman to patrol the port, which extended down-river to Gravesend and Tilbury. It is at least certain that, in 1376, he caught John Kent smuggling a cargo of wool away from London, and so earned prize-money to the value of £1000 in modern currency. It is certain also that his daily work for twelve years must have kept him in close daily contact with sea-faring folk, who, from Homer’s days at least, have always provided the richest food for poetry and romance. The commonest seaman had stirring tales to tell in those days, when every sailor was a potential pirate, and foreign crews dealt with each other by methods still more summary than plank-walking.[85]Moreover, there was even more truth than now in the proverb that “far fowls have fair feathers”; and the Genoese on Galley Quay had sailed many seas unknown even to the tempest-tossed shipman of Dartmouth, whose southern limit was Cape Finisterre. They had passed the Pillars of Hercules, and seen the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, and shuddered from afar at the Great Whirlpool of the Bay of Biscay, which sucked in its floods thrice daily, and thrice belched them forth again; and into which about this time “four vessels of the town of Lynn, steering too incautiously, suddenly fell, and were swallowed up under their comrades’ eyes.”[86]
Moreover, the very streets and markets of London then presented a pageant unquestionably far more inspiring to a man of Chaucer’s temperament than anything that can be seen there to-day. It is easy toexaggerate the contrast between modern and medieval London, if only by leaving out of account those subtle attractions which kept even William Morris from tearing himself away from the much-abused town. It is also undeniable that, however small and white, Chaucer’s London was not clean, even to the outward eye; and that the exclusive passion for Gothic buildings is to some extent a mere modern fashion, as it was the fashion two hundred years ago to consider them a positive eyesore. To some great poet of the future, modern London may well supply a grander canvas still; but to a writer like Chaucer, content to avoid psychological problems and take men and things as they appear on the surface, there was every possible inspiration in this busy capital of some 40,000 souls, where everybody could see everything that went on, and it was almost possible to know all one’s fellow-citizens by sight. Some streets, no doubt, were as crowded as any oriental bazaar; but most of the buying and selling went on in open market, with lavish expenditure of words and gestures; while the shops were open booths in which the passer-by could see master and men at their work, and stop to chat with them on his way. In the absence of catalogues and advertisements, every man spread out his gayest wares in the sun, and commended them to the public with every resource of mother-wit or professional rhetoric. Cornhill and Cheapside were like the Mercato Vecchio at Florence or St. Mark’s Square at Venice. Extremes meet in modern London, and there is theme enough for poetry in the deeper contrasts that underlie our uniformity of architecture and dress. But in Chaucer’s London the crowd was almost as motley to man’s eye as to God’s—
The very sticks and stones had an individuality no less marked. The churches, parish and monastic, stood out as conspicuously as they still stand in Norwich, and were often used for secular purposes, despite the prohibitions of synods and councils. For even London had in Chaucer’s time scarcely any secular public buildings, while at Norwich, one of the four greatest towns in the kingdom, public meetings were sometimes held in the Tolhouse, sometimes in the Chapel of St. Mary’s College, in default of a regular Guildhall. The city houses of noblemen and great churchmen were numerous and often splendid, and Besant rightly emphasizes this feudal aspect of the city; but he seems in his enumeration of the lords’ retainers to allow too little for medieval licence in dealing with figures; and certainly he has exaggerated their architectural magnificence beyond all reason.[88]But at least the ordinary citizens’ and artisans’ dwellings presented the most picturesque variety. Here and there a stone house, rare enough to earn special mention in official documents; but most of the dwellings were of timber and plaster, in front and behind, with only side-gables of masonry for some sort of security against the spreadingof fires.[89]The ground floor was generally open to the street, and formed the shop; then, some eight or ten feet above the pavement, came the “solar” or “soller” on its projecting brackets, and sometimes (as in the Custom House) a third storey also. Outside stairs seem to have been common, and sometimes penthouses on pillars or cellar steps further broke the monotony of the street, though frequent enactments strove to regulate these in the public interest. Of comfort or privacy in the modern sense these houses had little to offer. The living rooms were frequently limited to hall and bower (i.e.bedroom); only the better sort had two chambers; glass was rare; in Paris, which was at least as well-built as London, a well-to-do citizen might well have windows of oiled linen for his bedroom, and even in 1575 a good-sized house at Sheffield contained only sixteen feet of glass altogether.[90]Meanwhile the wooden shutters which did duty for casements were naturally full of chinks; and the inhabitants were exposed during dark nights not only to the nuisance and danger of “common listeners at the eaves,” against whom medieval town legislation is deservedly severe, but also to the far greater chances of burglary afforded by the frailty of their habitations. It is not infrequently recorded in medieval inquests that the housebreaker found his line of least resistance not through a window or a door, but through the wall itself.[91]Moreover, inthose unlighted streets, much that was most picturesque by day was most dangerous at night, from the projecting staircases and penthouses down to doorways unlawfully opened after curfew, wherein “aspyers” might lurk, “waiting men for to beaten or to slayen.” These and many similar considerations will serve to explain why night-walking was treated in medieval towns as an offence presumptively no less criminal than, in our days, the illegal possession of dynamite. The 15th-century statutes of Oxford condemn the nocturnal wanderer to a fine double that which he would have incurred by shooting at a proctor and his attendants with intent to injure.[92]