m(a) CHAUCER’S BIOGRAPHY
(i) Establishing dates
When beginning a biographical sketch it would be pleasant to be able to start with the simple fact of the year of birth. AJas, establishing such a date in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer is no easy matter. Writing in 1803 William Godwin begins his ’dissertation upon the Period of the Birth of Chaucer’ with the statement that ’the dates assigned to the birth and death of Chaucer… have never been questioned or disturbed’ (Godwin 1803: xxi). He continues, ’it is undoubtedly pleasing, in a subject which in many particulars is involved in obscurity, to be able to seize some points which are free from the shadow of doubt.’ The tone of certainty introduces what was the first suggestion that the hitherto received date for Chaucer’s birth of 1328 was in fact open to question. The trouble arose from a disposition made by Chaucer on
15th October 1386 in which he is described as ’Geffray Chaucere esquier del age de xl ans et plus armeez par xxvii ans’ (Crow 1966: 370). As Godwin realised, regarding 58 as forty years and more, while technically correct, nevertheless admits the possibility of a rather later date of birth. Despite this admission, and despite his own acknowledgement that the phrase ’forty years and more’ was often (though not inevitably, see Pearsall 1992: 315nl) used as a formula to indicate that the witness was of respectable years and could be regarded as reliable, Godwin himself did not relinquish ’the old chronology’ as he terms it (Godwin
1803: xxvii) preferring to retain the erroneous 1328 as the best guess. That date of 1328 itself is something of an invention, having emerged, it seems, from Thomas Speght’s estimation of Chaucer being born ’about the second or third yeer of Edward 3’, in his 1598 ’Chaucer’s Life’ which prefaced his edition of Chaucer’s works. The vague ’about’ was transmuted into the misleadingly precise date of 1328 by John Urry in his edition of Chaucer’s work of 1721 (see Crow 1966: 370) and was cited with little hesitation until Godwin himself hesitated over it. However, in the end Godwin charmingly disposes of the discrepancy of some fourteen to eighteen years, implied by the disparity between being born in 1328 and being forty in 1386, through reference to common human failings: >… •• rxJeji-ii ;•
Chaucer, with all his wonderful endowments, was a man; and it is incident to perhaps one half of mankind, particularly of that part
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
of our species who are accustomed to associate with the opulent and refined, when advanced beyond the middle period of human life, to be willing to be thought younger than they are.
(Godwin 1803: xxxv)
Appealing as such an explanation is, and much as it concurs with my own impression of Chaucer as a man who did not lightly underestimate himself or his talents, nevertheless, we must exonerate him of this particular foible. Evidence not available to Godwin (legal proceedings concerning the abduction of John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, declare John to have been unmarried in 1328. See Crow 1966: 3,
8,370-4) results in the current, if less definite, supposition that Geoffrey Chaucer is likely to have been born in London in the early 1340s. As Derek Pearsall puts it, ’it is wise not to be too specific about matters where there can be no certainty’ (Pearsall 1992:11), however much we
may desire it.
Tracing this long debate about Chaucer’s birth date, with its asides on the type of person Chaucer is deemed to have been, serves to highlight the way biography is a form of criticism in itself [156].
When it comes to the date of Chaucer’s death, things are more certain. Thanks to records of the annuities he was drawing and his standing as an acclaimed poet, courtier and public figure, his death merits a more precise date. We know that he died towards the end of •1400 and here there is less hesitation about taking the word of tradition and accepting the date of 25 October. This precision bestows a slightly
• spurious degree of certainty. The source of this date is a sixteenthcentury inscription on Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. The inscription itself is now illegible, and the tomb on which it was inscribed was erected in 1556 by Nicholas Brigham, who replaced the previous, original, tomb. There is thus no extant positive evidence of a precise date being inscribed on the original tomb, nor do we have any other evidence which provides the 25 October date, such as a will or contemporary record of Chaucer’s death. However, it does not do to be over-suspicious; the traditional date accords with what other evidence there is: the last recorded payment to Chaucer was made on
5 June 1400 and the lease on the last house he occupied passed to a Master Paul some time between 28 September 1400 and 28 September
1401. Thus there are no obvious grounds to dispute the usually quoted date of death as 25 October 1400, giving a life-span of some 55 or 60 years, which is a fair average for someone of his status in the fourteenth
century.
i,
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
(ii) Family background and early years
T time of general social mobility, Chaucer did his fair share of climbing d certainly more than his fair share of travelling. It is therefore tempting to see him as an example of someone rising by force of merit from lowly origins to a position of high regard: a symbol of the rising ’ddle classes of which we hear so much in the later middle ages. However, this is far from the case. John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, was a vintner and merchant of London who served in military campaigns in 1327 and 1329 and was deputy butler to John de Wesenham (the king’s chief butler) from 1347-49, during which time he was also responsible for collecting the custom on cloth exported from five ports. He was a man of means having inherited several properties as a result of deaths in the family, probably due to the Black Death of 1349. He himself died in 1366, leaving a widow and, as far as we can tell, his only son, Geoffrey. It is likely that Geoffrey was the only child, despite one document of 1619 which refers to a Katherine Manning as Chaucer’s sister (there are no fourteenth-century references to any sibUngs). Chaucer’s fame over the intervening two and a half centuries may well have led to him being ascribed a sister on no other evidence than a shared surname and some known dealings with the Manning family. Chaucer’s mother, Agnes, was likewise a person of means. She was the daughter of John de Copton, whose brother, Hamo, owned various properties which Agnes inherited in 1349. It is, as they say, an ill wind which blows nobody good, and the plague of 1349 seems to have been responsible for making Chaucer the son of a rather wealthy house before he was ten years old and sole recipient of the advantages the Chaucer parents had to bestow. These included connections to well-established families and an immediate background in a well-regarded, even prestigious, trade and a tradition of valued royal service. Moreover, as both parents survived until he was well into adulthood, he had the advantage of an unusually secure and settled childhood to speed him on his way to a remarkable life.
Before 1357 we have no documentary references to Geoffrey Chaucer, so our impressions of his early years must be based on surmise and the knowledge we have of what contemporary families in similar situations did. It is likely that he spent his early years in his parents’ London house, 177 Upper Thames Street in the St. Martin parish of the Vintry ward of the city. As its name implies, this was an area
requented by native and foreign merchants, particularly wine Merchants (vintners) and one in which many of them lived. In his
oyhood Chaucer would thus have been accustomed to seeing and
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
hearing people from the many countries who traded with England at this time, and he may even have picked up some knowledge of their languages, such as Italian. The London of the fourteenth century was a comparatively small city for a European trading and banking centre, though certainly the largest in England, with a population of around
50,000. Most of these people lived within the walled city, which occupied roughly a square mile of largely unpaved streets, containing churches, religious houses, hospitals, colleges, schools, taverns and also sudden spacious gardens, large public buildings and splendid town houses, as well as the many more crowded and decidedly less splendid dwellings of the less affluent and poor. It was a thriving and busy environment and one in which Chaucer’s various biographers have loved to picture him, speculating happily on the basis of very little [156].
A fine example of this habit of creating a background and childhood ’~ ”ici^n nf the Doet is provided by E J.
A fine example of this habit ot creating a uc^x&1
for Chaucer to fit one’s own vision of the poet is provided by E J. ’ j ;uoc. rVianrp.r in his preface to his Life Records o\
for Chaucer to fit one’s own vision or iuc pu^i. ^ r.
Furnivall, who describes Chaucer in his preface to his Life Records of
a natty, handy lad, but full of quiet fun – messing, I dare say, in Walbrook, … At school – St. Paul’s perchance – sharing in all the games and larks that Fitzstephen so well describes some 200 years
before … well up in his classes, I’ll be bound.
(Furnivall 1900: vii)
In actual fact, we have no evidence that Chaucer went to school, though various of his biographers, such as D. S. Brewer, have been keen to send him (see Brewer 1998: 14-17) and there is a reasonable likelihood that he went: the Vintry ward of London was well placed for schools, the prestigious St. Paul’s, with its good library, amongst them. It is usually there that he is sent and often presumed to have been a quick pupil. Even if he did not attend a school, knowledge of what they taught and of the kinds of thing children in the fourteenth century were likely to have been taught at home, gives us a fair idea of , the kind of initial education Chaucer would have received.
To begin with, not long after learning to speak he would have been taught his prayers in English and the alphabet from horn books. He may well have then learnt to read, to write, quite probably to count, and may have been introduced to Latin. Equipped with such basics, it
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
ssible he then went to a song-school of the kind mentioned in The Prioress’s Tale (Tales, 495-529), there was one close at hand, attached
c Paul’s but it is equally likely that he simply received his education at home, from his parents or (unlikely, but still possible) from a tutor. Or indeed, he may have gone to a grammar school at about the age of even By now he would be embarking upon acquiring a ready knowledge of Latin. Boys who went to school were not only trained in reading and writing Latin, but also in speaking it fluently. For Latin was not only the language of the church, but also of much legal work, of trade and general exchange across Europe. Texts on science, philosophy and medicine were written in Latin and to have an ease with the language and knowledge of at least extracts of its literature was still very much the sign of an educated person.
We must be careful not to over-estimate the level of knowledge of Latin texts. School books used extracts from Aesop’s Fables, Ovid, Virgil and Claudian amongst others, and collections of such extracts were compiled and would have been relatively readily available for reading in libraries held by schools, if not individually owned. Therefore, the kind of reading open to someone of Chaucer’s background would have relied on collections and the chance of what came his way. We must not, for example, take a reference to Ovid as an indication that an author had read, still less had constant access to, all of the Metamorphosis. In these days of cheap paperbacks, it is hard to imagine what it would have been like when books were copied by hand, were hence expensive and therefore scarce. A collection of twenty volumes would have counted as a sizeable library. On the other hand, the common use of books of extracts and the necessary habit of memorising lessons, meant that there was a large body of shared literature, to which writers such as Chaucer could refer with the knowledge that the authors and even extracts named would be familiar to their audience.
Latin was thus the principle subject taught at grammar schools, in a course which concentrated almost entirely on its linguistic and literary aspects. Correct spelling, syntax, pronunciation and constructions were the main goal, though one might speculate on how much the subjectmatter of the texts thus studied might seep into the pupil’s imagination. There is little evidence that mathematics formed any part of this curriculum; the thorough study of this subject was the province of a university education. However, here again we encounter the bias of Chaucer’s biographers who rightly point out that, given his use of numerology and astronomy in his writings, he must have learnt mathematics at some point. It is also worth bearing in mind that while arithmetic was a new subject at the time, the people most likely to
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
have a use for it were the very merchants and traders to whom Chaucer’s family belonged. It is by no means ridiculous to believe that he acquired at least the basics of these subjects while still fairly young. As William Courtnay points out
Learning was not required or enforced by the state or society but was incumbent only upon those who desired a career for which it , was a pre-requisite or an advantage. By the fourteenth century most occupations apart from agriculture benefited from literacy, but few required advanced degrees. Education in the late Middle Ages was still, therefore, an opportunity, not an obligation.
(Courtnay 1987: 14)
As the son of a wealthy merchant house with court connections, it is clear that in some way or another Chaucer would have been equipped with the necessary education for a life of civil and court service.
Somewhere in this education French would have figured, perhaps not formally, but certainly importantly. As well as being the language of the court, it was used for some legal and state documents and was certainly widely spoken in affluent homes. Italian was a good deal less central, but it is clear that Chaucer knew the language in the late 1370s, before he was sent to Lombardy, and it seems most likely that he acquired this knowledge while in London. How early he began to learn Italian, or how fluent he became, it is impossible to know. His writings make it clear that he was well versed in the increasingly important Italian authors of his time (Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were influences on and sources for his work) though it seems that, as with his Latin reading, he was happy to use a French crib when one was available. How far such cribs served for comparison or for initial comprehension is, like so much else, open to speculation.
What we do know for certain is that in 1357 he was a member of the court of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, son of the king, Edward in.
(iv) The Ulster household
The earliest record we have for Chaucer is contained in a fragment of household accounts for Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, which was discovered unexpectedly in the binding for another book. Such are the chances that characterise historical research. This document deals with expenses for the period July 1356 to January 1359 and here, in 1357, we find one Galfredus Chaucer (since the accounts are in Latin, the
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
are Latinised) being given 4 shillings for a paltok (short cloak) shillings for a pair of black and red hose and a pair of shoes. This vided him with clothing appropriate for a page. Later in the same Pear expenses are incurred in ensuring he has ’garniture’ for the Sunday tTfore Pentecost and for his necessary preparations for the feast of the Nativity. From these records it is generally assumed that Chaucer was a page (though the term is not specifically applied to him in the documents) and as such was a member of Elizabeth’s separate household which would have travelled with her round the country. Pages ranged in age from 10 to 17 and were in effect servants and personal assistants, sometimes given specific responsibilities. They were given board, lodging and clothing, but relied on their own family for cash. In return for their service they were educated in the ways of polite society and given the chance to establish links with the influential of the land and prove themselves useful and capable. It is possible that household clerks, who would be educated men in minor orders, were assigned to teach the pages, but even without such formal teaching there would be the opportunity to learn from the household and its visitors. Pages could improve their Latin and French, which were still the languages of polite and formal exchange at court, with English probably reserved for more relaxed moments. There would also be the chance of hearing or reading the literature of the moment: the French allegorical poems and romances, the books of religious instruction and debate, perhaps even the new works from Italy, written, remarkably, in the Italian vernacular, amongst which the name of Dante might have figured. With all this going on it is possible that a page from a good family, furnished with the basics, could acquire a wide education while in service. Inevitably the experience would also include composing verse and music: the fact that no texts that we can call Chaucer juvenilia survive does not mean he did not write any.
Regardless of exactly where Chaucer did his learning, books would have been scarce. They were expensive objects, laboriously copied by hand from copy-texts (exempla). Some were standards, such as Psalters, or the collections of extracts from Aesop, Ovid, Virgil and others, such as were used as school books; others were collections of texts assembled t° suit the taste of the person who commissioned the manuscript and might reflect their particular interests. Often individual manuscripts were added to a library over time and only collected and bound into book form at a later date. With few actual volumes around, literature was still most often read aloud to assembled groups. Thus, most of what was learnt was acquired through listening and remembering, and while books did circulate and the wealthier households had considerable
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libraries, we should guard against a mental image of Chaucer the page leafing idly through texts on his own in a book-lined room. The culture was at least as much oral as literate, in which speaking well and remembering accurately were essential skills. Indeed, the function of the memory was itself a topic of interest at the time. Mary Carruthers has brought together much of the material on the medieval ideas of the memory and the ways people could train themselves to remember efficiently, in her valuable study The Book of Memory (Carruthers 1990). Clearly in this kind of social arrangement, the better the household an individual joined the greater the chances available. John Chaucer did well for his son in this: Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster was married to Lionel of Antwerp, son of King Edward in and later Duke of Clarence. The Christmas celebrations for which we see Geoffrey Chaucer being furnished with clothes in 1357 were held at the house of Edmund, younger brother to Lionel, and presided over by Queen Philippa. Another brother was also there, John of Gaunt, who was to play a large role in Chaucer’s life later on. The fact that both of them were in the same place for the Christmas of 1357, and were much of an age, entices speculation on possible early meetings, despite their very different social circles. Speculation is also rife about another member of Queen Philippa’s household, Philippa Pan. This name, Pan, is almost certainly an abbreviation, but no-one is clear of what. She may be the elder sister of Katherine de Roet (who became John of Gaunt’s mistress and later wife) and also the Philippa who married Chaucer. Or, of course, she may not.
To return to less speculative grounds: in 1359, when Lionel came of age, his household and that of Elizabeth merged and Chaucer became one of the prince’s attendants. As such, he went to France on military service in Lionel’s company in September of 1359. By now he was a ’valettus’ or yeoman and was bearing arms. He was also worth £16 when he was ransomed on 1 March 1360, having been captured in France. The campaign had targeted Reims, traditionally the city where kings of France had been crowned and where Edward had hoped to be crowned himself, thus making good his claims to the French throne. It is also the place where Chaucer is likely to have seen the arms displayed which were later to be the focus of the Grosvenor/Scrope dispute, which occasioned Chaucer’s deposition some twenty-five years later in 1386, which in turn gives rise to our calculations for Chaucer’s date of birth. All that lay ahead, however, while in 1359-60 English expectations and armies alike were defeated and the month of March saw the end of that particular episode of the Hundred Years War.
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
Having been ransomed, Chaucer was then back in France that
tumn being paid 9 shillings in October of 1360 for carrying letters
3U England for Lionel, who was then Earl of Ulster (through his mar-
Taee1) and in Calais for the ratification of the Treaty of Breigny. This
11 have been the first instance of being sent on such a commission, which was standard employment for a valettus and is likely to have b en a case of carrying personal letters, rather than state documents. We then lose sight of Chaucer for a few years. Lionel went to Dublin
n 1361 as Viceroy to Ireland, but there is no evidence that Chaucer went with him. It seems more likely that he spent his time in the royal courts of England or Acquitaine, although there has been a prejudice in favour of believing he spent some time during this period at the Inns of Court or Inns of Chancery in London, acquiring the knowledge of legal affairs that is evident in his writing. Here he would have had the opportunity to learn French and Latin formulae and Chancery Hand, which was the official handwriting style, or script, for government documents and which Chaucer was to use later when he became a civil servant in the 1370s. He would have been able to combine such study with his court duties, attending sporadically, when not called to be elsewhere. The belief that Chaucer did spend some time in this way is based partly on the knowledge of legal ways which infuses his poetry, such as The House of Fame or the depiction of the Man of Law in the Canterbury Tales, and partly on the statement in Speght’s ’Life’ that Master Buckley (who was Keeper of records for the Inner Temple in Speght’s time) records seeing an entry for a fine of 2 shillings levied on Geoffrey Chaucer for beating a Franciscan Friar in Fleet Street. The record itself has never been retrieved, and while the details tally with known fines of the time, and while it is conceivable that Chaucer spent some time gaining informal training at the Inns, it is also worth heeding Pearsall’s point that by the sixteenth century it would have done an institution no harm to be able to prove some connection with Chaucer. It is tempting to assume that in this period Chaucer was composing the lyrics and songs to which he refers in his Retraction ( few of which survive). Certainty eludes us, however, and the best we can do is say that it is more than likely that he was writing, experimenting with the French forms that influenced much of his poetry [41].
(v) Royal service and connections with __ __ John of Gaunt
Whatever else he was doing between 1360 and 1367, Chaucer certainly suffered the death of his father in 1366. That same year seems to have
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been the one in which he married Philippa, who appears in records as Philippa Chaucer of the Queen’s chamber and receives an annuity of
10 marks in September 1366. It also appears that Chaucer was abroad in this year, as a ’Geffroy de Chauserre’ was granted safe conduct by Charles II of Navarre between February and May 1366. As there are no indications of exactly what Chaucer was doing to require such safe conduct, speculation again abounds. It is possible that he was on pilgrimage to the famous shrine of St. James of Compostela, although it would be an odd time of year to be making such a trip. Alternatively he may have been engaged on formal royal duties, but, if so, we would normally expect to find some mention of such business in the safe conduct document itself. Appealingly, this leaves open the option of a secret mission, possibly to do with Edward, Prince of Wales’s dealings with Pedro of Castile, in which the at least tacit support of Charles of Navarre was also desirable. 1367 seems to have been a less hectic year, with Chaucer being granted an annuity of 20 marks and with the birth of a son, Thomas. Sometime during this year Chaucer moved up a further rung of the social ladder, as household expenses for 1368 list him as a squire (though formal Latin records do not use the equivalent term until 1372) which he was to remain until 1378.
From the late 1360s the dominant figure in Chaucer’s biography was that of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Thanks to a fortuitous and apparently, happy, marriage to Blanche in 1359 and the swiftly following deaths of her father and sister, John of Gaunt was, by 1362, Duke of Lancaster and the richest man in England. Blanche herself died young, in 1368, aged 28. Her death is significant to us because it is commemorated in Chaucer’s poem The Book of the Duchess [65]. However sharp his grief at his wife’s death (and there is evidence that he felt strongly), political affairs moved on apace for John of Gaunt, who was to be found once again in France engaged in military campaigns in 1369. It seems that Chaucer was with him: a reward of a ’prest’ (an allowance to cover expenses) for £10 to Chaucer in this year is significant as being the earliest indication of his association with the Gaunt household, although it is highly likely that they had encountered each other well before this. Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, also joins the household eventually as, following Queen Philippa’s death in 1369, she moved to the court of Constance of Castile, who was to become John of Gaunt’s second wife in 1372. Despite being attached broadly to the same family, their respective duties would have meant that Geoffrey and Philippa would have spent much time apart. The household would have served as a base for them, albeit one which moved around the country following the often separate movements
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
f Gaunt and Constance. Even after Chaucer acquired a house for himself in 1374, he did not spend much time there at first as he remained on royal service, liable to be sent on various missions around the country or abroad. Such separation was usual at the time, so it is as well not to read too much into it, regardless of the many and heavy jokes fired at marriage throughout Chaucer’s works.
(vi) Travels to Italy
Even before 1374 Chaucer’s standing had risen again, as he is recorded among the sixty-two ’scutiferis camere regis’ or esquires of the king’s chamber, from 1371-73. As such, he was part of the ’secreta familia’, a kind of inner household, which travelled with the king wherever he went. Chaucer was a member of this circle for only a short period, however, as he was certainly sent abroad to Genoa and Florence in
1372-73. He went to Genoa to negotiate the appointment of a special seaport for the use of the Genoese merchants, which formed part of the commercial agreements being put in place at the time, following a peace treaty between England and Genoa in February of 1371. We do not know why he went to Florence, though Edward in was negotiating for loans and ships at this time. This was probably Chaucer’s first trip to Italy and it is more than likely that he was chosen for it because he could already speak Italian. While there he would have had the chance to increase what knowledge of the literature he had previously acquired; and, yet again, biographers have delighted in speculating on literary encounters he may have had. Certainly Florence was already the centre of a Dante cult (Dante died in 1321) and the writings of the elderly, but still living, Petrarch and Boccaccio would have been in circulation.” All three authors were significant literary influences for Chaucer [40] but it is highly unlikely that he encountered either of the latter in the flesh: Petrarch died a year later in 1374, and Boccaccio in 1375.
1374 seems to have been an eventful year for Chaucer. Having returned from Italy the previous year, he was granted in April a gallon of wine a day for life. Even for those times, that is a prodigious amount of wine, albeit an appropriate grant for the son of a vintner; the grant was confirmed by Richard on his accession to the throne in 1377. In
1378 Chaucer petitioned to have this daily ration converted into hard cash, and was allowed to take it in the form of 20 marks from then on ~ a highly respectable income, as well as a more disposable one. May of
3/4 sees him receiving a house over Aldgate in London rent-free in return for keeping it in good repair and not sub-letting it. These were common terms of lease for city officials, and indeed on June the 8th of
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that year Chaucer was appointed Controller of Customs for wool in the port of London at an annual salary of £10. On 13 June he was granted an annuity of £10 by John of Gaunt, ’in recognition of his services’, a phrase which some have taken to indicate gratitude for the poem The Book of the Duchess [65]. Philippa also received a mention in this grant for her services to Gaunt’s mother and his wife (this being Constance, his second wife, not Blanche). All in all, the Chaucers ended
1374 in more than comfortable circumstances.
The later 1370s found Chaucer engaged in quite a lot of travelling, often for unspecified reasons. The desire to regard these journeys as engagements on ’secret affairs’, and thus add a touch of glamour to Chaucer’s life, is aided by documents listing payments to Chaucer for just that. Although we do not know that he was going overseas in
1370 ’in eisdem secretis negotiis ipsius domini regis’ (’on those same secret negotiations of the lord king himself, Crow 1966: 45), he certainly was in 1377, when he engaged not only in ’secret business’, but also in the open business of treating for peace and negotiating a possible marriage between the then Prince Richard and a French princess. These negotiations came to nothing, as did several other such attempts at potential unions through marriage, including one with Catherine, daughter of Bernabo Visconti, Lord of Milan.
This latter negotiation meant that in 1378 Chaucer again visited Italy, this time going to Milan. It is likely that it was at this point, not before, that he acquired more thorough knowledge of the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Even if he did meet either or both of these venerable poets on his first Italian journey of 1373, their influence seems to have been less then than Dante’s. Now, five years later and in a different region (Milan was ruled by Petrarch’s patron, Galeazzo Visconti, Bernabo’s brother), Chaucer seems to have acquired not only more knowledge of these poets, but also copies of some of their work. Chaucer’s own poetry now begins to reflect the influences of Petrarch and Boccaccio (Anelida and Arcite [52] draws on Boccaccio’s Teseida), whereas his earlier writing owes more to Dante and the Classics. While at Milan Chaucer would also have viewed at first hand the workings of a despotic, even tyrannical court ruled by a cruel man. The Viscontis were not people to cross lightly, and traces of Chaucer’s reaction to visiting their court can be found in The Monk’s Tale [140] where ’Barnabo Viscounte’ is described as ’God of delit and scourge of Lumbardye’ (Tales VII: 2400), although his murder by his son-in-law draws only the carefully neutral comment ’But why ne how noot I that thou were slawe.’ (Tales VII: 2406). Critics have also seen the effects of this Italian visit in Chaucer’s rendition of the story of Griselde which
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f rms The Clerk’s Tale: [126] on which readers may find David W llace’s article ’”Whan She Translated Was”: A Chaucerian Critique f the Petrarchan Academy’ of interest (Patterson 1990: 156-215).
For us, 1378 is significant also as being the year in which John Cower . mentioned in a legal document in connection with Chaucer. He was granted powers of attorney for Chaucer in May to cover the period of Chaucer’s journeys to Lombardy. While it is evident from both poets’ writings that they knew and admired each other, this is the earliest documentary evidence of their friendship. Granting Cower power of attorney may have been no more than an kind of insurance policy against having law suits taken out against Chaucer in his absence. It was common for people who expected to be travelling for a while to make such arrangements and since by now Chaucer was a significant public figure, it was no more than commonly prudent of him to ask for such an attorney to be appointed. However, while it is best to regard it in such a light, it is tempting to see in this a pre-emptive strike against the charge which was probably already rumbling away in 1378 and which was finally laid to rest in 1380. This was the charge of raptus brought by Cecily Champaign.
(vii) The case of Cecily Champaign
As with so much else in Chaucer’s life, there is a good deal of speculation and disagreement over what exactly the charge of raptus means in this instance. Many seek to dismiss it as being ’rape’ as we understand it today, preferring to consider it inconceivable that one of our major literary figures could commit such a crime, and pointing out that the Latin term raptus was taken to indicate ’abduction’ not sexual assault. In the ’Chaucer’s Life’ which prefaces the Riverside edition of Chaucer’s Works, Martin Crow and Virginia Leland put the case concisely.
It [raftus] could have meant physical rape; or it could have meant abduction … The record, however, is clear; it means that Cecilia Chaumpaigne clears Chaucer of all responsibility.
(Riverside: xvii)
We can see here the desire to clear Chaucer of the blot of any unseemly behaviour. However, while it is true that raptus could mean abduction, with no implication of physical or sexual assault, Pearsall Points out that it takes on this meaning only when modified by the term abductus (Pearsall 1992: 135-7; see also Crow 1966: 343-7). requently such abductions aimed to force a marriage, usually in order
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to secure an inheritance for the abductor’s family Such was the case with Chaucer’s father, John Chaucer, who was abducted by his aunt in an attempt to force a marriage between him and his cousin in 1324 (see Crow 1966 3) The attempt came to nothing but legal wrangling, with no hint that John himself suffered more than being carried off by eager relations, but the point is that here the terminology is rapuerum et abdu\erunt, with exactly the use of abducere referred to by Pearsall When not so moderated mpere. seems to have carried all the significance of our modern verb ’to rape’ Necessarily it also carried all its associations and it is possible that Cecily Champaign simply used the threat of prosecution for rape as a lever to get money out of Chaucer We even have a possible reason for her feeling she was due some recompense in the figure of ’lyte Lowys, my sone’ (Ast 23-4) to whom Chaucer dedicates his Treatise on the Astrolabe [86] in 1391, referring to him as being ten years old This makes 1380 the year of Lewis’s birth and allows for the chance that he is in fact the son of Cecily Perhaps Cecily was raped and Lewis was the result, or perhaps he was the result of a happier liaison and she was simply ensuring some upkeep for the child Or, indeed, Lewis may be a late child of Phihppa’s and Cecily may have been acting from other motives Chaucer was a public figure moving in powerful circles and she may have hoped that such a man would do a lot to avoid the embarrassment and scandal of prosecution for rape, regardless of whether it was proved or not Whatever the truth of the . matter, the fact is that in 1380 Chaucer was released from the charge and any others arising from it, Cecily received £10 from John Grove, who, with Richard Goodchild, released Chaucer from any legal actions he might have against him and at the same time Chaucer called in several debts, including expenses for the Italian trip in 1378, and sold his father’s house As Pearsall suggests, this sudden eagerness to raise funds may indicate that other payments were made to Cecily (Pearsall
1966 136-37)
(via) Controller of Customs and the London years
Throughout this time and until 1387 Chaucer continued as Controller of Wool Custom and wool subsidy, adding to these Controller of Petty Custom in 1382 The post was perhaps more arduous than prestigious It required the meticulous keeping of records of taxes levied on merchants, the careful monitoring of the quantities of wool, woolskins and leather-skins being shipped out, together with the careful calculation of amounts due in tax This last was a far from simple
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
1 attracted both customs payments and subsidy payments,
task wod°i£ferent and more general customs charge was applied to a
H Miscellaneous range of goods, which came under Chaucer’s
r’rv,ai,rpr would have been dealing with around a thousand export r^mit Ljn«u*~t”L , i .
ts (’crockets’) each year and was expected to keep records m
hand This is when his time associated with the Inns of Court hnd°the acquisition of Chancery Hand would have proved useful He
311 robably already well acquainted with the kinds of formulae used for such documents, and indeed may well have been familiar with them f om childhood because of his father’s business His familiarity with court ways and the operation of a favour system there would have stood him m good stead for a different aspect of the post dealing with the various people who were awarded the post of Collector of customs over the years The Collector derived direct and personal profit from taxes Depending on how trade went, such profit could be handsome and of course each Collector would be keen to extract as much profit as possible during their time of office Those given the post would often be merchants to whom the king owed a favour, they were granted the collectorship as a reward and as a cheap way (from the crown’s point of view) of paying off debts Chaucer would have thus been caught between the collectors and the traders, trying to see fair play, or at least fair enough not to disgruntle either party too much It could not have been an easy task, albeit not without its own rewards
Some of those rewards came from positions which came Chaucer’s way as a result of the connections he made as Controller, rather than coming directly from the job itself These occasional roles indicate his increasingly well-established position in the influential circles of London through the 1370s and 1380s An example is standing mamprize or surety for other powerful men, such as John de Romsey, whom he had known when they were both squires at court and who had gone on to become the treasurer at Calais Chaucer is cited as surety for him in
1375 (Crow 1966 279-81), which involved being cited as a guarantor that Romsey would appear before the exchequer when required and give good account of his use of the property and money which had come under his jurisdiction as treasurer in Calais In this case the property came from a man accused of sedition Chaucer performed a similar role m 1378, this time on behalf of Sir William Beauchamp, who was granted the guardianship of the heir of Pembroke, who was en a minor In this instance Chaucer was expected to ensure that eaucnamp did not abuse his position and squander the property for personal profit, thus depriving the heir of his due Such positions remind
18
19
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
us not only of Chaucer’s public standing, but also of the smallness of the London circle: Sir William was not only a friend, but also Chamberlain to the royal household from 1378 to 1380, a witness for Chaucer in the Cecily Champaign case and also helpful in some unrecorded
way in Calais in 1387.
Traces of the smallness of this London world may be seen in the motifs of enclosure and inwardness that permeate not only Chaucer’s Dream Poems, which reflect court negotiations [61, 77], but also his epic Troilus and Criseyde [89], which was probably written in the early
1380s, the same period in which he translated Boethius’s philosophical work De Consolatione Philosophiae [83].
As well as roles indicative of high social standing, Chaucer also took on more directly lucrative posts. One such was the wardship of Edmund Staplegate. Edmund was a ward of court, which meant he was heir to his father’s property, but, being under age at his father’s death (i.e. under 21) could not himself control his lands and estate. As his father was a tenant-in-chief of the king, wardship fell to the crown, with the king supposedly being his guardian. In practice such wardships were usually granted by the king to some favoured person, perhaps as reward or as a way of paying off some kind of debt. The appointed guardian received some income from the estate, and was also due any payments that would have gone to the father, such as those made on marriage. In this case Edmund came of age only a few years after becoming a ward of court, and bought back the right to his own marriage payment for £104 – a substantial sum. Edmund was perhaps fortunate in his guardian: it was not uncommon for wards to have to go to court to claim back their own lands from unscrupulous guardians.
A further indication of the high regard in which Chaucer was held as Controller of Customs was the fact that he was allowed to appoint deputies to cover the times when he was sent abroad, as was the case in 1376. Eventually he was permitted to appoint permanent deputies to both the wool and petty customs, which he did in 1385. In 1386 he gave up the lease on his Aldgate house and seems to have moved out of London and into Kent. He had sold his father’s house in 1381, which was also the year of his mother’s death, but had continued to live in the house in Aldgate until this time. This means he was formally resident in London at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt and through the three days during which the mob of dissatisfied peasants, town workers and apprentices held sway in the capital. We do not know whether or not Chaucer was actually in London at the time, but we do know that Aldgate was one of the gates through which the insurgents streamed in June.
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
1
Revolt and the move to Kent
. t-.*(action had been brewing for some time amongst the poorer sses in England. Ever since Edward Ill’s death in 1377 and the ° a ’ n of the ten-year old Richard, there had been tussles for power h° en various nobles, and tensions between nobles and commoners, which had been exacerbated by increasingly heavy taxation, including the introduction of the Poll Tax which was levied in 1377, 1379 and ain in 1380. This last seems to have helped bring matters to a head . ^g form of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Since taxation was the focus of grievance, the principle targets of the uprising were the tax collectors, the hugely rich John of Gaunt (whose Savoy palace was burnt down during the riots) and the Flemish weavers recently brought over and regarded as foreigners depriving native English people of work. As a Controller of Customs and associate of John of Gaunt, Chaucer would have been well aware of the danger of his position, but he makes little direct reference to it in his writing. Maybe he was lucky and absent from London at the time. Whatever the truth, it is clear that he knew of events – the slaughter of the innocent Flemmings provides matter for a simile in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale [141], where the furore following the attack of the fox on the hen run is described thus:
Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille •,,»,,
Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, y _
As thilke day was maad upon the fox. f , f,
(Tales VII: 3394-7) , a. /,,,-’, .1,
We may speculate, then, that the move to Kent was a welcome escape from the various tensions of life in the City, reflected in the lyric Lak ofStedfastnesse, arguably composed at around this date [56]. Not that this meant moving out of the current of events. Having been part of the commission for peace in Kent in 1385, which meant he was m effect a Justice of the Peace, he was appointed a ’knight of the shire’ in 1386 and as such sat as a member for Kent in the Parliament of October-November 1386. Chaucer was not a knight, but, due to the re uctance of men of influence to become knights and accept the various mancial and military burdens that entailed, it had become common
0 appoint well-regarded and well-connected commoners to such Positions. Like his Franklin, Chaucer was thus a parliamentary knight, Or which he received 4s per day while Parliament sat.
20
21
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The session he attended was a fairly lively one, with Parliament
seeking to curb the power of the lords and magnates attacking each
other: Gloucester demanded the removal of Suffolk, who was highly
powerful and very much in King Richard’s favour. Richard objected,
left Parliament, was out-manoeuvred, and returned to find Suffolk
impeached. Heady stuff. Less glamorous, but closer to home for
Chaucer, was a minor petition that all life holders of public offices
should be removed (on the general assumption that they were bound
to be corrupt) and such posts never again be appointed for life. Nothing
came of this directly, but it so happens that Chaucer resigned both his
controllerships and left the customs at the end of the year. It is hard
not to think that this move may have been prompted by political
canniness as much as by the pressure of his increasing duties in Kent,
or indeed by simple weariness with the posts.
(x) Time in Kent
1386 was also significant as the year of the Scrope/Grosvenor trial, the dispute over the right to a certain coat of arms, in which Chaucer made his deposition from which all calculations of his birth are taken. One might expect things to quieten down a little after all this and with his move to Kent, but that isn’t quite the case. For one thing 1387 saw what seems to have been his last journey abroad, when he went to Calais on undetermined business, during which William Beauchamp was so helpful. Thereafter, he returned to Kent and his duties there, and also to his writing. By now he was a well-respected poet, having translated Le Roman de la Rose (part of which may survive in the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose) [62] in the 1360s, composed The Book of the Duchess in the late 1360s or 1370s, completed his dream poems, The Parliament ofFowles and The House of Fame, and also the narrative poem Anelide and Arcite. He had written Troilus and Criseyde, finished his translation of Boethius, which we know as the Boece and probably begun The Legend of Good Women. Now, in 1387, the year of his wife’s death, we believe he began work on The Canterbury Tales.
However, life in Kent was not all writing poetry. As a Justice for the Commission of Peace, he shared with magistrates the duty of dealing with minor offences, such as assault, unfair or unlawful trading, and also for conducting preliminary hearing for cases which would be referred on to other courts. The post was a definite step up the ladder from his roles in London, as well as having the advantage of removing him from the increasingly restive capital. It must be remembered that Chaucer was very obviously associated with the king’s party, albeit in
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
a reno
litically unimportant way. As a whole Richard’s reign is not Downed for its domestic peace and harmony between the magnates: was better off out of it.
3 ^s^Chaucer would have altered his circle from that of wealthy °hants and influential court officials to that of equally wealthy m<d differently influential lawyers and gentry, while also encountering all walks of life as they came before or appealed to the Justice of the p Ce Not that all Chaucer’s dealings with the law came from the one
, f tne bench. He was summoned for debt on several occasions, six times, indeed, by a Henry Atwood, innkeeper, between January 1389 and January 1390. At this point it is reasonable to suppose the matter was settled out of court, since it appears Chaucer never answered the summons. Such evidence of outstanding debts should not be taken as a sign of penury, despite the fact that earlier biographies of Chaucer depict these years as times of hardship resulting from civic upheaval and possible loss of favour at court. As we have seen, the move to Kent was by no means disadvantageous, but it is the case that in 1388 Chaucer resigned his exchequer annuity (held since 1367) and the one resulting from his wine grant of 1378. Both these were transferred to John Scalby, but while this reduced Chaucer’s annual income substantially, it may well have saved him from prosecution by Parliament, which had turned its attention to members of the king’s household, particularly those granted annuities by Edward in. Here again we see signs of a man capable of reading a political situation wisely and acting accordingly to avoid trouble.
His reputation as a poet may have helped. Although we are now fond of regarding his poetry as a great social document, giving us insights into the life of his times, it is nevertheless carefully silent about many of the burning social issues of the day. Reading his works, one can remain as oblivious of the Peasants’ Revolt and the effects of the perpetual wars with France as one can of the Napoleonic Wars when reading Jane Austen.
(xi) Clerk of the King’s Works
^ – – ’
TrT Ch*UCer undoubtedly was, he did not remove himself entirely £ dUtleS associat:ed with the royal household. In 1389 he
.
°f the Ki”g’S W°rks’ a P°sition which was It • two months after regaining his regality in May
favour 0fSR°l ^ ** ”* ^ aPPomtment evidence of the continued a loval SP d and a ^cognition of reliable service from Chaucer as
servant m civil duties as well as in his poetry. Certainly, following
22
23
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
his politic resignation of his annuities two years before, this post represented a doubtless welcome increase in income, paying 2s a day enough to keep at bay the likes of Henry Atwood Lucrative as it was, the post was no sinecure It involved overseeing more financial affairs than his previous post as Customs Controller and included responsibility for the maintenance of various royal properties He was the head of all the clerical staff involved in the running of these estates, and as such chiefly responsible for the payment of wages and provision of workmen and materials for upkeep and repairs The properties under his particular care included The Tower of London, Westminster Palace, the royal houses of Eltham, Sheen (mentioned in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women [81, 100]) and King’s Langley and, from 1390, St George’s Chapel and Windsor Of these the two biggest enterprises were the Tower, which was having a new wharf built, and the Chapel St George’s Chapel was in such poor repair that it was recorded as ’en poynt du ruyne et de cheirer a la terre si ele ne soit le plustost faite et emendee’ that is, ’on the point of rum and of falling to the ground unless it is speedily restored and repaired’(Crow 1966 408) Chaucer’s attempts to get work done here were futile and the Chapel did indeed fall down roughly thirty years later, despite some restoration in 1396, well after the end of Chaucer’s terms of office
Chaucer remained as Clerk of the King’s Works until June of 1391, when he was commanded to give up the office to John Gedney, who
* was, in Pearsall’s term ’much more of a professional civil servant’ (Pearsall 1992 214) This change in type of appointee may reflect the ever-increasing administration demanded by the post, and in turn Chaucer may have been glad enough to relinquish the position Of course, it is also possible that Richard was glad enough to be rid of him Richard’s building plans were always ambitious and would have kept any Clerk of Works busy, travelling from project to project and pushing on the work Other events might also have contributed to Chaucer’s possible willingness to leave the post He had been attacked and robbed three times in September of 1390, once on the 3rd and twice, incredibly, on the 6th It may have been bad luck, or deliberate targeting of a man likely to be carrying substantial sums of money (as indeed he was, losing £20 6s 8d of the king’s money on the 3rd and a total of £19 43d on the 6th, plus his own horse and various effects) The first robbery happened at a place appropriately termed ’le fowle ok’ and was never accounted for, though Chaucer was acquitted from repaying the money stolen from him Richard Bnerley, a known highway-man, was caught and confessed to the second robbery, and implicated others of his gang in the third Such incidents would
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
certainly take any shine off the job of Clerk of Works, and may well have contributed, in one way or another, to Chaucer’s leaving the post m June of the following year
Chaucer was also writing busily during these years, as well as continuing with The Canterbury Tales and beginning his Treatise on the Astrolabe, he translated Pope Innocent Ill’s De misena condiaoms humane, (also known as De contemptu mundi), to which he refers in his The Legend of Good Women [81,100] as ’Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde’ (Legend G 414) While such works are not popularly interesting now (and indeed may never have been, judging from the fact that no copies survive) it is salutary to remember that a noticeable amount of the time Chaucer devoted to literary activities was spent in translating or adapting a wide range of works by other writers, from the early experiments with French lyrics and dream poems through to such major treatises Having been thus absorbed, the influence of such works would often show up in his own fictional poetry both the Pardoner’s and the Man of Law’s Tales bear witness to Chaucer’s imaginative recycling of Pope Innocent’s text
When Chaucer ceased being Clerk of Works his annual income would have dropped noticeably While in office he had incurred several debts on the crown’s behalf, and it was some considerable time before he was reimbursed The final, large, sum of £66 13s 4d, was paid in May
1393 Before this he had secured a gradual repayment of another debt due to him, but money seems to have been tight, or at least he was unwilling to part with it lightly, as we once again find him being sued for debt during these years His pattern seems to have been to allow the summonses to build up until the last possible date and then settle out of court It is a process not unknown today, and then, as now, the running up of debts may have been as much a sign of reasonable affluence and a certain attitude towards paying bills, as of financial difficulties Moreover he was not totally without income, since his annuity from Gaunt seems to have continued until Gaunt’s death in
1399, when a grant from Gaunt’s son, by then Henry IV, seems to have been in effect a continuation of the original annuity Similarly, from 1394 he received an annuity of £20 granted by Richard II in recognition of his good service (whether literary or civil is unspecified) and again confirmed by Henry Gifts, too, were forthcoming in the
1390s as we see him receiving a rich gown from Henry in 1395 or 96 (while Henry was still just the Earl of Derby, and simply the son of John of Gaunt, rather than the claimant of the throne) and in 1397 a tun of wine annually from Richard Nor was he long without employment as at some point in the 1390s he was appointed Deputy
24
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Forester for North Petherton in Somerset. The exact duties.of this post remain unclear, but it is unlikely that it ^chndmg^und in woods. It may have been another post which involved acting a arbitrator, ttus time between the family which owned the estate (me Mortimers) and that which farmed it. . .
For all this time Chaucer was resident in Kent, appearing m various records as a witness to contracts or transfers of property, usually involving men he would have known through his court connections. Thus, he witnesses for Sir Nicholas SarnesHeld, the king s standardbearer, m 1393 and in 1395 for a transfer of land from the Archbishop of York to, amongst others, the Archb.shop of Canterbury, anone of Chaucer’s old friends, Sir Philip de le Vache. Life in Kent was thus no reclusive retirement, and indeed m 1398 he was on the move gene ally through England on the king’s ’arduous and urgent business (arduaa urgenaa negpcia). We have no details of what that busmess was, nor any clear explanation for the fact that Chaucer secured * warrant ot protection in May 1398, to last for two years and cover him tor any law suits brought while travelling. There was one such suit on me horizon, as the widow of Walter Buckholt was trying to collect me considerable sum of £14 Is.lld which had been due to her husband However, if this was the reason for requesting the royal warrant Chaucer does not seem to have used it, and the case went through me usual motions of court, being settled, it appears, so**” October 1398 and June 1399 (Crow 1966: 62-64 and 397^01) ^1398 seems to have marked the end of his time in Kent, as by 1399 he is bacK in London, not in Aldgate but m a house in Westminster, assorted with the Abbey. Rather pleasingly we know this because responsibility for collecting from him a debt for £1 payable to ^^^^ from the Sheriff of Kent to that of London in 1399: later that same ’ year it was declared ’desperate’ or uncollectable.
(xii) Return to London: the last years For England as a whole 1399 was a momentous year: Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son, was so enraged by Richard s co sequestration of the Lancaster estates on Gaunt’s death that he returned from exile in June, landed in the North ^^d (whde Richard was engaged in Ireland) and forced Richards abdication m September. In many ways it was a remarkably bloodless overthrow and certainly from Chaucer’s point of view the shift in power was less worrying than it might have been, since, despite his connect 10ns with the royal household of Richard, his links with John of Gaunt and Henry
26
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
himself were strong. In effect it seems merely to have required going through the rigmarole of re-establishing his various annuities and grants, with the inevitable delays such negotiations always seem to entail. By now Chaucer may well have been ailing. The house in Westminster has been described as the fourteenth-century equivalent of sheltered accommodation (Pearsall 1992: 275) as it lay within the grounds of the Abbey and as such was under its general care. It was, naturally, a prestigious lease whose previous and subsequent tenants were also royal servants, so it may have been a way to confirm his own status as well as to take some steps towards an easier life. It is here that we presume Chaucer died on 25 October 1400. He was buried at the entrance to St. Benedict’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, which was at this time just beginning to be used for the burial of Abbey tenants and royal servants. Later, in 1556, he was moved to his current position in what is now termed ’poets’ corner’ and a large commemorative tomb erected for him by Nicholas Brigham.
Chaucer was definitely survived by his son Thomas, whom we believe to be his first child, and possibly also by Lewis. We know next to nothing of Lewis, expect that the Treatise on the Astrolabe was written for him, and that he is mentioned, with Thomas, in a record of payment to them as men at arms in Carmarthen in 1403. Records for Thomas are fuller and reveal an astutely managed political career which included being Speaker for the House of Commons. It also included a typically advantageous marriage and continued links with the House of Lancaster. His daughter married well, becoming on her third marriage, the wife of William de la Pole, Earl and Duke of Suffolk, at one time the most influential man in England. Quite a social shift from the wellregarded but nonetheless merchant base of her grandfather. Two other children are attributed to Chaucer, both daughters and both probably spurious. An Elizabeth Chausier was nominated as a nun at St. Helen’s Priory, London, in 1377 and a record exists for expenses paid by John of Gaunt covering outlay and gifts for an Elizabeth Chaucy becoming a nun at Barking Abbey. The two Elizabeths are likely to be the same person and the mention of John of Gaunt has inclined people to regard her as Geoffrey Chaucer’s daughter, but no direct mention of her father exists and Chaucer was a common enough name for this to be simple coincidence. Likewise, an Agnes Chaucer is listed as in attendance at the coronation of Henry IV, but no further indications exist to tell us whether she was related to the poet in any way.
The very fact that Chaucer is given these conjectural daughters attests to his significance, both as poet and public figure. He lived through some of the most restless years of England’s history, but seems
27
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
(b) SOCIAL, LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
Tracing Chaucer’s life provides some idea of the personal background to his literature, but that personal background was itself set against a wider social and historical backdrop and there are elements of that which it is useful to bear in mind
(i) War and chivalry
Throughout Chaucer’s life, England and France warred intermittently and were engaged in the series of battles which is now termed The Hundred Years War and which included the campaigns and peace treaties in which Chaucer was involved [12-17] Edward in laid claim to the French throne in 1337, thus starting the conflict which passed through stages of war and uneasy peace until it was eventually resolved in 1453 Over the years methods of waging war changed markedly, but the notion of a Knight and of Chivalry remained current Even m the twentieth century the concept of the chivalnc knight is familiar as he rides through films and fiction, although one would be hard pushed to say when one last existed in the flesh During the mid fourteenth century, though, the figure of the knight was dominant both on the field and in the imagination Skilled and respected, he engaged in oneto one conflict in battles, was a member, or leader, of a company based on a lord’s household and its expectations of service There were mfan trymen, but they tended to be regarded as of little importance and were rarely marshalled with the same forethought as cavalry (although yeomen and tenants of all degrees were required to render military service when called upon, and sometimes to provide companies of foot soldiers, depending on their own social standing) The expertise and the reputation rested with the knight basically, horses bestowed kudos The battle of Crecy (1346) changed that Here Edward used both bowmen and infantry to deadly effect The range of a longbow, the ability to send over repeated showers of arrows and the skill of the archers undermined the concept of a brief shower of javelins followed by dose engagement Additionally, Edward’s use of footsoldiers armed with long knives made the infantry a force to be reckoned with Of course there were still knights, and while the bowmen won acclaim, the figure of the knight still reigned supreme especially in the popular imagination This was greatly aided by the person of Edward Prince of Wales eldest son of Edward in (popularly known since the sixteenth
29
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
century as the Black Prince). He seemed to embody all the qualities of perfect knighthood: indisputably of noble blood; a renowned soldier and commander; capable of acting in the most chivalrous manner, as when, having captured King John II of France at Poitiers, he insisted on acting as his squire. All this must have helped to maintain the ideal of knighthood. The fact that Edward was also capable of coldly watching the slaughter of defeated French men, women and children while rewarding his supporters with prodigal gifts, all fits with the chivalric concept. Add to this that, like all English nobles, he was fluent in French (his mother, Queen Philippa, was French and half the French royal family were living as prisoners in the English court at the time) and that he was married to Joan of Kent, whose beauty led her to be called The Fair Maid of Kent, and we have a perfect picture of knighthood. Finally, by dying at the relatively young age of 46 in 1376, and thus never becoming king, his popular appeal was left untarnished. Richard, his son, who became Richard II, had a hard act to follow in some ways. He, too, used the idea of chivalry, even commanding lists to be built for a tournament at Smithfield in 1390, when Chaucer was Clerk of the King’s Works. The lists were a poor show, but the idea still retained a certain romantic appeal and Richard may well have been using them as a political ploy.
Two sets of associations with war thus co-existed in fourteenthcentury England: the relatively new, but clearly efficient, version which involved greater use of commanders, increased use of conscription and frequent levying of taxes to pay for it all, and the older version centred on the figure of the knight with the idea of household companies under the command of nobles who were obliged to raise, equip and pay a given number of men whenever required. While the newer version had its social effects as it revived the concept of every adult male being obliged to possess arms appropriate to his station and know how to use them too, the established concept of the knight^at-arms continued to hold sway in the literature.
(ii) Chivalry
The idea of chivalry has an enduring appeal, associated as it is with the rarefied life of court culture, and summoning up a world of brave and elegant knights often in love with beautiful ladies, who might be loving or cruel in return. All in this world are musical, compose verses with ease in English, French and probably also Latin, and are of noble, or ’gentle’ blood. While the concept had its representatives in life, its influence is most evident in the literature. The figures of the Knight
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
• among the Canterbury Pilgrims are obvious examples, as and S(^^an in Biack of The Book of the Duchess [66] and Troilus in
ar£ A Criseyde [89], while the discussion of what it means to be Troilus ana _ _ ^ ^.^ ^ ^^ an<j Franklm,s ta[es [122j 131]
: wider scope of the concept. Beyond Chaucer, the
entil
^ . eyon aucer, e
up,r witness to u«- v r
’A al is central to the anonymous poem bir L,awain and me. which, in the only surviving manuscript, is ended with
nigt, wc, ,
£ >^ Qrcj£r of fae Garter. This order was founded by Edward TIT m°348 in a move which demonstrated not only his own enthusiasm f /the courtly ideal, but also his shrewd political sense, as the ideas of honour and companionship could do much to unite the noble and powerful families of the time, thus reducing their inclination to fight amongst themselves or with the king. This concept of what is essentially a brotherhood was most completely brought together in English by Malory when he undertook his Arthurian tales around 1400, in what we now tend to term Malory’sMone D’ Arthur. Malory reinvigorated the tales of Arthur and his knights, presenting them as the flower of knighthood, but also, significantly, setting the tales in a distant and undetermined bygone age, while lamenting the loss of such ideals in his own time. Like all Golden Ages, that of Chivalry is always past.
In what was once a standard work on Chaucer, Chaucer and his England (1908) George Coulton eulogises the role of the theory of chivalry:
Essentially exclusive and jealous of its privileges, the chivalric ideal was yet the highest possible in a society whose very foundations rested on caste distinctions, and where bondmen were more numerous than freemen. The world will always be the richer for it; but we must not forget that … it postulated a servile class; the many must needs toil and groan and bleed in order that the few might have grace and freedom to grow to their individual perfection.
(Coulton 1908: 188)
’n is right to remind us of the underbelly of this idealised an inc ” ’. lmportant to retain the distinction between what was men acT’n ^”^ C°nC6pt and real life’ ^the fourteenth century tax and ”b SOUght C° aV°id becommg knights due to the burdens of dearth of k ga^°ns of military service the position entailed, hence the Parliament if Whkh made k Possible for Chaucer to be elected as a a-ry knight in 1386. Nevertheless, the idea still commanded the qualities associated with knightly behaviour, such as
30
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’gentilesse’ (on which Chaucer composed a lyric [58]) were still highly regarded. Those who wish to explore the concept of chivalry further, will find Maurice Keen’s book Chivalry most helpful.
Matching the code of chivalry and in part contributing to it, was the concept of courtly love. There is some debate over how much this was a purely literary code and how much it actually affected the behaviour of courtiers or those who aspired to polite living. What is not in doubt is its standing as a recognised convention underpinning much of the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries. The first part of the French allegory, Le Roman de la Rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris (d. 1237) and translated by Chaucer, epitomises that code [62]. In this dream poem the lover (male) enters the Garden of Love, which is open only to those who are beautiful, wealthy and leisured. In it he finds the Rose (female), whose beauty enslaves him and which he desires to gain. The Rose is, however, guarded and not just by thorns. Dangers of various kinds confront the Lover, which he must overcome by bravery or trickery in order to reach his goal. In Lorris’ text, the allegory is intricate and largely concerned with courtly love, but he never finished the work. In around 1277 Jean de Meun picked up the text and provided an ending in a rather different tone, expanding the allegory’s frame of reference to include ideas on the faculty of reason, social satire and snide attacks on his contemporaries. Chaucer clearly read and was influenced by de Meun’s text, but it is de Lorris who provides the most courtly element. For twentieth-century students of the convention, C.S. Lewis’s study The Allegory of Love (1936) remains the best starting
point.
In brief, courtly love posited a Lady, always beautiful, often married or apparently unobtainable, who was the object of love for a knight. This knight was handsome and accomplished and expected to prove his worth through the eloquence of his speech and readiness to undergo any trials set by his lady with unerring loyalty. The lady’s role was to test her suitor’s devotion by expressing lack of interest, setting tasks and in general putting objects in his way. All of this came under the general heading of ’luf-daunger’ which might also include the oppositions of relatives or a perceived mis-match in social station. The true lover-knight overcomes all obstacles and remains devoted. His reward is becoming the recognised lover of his lady (which might or might not include marriage and/or physical consummation of the affair, depending on the text). It is probably a mistake to assume that much
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r tnjs was actually enacted by members of the various courts of the r urteenth century, but it was certainly an available fiction which •nformed the cultural climate, much as the wider and associated conventions of chivalry did. Among families with inheritances to protect, early marriages were not uncommon, nor was the practice of contracting engagements between children, or marriages between partners of widely differing ages. The higher up the social scale, the more likely such matches; Richard II provides a case in point as he married Anne of Bohemia when he was 15 and she 16. After her death he married Isabella of France, who was then only seven years old. Richard was 30; it was a political marriage. Although this is the extreme, it is worth remembering that merchants, too, had lands and investments to protect and wise marriages to contract. Where such disparity in ages exists and marriage more openly regarded as a business matter than it is now, and not necessarily a personal affair, the imaginative appeal of courtly love is readily understood.
(iv) Marriage and remarriage
Where marriages could be contracted between partners of such different ages, it is to be expected that widowhood for both men and women was fairly common. As well as simple age difference, disease, war and dangers of childbirth all had their effects, making second and third marriages fairly common; even fourth marriages were not unduly out of the way. John of Gaunt married three times, as did Alice, Chaucer’s grand-daughter. Divorce was, of course, all but unheard of and annulments rare: each was shameful and expensive, requiring dispensations from the Pope as well as legal palaver, making such things the preserve of the rich. Remarriage could follow pretty soon after the death of the previous partner without attracting undue comment. Chaucer’s mother, for instance, married Bartholomew Chappell in 1366, the year of John Chaucer’s death. On the other hand, some men made their widow’s inheritance conditional upon not remarrying in order to prevent some unrelated person benefiting from their hard work. Jenny Kermode cites one sixteenth-century London merchant who neatly sums up the attitude:
She will marrie and enrich some other with the fruites of my travaille. Wherefore I think it necessarie to abridge her of that liberty which the custom doth extende. i
• • (Kermode 1999: 8)
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It is against this background of common practice that we must read Chaucer’s portrayals of marriage, and in particular the Wife of Bath’s prologue [120].
(v) Death, plague and revolt
The Black Death of 1348 seems more striking in our retrospective view of the late medieval period than it did to those who lived through it. The general level of infant mortality was around four in five (that is one in five infants surviving) and every summer brought increased level of disease and the threat of epidemics, while winter had its own hardships. The bubonic plague (Black Death) was one such disease: arriving in Europe in 1347, it spread rapidly and arrived in England in
1348, where it raged for the best part of a year. This was not the only occurrence of the disease (it struck again, severely in 1361, and then again in 1368-69, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405) but it was its most virulent. Of the estimated 4-5 million people in England 1.5-2 million died. For those who saw it close at hand, it must have been an horrific disease. Those infected suffered boils, acute pain and gave off an appalling stench. Very few survived, most dying within three days. Given this, it is perhaps surprising that Chaucer’s writing hardly refers to it. However, living through a time of disease is not the same as surviving the disease itself. The vast majority of those who came through the epidemic of 1348 (and its later recurrences) did so because they were never infected, which may well lead to a different attitude to the disease. Besides, even the most severe outbreak brought some benefits: for labourers it further loosened the ties to land-owners and increased the chances of higher wages, while for the middle classes there was property to inherit. Life simply went on.
Likewise, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 goes oddly unremarked by Chaucer, although it presumably had an impact. It is hard to pin-point exactly why the revolt occurred when it did, as the various contributing factors (e.g. high taxation, labour laws, the obvious power of magnates apart from the king) had existed for some time (see Dobson 1982: 20; Dyer 1994: 221-39). What is clear is that charismatic leaders were to hand and much of the energy of the uprising comes through the writings of the rebels at the time. Some of these have been collected by Professor Barry Dobson in his book The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Dobson, 1983) and make interesting reading. Chaucer’s near silence on the matter (with the exception of the line in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale [21]) is remarkable not only because the mob entered London through ’his’ gate of Aldgate, but also because Kent, where he had associations, was
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e of the centres of the first uprisings. His comparative silence may h a mark of caution, given Chaucer’s links with several of the groups rgeted by the mob, or a sign of a lack of sympathy with the grievances f the rural poor or town apprentices. Such a lack would not be surnrising in a wealthy townsman and civil servant. Whatever his personal convictions, Chaucer was not a political or social poet in the way his contemporary William Langland was. While most classes are represented in Chaucer’s writing, all his characters are literary creations. As Coulton pointed out, ’we believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection that they are there only to point an artistic contrast’, while Chaucer’s imagination was evidently caught by individuals and their quirks, ’the multitude interested him comparatively little’ (Coulton 1908: 268).
(vi) Church as institution
For our purposes it is probably easier to think of Church as institution as separate from the concept of religion. Such a division is not entirely inaccurate. England, like the rest of Western Europe, was predominantly Christian, which at this time meant Catholic, with the titular Head of the Church being the Pope, and monarchs of individual countries ruling by Divine Right. This is not to say that everyone held precisely the same beliefs, or even followed exactly the same practices, but the Church provided the framework for thought, just as the Christian calendar, with its rituals and festivals provided a structure for the year. But having one structure, however dominant, does not exclude others: as the opening of The Canterbury Tales reminds us, April means not only the start of the pilgrimage season, but also the season of spring and general lifting of the spirits. The seasonal year was at least as noticeable as the ritual one. It would be a mistake to think that people in general were necessarily more pious simply because pervasively held Christian belief created common terms of reference.
Conversely, the day to day contact with the institution of the Church in all its various forms would have been so common as to be unremarkable. As well as attending mass when required (at least once a week, and usually more), one would have encountered some officer or associate of the Church with a frequency which would astound us now. The Church was a huge employer, forming almost a mini-state within a state. It had its own courts, with attendant officers, such as summoners; it had parishes and churches, with the attendant parsons, priests, bishops, and archbishops, as well as the many religious houses
– the monasteries and convents, inhabited by monks, nuns, friars or
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
canons, each again, with its individual hierarchy. There were also roles more tangentially attached to the Church, such as those of itinerant mass-priest, who made his living saying masses for the dead, but was not licensed to conduct all the offices of a priest, or that of pardoner, who might be licensed to preach, hear confession and give pardon, but, again, could not perform the other offices, such as marriages or baptisms. Moreover, most formal education came under the province of one aspect of the Church or another, be it the church schools, or the universities, and thus many people we would now think of as civil servants or secretaries were technically members of the Church, albeit only in lower orders, and may never have performed any religious service. It was not always the case; although he was Clerk of the King’s Works, Chaucer never held a religious qualification, but a ’clerk’ could be both clerk, as we use the term, and cleric.
As well as providing all these possible posts or roles, and thus offering a complete career structure for both men and women (to be the head of a convent would be no mean post, especially if one managed to join one of the wealthier and so better provided ones), the Church was also a major landowner. A peasant would be as likely to be working on church land as that owned by a lay lord or yeoman, and tenant farmers might be renting their land from an Abbey. The richer abbeys and monasteries (and some, such as Bury St. Edmunds which more or less became the town, or Fountains in Yorkshire, were extremely rich) would also employ builders, carpenters and other tradesmen as and when required and would often have a kind of satellite community made up of lay-brothers who were not fully ordained, but were closely attached to the monastery.
All this activity did not ensure respect, of course. Rather the opposite. We can sub-divide the Church into secular clergy, (concerned with parish churches and ordained as members of the general Christian church) and the religious (monks, friars, canons or nuns who were members of particular religious orders and followed their rules). Monks were criticised for being too rich, too keen on good living and too willing to travel the country, away from their monastery or abbey, which was where they were supposed to be enclosed. However, at least they were established (the term used for those attached to a particular house) and so, theoretically, they contributed to their local communities in terms of employment and were to some degree self-sufficient. Friars were criticised for not being thus established, and while this meant they were not so often associated with rich houses, they were instead dependent on charity, which might take the form of money or food given to the friar in return for confession. Canons came in for less
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formal criticism, perhaps because, as communities made up of secular and religious members and usually attached to substantial town churches, they seemed more part of the community. One of the largest groups followed the rule of St. Augustine, and were referred to as Canons Regular, or Black Canons (from the colour of their cloaks); the Canon of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of these.
At the head of all these various forms of Christian life was the Pope, who at least nominally was the head of the whole Christian church. However, that position was somewhat compromised by the Great Schism, which occurred in 1378 and resulted in two popes co-existing: one, Urban IX in Rome, the other, Clement VII, in Avignon. The split was not resolved until 1417 with the election of Martin V Cower and Langland express deep concern over this split: characteristically, Chaucer remains silent on the matter, though, as England sided with the Italians (and against France), it may have been a reason for his journey to Italy at that time.
(vii) Religion and philosophy
So much for the structure of the Church. Its influence on the philosophy of the time was even more far-reaching, but that is not to say it was stultifying. The most complex systems of thought at the time had been established by intellectuals within the Church, where there was better access to libraries and possibly more time to devote to study. Entering a religious order allowed people with intellectual ambition to pursue their studies, often learning from an established philosopher. Two orders of Friars, both founded in the thirteenth century, dominated the intellectual landscape at the time: the Dominicans, with Albertus Magnus (d.1280) and St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), and the Franciscans, with Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William Ockham (d.1349). The ideas advanced by these people, their followers and their critics covered not only theological matters, but also the function of reason, discussions of how memory worked, ideas on teaching, the role of mankind in the world, principles of science; in short all aspects of philosophy. It was taxing intellectual stuff, and it was also fascinating and pertinent. For those wishing to enter the area now, the best starting place is probably still Gordon Leff ’s Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham, in which the first half of the fourteenth century is characterised as ’scepticism versus authority’ (Leff 1958: 262).
Part of that scepticism was evident in the growing number of increasingly educated lay people who were becoming involved in theological enquiry. Probably the most readily identifiable group were
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the Lollards (a term derived from the Dutch for ’mumbler’) who advocated a return to a simpler way of Christian life and rejected the over-rich and corrupt state of the Church. Needless to say, they were eventually regarded as heretics and were persecuted in the fifteenth century, but in the fourteenth century the movement was still young and provided a common ground for many who were both critical of prevailing ideas and hierarchies and seriously interested in finding alternatives. The Lollards drew support from the ideas of John Wyclif (although Wyclif himself was not actually a Lollard) and those ideas included the call for having the Bible translated into the vernacular, to ensure a more direct access to it for the majority of people who did not understand Latin easily, if at all, and also criticism of any liturgical practice not obviously supported by Biblical example. In particular, discussions of the questions surrounding the concept of free will figured in Lollardry, questions which Chaucer also explores in The Knight’s Tale [110] and Troilus and Criseyde [89]. It is unlikely that Chaucer himself was a Lollard, but his name is linked frequently with the group of Lollard knights (including John Clanvowe, a diplomat and writer, and Simon Burley, Richard IPs tutor) who clearly formed a significant part of his audience (see for example, Crow 1966: 343; 347; 360).
There is one final, more amorphous, group to add to this welter of intellectual activity, that of the mystics and recluses. There was a significant number of these people, whose existence bears testimony not only to a fervent religious strand, but also to the strength of individualism at the time. Some of them became well-known and respected figures, who were sought out and consulted by others. One such was Dame Julian of Norwich, who became something of a cult figure after writing her account of her experiences during a severe illness in 1373 and her interpretation of them (known as The Revelations of Divine Love or The Shewings of Divine Love). Others would have had more local reputations. They tended to live simple, devotional lives and some, often called anchorites, chose to withdraw from direct contact with the world, sometimes even to the extent of being literally walled up in a small cell at the side of a church with one angled window, through which they could see the altar and partake in services, without themselves being seen. Versions of mysticism and debates about the best kind of life to live were also popular, with different views being held by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton, who wrote the Scale of Perfection and The Mixed Life. All of these authors were Chaucer’s direct contemporaries and their writing offers a wider context for The Parson’s Tale, his depiction of female religious characters and his debates on the operation of individual will. At the same time,
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he ancient world still exerted its influence, as people continued to Hraw on Plato and Aristotle, and still attempted to reconcile the classical nd Christian philosophies, as Boethius had in the sixth century.
On a more popular level, Saints’ Lives were widely read and also promulgated Church morals and doctrine. As a form such Lives fall somewhere between adventure story and romance and indeed drew on the language of each. They provided entertainment in an irreproachable form, so much so that reading or hearing one counted as an act of devotion. A good summary of this now largely extinct genre can be found in Wogan-Browne and Burgess (1996).
In all these ways the church and religion played a part in social, economic, political and intellectual life, but not all of Chaucer’s influences, and certainly not all of his context, were religious.
(viii) Literary contexts
English
One of the most significant changes during Chaucer’s lifetime was the increased use of the vernacular as a medium for all writing, regardless of its function. Although legal and formal documents were still written primarily in Latin or French, Parliament opened for the first time in English in 1362 and philosophical or religious treatises were appearing in English. The Cloud of Unknowing is a case in point, while Wyclif and the Lollards were pressing for the Bible to be translated into English. John Cower, Chaucer’s contemporary and friend, whom he calls ’moral Cower’ at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (V: 1856), wrote in English (albeit with the Latin title Confessio Amantis) as well as French and Latin, which perhaps demonstrates that he considered English just as prestigious as the other two languages. There was also the flourishing alternative tradition of alliterative verse, which retained links with the older Anglo-Saxon verse forms and which Langland used for Piers Plowman, while the Gawain poet combined it with a rhyming structure for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. Chaucer does not seem to have had much time for this form: his Parson dismisses it as northern, asserting ’I am a Southren man;/I kan nat geeste ”rum, ram, ruf”, bylettre’ (Tales, X: 42-3). It is hardly a fair comment, nor an accurate one, since Langland was based in the Malvern Hills and in London, but it does reveal the prejudice in favour of the more Frenchinfluenced version of English which prevailed in London and which Chaucer helped to become standard.
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Other literature in English also permeated the times. Secular, political and religious lyrics abounded, as did ballads and romances. In general romances told stories of love or adventure about high-born people in distant places and enshrined noble ideals and courtly behaviour. They might also retell Classical legends and a sub-group, the lai, tended to include magic. They are often contrasted with fabliaux, also a thriving genre, which, like the romance, had French roots. Fabliaux were bawdy tales about low-born people in contemporary settings, whose plots revolve around sex and trickery and tend to be amoral if not immoral. Both were popular genres which made use of stereotypes and narrative conventions and, importantly, shared much the same audiences. In addition there was the drama. Best known to us are the cycles of plays (mystery plays) performed by Guildsmen, often on wagons working their way round the streets of cities, but there were also plays about saints lives (miracle plays) and allegories, such as Everyman.
An important manuscript, the Auchinleck Manuscript, epitomises much of the range of English writing available to Chaucer and his contemporaries. It is a miscellany of things, the majority in English, including romances, saints’ lives and various satirical, didactic or religious pieces. A modern facsimile (Pearsall and Cunningham 1977) offers the chance of browsing through the kind of material and presentation Chaucer would have encountered. Moreoever, there is some evidence that this manuscript may have been owned by the Chaucer family at some stage (see Pearsall and Cunningham 1977: ix).
Italian
t\
Although surrounded by this welter of English, Chaucer was also a man of his times and class in being aware of Italian and French literature. During the 1290s Dante had asserted the claims of Italian to be regarded as a worthy vehicle for high literature in his Vita Nuova, driving the point home in the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) and arguing that Italian should replace Latin in De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular). Chaucer makes direct reference to Dante (even parodying his eagle in the bird of The House of Fame), as he does also to Petrarch (for instance in The Clerk’s Tale Tales, IV: 31-5), but although Petrarch wrote his long sonnet sequence in Italian, he used Latin for much of his work, and indeed did much to revive the study of Greek and Latin. Boccaccio, the third influential Italian, is oddly not mentioned directly by Chaucer, although he was clearly a source for many of his texts, in particular // Fi/ostrato (The Love-Struck) for Troilus and Criseyde and the Teseida for The Knight’s Tale. Boccaccio
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n Chaucer seem to have shared some of the same interests in types £ wrjting. Boccaccio’s Decameron is a collection of tales, told over ten days by nobles escaping the Black Death. Influenced by Petrarch, he also studied the classical humanists – perhaps he was a little too close to Chaucer for him to name him overtly in his works. Detailed studies have been made of Chaucer in relation to his Italian sources and contemporaries, such as Boitani’s book Chaucer and Boccaccio (1977) and his collection of essays on general Italian influences (Boitani 1985) or Nick Havely’s work on Chaucer and Boccaccio (Havely: 1980), which will be of interest to those wishing to explore thoroughly this aspect of Chaucer’s work.
– •> ’ : ’ . >,’ . .-,£, .”! ,
French ’”’•’•• i •’ ” -’” >•’’ ’ ’
As well as the Italians there were the French. Some mention has already been made of courtly lyrics, the French romance form and above all of Le Roman de la Rose, but there were also broader forms, just as there were in English, consisting of the comic tales (fabliaux) and chansons de geste. During his early career, Chaucer was surrounded by and imitated the many styles of literature in French which flourished in the English court, with its French queen and the court in exile of king John II of France. Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-77) is a particularly significant figure: a musician and poet, he was one of the most influential writers of his time and many of Chaucer’s works are indebted to him either directly (e.g. The Book of the Duchess) or in more general terms of style. Chaucer’s relation with another Frenchman, Oton de Granson, seems to have been more reciprocal, as each imitated or adapted the poems of the other. They were exact contemporaries moving in the same circles: Granson was in the households of Edward in, then Gaunt and finally Richard II. Deschamps, meanwhile, not only imitated Chaucer, but also sent him some of his own ballads in the 1380s, prefaced with a dedicatory poem, praising Chaucer as ’le grand translateur’ of Le Roman de la Rose. Those wishing to trace Chaucer’s French influences will find Charles Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition a good place to start (Muscatine 1957), while James Wimsatt provides more detailed discussion of Chaucer’s relation to French contemporaries and the love poets (Wimsatt 1968 and 1991). One of the most significant French figures for us was the poet and chronicler, Jean Froissart. Froissart and Chaucer clearly knew each other well by the 1360s: their poetry shows mutual influence and Froissart mentions Chaucer several times in his Chroniques. As well as providing source material for some of Chaucer’s earlier poetry, the tone of voice
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adopted by the chronicler, which is one of disinterested close observation rather than moral judgement, is similar to that used in The Canterbury Tales. Far from signalling lack of engagement, or of interest, this tone allows for a sharp description of character which Pearsall terms ’a kind of connoisseurship’ (Pearsall 1992: 69). In addition to such literary input, Froissart’s accounts furnish us with a vivid (albeit idiosyncratic) impression of court life and provide us with some insights into the political intrigues of the day, as well as descriptions of the culture and hospitality that went with them. Then, as now, corporate entertaining was an expensive and significant business.
When it comes to Chaucer’s influence on English poetry and language, it is this adaptation of French and Italian habits of rhyme and the use of lightly anglicised French or Italian words which tends to strike us a paramount, and led Lydgate to term him the father of English poetry, a title which seems to have stuck. It was not all gain, of course. The northern English and Anglo-Saxon traditions had their own vocabulary and verse forms, which created a different kind of richness, but one which did not suit Chaucer’s purposes so well. The loose-limbed alliterative verse form was based on two alliterating words in the first part of the line, a pause (caesura) and at least one further alliterating word in the second half line. This allowed for a varying number of syllables and stresses in each line, which makes it a good vehicle for long narrative poems, but was of little interest to Chaucer. His preference was for a more marked rhythm and he clearly loved rhyme, developing the rhyming couplet as his favoured form for narrative. It is this we can hear echoing down the years through his many followers and imitators: Henryson, Dunbar, Hoccleve and Lydgate all continue where Chaucer broke off, and help form the wider literary context and history in which we read him now.
The more one explores this context, the more fascinating it becomes, revealing the fourteenth century as a rich and fertile time for literature. Nonetheless, one of the most significant contexts in which to read Chaucer’s works is that created by the texts themselves, so it is to those works this volume now turns.
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French) can be found in Benson and Andersson (1971) Ri8by (i996] offers a straightforward presentation of Chaucer in his social context while Dyer (1994) is an approachable account of life in general in Medieval England. Brewer (1998) and Pearsall (1992) naturally focus more precisely on Chaucer, and are invaluable. Burrow (1982) is an accessible and reliable introduction to Chaucer’s general literary context and Rtcardtan Poetry (Burrow 1971, 1992) draws the connections between Chaucer and three of his great English contemporaries: Cower Langland and the Gawatn poet. ’
Further Reading
The specific topics of chivalry, religion and courtly love are covered by Keen (1984), Leff (1958) and Lewis (1936), respectively. Boitani (1977 and 1985) and Havely (1980) cover Chaucer’s Italian influences. Muscatine (1957) and Wimsatt (1968 and 1991) explore the French connection generally, and examples of contemporary fabliaux (not all
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