The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  In fact, the tax did prove collectable, more or less. But the administration of the tax was so crooked that the sum collected proved completely inadequate. In the January parliament of 1380 Lord Richard Scrope, Chancellor, revealed that the poll tax, “together with a similar subsidy granted…by the clergy,” amounted to less than £22,000 at a time when the half-year’s wages of English troops exceeded £50,000. Scrope’s admission of failure resulted in his replacement by Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury. Sudbury brought back the “movables” tax, and he too failed. In a state of desperation, the government called another parliament to assemble at Northampton, deliberately avoiding Westminster because of the government’s known unpopularity in London. Sudbury gave an accurate and depressing picture of how things stood, and the result was the flat three-groat poll tax of 1380.

  It was an act of panic, as Gaunt must have known and as Chaucer must even more surely have known, back in England now, listening to the mutterings of common laborers at the customhouse, talking with seamen as their cargo was unloaded, or musing with thoughtful friends in his house over Aldgate. But Providence had given the government no choice. The graduated tax, though right in principle, had failed miserably, and the Commons was having no more of it. The “movables” tax was to the Commons’ disadvantage, and they wouldn’t accept that either. Gaunt, with his millions, couldn’t understand that the three-groat tax was flatly beyond most peasants’ means. Widespread tax evasion was inevitable, so that the government was forced to fierce measures for collection: an efficient program of evasion-hunting by inquiry commissioners empowered to punish offenders by imprisonment or any means “necessary.” To England’s detriment, the fierce measures worked. By the end of May over £37,000, approximately four-fifths of the total assessment, had reached the Exchequer. But the torch had been set to the powder keg. The shires visited by the king’s commission of inquiry were the shires that exploded into violence. The first to rise were the home counties and East Anglia, partly because the peasants there were the most prosperous and class-conscious, and partly because the old manorial system was there least in force. The outbreaks began in Essex at the end of May 1381, and spread like wildfire over Kent, where Chaucer’s family probably had holdings. There more than elsewhere the tactics of the rebels were those they’d learned as soldiers marauding in France: plunder, arson, and more or less selective murder.

  A brother of Chaucer’s friend and sometime fellow diplomat Sir John Burley—a man by the name of Sir Simon Burley, with whom Chaucer would later serve as justice of the peace and who was at this time beloved old magister of King Richard—is cited in the chronicles as one of the severest of the king’s men. Since Sir Simon was a man with whom Chaucer would be closely involved in later years, one can’t help but wonder what Chaucer thought when he heard of the man’s behavior on this occasion. We’re told:

  Afterwards, on Whit Monday [June 3] Sir Simon de Burley, a knight of the king’s household, came to Gravesend in the company of two of the king’s serjeants-at-arms and there he charged a man with being his own serf. The good men of the town came to Burley to arrange a settlement because of their respect for the king, but Sir Simon would not take less than £300 [$72,000] in silver, a sum which would have ruined the said man. On which the good men of Gravesend requested Burley to mitigate his demand, but they could not come to terms nor reduce the amount, although they told Sir Simon that the man was a Christian and of good repute and so ought not to be ruined forever. Wherefore the said Sir Simon grew angry and irritable, much despising these good townsfolk; and out of the haughtiness of his heart, he made the Serjeants bind the said man and lead him to Rochester castle for safekeeping. Great evil and mischief derived from this action; and after his departure, the commons began to rise, welcoming within their ranks the men of many Kentish townships.8

  In Chaucer’s poetry all extreme positions, especially positions based on self-righteousness, come in for humorous attack, and we may be sure that Burley’s obstinate insistence on what he believed he had coming to him, however his former serf or all England might suffer, would be, in Chaucer’s mind, a piece of drunken stupidity. Though the peasants might sometimes seem, to Chaucer, “a dirty and nasty people” (as George Washington described his Yankee troops), he would have had to say to Burley (if pressed to speak) what he wrote in his ballade Gentilesse:

  The firstë stok, fader of gentilessë— [i.e., Christ]

  What man that claymeth gentil for to be

  Must folowe his trace, and alle his wittës dressë

  Vertu to sewe, and vyces for to flee. [follow]

  For unto vertu longeth dignitee, [belongs]

  And noght the revers, saufly dar I demë, [judge]

  Al were he mytre, croune, or diademë. [Though wear he]

  Since Kent is not a large county and was much less populous in Chaucer’s day than now, Chaucer must have known, with his middle-class Kentish connections, what Burley, coming in as a stranger, could not: the men of Kent were a proud lot, loyal to the king but thoroughly fed up with his high-handed ministers. If Burley imagined that any slightest sign of capitulation on his part might open the floodgate to anarchy, he was mistaken. His intransigeance confirmed Kent’s worst suspicions about men of Burley’s kind, and so the Kent war was on. Burley was dealing not with ungrateful peasants but with men inspired, men with strong leaders like Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball. The peasants of Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Bedfordshire tore down houses, burned barns and fields, and, according to Froissart, marched on London in an army of sixty thousand men to join the oppressed and angry journeymen of the city.

  Chaucer, in his house over Aldgate, watched them come. What he thought of it he does not say. He mentions the affair in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, comically comparing the outcry of an old widow, her two daughters, and all their farm animals (when their rooster is stolen by a wicked fox) to the hideous noise of “Jakkë Straw and his meynée [retinue]” as they rush to murder Flemings:

  This sely wydwe and eek hir doghtres two [humble]

  Herden thise hennës crie and maken wo,

  And out at dorës stirten they anon,

  And syën the fox toward the grovë gon, [see]

  And bar upon his bak the cok away,

  And cryden, “Out! harrow! and weylaway!

  Ha! ha! the fox!” and after hym they ran,

  And eek with stavës many another man.

  Ran Colle ourë dogge, and Talbot and Gerland,

  And Malkyn, with a dystaf in hir hand;

  Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hoggës,

  So ferëd for the berkyng of the doggës

  And shoutyng of the men and wommen eekë,

  They ronnë so hem thoughte hir hertë breekë.

  They yolleden as feendës doon in hellë;

  The dokës cryden as men wolde hem quellë;

  The gees for feerë flowen over the treës;

  Out of the hyvë cam the swarm of beës.

  Sy hydous was the noyse, a, benedicitée! [bless ye]

  Certës, he Jakkë Straw and his meynée

  Ne madë nevere shoutës half so shrillë

  Whan that they wolden any Flemyng killë,

  As thilkë day was maad upon the fox. [that]

  Of bras they broghten bemës, and of box,

  Of horn, of boon, in whichë they blewe and powpëd,

  And therwithal they skrikëd and they howpëd—

  It semëd as that hevenë sholde fallë! [shrieked and whooped]

  With all its mock-epic machinery, its rush of rhythms, the passage is as full of merry turbulence as anything Chaucer ever wrote, but the allusion to the Peasants’ Revolt is brief, and even the surrounding comic allusions to the terrible yelling of fiends in hell and the final destruction of all the world do not tell us much about Chaucer’s real feelings. One can guess them, probably. Philippa Chaucer was herself a Fleming, and as the wife of a friend of John of Gaunt, “the most hated man in England,” at least by commoners,
her danger, as well as Chaucer’s, was real enough.

  The peasants’ success in 1381 resulted only in part from their violence, though they were violent enough. The men they opposed, the king’s chief ministers, had the misfortune of being, on the whole, fair-minded men, not men like Simon Burley. Archbishop Sudbury, the king’s chancellor, brought into government from his quiet life in Canterbury because of his reputation for wisdom and saintliness, was a reasonable and gentle man. As Professor Oman has written of him, “he would probably have been enrolled among the martyrs of the English calendar if only he had been more willing to make martyrs himself.” He refused to crush Wyclif’s supposed heresy because Wyclif’s arguments encouraged reflection. He handled the king’s affairs, including tax collection, without a trace of corruption, as did his colleague, the treasurer, Sir John Hales, “a magnanimous knight, though the Commons loved him not.” Such men could not deal with the rise of the peasants because the peasants, they knew, had a partly valid point. They stalled and mused and struggled to do right, and by the time it was over the peasants, after loud, angry speeches, had chopped off their heads.

  The failure of both the city of London and the royal government to crush the revolt in its early stages was a result of this same hesitancy and confusion. The time was the very pattern of the contemporary catastrophe Yeats describes: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are filled with passionate intensity.” The king’s advisers were aware of the widespread sympathy the rebels had from the city’s lower classes, and they undoubtedly disagreed fiercely among themselves about what should be done. Men influenced by Gaunt’s ideas and patronage favored moderation (Gaunt himself was away in Scotland, working on peace negotiations which, because of the riots, came to nothing); men like the king’s old mentor Simon Burley favored increasing sternness. In the end they apparently decided that their only hope must be a policy of conciliation. They began with an attempt to treat with the rebels, the king, his chancellor, treasurer, and personal retainers setting out by water from the Tower to meet with them. But the rebels looked wild and dangerous, pitchforks raised, longbows armed, battle rags flying—they had already demanded the heads of Gaunt and the chief officers of the state—and the royal barge turned back in alarm. Frustrated in his desire to speak with the king and knowing that his men were running short of supplies, Wat Tyler led his army up to Southwark, where they opened up the prison, destroyed one of the marshal’s houses, then pushed on to Lambeth to burn the Chancery records, including their prime target, records of villeinage. They went from there to London Bridge and, with help from within, invaded the city; then on to Fleet Street, where they opened the prison, and on to the New Temple to burn lawyers’ rolls and lawyers’ houses and the houses of state officials. The Londoners, meanwhile, were destroying the most beautiful house in all England, where Philippa had served and Chaucer had often been in attendance, John of Gaunt’s palace of Savoy. Gaunt’s splendid furnishings, stained glass, plate, jewels, and magnificent clothes were trampled under foot and burned or cast into the Thames. Gunpowder did the rest, leaving the palace black rubble. There was no looting, probably on Tyler’s order. The rebels were not thieves or robbers, they said, but zealots for truth and justice. One man caught stealing a silver piece was hurled with his prize into the flames.

  Young King Richard, in the Tower, watching the city catch fire around him, appealed in vain for advice from his advisers and at last, taking the reins in his own hands (if we believe contemporary chronicles), pardoned the rebels, promised them redress of their grievances, and commanded them to meet him the following morning at Mile End. He kept his word, and when he and his small party arrived there, the great crowd knelt, saying, “Welcome, King Richard! We wish for no other king but you.” He promised, with sincerity, that he would gladly punish any “traitors to the realm”—by which the peasants meant people like Gaunt and customs controller Geoffrey Chaucer—if they could be proved such by law. But even as he spoke, it was too late for law. Another mob of peasants was now storming the Tower, where apparently by the policy of conciliation six hundred men-at-arms and six hundred archers stood back to let them through. They ransacked the privy wardrobe where the royal arms were stored and, unchecked by disciplinarians like Tyler, invaded the bedchambers and “attempted familiarities” with plump and terrified old Princess Joan, wife of the Black Prince and mother of the king, then found Sudbury, Hales, and others at their prayers and hurried them away to execution.

  Yet Richard’s moderation had done some good. Great crowds had left London, believing his Mile End promises, and those who remained—Wat Tyler’s segment of the rabble army—Richard went out to meet the following day at Smithfield. Once again, King Richard was the hero of the hour. The story is beautifully told by Walsingham, but I must give a slightly altered version which is probably, all things considered, more nearly the truth.9

  Wat (Walter) Tyler, a Kentish ex-soldier, was a fierce and intelligent revolutionary, though not in our modern sense, since what he sought was a return to the old days, the old ways, direct communication between commoner and king in a hierarchic universe, not “universal freedom” in our modern sense but the freedom of understanding and mutual respect between king and subject. In our time he would have wished to throw down the government entirely, perhaps, but he was a fourteenth-century man who believed with all his soul in the king, though he hated the king’s ministers. Walsingham is therefore probably right that Tyler wanted (and thought the king wanted) “a commission for [Tyler] and his men to execute all lawyers, escheators and others who had been trained in the law or dealt in the law because of their office.” It is probably true, as Walsingham says, that: “He believed that once all those learned in the law had been killed, all things would henceforward be regulated by the decrees of the common people.” He wanted, in other words, not tricky statutes and the deadly art of lawyerese, but law by “plain sense,” common law as the peasants and men like the legendary Beowulf understood it.

  When Tyler arrived at Smithfield to deal with the king, he was met not by the king, as promised, but by a knight, Sir John Newfield, who came up to him on an armed warhorse to hear what he might say. According to Walsingham, “Tyler grew indignant because the knight had approached him on horseback and not on foot, and furiously declared that it was more fitting to approach his presence on foot than by riding on a horse.” Tyler drew his knife, and Newfield drew his sword. Not because he “could not bear to be so insulted before his rustics” but because he hated “gentlerymen” and had principle behind him, Tyler kept his ground, prepared to fight.

  As King Richard saw Sir John’s danger and wished to calm Wat Tyler’s rage, he sternly ordered Sir John to descend from his horse and hand over the sword he had drawn on Wat. Newfield obeyed. But Tyler, Walsingham says, was still urgent to kill. Perhaps that is true; men do odd things when enraged; yet what follows is curiously slow, curiously deliberate, and, since it is the merchant class that dispatches Wat Tyler, head of the laborers’ army, looks a little like plain murder.

  [T]he Mayor of London, William Walworth [fat, crooked Walworth, customs collector under Geoffrey Chaucer and close associate of collector Nick Brembre, who once hanged twenty-two of his enemies from one tree] and many royal knights and squires who were standing near came up to the king; for they believed it would have been shameful, unprecedented and intolerable if, in their presence, the king had allowed a noble knight to fall before him to so shameful a death…

  On this the king, although a boy of tender age, took courage and ordered the mayor of London to arrest Tyler. The mayor, a man of incomparable spirit and bravery [!] arrested Tyler without question and struck him a blow on the head which hurt him sore. Tyler was soon surrounded by the other servants of the king and pierced by sword thrusts in several parts of his body.

  From which he died. Wat Tyler had been misled by a kind of idealism. He believed he could talk to the king and win justice—as perhaps he might have if he’d found the king alone.
His luck was bad, but then, so was Richard’s, who by all accounts had no wish to see Tyler killed.

  The peasants who stood watching the attempt at truce saw the murder and cried out, according to Walsingham: “Our captain is dead; our leader has been treacherously killed. Let us stay here together and die with him; let us fire our arrows and staunchly avenge his death!” If they had done so, the king might himself have been killed; and before it was all over, Richard would wonder if that might not have been better. However, the king, with marvelous presence of mind (Walsingham says), and with striking courage for so young a man, spurred his horse toward the peasants and rode amongst them, saying, “What is this, my men? What are you doing? Surely you do not wish to shoot your king? For I will be your king, your captain and your leader! Follow me!”

  It was a trick, according to contemporary chronicles and according to most historians from that time to this. Richard’s purpose, we are told, was to lead the rustics away from Smithfield where they might set fire to the houses. But that is surely a half-truth. Though worried about Smithfield, Richard was in earnest. Like the ancient King Alfred, to whom he looked as one of his models, Richard believed and would believe all his life that “the lesser people” were his strength and responsibility. In the end, in fact, he would die trying to raise among them an army to oppose his magnates.

  Nevertheless, the bargains he struck with his rioting peasants were all undone by the magnates around him and by his wise old advisers, including Burley and London’s Mayor Walworth. For their faith in the young king’s promises, the peasants were rewarded by being hanged, drawn, and quartered, or beheaded—the punishment for treason. John of Gaunt, usually a force of moderation in the royal counsel, was still stranded up north and would remain there for months, and even had he been in London, he’d no doubt have been helpless. The king, in making his just and idealistic promises, had had no idea of the degree to which his government was indeed corrupt, or the extent to which those around him, men he loved (John of Gaunt, Simon Burley, or the court’s star poet), were compromised. If the angelically beautiful, blue-eyed king had delivered on his promises, he would have found himself a man without family or friends, or no friends but such men as “the mad priest of Kent.” More cynical yet ultimately more moderate counsel prevailed, to the good young king’s bafflement and sorrowful indignation.