by Mary Malloy
“I found an interesting article for you in Nature from 1998,” it began. “Some scientists, who ordinarily use computer models to trace the DNA family trees of biological specimens, teamed up with some Chaucer scholars and they analyzed all the surviving manuscript versions of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue with very interesting results.”
She went on to describe the methodology of the research. Eighty-eight manuscript copies of The Canterbury Tales survive that were made before 1500. They are all different, many are just fragments, and 58 of them include the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The most important of these manuscripts, and the ones most often used as sources for published editions, are the Ellesmere manuscript at the Huntington Library in California, and the Hengwrt manuscript at the National Library in Wales.
“The Ellesmere is perhaps the more famous,” Jackie wrote, “because it includes wonderful little portraits of the pilgrims, painted in the early part of the fifteenth century. We looked at these before you left.”
The purpose of the elaborate computer project was to see if it was possible to find Chaucer’s “last, best” version of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue from the Tales, which were unfinished at the time of his death.
The researchers concluded that the Wife was most outrageous in the earliest versions and thereafter was, according to Jackie’s source, “really a woman struggling to keep her appetites within the confines of Christian marriage.... She is still outrageous, but with hankerings after respectability . . . arguably a more subtle, more satisfyingly rounded portrait.”
Lizzie printed the message and took it instantly to Alison. “How do you like this?” she asked. Jackie had included a link to an article in the British newspaper The Independent from 1998, which summed up the research.
A scientific analysis of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue has revealed that Geoffrey Chaucer changed his mind about a key passage in the tale that has blackened the lady’s character forever. The passage, where the Wife of Bath says she satisfies her sexual appetite with whatever man she can, was meant to have been deleted from a working draft of The Canterbury Tales but was instead copied into subsequent manuscripts after Chaucer had died.
The 26 lines in the passage turned the Wife of Bath into a “monster of carnality” according to scholars, but Chaucer had a change of heart over his original description of her character, say scientists.
This was interesting news for Alison.
“Do you like Chaucer better for having at least thought about cleaning the character up a bit?” Lizzie asked her.
“Perhaps.”
“There is still the tale she tells though,” Lizzie said. “That may be the cruelest thing of all that he did to her.”
“There has been scholarship on that as well, of course, and some debate if the tale we now associate with her was the one Chaucer intended for her to tell.”
They talked of these things as they walked that morning around Bath. Alison pointed out to Lizzie those parts of the place that survived from ancient and Roman times, and from the age described in Jane Austen’s novels in the late eighteenth century.
“Unfortunately, most of the medieval parts of the town have been so altered as to be unrecognizable, so you are not seeing much of Bath as it was known to the Weaver.” She explained that the abbey had been so extensively renovated over time that little of the original fabric was visible, and the whole impressive and elaborate structure of the Roman Baths had been excavated in the nineteenth century, after sitting under other buildings for more than a thousand years. “The Weaver probably lived right on top of all this and didn’t even know it was there.”
They had spoken of Jane Austen when they looked at the maps to plan the route and now spoke of her again. Alison had often taught her books and Lizzie had read them ardently since she was in high school. She was pleased to think again about Austen’s first and last novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which were largely set in Bath. They had lunch at the Pump Room, where Austen had set so many scenes of elegant people drinking the sulfurous water that bubbled up from the Roman baths beneath them.
“The surviving architecture makes it so easy to imagine myself here with Anne Elliot or Catherine Moreland,” Lizzie said, mentioning two of her favorite Austen heroines. “I’m sorry we can’t feel that with the Weaver and her age.”
“You don’t feel it here,” Alison said. “But you will along the path. The cathedral at Wells and a street near it are very well preserved and will give you a wonderful sense of that past.”
It was a reminder that Lizzie must be soon embarking on the walk. In the next few days, she and Alison scouted several places by car to see how the paths looked. They acknowledged that much of the route taken by the Weaver would have been along what were now the paved roads, but Lizzie was unhappy at the prospect of walking on them. They looked dangerous to her. Generally just over one lane wide, they were bound by a high hedge on each side and there were enough curves that the visibility ahead was seldom more than a few car lengths. Add to that the fact that the steep shoulder, or “verge” as Alison called it, was covered with a prickly vegetation, and that people drove very fast, and Lizzie felt that she would be safer if she could stay on the footpaths.
“Obviously we don’t have enough information for me to follow the Weaver’s tracks exactly,” she said. “If there are some places where you think it is necessary for me to be on the road I will, of course, walk there, but I would prefer not to.”
“My objective is to explain to modern readers the process of this pilgrimage,” Alison answered, “and to prove that the Weaver traveled the path. We can make some logical assumptions about how she traveled between places, but we can only speak with certainty of those places either mentioned in the journal or shown on the tapestry; everything else is speculation.”
“And she had a horse,” Lizzie added. She was reminded of this by an illustration from the Ellesmere manuscript that Jackie had attached to her email.
The few days remaining before Lizzie’s departure went rapidly. She and Alison scouted as much of the first few days that could be done in a car, and Alison pointed out where the footpaths left the road to go across fields. At the road end they were well enough marked, but Lizzie wasn’t convinced they would continue that way once she had tromped out of sight of the road.
The evening before her departure, Edmund and George joined them for dinner and once again the maps came out and she and Alison traced the path with them.
“If you are traveling down this road through Inglesbatch, I see you have a ‘piggery’ to pass through,” Edmund said with a smile.
Lizzie did not smile back. “That looks a lot more amusing if you are not about to walk through it in an expensive pair of the finest walking shoes ever made.”
“Would you like a companion on your first day?”
This was not the first time that Edmund had offered to accompany her on her walk, but as much as she would have enjoyed his company, she felt that the uncertainties of the first few days should not have witnesses. “In a few weeks I would love that,” she answered warmly. Rejecting his company did not mean that she was unwilling to enumerate her fears for what might happen to her on the walk. “The number of ways that I could get hurt are many,” she said. “I could get bitten by a dog, gored by a bull, hit by a car, stung by a bee—”
Edmund interrupted her. “That last one I can help you with,” he said, handing her a package. “I made up a first aid kit for you and it can help with some of the minor scrapes and bruises, and with an allergic reaction if you have one.” He reminded her that she could call him on her cell phone and he could be to her within hours. “No matter where you are, no matter what time it is,” he said. He made her acknowledge him. “I’m serious,” he repeated, “any time.”
She thanked him, knowing he would rescue her if she needed it, but she hoped she wouldn’t.
The next day, Lizzie marched out the door of Alison’s house, put her feet on the road toward Wells, and began
the adventure she had anticipated and feared for months.
Chapter 12
Lizzie was not so naïve as to believe that all the public footpaths in England would be paved, but she had allowed herself to indulge in some fantasies of hard-packed dirt paths, possibly shaded by boughs arching overhead. She was, consequently, disappointed to find that for her first morning there was almost no path at all that could be found on the Ordnance Survey map to take her from Inglesbatch to Chewton Mendip, the halfway point to Wells. Determined as she was not to walk on the roads, she decided to depend on local knowledge and consequently when she arrived in Inglesbatch she asked a couple working in their garden about local footpaths to Chewton Mendip.
“You can just walk right along this road and you’ll be there,” the woman answered.
Lizzie explained that she was trying to avoid the road, and though the Inglesbatchians were clearly perplexed by that, the man took the map from her, determined to help. He pointed to a curve in the road and told her to go straight at that point “past the piggery, turn into the field and then cross it down to the stream to pick up the path. If you walk along the stream you’ll find a proper bridge.”
She spent a few minutes chatting with the couple before she left them. They had a small farm and a B&B, and they pointed out their seventeenth-century stone barn and described the problems of fitting modern farm machinery into it. They were the first farmers Lizzie met in England and they set a very high standard of intelligence and historical knowledge. There was nothing the least bit rural or provincial about them and the fact that they seemed skeptical of the whole walking enterprise gave Lizzie pause. When she could no longer delay her departure by discussion she adjusted her pack, and set off toward the piggery.
She felt good, strong. The countryside had an exotic quality that was exhilarating and the weather was perfect for walking. When she got to the curve of the road there was no indication of any kind of a public footpath, and two mangy dogs came out of nowhere to bark at her. Still, she was upbeat and energetic. Even the piggery failed to darken her day, though the road was thick with a deep, black, swiney muck. The Mephisto walking shoes that she had paid $300 for in Boston were now worth about three bucks, she thought as she approached the field described by the farmer.
There were actually two fields, a nearer one populated by horses, and another beyond with tall grass; they were divided by a fence and ran down a steep slope to the stream shown clearly on the map. As there was nothing to indicate a public footpath, Lizzie hesitated to walk through the horse field, as it was so clearly private property. The wild and uncultivated look of the next field on made it seem like it must be freer of access to the public and for that reason she chose it.
The grass was knee-height, slick and steep, with an unseen and uneven footing. On the downhill climb Lizzie found that her pack made her unsteady. She tried once to grab onto a fencepost for support, but the fence itself was made of barbed wire and was no help. In trying to avoid grabbing the barbed wire she missed her footing and fell. It was only when she had struggled almost to the bottom of the hill that she fully comprehended the implications of the barbed wire fence. She would have to climb over it to travel along the stream in the right direction.
Near the stream, a small tree offered something to hang onto as she tossed her pack over the fence and followed. This, she thought, as she scrambled gracelessly across, was the reason that she wanted no witnesses until she better knew her strengths and weaknesses. Only the horses were there—their big dark eyes looked at her disinterestedly, as if awkward women commonly dropped into their field from that fence and that tree.
There was no path. There was only thick vegetation and a muddy stream bed, but in the distance was the bridge she had been promised and to that beacon she made her way, assuming that there must be a recognizable path associated with it at either end, and for a time there was. The progress of the day alternated between moments of frustration and moments of bliss, with more of the former than the latter. Once she found that she had circled around to a place she had already passed more than an hour earlier. She found that some of the footpaths were blocked by electric wires, which she covered with the Ordnance Survey map and clambered across. But she also passed through a small wood carpeted in bluebells, and at that moment she pictured the Weaver, ambling through these same woods on her way to Canterbury.
There was a great golden rooster on the steeple of the church in Priston, which Lizzie admired as she passed through that town. Between there and Timsbury was a real path, well worn by the tread of many feet. Lizzie nodded at several local people, mostly women, as they made their way from one village to the other to shop or visit. One of them wore a woolen skirt and sensible shoes and when she reached the ubiquitous two-step stile, which made it possible to pass into or out of a field without letting the livestock loose, she was unhesitant in making the climb.
Lizzie turned back to watch her and saw the crowing cock on the Priston church as it caught the afternoon light. Thereafter she turned around several times again as she walked down a gentle slope, until the golden rooster sat on the crest of the hill, and then disappeared. The weather was cool and misty, the countryside beautiful. Jane Austen had once written that England looked better through mist than sunshine, and Lizzie was reminded of a favorite episode from Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet trekked across the countryside to visit her ailing sister Jane at Netherfield. When she arrived at the house, the hem of her skirt was covered in mud, which scandalized the Bingley sisters, but the glow in her cheeks after that walk led Mr. Darcy to fall in love with her.
“Mr. Darcy,” Lizzie said under her breath. There were a number of sheep around her and a frisky lamb seemed to answer with a high bleat.
She felt that the Ordnance Survey map, on which she had depended with such confidence from the comfort of Alison’s study, was failing her. She was hungry and tired, her feet were wet and aching, and though it seemed like the path she was on was evident on the map, she had been lost enough times on this, her first day, to have real doubts about her current location. If she was where she thought she was, then there was a pub at the top of the next rise. She climbed hopefully and was rewarded with a lovely old place called The Stars.
Sitting with a pitcher of water in front of her, a pint of cider on the way, and the promise of ham and cheese, Lizzie felt herself sink into the padded seat beneath her and relax. She stripped off her shoes and socks and stretched and wiggled her toes against the flagstone floor. She believed she had conquered the worst of the hills. Chewton Mendip lay along this road and she was within a few miles of her destination. When she finished her meal she marched on and found the B&B that Alison had arranged for her.
Martin was waiting for her call and wondering how the day had gone, and when she called him she described it with less drama than she might have were she not so bone tired.
“Do you feel like this will help with the book you are working on with Alison?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she said honestly. “I am so out of my element. But I think I will make an adjustment that will allow me to slow my mind down to a walking pace, and then there will be things to learn.”
He asked her to describe some images for him, and she told him of the animals she had seen: cows, dogs, sheep in profusion, and one golden cockerel. “Tomorrow I will get to Wells,” she said. “We know the Weaver visited there, so I am thinking of it as the first day of actual work.”
“Today was the preamble?” He laughed at his own joke as he said it, and she felt good hearing his laugh. They spoke for several minutes about his work on the Newcastle mural. When she hung up she walked to the window of the room in which she was staying. The sun had not yet set, though the day had been long and she was completely exhausted. Below the window was an old swimming pool that the family running the B&B had turned into a fishpond and water garden.
She lay on the bed and thought about how much of the English countryside would still seem famil
iar to the Weaver, and even more so to Jane Austen. There was a quality to the countryside that, while not quite “timeless,” seemed continuous. Despite the fact that most of the population in England lived in cities, it was still the rural districts that defined England both to its own population and to the romantic outsider, like herself. The small farms, stone walls, hedges, and livestock; the ancient barns set in their lush green rolling landscape; the small farmhouses that had been continuously occupied for centuries, all contributed to the feeling that the place and its past were inextricably woven together.
Lizzie opened the first aid kit that Edmund had made for her to take some aspirin for her aching feet, and found a card tucked inside.
“I am so glad to know that you are back in England,” he wrote. “I have thought often of pilgrimages since we spoke of this at Christmas. I can give you no advice from personal experience, but I did find a good Biblical passage, Jeremiah 6:16. (Admittedly I didn’t find it by reading the Bible but by searching online!) It advises you to ask for help, which I hope you will.
Stand at the crossroads and look,
Ask for the ancient paths,
And where the good way is,
And walk in it,
And you will find rest for your soul.”
Chapter 13
There was no way to avoid walking on the road the next morning and Lizzie was disappointed as she went over the map with Betty, her hostess at the B&B. Her feet were still sore and when Betty offered to drive her a few miles to a bridle path that led into Wells, Lizzie accepted. While this was a clearer path than any of those through the fields of yesterday, it was still hard going. The decline was steep and the surface was first muddy and then rocky, but the views through the mist were idyllic. It was a soft cool day and the air was filled with the sounds of birds, some like the jingle of a tambourine, and one like the honk of an old car horn. The steady sounds of sheep and cows added to the chorus.