THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND(FROM MS. ROY. 16 F. ii, f. 73: A LATE 15TH CENTURY MS. OFTHE POEMS OF CHARLES D’ORLÉANS)
But to return to the inside of the houses. The contract for a well-to-do citizen’s dwelling of 1308 has been preserved, by a fortunate chance, in one of the city Letter-books. “Simon de Canterbury, carpenter, came before the Mayor and Aldermen ... and acknowledged that he would make at his own proper charges, down to the locks, for William de Hanigtone, skinner, before the Feast of Easter then next ensuing, a hall and a room with a chimney, and one larder between the said hall and room; and one solar over the room and larder; also, one oriel at the end of the hall, beyond the high bench, and one step with a porch from the ground to the door of the hall aforesaid, outside of that hall; and two enclosures as cellars, opposite to each other, beneath the hall; and one enclosure for a sewer, with two pipes leading to the said sewer; and one stable, [blank] in length, between the said hall and the old kitchen, and twelve feet in width, with a solar above such stable, and a garret above the solar aforesaid; and at one end of such solar, there is to be a kitchen with a chimney; and there is to be an oriel between the said hall and the old chamber, eight feet in width.... And the said Williamde Hanigtone acknowledged that he was bound to pay to Simon before-mentioned, for the work aforesaid, the sum of £9 5s.4d.sterling, half a hundred of Eastern martenskins, fur for a woman’s head, value five shillings, and fur for a robe of him, the said Simon, etc.”[93]Read side by side with this the list of another fairly well-to-do citizen’s furniture in 1337. Hugh le Benere, a Vintner who owned several tenements, was accused of having murdered Alice his wife.[94]He refused to plead, was condemned to prison for life, and his goods were inventoried. Omitting the stock-in-trade of six casks of wine (valued at six marks), the wearing apparel, and the helmet and quilted doublet in which Hugh had to turn out for the general muster, the whole furniture was as follows: “One mattress, value 4s.; 6 blankets and one serge, 13s.6d.; one green carpet, 2s.; one torn coverlet, with shields of sendal, 4s.; ... 7 linen sheets, 5s.; one table-cloth, 2s.; 3 table-cloths, 18d.; ... one canvas, 8d.; 3 feather beds, 8s.; 5 cushions, 6d.; ... 3 brass pots, 12s.; one brass pot, 6s.; 2 pairs of brass pots, 2s.6d.; one brass pot, broken, 2s.6d.; one candlestick of latten, and one plate, with one small brass plate, 2s.; 2 pieces of lead, 6d.; one grate, 3d.; 2 andirons, 18d.; 2 basins, with one washing vessel, 5s.; one iron grating, 12d.; one tripod, 2d.; ... one iron spit, 3d.; one frying-pan, 1d.; ... one funnel, 1d.; one small canvas bag, 1d.; ... one old linen sheet, 1d.; 2 pillows, 3d.; ... one counter, 4s.; 2 coffers, 8d.; 2 curtains, 8d.; 2 remnants of cloth, 1d.; 6 chests, 10s.10d.; one folding table, 12d.; 2 chairs, 8d.; oneportable cupboard, 6d.; 2 tubs, 2s.; also firewood, sold for 3s.; one mazer cup, 6s.; ... one cup called “note” (i.e.cocoanut) with a foot and cover of silver, value 30s.; 6 silver spoons, 6s.”[95]
This implies no very high standard of domestic comfort. The hall, it must be remembered, had no chimney in the modern sense, but a hole in the roof to which the smoke went up from an open hearth in the centre of the room, more or less assisted in most cases by a funnel-shaped erection of lath and plaster.[96]It is not generally realized what draughts our ancestors were obliged to accept as unavoidable, even when they sat partially screened by their high-backed seats, as in old inn kitchens. A man needed his warmest furs still more for sitting indoors than for walking abroad; and to Montaigne, even in 1580, one of the most remarkable things in Switzerland was the draughtless comfort of the stove-warmed rooms. “One neither burns one’s face nor one’s boots, and one escapes the smoke of French houses. Moreover, whereas we [in France] take our warm and furredrobes de chambrewhen we enter the house, they on the contrary dress in their doublets, with their heads uncovered to the very hair, and put on their warm clothes to walk in the open air.”[97]The important part played by furs of all kinds, and the matter-of-course mention of dirt and vermin, are among the first things that strike us in medieval literature.
But the worst discomfort of the house, to the modern mind, was the want of privacy. There was generally but one bedroom; for most of the household the house meant simply the hall; and some of those with whom the rest were brought into such close contact might indeed be “gey ill to live wi’.”[98]We have seen that, even as a King’s squire, Chaucer had not a bed to himself; and sometimes one bed had to accommodate three occupants. This was so ordered, for instance, by the 15th-century statutes of the choir-school at Wells, which provided minutely for the packing: “two smaller boys with their heads to the head of the bed, and an older one with his head to the foot of the bed and his feet between the others’ heads.” A distinguished theologian of the same century, narrating a ghost-story of his own, begins quite naturally: “When I was a youth, and lay in a square chamber, which had only a single door well shut from within, together with three more companions in the same bed....” One of these, we presently find, “was of greater age, and a man of some experience.”[99]The upper classes of Chaucer’s later days had indeed begun to introduce revolutionary changes into the old-fashioned common life of the hall; a generation of unparalleled success in war and commerce was already making possible, and therefore inevitable, a new cleavage between class and class. The author of the B. text of “Piers Plowman,” writing about 1377, complains of these new and unsociable ways (x., 94).
Few men, however, could afford even these rudiments of privacy; people like Chaucer, of fair income and good social position, still found in their homes many of the discomforts of shipboard; and their daily intercourse with their fellow-men bred the same blunt familiarity, even beneath the most ceremonious outward fashions. It was not only starveling dependents like Lippo Lippi, whose daily life compelled them to study night and day the faces and outward ways of their fellow-men.
But let us get back again into the street, where all the work and play of London was as visible to the passer-by as that of any colony of working ants under the glass cases in a modern exhibition. Often, of course, there were set pageants for edification or distraction—Miracle Plays and solemn church processions twice or thrice in the year,—the Mayor’s annual ride to the palace of Westminster and back,—the King’s return with a new Queen or after a successful campaign, as in 1357, when Edward III. “came over the Bridge and through the City of London, with the King of France and other prisoners of rich ransom in his train. He entered the city about tierce [9 a.m.] and made for Westminster; but at the news of his coming so great a crowd of folk ran together to see this marvellous sight, that for the press of the people he could scarce reach his palace after noonday.” Frequent again were the royal tournaments at Smithfield, Cheapside, and Westminster, or “trials by battle” in those same lists, when one gentleman had accused another of treachery, and London citizens might see the quarrel decided by God’s judgment.[100]Here were welcome contrasts to the monotony of household life; for there was in all these shows a piquant element of personal risk, or at least of possible broken heads for others. Even if the King threw down his truncheon before the bitter end of the duel, even ifno bones were broken at the tournament, something at least would happen amongst the crowd. Fountains ran wine in the morning, and blood was pretty sure to be shed somewhere before night. In 1396, when the little French Princess of eight years was brought to her Royal bridegroom at Westminster, nine persons were crushed to death on London Bridge, and the Prior of Tiptree was among the dead. Even the church processions, as episcopal registers show, ended not infrequently in scuffling, blows, and bloodshed; and the frequent holy days enjoyed then, as since, a sad notoriety for crime. Moreover, these things were not, as with us, mere matters of newspaper knowledge; they stared the passer-by in the face. Chaucer must have heard from his father how the unpopular Bishop Stapledon was torn from his horse at the north door of St. Paul’s and beheaded with two of his esquires in Cheapside; how the clergy of the cathedral and of St. Clement’s feared to harbour the corpses, which lay naked by the roadside at Temple Bar until “women and wretched poor folk took the Bishop’s naked corpse, and a woman gave him an old rag to cover his belly, and they buried him in a waste plot called the Lawless Church, with his squires by his side, all naked and without office of priest or clerk.”[101]Chaucer himself must have seen some of the many similar tragedies in 1381, for they are among the few events of contemporary history which we can definitely trace in his poems—
What modern Londoner has witnessed this, or anythinglike it? Yet to all his living readers Chaucer appealed confidently, “Have ye not seen?” Scores of wretched lawyers and jurors were hunted down in that riot, and hurried through the streets to have their heads hacked off at Tower Hill or Cheapside, “and many Flemings lost their head at that time, and namely [specially] they that could not say ‘Bread and Cheese,’ but ‘Case and Brode.’”[103]It may well have been Simon of Sudbury’s white face that haunted Chaucer, when the mob forgot his archbishopric in the unpopularity of his ministry, forgot the sanctity of the chapel at whose altar he had taken refuge, “paid no reverence even to the Lord’s Body which the priest held up before him, but worse than demons (who fear and flee Christ’s sacrament) dragged him by the arms, by his hood, by different parts of the body towards their fellow-rioters on Tower Hill without the gates. When they had come thither, a most horrible shout arose, not like men’s shouts, but worse beyond all comparison than all human cries, and most like to the yelling of devils in hell. Moreover, they cried thus whensoever they beheaded men or tore down their houses, so long as God permitted them to work their iniquity unpunished.”[104]De Quincey has noted how such cries may make a deeper mark on the soul than any visible scene. And here again Chaucer has brought his own experience, though half in jest, as a parallel to the sack of Ilion and Carthage or the burning of Rome—
Last tragedy of all—but this time, though he may well have seen, the poet could no longer write—Richard II.’s corpse “was brought to St. Paul’s in London, and hisface shown to the people,” that they might know he was really dead.[106]
Nor was there less comedy than tragedy in the London streets; the heads grinned down from the spikes of London Bridge on such daily buffooneries as scarcely survive nowadays except in the amenities of cabdrivers and busmen. The hue and cry after a thief in one of these narrow streets, encumbered with show-benches and goods of every description, must at any time have been a Rabelaisian farce; and still more so when it was the thief who had raised the hue and cry after a true man, and had slipped off himself in the confusion. The crowds who gather in modern towns to see a man in handcuffs led from a dingy van up the dingy court steps would have found a far keener relish in the public punishments which Chaucer saw on his way to and from work; fraudulent tradesmen in the pillory, with their putrid wares burning under their noses, or drinking wry-mouthed the corrupt wine which they had palmed off on the public; scolding wives in the somewhat milder “thewe”; sometimes a penitential procession all round the city, as in the case of the quack doctor and astrologer whose story is so vividly told by the good Monk of St. Alban’s. The impostor “was set on a horse [barebacked] with the beast’s tail in his hand for a bridle, and two pots which in the vulgar tongue we callJordansbound round his neck, with a whetstone in sign that he earned all this by his lies; and thus he was led round the whole city.”[107]A lay chronicler might have given us the reverse of the medal; some priest barelegged in his shirt, with a lighted taper in his hand, doing penance for his sins before the congregation of his own church. The author of “Piers Plowman” knew this well enough; in introducing us to his tavern company, it is a priest and a parish clerk whom he shows us cheek-by-jowl with thetwo least reputable ladies of the party. The whole passage deserves quoting in full as a picture of low life indeed, but one familiar enough to Chaucer and his friends in their day; for it is a matter of common remark that even the distance which separated different classes in earlier days made it easier for them to mix familiarly in public. The very catalogue of this tavern company is a comedy in itself, and may well conclude our survey of common London sights. Glutton, on his way to morning mass, has passed Bett the brewster’s open door; and her persuasive “I have good ale, gossip” has broken down all his good resolutions—
A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE 14TH CENTURY,WITH A WREATH OF PAST TROPHIES OVER HIS SHOULDER(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6 f. 503 b)
ALDGATE TOWER
“For though the love of books, in a cleric, be honourable in the very nature of the case, yet it hath sorely exposed us to the adverse judgment of many folk, to whom we became an object of wonder, and were blamed at one time for greediness in that matter, or again for seeming vanity, or again, for intemperate delight in letters; yet we cared no more for their revilings than for the barking of curs, contented with His testimony alone to Whom it pertaineth to try the hearts and reins.... Yet perchance they would have praised and been kindly affected towards us if we had spent our time in hunting wild beasts, in playing at dice, or in courting ladies’ favours.”—The “Philobiblon” of Bp. R. de Bury (1287-1345).
Evenin the 14th century a man’s house was more truly his castle in England than in any country of equal population; and Chaucer was particularly fortunate in having secured a city castle for his house. The records show that such leases were commonly granted by the authorities to men of influence and good position in the City; in 1367 the Black Prince specially begged the Mayor that Thomas de Kent might have Cripplegate; and we have curious evidence of the keen competition for Aldgate. The Mayor and Aldermen granted to Chaucer in 1374 “the whole dwelling-house above Aldgate Gate, with the chambers thereon built and a certain cellar beneath the said gate, on the eastern side thereof, together with all its appurtenances, for the lifetime of the said Geoffrey.” There was no rent, though of course Chaucer had to keep it in repair; in an earlier lease of 1354, the tenant had paid 13s.4d.a year besides repairs. The City promised to keep no prisoners in the tower during Chaucer’s tenancy,[109]butnaturally stipulated that they might take possession of their gate when necessary for the defence of the City. In 1386, as we have already seen and shall see more fully hereafter, there was a scare of invasion so serious that the authorities can scarcely have failed to take the gates into their own hands for a while. Though this need not necessarily have ended Chaucer’s tenancy altogether, yet he must in fact have given it up then, if not earlier; and a Common Council meeting held on October 4 resolved to grant no such leases in future “by reason of divers damages that have befallen the said city, through grants made to many persons, as well of the Gates and the dwelling-houses above them, as of the gardens and vacant places adjoining the walls, gates, and fosses of the said city, whereby great and divers mischiefs may readily hereafter ensue.” Yeton the very next day(and this is our first notice of the end of Chaucer’s tenancy) a fresh lease of Aldgate tower and house was granted to Chaucer’s friend Richard Forster by another friend of the poet’s, Nicholas Brembre, who was then Mayor. This may very likely have been a pre-arranged job among the three friends; but the flagrant violation of the law may well seem startling even to those who have realized the frequent contrasts between medieval theory and medieval practice; and after this we are quite prepared for Riley’s footnote, “Within a very short period after this enactment was made, it came to be utterly disregarded.”[110]The whole transaction, however, shows clearly that the Aldgate lodging was considered a prize in its way.
That Chaucer loved it, we know from one of the too rare autobiographical passages in his poems, describinghis shy seclusion even more plainly than the Host hints at it in the “Canterbury Tales.” The “House of Fame” is a serio-comic poem modelled vaguely on Dante’s “Comedia,” in which a golden eagle carries Chaucer up to heaven, and, like Beatrice, plays the part of Mentor all the while. The poet, who was at first somewhat startled by the sudden rush through the air, and feared lest he might have been chosen as an unworthy successor to Enoch and Elias, is presently quieted by the Eagle’s assurance that this temporary apotheosis is his reward as the Clerk of Love—
The Ruler of the Gods, therefore, has taken pity on the poet’s lonely life—
Here we have the central figure of the Aldgate Chamber, but what was the background? Was his room, as some will have it, such as that to which his eyes opened in the “Book of the Duchess”?
Those lines were written before the Aldgate days; and the hints which can be gathered from surviving inventories and similar sources make it very improbable that the poet was lodged with anything like such outward magnificence. The storied glass and the frescoed wall were far more probably a reminiscence from Windsor, or from Chaucer’s life with one of the royal dukes; and the furniture of the Aldgate dwelling-house is likely to have resembled in quantity that which we have seen recorded of Hugh le Benere, and in quality the similar but more valuable stock of Richard de Blountesham. (Riley, p. 123.) Richard possessed bedding for three beds to the total value of fifty shillings and eightpence; his brass pot weighed sixty-seven pounds; and, over and above his pewter plates, dishes, and salt-cellars, he possessed “three silver cups, ten shillings in weight.” Three better cups than these, at least, stood in the Chaucer cupboard; for on New Year’s Day, 1380, 1381, and 1382, the accounts of the Duchy of Lancaster record presents from John of Gaunt to Philippa Chaucer of silver-gilt cups with covers. The first of these weighed thirty-one shillings, and cost nearly three pounds; the second and third were apparently rather more valuable. We must suppose, therefore, that the Aldgate rooms were handsomely furnished, as a London citizen’s rooms went; but we must beware here of such exaggerations as the genius of William Morris haspopularized. The assumption that the poet knew familiarly every book from which he quotes has long been exploded; and it is quite as unsafe to suppose that the artistic glories which he so often describes formed part of his home life. There were tapestries and stained glass in churches for every man to see, and in palaces and castles for the enjoyment of the few; but they become fairly frequent in citizens’ houses only in the century after Chaucer’s death; and it was very easy to spend an income such as his without the aid of artistic extravagance. Froissart, whose circumstances were so nearly the same, and who, though a priest, was just as little given to abstinence, confesses to having spent 2000 livres (or some £8000 modern English money) in twenty-five years, over and above his fat living of Lestinnes. “And yet I hoard no grain in my barns, I build no churches, or clocks, or ships, or galleys, or manor-houses. I spend not my money on furnishing fine rooms.... My chronicles indeed have cost me a good seven hundred livres, at the least, and the taverners of Lestinnes have had a good five hundred more.”[112]Froissart’s confession introduces a witty poetical plea for fresh contributions; and if Chaucer had added a couple of similar stanzas to the “Complaint to his Empty Purse,” it is probable that their tenor would have been much the same: “Books, and the Taverner; and I’ve had my money’s worth from both!”
1. GROUND PLAN AND SECTION OF THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON—A TYPICALTIMBER HOUSE OF THE 14TH CENTURY. (For the Hall, see Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”)
2. PLAN OF ALDGATE TOWER AS IT WAS IN CHAUCER’S TIME
Professor Lounsbury (“Studies in Chaucer,” chap. v.) has discoursed exhaustively, and very judicially, on Chaucer’s learning; he shows clearly what books the poet knew only as nodding acquaintances, and how many others he must at one time have possessed, or at least have had at hand for serious study; and it would be impertinent to go back here over the same ground. But Professor Lounsbury is less clear on the subject which most concerns us here—the average price of books; for the three volumes which he instances from the King’s library were no doubt illuminated, and he follows Devon in the obvious slip of describing the French Bible as “written in theGaeliclanguage.” (II., 196; the reference to Devon should be p. 213, not 218.) But, at the lowest possible estimate, books were certainly an item which would have swelled any budget seriously in the 14th century. This was indeed grosslyoverstated by Robertson and other writers of a century ago; but Maitland’s “Dark Ages,” while correcting their exaggerations, is itself calculated to mislead in the other direction. A small Bible was cheap at forty shillings,i.e.the equivalent of £30 in modern money; so that the twenty volumes of Aristotle which Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford had at his bed’s head could scarcely have failed to cost him the value of three average citizens’ houses in a great town.[113]Among all the church dignitaries whose wills are recorded in Bishop Stafford’s Register at Exeter (1395-1419) the largest library mentioned is only of fourteen volumes. The sixty testators include a Dean, two Archdeacons, twenty Canons or Prebendaries, thirteen Rectors, six Vicars, and eighteen layfolk, mostly rich people. The whole sixty apparently possessed only two Bibles between them, and only one hundred and thirty-eight books altogether; or, omitting church service-books, only sixty;i.e.exactly one each on an average. Thirteen of the beneficed clergy were altogether bookless, though several of them possessed thebaselardor dagger which church councils had forbidden in vain for centuries past; four more had only their Breviary. Of the laity fifteen were bookless, while three had service-books, one of these being a knight, who simply bequeathed them as part of the furniture of his private chapel. Any similar collection of wills and inventories would (I believe) give the same results, which fully agree with the independent evidence of contemporary writers. Bishop Richard de Bury (or possibly the distinguished theologian, Holcot, writing in his name) speaks bitterly of the neglect of books in the 14th century. Not only (he says) is the ardent collector ridiculed, but even education is despised, and money rules the world. Laymen, who do not even care whether books lie straight or upside down, are utterly unworthyof all communion with them; the secular clergy neglect them; the monastic clergy (with honourable exceptions among the friars) pamper their bodies and leave their books amid the dust and rubbish, till they become “corrupt and abominable, breeding-grounds for mice, riddled with worm-holes.” Even when in use, they have a score of deadly enemies—dirty and careless readers (whose various peculiarities the good Bishop describes in language of Biblical directness)—children who cry for and slobber over the illuminated capitals—and careless or slovenly servants. But the deadliest of all such enemies is the priest’s concubine, who finds the neglected volume half-hidden under cobwebs, and barters it for female finery. There is an obvious element of exaggeration in the good Bishop’s satire; but the Oxford Chancellor, Gascoigne, a century later, speaks equally strongly of the neglect of writing and the destruction of literature in the monasteries of his time; and there is abundant official evidence to prove that our ancestors did not atone for natural disadvantages by any excessive zeal in the multiplication, use, or preservation of books.[114]
Chaucer was scarcely born when the “Philobiblon” was written; and already in his day there was a growing number of leisured laymen who did know the top end of a book from the bottom, and who cared to read and write something beyond money accounts. Gower, who probably made money as a London merchant before he became a country squire, was also a well-read man; but systematic readers were still very rare outside the Universities, and Mrs. Green writes, even of a later generation of English citizens, “So far as we know, no trader or burgher possessed a library.”[115]Twenty-nine years after Chaucer’s death, the celebrated Whittington did indeed found a library; yet this was placed not atthe Guildhall, to which he was a considerable benefactor, but in the Greyfriars’ convent. The poet’s bookishness would therefore inevitably have made him something of a recluse, and we have no reason to tax his own description with exaggeration.
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ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS AS RECONSTITUTED INW. NEWTON’S “LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME”
12. ST. MICHAEL’S, ALDGATE; 25. BLANCH APPLETON; 26. ST. CATHERINE, COLEMAN STREET;27. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE; 28. PRIOR OF HORNCHURCH’S LODGING; 29. SARACEN’S HEAD
London has never been a silent city, but Chaucer enjoyed at least one of the quietest spots in it. If (as we have every reason to suppose) the Ordinance of 1345 was far from putting an end to the nuisances which it indicates, then Chaucer must have heaved a sigh of relief when he had seen the Custom-House locked up, and turned his back on Spurrier Lane. The Spurriers were addicted to working after dark for nefarious ends of their own; “and further, many of the said trade are wandering about all day, without working at all at their trade; and then, when they have become drunk and frantic, they take to their work, to the annoyance of the sick and of all their neighbourhood, as well as by reason of the broils that arise between them and the strange folks who are dwelling among them. And then they blow up their fires so vigorously, that their forges begin all at once to blaze, to the great peril of themselves and of all the neighbourhood around. And then too, all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks, which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges.”[116]We may trust that no such offensive handiwork was carried on round Aldgate, whither the poet would arrive about five o’clock in the evening, and sit down forthwith to supper, as the sun began to slant over the open fields. We may hope, at least, that he was wont to sup at home rather than at those alluring cook-shops which alternated with wine-taverns along the river bank; and that, as he “defyed the roast” with his Gascon wine, Philippa sat and sipped with him from one of time-honoured Lancaster’s silver-gilt cups. Even if we accept themost pessimistic theories of Chaucer’s married life, we need scarcely doubt that the pair sat often together at their open window in the twilight—
The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out from Bow steeple.[117]Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in “Troilus and Criseyde,” written during this very Aldgate time. The hero watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the evening shadows leave most to the imagination—
And far within the night, while the “uncunning porters” sing over their liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the “Romance of the Rose.” Does he not also, to poor Philippa’s disgust, “laugh full fast” to himself sometimes over that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains “of wicked wives ... more legendës and lives than be of goodë wives in the Bible”? It is difficult to escape from this conviction. His “Wife of Bath” cites the treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals. Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the belly, like that of the Apocalypse. “Late to bed” suits ill with “early to rise,” and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat unsympathetic “Awake, Geoffrey!” was often the first word he heard in the morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven—
TOWN AND COUNTRY
Thatwhich in Chaucer’s day passed for rank “sluggardy a-night” might yet be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he needed Philippa’s shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, “that he had seen the sun rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together.” It is indeed startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night’s dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner’s mood: “the sun, my dear, that’s God!” In the days when a tallow candle cost four times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beautiesof sunset as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his “Playground of Europe,” has brought a wealth of illustration and penetrating comment to show how strictly men’s ideas of the picturesque are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sülte, for instance, in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, “who oft-times affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the air.” The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so that “many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the Bürgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity to a herring-barrel.” What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or Tintern was not the beauty of “these steep woods and lofty cliffs,” but their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks’ own labours and those of their servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to listen how “the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of birds,” then they felt their forefathers to have been right in “noting fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds.”[118]After all, the earth was cursed for Adam’s sake, and even its apparent beauty was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang in hisrepentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists—
Ruskin’s famous passage on this subject (“M. P.,” iii., 14, 15) is, on the whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two remarkable exceptions. The poet of “Pearl,” who probably knew Wales well, describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas anticipated Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also with apparent sympathy.[119]Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil’s tomb.[120]The scenic splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and variety of the sunrises in the “Decameron” is equalled only by the bald brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer; Criseyde’s “Ywis, it will be night as fast,” is quite a characteristic epitaph for the dying day.
On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant conventional repetition; andhere Chaucer is at his best. He may well have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard de Bury calls “a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk,” yet no poet was ever farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature—
Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop’s wood within a mile’s walk of Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the “Great Shaft of Cornhill,” the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122]These May-day festivities, which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we consider that even in castles and manor-houses men’s lives differed from this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the monotony of woman’s life under theseconditions, doubly bound as she was to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame, with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Mass and gossip with a few neighbours—only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of last year’s fruit—in that position, men watched the first green buds with the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval ideal. Fénelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called interests of religion.[123]It would be difficult to find a single great preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted to put down the practice of throwing on these occasionssnow, sawdust, and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124]These and other similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in the streets. “If any man speak to thee,” writes the Good Wife for her Daughter, “swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way”; and again—
“When thou goest into town or to church,” says the author of the “Ménagier de Paris” to his young wife, “walk with thine head high, thine eyelids lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards.” Even Chaucer tells us of his Virginia—