by John Gardner
CHAPTER ONE
1 George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1965) pp. 10-16. Various scholars, including J. M. Manly, have argued for a later date—1345 or 1346—mainly on the grounds that Chaucer’s poem the Book of the Duchess, composed not before 1369, is too immature for a poet of almost thirty; but all recent critics of the poem agree that it is in fact one of Chaucer’s minor masterpieces, by no means crude and immature, and some have argued for a date of composition later than 1369, perhaps even 1377 (a bad idea suggested by Michael D. Cherniss in “The Boethian Dialogue in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68.4 [October 1969] 655-65).
Another argument for dating Chaucer’s birth later than 1345 is the fact that, in 1399, he leased a house for fifty-three years at a rental of 53s. 4d. (see Hazel Allison Stevenson, “A Possible Relation Between Chaucer’s Long Lease and the Date of His Birth,” Modern Language Notes 50 [1935] 318-22). By this theory, Chaucer was fifty-three in 1399 and whimsically made use of his age in making up the lease. Williams points out that 53s. 4d. is exactly four marks, and Manly viewed the fifty-three years as the unexpired part of an earlier lease.
Still another argument for a birth date around 1345 is the once standard notion that Chaucer was a page in the household of the countess of Ulster in 1357. Williams’ analysis of this notion is too complex to summarize here, but his conclusion is, rightly, “that the Countess’ household records do not prove, or even lend support to the hypothesis that Chaucer was a page, and therefore a boy under sixteen years of age, in 1357. What the records really show is that he was a minor employee in 1357, and probably not a page” (p. 13).
At a trial in 1386, Chaucer is reported in the official register as having “borne arms for twenty-seven years,” that is, since 1359. Since the king’s levies called up all able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, the court record has been taken as proof that Chaucer first took up arms in 1359 and must therefore have been sixteen. Williams confutes that theory as follows: “As a matter of fact…there had been no military expedition for Chaucer to join (except that Black Prince’s private raid [with his private army] in 1356) since 1355. That is to say, he would have had no occasion to become ‘armeez’ in the king’s service before the autumn of 1359—unless he had been born before the autumn of 1339. What this part of the record shows, therefore, is that Chaucer was at least sixteen years old in the autumn of 1359—but whether just sixteen or several years older, is not indicated” (pp. 13-14). Williams’ argument is not really weakened, it seems to me, by the fact that Englishmen did sometimes slip into the army at fifteen, as the poet’s father seems to have done. Williams concludes: “All that the records permit us to say is that Chaucer was born before 1346. But in view of the fact that he had a responsible position as Prince Lionel’s courier in 1360, and that this position would certainly not have gone to a mere stripling, we must believe that Chaucer was at least twenty years old in 1360. In other words he was born no later than 1340, or possibly early in 1341, and he may have been born a little earlier than 1340” (p. 16).
Manly, Rickert, et al. (Chaucer Life-Records, edited by Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson from materials compiled by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, with the assistance of Lilian J. Redstone and others [Oxford University Press, London, 1966], hereafter cited as Life-Records), in arguments published before Williams’ analysis, would date Chaucer’s birth at “probably nearer 1345 than 1340” (p. 9, n. 1). For their argument, answered above, see Life-Records, pp. 372-4. In 1328, by the way (Speght’s date for the birth of Chaucer), John Chaucer, the poet’s father, was not yet married.
2 John Matthews Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer: Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1926; reprinted by Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1959), pp. 74-5.
3 Life-Records, p. 10.
4 F. J. Furnivall, Life-Records of Chaucer, Part II (Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co., London, 1900), p. vii.
5 Williams, pp. 11-13.
6 G. G. Coulton, in Chaucer and His England (Russell & Russell, New York, 1957), p. 12, follows Mr. V. B. Redstone in taking it as certain that “the poet’s ancestors were chaussiers, or makers of long hose.…”
7 For further details on Chaucer’s early ancestors, see Life-Records, pp. 2-3 and p. 2, n. 2.
8 In giving modern equivalents for medieval sums, I assumed at the time of this writing (mid-July 1974), 1s. = $12.00, £1 = c. $240.00. Even without the added inconvenience of the present inflationary spiral, such estimates are necessarily very rough, since some things cost more in the Middle Ages than now, for instance “buttons” (they were then jewelry), while other things cost much less, for instance timber. George Williams, writing in the mid-sixties, conservatively estimated 1s. = $10.00 (p. 12). The editors of Edith Rickert’s Chaucer’s World (Columbia University Press, New York, 1948), p. 175, n. 57, estimated that the minimum value of a shilling in 1376 was $7.50. Another group of writers calculates that the fourteenth-century pound is now £60.
9 Manly, p. 22.
10 Manly et al., in Life-Records, suggest—unconvincingly, I think—that John Chaucer’s trip may have been a military expedition and that the “John Chaucer” meant in this record may have been that “John de Northwell, son of Agnes Chaucer of London, to whom William de Northwell deeded certain properties in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire” (p. 4). I think John de Northwell (Chaucer’s half brother) was too young, and the nature of the company with whom “John Chaucer” traveled, mostly rich merchants, suggests that the mission was diplomatic, as I argue later.
11 Life-Records of Chaucer, Part 2, pp. 47-8.
12 See Coulton, Chaucer and His England, p. 16.
13 Coulton, pp. 16-17.
14 Coulton, p. 17.
15 Coulton, pp. 19-20.
16 Cf. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer, p. 25, and Life-Records, p. 4, n. 10.
17 Manly, pp. 47-8.
18 Life-Records, p. 5.
19 Even in the Middle Ages, “chivalry” meant different things to different people or in different contexts. In its narrow legal context it meant, in England, the tenure of land by knights’ service, and had nothing to do with morality. In a slightly broader sense it meant, simply, “cavalry“—cf. “chevalier“—and in a still broader sense, the expected behavior of a chevalier or knight. The court of chivalry, created by King Edward III, had jurisdiction in cases of legal and moral offenses by knights in times of war or peace, and apparently made the tacit assumption that a knight’s behavior should at least approach that proposed in the various thirteenth-century French books on chivalry and exemplary biographies of knights. After Edward’s time the court of chivalry dealt mainly with precedence, coats of arms, and so forth. It can be argued that “chivalry” was a word so broad in the fourteenth century that it meant nothing at all; nevertheless, when a knight told a lady, “I is thyn awen knyght,” she was meant to believe him.
20 An Anglo-Norman lament ascribed to Edward II has been discovered and edited by P. Studer, who accepts the ascription (Modern Language Review 16 [1921] 34-46). V. H. Galbraith doubts that the poem is Edward’s (“The Literacy of the Medieval English Knights,” Proceedings of the British Academy 21 [1935] 231, n. 6).
21 May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford University Press, London, 1959), pp. 95-6.
22 See McKisack, p. 63.
23 McKisack, p. 21.
24 Though the Church regarded moneylending at interest as a grave sin, it was common throughout Europe. “Cahorsins” from southern France and “Lombards” from north Italian towns, though ostensibly Christians, openly loaned at interest, sometimes doubling as pawnbrokers loaning on collateral. Jews had done the same until they were expelled from most parts of western Europe in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. German Jews remained in business until the fourteenth-century exterminations. Interest rates were from 20 to 40 per cent, and even so the
rate of failure of moneylenders was astronomical, partly because the code of chivalry did not, in general, extend to businessmen. Evasions of the letter of the law were common: money loaned not for interest but for special favor, the taking of deposits to be repaid on demand and which might be invested in the meantime, and life-insurance gambling, whereby the man who borrowed need pay nothing back if he was lucky enough to die within a specified period of time—a game still popular. See David Nicholas, The Medieval West, 400-1450: A Preindustrial Civilization (The Dorsey Press, Homewood, Illinois, 1973), pp. 137-68, et passim.
CHAPTER TWO
1 See Edith Rickert, Chaucer’s World, edited by Clair C. Olson and Martin M. Crow (Columbia University Press, New York, 1948), pp. 4-7, and for further detail on Vintry Ward tenements, Life-Records, pp. 10-12.
2 Derek Brewer, Chaucer in His Time (Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, 1963), p. 101.
3 See H. S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” Speculum 5 (1930) 343-77.
4 See Rickert, Chaucer’s World, pp. 15-25.
5 From G. G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (Macmillan Company, New York, 1930), pp. 120-1. The translation is Coulton’s.
6 See those collected by Rickert, pp. 13-19, et passim, and in Coulton’s Life in the Middle Ages.
7 Rickert, pp. 95-6.
8 Rickert, p. 97.
9 Rickert, p. 98.
10 G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama: The English Scene from Conquest to Reformation (Macmillan Company, New York, 1938), pp. 105-6.
11 Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, v. 4, p. 210.
12 Coulton, Medieval Panorama, p. 115.
13 Rickert, pp. 101-2.
14 Rickert, p. 119.
15 Rickert, p. 119.
16 See Coulton, Medieval Panorama, pp. 392-3.
17 David Nicholas, The Medieval West, 400-1450: A Preindustrial Civilization (The Dorsey Press, Homewood, Illinois, 1973), p. 217, et passim.
18 Coulton, Medieval Panorama, p. 493.
19 From the Chronicron Henrici Knighton, quoted by R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Macmillan and Company, London, 1970), pp. 59-63.
20 See Rickert, p. 121, n. 33.
21 Brewer, p. 127.
22 For the list of books, see Rickert, pp. 121-2.
23 C. F. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1925), v.1, p. 114.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Marchette Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1946), p. 42.
2 These arguments were first offered by George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1965), pp. 12-13.
3 G. G. Coulton gives glimpses behind the scenes at a mystery play in Life in the Middle Ages (Macmillan Company, New York, 1930), v. 2, pp. 138-42. From fragmentary lists of props, costumes, and so forth, it is possible to calculate the cost of these pageants. A complete set (there would be twenty or more pageants in one day’s playing) could cost considerably more than a modern Broadway play.
4 Froissart tells of a wonderful dream Charles VI had of a “cerf volant”—flying horse. See Haldeen Braddy, Geoffrey Chaucer, Literary and Historical Studies (Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1971), pp. 71-5.
5 Adapted from Froissart by Edith Rickert, Chaucer’s World (New York, 1948), pp. 214-15.
6 F. George Kay, Lady of the Sun: The Life and Times of Alice Ferrers (Barnes & Noble, New York, 1966), 63.
7 Bernard J. Manning, in The Cambridge Medieval History, planned by J. B. Bury and edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton, and Z. N. Brooke (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932), p. 63.
8 Williams, p. 19.
9 G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England (Russell & Russell, New York,
10 Life-Records, p. 17, n. 2.
11 Life-Records, p. 17.
12 Coulton, Chaucer and His England, pp. 22-3.
13 Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, v. 2, p. 91. Cf. O. F. Emerson, Chaucer Essays and Studies (Western Reserve University Press, Cleveland, Ohio, 1929), pp. 182-246.
14 Emerson, pp. 245-6.
15 See T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1892), v. 1, pp. 56-7.
16 Emerson, p. 246.
17 See Life-Records, p. 20.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 J. M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1926; reprinted by Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1959), p. 13.
2 Manly, p. 13.
3 Quotations of Fortescue, here and below, are drawn from Manly, pp. 15-18.
4 For fuller elaboration of these arguments, see George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1965), pp. 20-157, and Manly, pp. 29-30.
5 For more detailed discussion of the Oxford question, see F. P. Magoun, Jr., “Chaucer’s Great Britain,” Medieval Studies 16 (1954) 146; A. Wigfall Green, “Chaucer’s Clerk and the Medieval Scholarly Tradition as Represented by Ric. de Bury’s Philobiblion,” Journal of English Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland) 18 (1951) 1-6.
6 For an interesting contemporary holistic account of why acupuncture (and other things) works, see the transcribed lectures of Michio Kushi, e.g., “Acupuncture,” Ancient and Future Worlds, transcribed by Joan Mansolilli (Tao Publications, 31 Farnsworth St., Boston, Massachusetts, n.d.).
7 Quoted by G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama (Cambridge University Press, London, 1938), p. 402.
8 Coulton, Medieval Panorama, p. 402.
9 For the story, from Adam of Usk’s Chronicon, see Edith Rickert, Chaucer’s World (Columbia University Press, New York, 1948), pp. 131-2.
10 Chaucer in His Time (Nelson, London, 1963).
11 It has occasionally been doubted that the “Philippa Chancy” of the annuity record was Chaucer’s wife and, further, that Chaucer’s wife was Sir Paon Roet’s daughter. It has also been suggested, originally by gremlins, that the Philippa Chaucer who received the annuity was unmarried at the time but chanced to have the same name as the poet. For certain reasons, the argument requires that this lady later did (to end all the tiresome confusion, I suppose) marry Geoffrey Chaucer. All reasonable doubts have been resolved on heraldic grounds by Russell Krauss in “Chaucerian Problems, Especially the Petherton Forestership and the Question of Thomas Chaucer,” in Three Chaucer Studies, ed. Carleton Brown (Folcroft Press, Folcroft, Pennsylvania, 1932, reprinted 1969), pp. 36-7.
12 See Margaret Galway, “Phillipa Pan’, Philippa Chaucer,” Modern Language Review 55 (1960) 481-7, 483, n. 4.
13 Williams, p. 47.
14 Chaucer’s Official Life (G. Banta Publishing Co., Menasha, Wis., 1912), p. 58. Cf. Williams, pp. 33-41. Against Hulbert’s view, see G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England (Russell & Russell, London, 1927), p. 22; George H. Cowling, Chaucer (Methuen and Co., London, 1927), p. 13; G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (Faber and Faber, London, 1932), p. 93; Nevill Coghill, The Poet Chaucer (Oxford University Press, London, 1949), p. 3; and Kemp Malone, Chapters on Chaucer (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1951), p. 22.
15 See Gareth W. Dunleavy, “The Wound and the Comforter: The Consolations of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Papers on Language and Literature 3 (1967) 14-27.
16 Quoted by Krauss, p. 146.
17 Krauss, loc. cit.
18 Krauss, pp. 162-3.
19 Krauss, p. 163.
20 Williams, p. 50.
21 Williams, p. 48.
22 In an entry of May 15, 1372, of the Lancaster Register she receives a grant for “good and agreeable service” to Blanche of Lancaster, who died in 1369. See Krauss, p. 135, n. 11.
23 In a review of Three Chaucer Studies, Speculum 8 (1933) 535.
24 T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, His Life and Writings (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1892), v. 1, pp. 113-14.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Lady of the Sun: The Life and Times of Alice Perrers (Barnes & Noble, New York, 1966).
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2 Geoffrey Chaucer, Literary and Historical Studies (Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1971), p. 111.
3 The version I give is not standard. The standard version is that Alice, cunning and acquisitive to the bone, saw her chance in Windsor, and that Windsor saw a chance of advancement through Alice. The standard version does not fit any of the facts very well, certainly not the fact that Alice risked her neck to save Windsor when he was imprisoned in the Tower. At any rate, Chaucer admired William of Windsor, as did many in Chaucer’s circle.
4 Kay, p. 12.
5 Kay, p. 22.
6 S. Luce (ed.), Chroniques de J. Froissart (Paris, 1888), VIII, 139, n. 3.
7 On this point and others below, see Haldeen Braddy, Geoffrey Chaucer, Literary and Historical Studies, pp. 107-15.
8 Braddy, p. 112.
9 See Manly, Rickert, et al., Life-Records, p. 40.