The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  It was of course a mistake, as Richard II would perceive. War was the way to national bankruptcy, to the death of the Christian chivalric ideal, and to further weakening of the royal prerogative. King Richard would close down England’s multi-front wars and work for his own version of what was right in “the marriage of king and state”; the barons would once more fight for their ancient privileges; and Chaucer’s poetry would, in various disguises, lay the comedy and tragedy of the love conflict bare. Like his father, like his close friend John of Gaunt, or like Gaunt’s father-in-law, the younger Henry Lancaster, Geoffrey Chaucer would be unshakably a king’s man, one who seriously believed the words Shakespeare gives to his foppish King Richard:

  Not all the water in the rough, rude sea

  Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

  Yet Chaucer would understand, too, the feelings—and the threat—of the tyrannized, whether in the marriage of the king and the state or in the ordinary household—feelings like those of the unsinkable Wife of Bath:

  Experiencë, though noon auctoritee

  Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

  To speke of wo that is in mariagë!

  But in 1340, the year Edward III of England assumed, on questionable grounds, the title “King of France,” neither the effects of war nor the effects of weakened monarchy were obvious. That was the year the English navy won its stunning victory over the French at Sluys. It was also the year John of Gaunt was born and, probably, Geoffrey Chaucer. It was a wonderful time to be an Englishman.

  Meanwhile, in India and throughout Europe, there was famine that year. All over the world the weather was gradually, mysteriously changing—black, smoky rains, colder winters, unheard-of droughts. The next year, India would have plague, which would soon move northward.

  * * *

  *That is, “de Dennington.” Since medieval English usage was inconsistent and can be confusing, I anglicize de to of throughout and at times drop the of as later generations of these families would do. I retain de in direct quotations and some names of Frenchmen, e.g., Guichard d’Angle.

  Two: Chaucer’s Youth and Early Education—Life and the Specter of Death on the Ringing Isle (c. 1340-1357)

  IT HARDLY NEEDS SAYING THAT THE WORLD INTO which Geoffrey Chaucer was born was not like ours. After careful thought, if we were given the choice of living then or now, we might well decide to scrap our modern world; but on first transportation to Chaucer’s time, we would probably have hated it—its opinions and customs, its superstitions, its cruelty, its hobbled intellect, in some respects its downright madness. One need not talk of such blood-curdling horrors as public hangings, beheadings, burnings-at-the-stake, drawing-and-quarterings, public whippings, blindings, and castrations; or of imprisonments in chains and darkness without hope of deliverance; or of trials by combat, or of torturings (the rack, the snipping off of the adulteress’s nipples or the repeated branding of her forehead, by Edward II ’s Ordinances)—all these were common, the unavoidable experience of any man who had eyes to see or ears not deaf to the victims’ shrieks; and if far less common in England than in France or, worse yet, Italy, where the family of Malatesta (“Bad-head”) filled a deep well with the severed heads of victims, the difference would strike a modern visitor as trifling. England’s great poet of gentleness and compassion walked every day in a city where the fly-bitten, bird-scarred corpses of hanged criminals—men and women, even children—draped their shadows across the crowded public square. If the crime was political, the corpse was tarred to prevent its decaying before the achievement of the full measure of its shame. As Chaucer strolled across London Bridge, making up intricate ballades in his head, counting beats on his fingers, he could see, if he looked up, the staked heads of wrongdoers hurried away by earnest Christians to their presumed eternal torment. With our modern sensibilities we would certainly object and perhaps interfere—as Chaucer never did—and for the attempt to undermine the king’s peace, not to mention God’s, our severed heads would go up on the stakes beside those others.

  To call it an age of—at least in some quarters—downright madness is not as extreme as it may sound: Chaucer’s time was one in which official doctrine split human personality in ways we would now call schizophrenic. All violence, all aggression, all selfishness and cruelty in everyday activity were sternly condemned, though they were in fact not uncommon. For many people, the model of virtue, as all pious literature and painting shows, was the hangdog saint, hands limply extended in a gesture of helplessness and self-effacing acceptance of providential whim, or fingertips touching in timid prayer, pale eyes rolled up. (Such attitudes, admittedly, must have been more common among artists who served the Church than they were on London streets.) Yet it was an age of crusades, Jewish ghetto burning (in places like Germany, where there were still Jews*), judicial murder, legally sanctioned wife-beating (it was legal to beat a wife into unconsciousness, but not acceptable to beat her until her inert body farted, a sign that she was in shock and might possibly be dying). Outside the more sophisticated courts of the nobility and such centers of liberal thought as Oxford, it was an age of misogyny, when women were regularly and insistently viewed as the source and symbol of all human wickedness, yet at the same time it was an age of Mariolatry and courtly love—two systems (loosely speaking), one religious, one secular, which made women the pattern and vector of all human goodness. Nor is it mere hindsight that shows us these deep and, from our point of view, psychologically deadly paradoxes. They are the subject matter of the period’s finest poets. Men like Dante and Chaucer, in different ways and to different degrees, analyzed these conflicts and worked, consciously or otherwise, toward a gradual softening of the official hard line. A modern humanist might have thrown up his hands in dismay.

  But in small things, too, we might be bothered, at least at first, by life in the Middle Ages—for instance, by Chaucer’s annoying habit (or any other well-educated man’s) of always reading to himself aloud, never silently, “barking on books,” as one fifteenth-century playwright puts it; or, to speak of things less petty, we might be bothered by the general manners of the better class of people in the fourteenth century. They ate with their fingers, except for the occasional employment of a knife or soup spoon, and even the fingers of courtly ladies were not impeccably clean. People washed before meals, but often in plain cold water; soap and hot water, though available if the occasion warranted, were more troublesome to come by then than now. And since meat dishes were normally sharp and spicy stews—because of men’s limited knowledge, at that time, of refrigeration, and the resultant need to disguise the taste of rottenness (only after hunts or at holiday festivals were there broiled meats and roasts)—the business of taking one’s supper with one’s fingers, even if managed with the aplomb of Chaucer’s Prioress (whom Chaucer gently mocks as a touch too fussy) made for mess. According to medieval handbooks on manners, correct form, if one had a stuffed-up nose, was to blow it on one’s clothing—the underside of a skirt or, say, a sleeve-flap. When Richard II introduced the handkerchief at court, it was considered by his enemies a further sign of his intolerable, effeminate aestheticism. Why a handkerchief is preferable to the skirt or sleeve-flap is perhaps a question for scholastic philosophy; what difference, after all, which abditorial vestimentum should collect the germs? Nevertheless, a twentieth-century visitor to the past might well be put off by a gray-eyed Queen Guinevere who happened to be down with a cold when he met her, or even by Chaucer’s beautiful Blanche of Richmond, blind Henry’s granddaughter, “fair Lady White.” The modern man’s revulsion, I hasten to add, might not last long, if we assume a man of sense. Custom is everything. “Ecch contree hath his lawës,” as Chaucer writes. “For every wight which that to Romë went / Halt not o [one] path, or alway o manerë.” But even so…

  A modern visitor might be distressed, too, by the living arrangements: no glass windows except in the houses of the rich—places like John Chaucer’s house on Thames Street and, bette
r yet, John of Gaunt’s palace on the Savoy, where the glass was stained. At night all light that might have labored in through the coarse glass windows, or the parchment windows or nothing-covered windows in poorer houses, was tightly sealed out by wooden shutters. (It made, of course, for a coziness we miss.) There were no chairs, only benches or cushioned trunks for a lady or a gouty old gentleman to sit on; at meal-times the servants brought out trestles and table-boards. There was no privacy, even in a vintner’s big house. Whereas the poor lived in only one room, or at most two, in company with their chickens, pigs, geese, cats, and mice, a vintner’s house might have numerous rooms, but none to be alone in. A house like Chaucer’s father’s would be a large building with a high stone wall and gardens around it, perhaps a few fruit trees, a house with a steeply pitched tile roof and leaded-glass bay windows projecting from the second and third floors. There were various outbuildings, including a pigpen (the livestock of the citizenry was a persistent problem for town magistrates, who repeatedly issued ordinances forbidding the inhabitants to let their horses, swine, and geese run loose in the streets); and inside the house lay a labyrinth of corridors and chambers, dark arches, stairs. There would be a garret, or coalhouse, set over the great gate opening onto Thames Street and extending over whatever humble tenantries were built into the wall; there would be a “pastry house” or bakehouse, connected with the kitchen, which stood next to the central hall; a vaulted cellar and a larder house, with a buttery above, and above that a chamber, all connected by stairs; beyond the hall, the great parlor, with small chambers around it, a chapel, perhaps a privy; and there would probably be, elsewhere, a cloth-house with closets, a bolting house, third-floor garrets, and various chambers for storage, laundry, and so forth. A rich splay of rooms; but the rooms—queerly small, from a modern point of view—were for working in, never for getting away by oneself. For living there was only the great parlor and the hall, which doubled as a dining room.1 In the bedrooms the inhabitants slept several to a bed, usually naked, though sometimes in heavy, long nightgowns and nightcaps. (Nightgowns and nightcaps are frequently mentioned in medieval wills.) Though today we might object to sleeping several in a bed, no objection seems to have crossed medieval minds; even the gentlemen-servants to the king slept two to a bed, as Edward’s Ordinances show. It may be, however, that we pay dear for our privacy. The loneliness, ennui, and alienation now so common seem to have been rare diseases in the late Middle Ages.

  There were other disadvantages in the living arrangements. The walls of a good medieval English house were cold, sometimes damp and, in general, sparsely adorned except for dish-and-mug shelves, though doors had carved figures, in the better houses, and pillows, coverlets, and draperies had pictures—sometimes bright flowers, sometimes beautifully fashioned crucifixions or depictions of the gruesome deaths of saints—and often in the best houses rooms boasted tapestries and hangings or even “halls,” tapestries that covered the whole room. For the arts it was an unusually good time, of course. William Morris was not exaggerating when he wrote in Gothic Architecture (1893), “Every village has its painters, its carvers, its actors.…The few pieces of household goods left of [that time’s] wreckage are marvels of beauty; its woven cloths and embroideries are worthy of its loveliest building; its pictures and ornamented books would be enough in themselves to make a great period of art.” On the floor, however, beneath the feet of those long-gowned, high-hatted, white-breasted ladies, lay straw or sometimes reeds for covering, and, here and there, dogshit. Derek Brewer reminds us of Erasmus’s remarks about the filth on floors, more than a century after Chaucer’s time, and suggests that things were probably worse rather than better in the fourteenth century. Both Brewer and Erasmus perhaps overdraw, or at any rate impose on the late Middle Ages a standard of cleanliness that would probably strike a medieval gentleman as overscrupulous if not bizarre; nevertheless Brewer’s summary and comment on Erasmus seems worth quoting:

  The floors…are usually of clay, upon which are placed rushes, which are occasionally added to but never changed. They remain for twenty years, warming beneath them spittle, vomit, urine, spilt beer, the remains of fish, and other filth not to be mentioned. This would be in the hall, where people ate, rather than in the other rooms, but still it gives point to the foot-cloth that John Russell’s valet must put down on the ground for his master to step onto when he dressed, even in his own chamber; hence the point of Chaucer mentioning that Criseyde’s parlour was paved—it showed how fine it was. When a knight was being armed, of which there is a colorful description in Sir Gawain, it was customary to put down a rich cloth on which he stood and on which the armour was laid. When the armour had been “rocked,” that is, rolled, to free the rust, and polished, and oiled, one would not want it to pick up the mess on the floor.2

  Not that Englishmen in 1340 were savages. They’d been horrified by the behavior of the Scots in war—striking castles, villages, and thorpes without warning, often leaving behind them nothing still alive, not even dogs and cats (the religion Christianity supplanted was not dead, we’ve begun to see, a religion which warned of shape-shifting, so that not even an English sheepdog could safely be trusted); and they were horrified, too, by their equally Celtic allies the Welsh, who, like the Scots, went into battle half-naked, their bodies greased, and took such devilish delight in cutting heads off—as Celts had been doing since time began—that whenever some head was needed (like Gaveston’s) the English nobility sent for Welshmen to deal with the unpleasantness. When law and order broke down entirely in Edward II’s time, for example, and war and famine drove both Celtic (especially the Irish) and Anglo-Saxon peasants to acts of cannibalism, the whole of the British Isles was sufficiently civilized to be deeply shocked.3

  Needless to say, in highly sophisticated cities like London, men behaved rather better than elsewhere. There, where law and order were mainly in the hands of the guilds, no cheating of the people was tolerated, once it had been noticed. A man who sold charcoal in shorted measure—or sold pies made of entrails instead of decent meat, or flogged off rotten fish and swore it was wholesome—might be clamped in the pillory, and his foul goods burned under his nose.4 Strict laws prohibited the befouling of highways and waterways—though the laws were frequently ineffective—and saw to the fining or imprisonment, or worse, of every kind of public nuisance from the cutpurse to the gentleman-robber to the tavern-keeper whose sign was so large it interfered with passing traffic.

  But for all the care of English law, and for all the high-mindedness of English guildsmen (who were, after all, protecting their own interests in their attempt to keep up quality), crookedness and violence were standard in the Christian Middle Ages. The more ferocious the punishment, the more ingenious the crooks. Chaucer, Langland, the monk John Lydgate—for that matter, most of the better English poets—tell of the cunning and cynicism of society’s parasites and of the helplessness and fury of decent men undone by them. One vivid description of crooked merchants is John Gower’s in the Mirour de l’Omme (translated here from the original French):

  There is one merchant in these days whose name is on most men’s tongues: Trick is his name, and guile is his nature: though thou seek from the East to the going out of the West, there is no city or good town where Trick doth not amass his ill-gotten wealth. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and sells.…In the mercer’s trade also doth Trick, of his cunning, practice often divers guiles.…Birds of that feather never want a tongue, and Trick is more clamorous than any sparrowhawk: when he seeth strange folks, then shalt thou see him pluck and draw them by the sleeve, calling and crying: “Come,” quoth he, “come in without demur! Beds, kerchiefs, and ostrich feathers—sandals, satins, and stuffs from oversea—come I will show you all. What d’ye lack? Come buy, ye need go no further, for here is the best of all the street.…” Sometimes Trick is a draper.…Men tell us (and I believe it) that whatsoever is dark by nature hateth and avoideth the light: wherefore when I see the draper
in his house, methinks he hath no clear conscience. Dark is the window where he bargaineth with thee, and scarce canst thou tell the green from the blue; dark too are his ways, none may trust his word for the price of his goods. Darkly will he set thee his cloth at double price, and clinch it with an oath; darkly thus will he beguile thee all the worse, for he would persuade that he hath done thee a friendship, wherein he hath the more cozened thee, saying that he hath given thee the stuff at cost price to get thy further custom; but the measure and the market price will tell thee afterwards another tale.…5

  All the poets agree, and so do the surviving court records,6 on the darkness and closeness of the con artists’ shops or the underground dens of alchemists and “jugglers” (conjurers) and on the danger of alleyways and even main streets after curfew rang, where men were murdered for trifling reasons or no reason at all, stabbed by daggers, run over by horsemen, smashed to the ground by a quarter staff or door-bar in an argument over (in one recorded case) ten apples, or robbed and beaten by midnight roisterers in animal masks or the terrifying chalk-white mask of that pagan remnant Robin-o-the-Green, “the lily-white boy.” Those streets were darker than even the worst in New York are now, lighted only by the occasional flimmer of a torch behind iron-barred gates; and they were darker yet, subjectively: there were ghosts in those days, as all commoners knew for a certainty, though educated people were inclined to scoff, and there were preying devils in the shape of men—“passing men,” as Chaucer calls them in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.