The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Evidence that Chaucer, serving under Lionel, was with the Black Prince, not in Edward’s main army, and that after his capture and ransom he returned to the service of Prince Lionel, for whom he carried letters back to England from Calais (for which he was paid £24 10s. 8d.), supports Lounsbury’s impression that the king’s contribution may not have made up the whole ransom, and that Prince Lionel must also have contributed. Be that as it may, Chaucer was ransomed swiftly, as these things went. He probably rejoined the army at Guillon in Burgundy, carried Lionel’s letters, then returned with answers, and after the treaty of Brétigny, on May 18, sailed home with the king’s sons to England.16

  King Edward’s victory was illusory, like so many victories throughout Edward’s reign—won on the battlefield, where the English were supreme, but allowed to slip away at the conference table, where no one, not even Earl Henry, could match the subtle French. Treaty negotiations dragged on for some time. (It was probably letters involving Lionel’s private affairs, not, as some have thought, letters concerning the treaty, that Chaucer took to England.)17 The ransom now finally set for King John was £30 million ($7,200 million), but England was never to get more than a trickle of it; and when spring came in earnest, and Edward was about to resume his attack on Paris and close the war, his army was struck by a freak April storm. According to Holinshed, by the end of that “Black Monday,” huge hailstones and interminable ground-lightning flashes had killed or injured a thousand knights and six thousand horses. Shaken to the boots by religious fear, Edward vowed to make peace then and there and renounced before God all claim to the crown of France. He later changed his mind.

  As for Chaucer, numerous scholars have suggested that having seen what he had seen of war, he may have had second thoughts about glory, at least where he was concerned. All things considered, that’s unlikely. Chaucer was a gentle human being, that’s true. But nowhere in his poetry does he draw back from violence, either the formal violence of war or jousting or the violence of an old drunken miller and a pair of Cambridge clerks. He was an Englishman. He wore his sword proudly, we may be sure—he would never have been embraced in courtly circles, otherwise—and when he swung it, after training as a courtier, he swung it with a measure of style and murderous intent. But now the time for swinging swords was temporarily over. Whether at the promptings of some royal patron or by his own inclination—probably both—he apparently settled down (more or less) and became a student. Prince Lionel stormed off to Ireland to make trouble for the natives. Chaucer bowed his humble good-byes, kissed the countess on both cheeks, and went hunting for books.

  Four: Chaucer’s Further Education, a Summary of Some Fourteenth-Century Ideas of Great Importance to Chaucer, and the Poet’s Marriage to Philippa Roet—Speculations and Scurrilous Gossip (1360-1367)

  IT WAS ONCE COMMON FOR BIOGRAPHERS TO SUPPOSE that Chaucer was with Lionel in Ireland until the end of 1367, when Lionel returned to England. That idea has been abandoned by most Chaucerians for three reasons: the absence of all mention of Ireland in his poetry, except one use of a generally Irish motif in the Wife of Bath’s Tale; the strong circumstantial evidence that he was studying in London some of this time, or perhaps London and then Oxford; and the recent discovery that he was granted safe-conduct as king’s “esquire” (a rank higher than vallettus if the word is used technically, as in this case it probably was not) for travel to Navarre, in northern Spain, from February 22 to May 24, 1366. (The record of this grant of safe-conduct was published in 1890 but recognized as referring to Chaucer only in 1955.) Lacking other information, early biographers kept Chaucer busy composing his English translation of the French Roman de la Rose and assigned him a tragic unrequited love anguish of eight years’ duration, perhaps directed toward Gaunt’s wife Blanche. Chaucer probably did do his translation of the Roman at about this time, though it hardly took seven years; and as I’ve said already, he probably did in some sense love Blanche, though it’s highly improbable that for eight long years he adored her or anyone else from afar without revealing his love (as he claims in the Book of the Duchess)—improbable, in fact, that he loved Blanche of Lancaster in that way. Chaucer’s self-portrait in the Book of the Duchess is a comic caricature designed to contrast with his portrait of the true and successful lover, John of Gaunt, and we may feel sure that whatever love he may have felt for Blanche he felt equally—judging by the poem—for her husband.

  If Chaucer was at all like a modern man, the missing six years, from the time he was twenty-one to the time he was twenty-seven, were among the most interesting and rewarding of his life. They gave him his higher education; they left him in a position to be called, in a record dated June 20, 1367, “dilectus valettus noster”—our beloved yeoman—by King Edward; they led him, probably by devious paths, to marriage with a lady of noble birth; and they won him, as patron and personal friend, the magnificent John of Gaunt. Perhaps more important than all the rest, they were the years of Chaucer’s poetic apprenticeship.

  Chaucer must have been, repeatedly, a member of the audience where poetry was read—at royal courts, in obscure country manors from just outside London clear to Lancashire, or in the wide, well-lit chambers of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace—intently studying not only the poems but their presentation as well, the subtle alterations of voice and gesture that made this so basically an oral poetry. He may perhaps have lingered with other young “enditers” afterward, not intending to speak or ask questions himself, but eager to hear what silver-haired, black-robed Froissart might have to say, or the latest celebrated visitor from the continent, perhaps the young lyricist and shaper of dream poems, Eustace Deschamps, with whom, years later, Chaucer would exchange works. Young Chaucer could be found, from time to time, in one of the dining halls that served the inns of court, at one of which inns he was studying law—could be found, perhaps, absent-mindedly reaching for his pewter mug, head craned toward a parchment extended in his direction by a short, dour man we recognize at last as his fellow law student and future fellow poet in the court of King Richard, “moral” John Gower. (The poem runs on and on.)

  The early poems of Chaucer—poems like his loose translation from French, the ABC(and by his own account he did other translations)—show talent, wit, linguistic felicity, and show too, of course, his willingness to learn his craft in the expected manner: in the Middle Ages as in the eighteenth century, translation and imitation of great older poems were the normal first steps toward a career as an original poet. His most important translation, the Romance of the Rose, taught him many of the techniques he would use all his life: how to create vivid allegorical figures and conventional landscapes with such original touches as would make them an extension of tradition, a lively combination of the old and the new; how to organize a long, complex poem; and above all, perhaps, how to achieve the essential of great poetry, a unique poetic voice. Partly driven by necessity, translating from a melic tongue abounding in rhymes to a less fluid language where rhymes were scant, Chaucer learned an easy, colloquial style that would serve him faithfully from that moment on, becoming, as the years passed, richer, more subtle, more capable of both comic irony and pathos, even of epic high seriousness. Notice the effortless colloquialism here, in a passage of Chaucer’s Romance of the Rose that he would borrow later for the Book of the Duchess.

  Thesë trees werë set, that I devysë,

  Oon from another, in assysë, [in measure]

  Fyvë fadome or sixe, I trowë so;

  But they were hye and great also,

  And for to kepe out wel the sonnë,

  The croppës were so thicke yronnë, [crops (twigs)]

  And every braunche in other knet, [knitted]

  And ful of grenë levës set,

  That sonnë myght there non discendë,

  Lest [it] the tender grassës shende. [hurt]

  Or here:

  About the brinkes of these wellës,

  And by the stremës overal ellës,

  Sprang up the grass, as thicke
yset

  And softe as any veluët [velvet]

  On which men myght his lemman leyë, [sweetheani]

  As on a fetherbed to pleyë…

  Here we have already the authoritative voice of the mature poet. With his first reading of his delightful English version of the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s reputation was established. Even so, probably no one was prepared for his first great full-length original poem. The Book of the Duchess is a masterpiece, and Chaucer must have known it. When it first appeared, it was a work as original, as deeply felt, and as “difficult,” as T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Aesthetically at least, one can speak no longer, after this splendid poem, of “the young Chaucer.” From this point on, he would write as a master with only one important technical problem left to solve—the problem all first-rate poets must solve: how to simplify. Blanche of Lancaster died in 1369, and Chaucer probably wrote his elegy soon after. It was largely during the “lost years” that he learned how to do it. Whatever his love of war, diplomacy, flirtation, and the rest, nothing in his life can have surpassed the excitement of beginning to penetrate “the craft so long to lernë.”

  Upon returning, ransomed, from the war in France, Chaucer went to what we may loosely call law school. Some scholars still think this a matter of uncertainty, but there are numerous reasons for believing it. For one thing, we have records from 1395 and 1396 in which he signs as “attorney”; for another, in his prose and poetry Chaucer makes easy use of terms that, in the fourteenth century, no one but a man with some training in law would be likely to know—terms like those found in the Reeve’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee, which is riddled with such language. Whereas a modern writer can easily bone up on philosophy, biochemistry, psychology, or whatever he may please, having available large libraries of books, a medieval poet had to learn arcane matter by rote under a teacher or from manuscripts linguistically and otherwise obscure, as well as virtually unobtainable except by professionals, since knowledge at the time tended to be prized as occult, the property of jealous guardian “masters.”

  Moreover, all of Chaucer’s jobs in later life were jobs which, normally, only people with legal training held. J. M. Manly describes a study made by two of his students:

  The personnel of nearly four hundred [diplomatic missions like Chaucer’s to Genoa] was investigated. About eighty of them contain members concerning whose social status and business training no information has been discovered, but in all cases in which it is possible to ascertain facts, that is, about three hundred and twenty, it appears that the last-named member of the commission is always a person who has some legal training. It seems, therefore, not an unfair assumption that the frequency with which Chaucer was chosen for such negotiations was due…to his possession of special [legal] qualifications for the work.1

  Manly’s most telling argument has to do with an ancient tradition that Chaucer once beat up a friar. In his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works, Thomas Speght said, “Yt semethe that these lerned menne [Chaucer and John Gower] were of the Inner Temple [for the training of lawyers], for that, manye yeres since, master Buckley did see a recorde in the same howse, where Geffrye Chaucer was fined two shillinges for beatinge a Franciscane Fryer in fletestreate [Fleet Street].” The record Master Buckley saw was later destroyed, perhaps by angry peasants in 1381, but Buckley’s account was accepted as true, or at least as probable, by Sir William Dugdale and later writers on the inns of court. It was rejected by an early Chaucerian Francis Thynne, in his Animadversions on Speght’s edition, but his information was faulty. He believed Chaucer was born in 1328 and thus too “grave” a man to go beating up friars, and he believed that the teaching of law in the Temple began after 1370, whereas in fact law was taught there as early as 1347.

  For these reasons and others, Buckley’s account may be accepted as true. Buckley was the one man in England, Manly shows, whose particular business it was to have seen such a record if it existed. He was not only a member of the Society of the Temple but the official charged with preservation and care of the Temple records. Moreover, the fine Chaucer paid for his assault on the friar was appropriate for the time and place. No Temple records survive, but study of the records of Lincoln’s Inn, a similar institution, has shown that “fighting and other disorderly conduct were among the offenses most frequently subject to fines, and that the fines imposed ranged commonly from 1s. 3d. to 3s. 8d.”2

  So the strong likelihood is that while Chaucer was studying at the Inner Temple, which at that time lay just outside the city, bounded by Fleet Street on the north, he encountered some friar, perhaps from the convent just inside the city gate, and had words with him, and eventually gave him a knock. Various scholars have pointed out that as a student seriously concerned with knowledge, Chaucer could find plenty to dislike in your average fourteenth-century friar. Though sworn to poverty, friars were often the favorites of princes—the Black Prince, among others, gave them extravagant gifts—and managed to amass such wealth as to make their wills run for pages and pages. Though notorious paraders of knowledge—some with good reason—many of the later fourteenth-century friars whose histories and opinions come down to us were humbly born, ill-educated men whose claim to scholarship cannot have been very impressive to the truly learned.

  Whatever Chaucer thought of friars in general, the one friar he has immortalized in the Canterbury Tales is a dreadful man indeed, a fornicator, as Chaucer slyly hints through such puns as “a noble post,” and perhaps a homosexual as well as a heterosexual, if “famulier” is a double entendre; he is a false confessor who cares more for payment than repentance, a man who actively eschews his main responsibility, ministry to the poor and ill, and who finds abhorrent his order’s vow of poverty; a man, finally (as the Summoner of the Tales makes the pilgrims believe), who is one of the stupidest clerics in all merry England. Attacking friars was something of a literary convention in Chaucer’s day and might also appeal to Chaucer because he sympathized with John Wyclif, who at almost exactly the time Chaucer was writing his General Prologue was in angry disputation with several Franciscans and was attacking the order’s very existence as unwarranted by scripture. But however natural or conventional the lampoon against friars, no other literary attack can hold a candle to Chaucer’s.

  A Frerë ther was, a wantowne and a meryë [sportive (wanton)]

  A lymytour, a ful solempne man.

  In allë the ordres foure is noon that kan [one who begged within a designated area(?)]

  So muchel of daliaunce and fair langagë.

  He haddë maad ful many a marriagë

  Of yongë wommen at his owenë cost.

  Unto his ordre he was a noblë post!

  Ful wel biloved and famulier was he

  With frankeleyns over al in his contree, [the climbing class just below

  And eek with worthy wommen of the toun; knights, often accused

  For he haddë power of confessioun, of prissiness if not

  As seyde hymself, moorë than a curat, homosexuality]

  For of his ordre he was licenciat. [licensed (licentious)]

  Ful swetely herde he confessioun,

  And pleasaunt was his absolucioun:

  He was an esy man to yevë penauncë,

  Ther as he wistë to have a good pitauncë.…

  He knew the tavernes wel in every toun

  And everich hostiler and tappesterë [innkeeper and barmaid]

  Bet than a lazar or a beggesterë; [leper or begger]

  For unto swich a worthy man as he

  Accorded nat, as by his facultee,

  To havë with sikë lazars aqueyntauncë. [sick]

  It is nat honest, it may nat avauncë

  For to deelen with no swich poraillë [poor people]

  But al with riche and sellerës of vitaillë.… [victuals]

  There nas no man nowher so vertuous:

  He was the bestë beggere in his housë.…

  For thogh a wydwe haddë noght a sho, [shoe]


  So plesaunt was his “In principio,”

  Yet wolde he have a ferthyng, er he wentë. [farthing (fair thing?)]

  His purchas was wel bettre than his rentë… [income.…expenses]

  His eyen twynkled in his heed aryght, [eyes]

  As doon the sterrës in the frosty nyght.

  This worthy lymytour was clepëd Huberd. [named]

  To some Chaucerians, Chaucer’s usually gentle nature makes the story of his beating a friar seem unbelievable. It helps to remember that the poet’s father John Chaucer, though a stable citizen respected by the courts, was apparently involved in a tavern fight even at the mature age of forty, and that Geoffrey, like his father, was a wine drinker. He was of course no alcoholic—he left too much poetry and held too many positions of responsibility—but students did in the fourteenth century occasionally get drunk, as did kings. And so it may be that on his way down Fleet Street (toward nightfall, let us say, the nightingales in the vines and the thrushes in the oak trees just beginning their evening calls, and from half a mile away, where there were hedged country fields, a lowing of cattle waiting by barn doors for milkmen), young Chaucer and several somewhat flushed Temple friends fell in with a friar whose opinions struck young Geoffrey, the more he thought them over, as dangerous, immoral, and unreasonable. Then again, of course, Chaucer may have been perfectly sober. Part of his greatness as a poet resides in his sure sense of right and wrong, his nose for the excessive; and we know that in political life he was a man of great loyalty to principles and people he believed in. The Temple authorities were sufficiently in agreement with Chaucer’s point of view on the friar that they let him off with a nominal fine, a mere two shillings and, probably, a warning that he be, in the future, more discreet.