In 1369 a Geoffrey Chaucer was again with the army in France, but no particular adventures seem to have befallen him.
At this time John of Gaunt’s influence was paramount at the English court, which may partly account for Chaucer’s steady and rapid promotion. In 1370 he was sent abroad on an important mission—the exact nature of which we do not know—and two years later he went to Genoa to arrange which English port should become the headquarters of the Genoese trade. From Genoa he went to Florence, and by November 1373 he was back in England again.
When Chaucer went to Italy, Dante had already been dead for over fifty years, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, the other members of that great trilogy of the earlier Renaissance, were both alive. Chaucer makes his clerk declare that he learned the tale of Griselda
... at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
······
Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke sweete
Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,[16]
(Clerkes Prologue, ll. 31-33.)
but it is impossible to say whether this is autobiographical or not. The two poets may well have met, but in this, as in so many other cases, we cannot be certain. It is improbable that he ever met Boccaccio, since, largely as he borrows from the Filostrato and the Teseide, he never once mentions Boccaccio’s name, and when, in Troilus and Criseyde, he confesses that he is indebted to an earlier poet for his story, he gives him the apparently fictitious name of Lollius. Mr. Coulton suggests that Boccaccio’s works may have been published anonymously and that Chaucer may have been ignorant of their real author, and this could hardly have been the case if the two had met. But whether Chaucer had, or had not, any personal intercourse with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both their work and Dante’s exercised marked influence upon him. More of this will be said in the next chapter; here it is sufficient to note that the Italian mission affected not only his material prosperity but also his literary development.
Meanwhile he continued to grow in favour at court. On St. George’s Day, 1374, he was granted a daily pitcher of wine from the royal cellars—later commuted for a payment in money. In the following May he rented the gate-house of Aldgate from the corporation of London. A month later he was appointed controller of customs for wool, etc., in the port of London, receiving a few days afterwards an additional pension of £10 a year from John of Gaunt and his wife. Office work seems to have weighed heavily on the poet, and there may well be truth in the complaint of the Hous of Fame (Bk. II, l. 644, etc.) that it cut him off from all intercourse with the world:—
... thou hast no tydinges
Of Loves folk, if they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that god made;
And noght only fro fer contree
That ther no tyding comth to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That dwellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herest neither that ne this;
For whan thy labour doon al is,
And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,
In stede of reste and newe thinges,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon;
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another boke,
Til fully daswed is thy loke,[17]
And livest thus as an hermyte
Although thyn abstinence is lyte.
In November 1375 Chaucer was granted the wardship of Edmund Staplegate of Kent. Few persons nowadays would welcome such a charge, but in the fourteenth century the position of guardian was highly coveted, and not infrequently bought for a good round sum, since the holder had a right to a certain percentage (sometimes amounting to as much as 10%) of the ward’s property, to say nothing of the power of selling him (or her) in marriage. This particular wardship brought in £103.
In 1376-7 Chaucer was again employed on various secret missions abroad. In April 1377 he was sent to France to treat for peace with Charles V, for which service he received £48 13s. 4d. In June of this year Edward III died, but for a time John of Gaunt still retained his power, and soon after the accession of the boy king, Richard II, we find Chaucer sent on an embassy to
Barnabo Viscounte,
God of delyt, and scourge of Lumbardye.
(Monkes Tale, ll. 408-409.)
Amongst those whom he appointed to act for him during his absence, was his friend and fellow-poet, John Gower.
In May 1380 occurred a curious incident, of which no full and satisfactory explanation has yet been found. By a deed dated May 1st, one Cecilia de Chaumpaigne releases Geoffrey Chaucer from a charge which she had brought against him de raptu meo. It has been suggested (Camb. Hist. Lit., Vol. II) that this may refer to one of those attempts to carry off an heir or heiress and marry them forcibly to some relation of the abductor, which were not infrequent at the time. Chaucer’s own father had been the victim of such an attempt, being kidnapped in order that he might be married to Joan de Westhale. The case had come before the courts and the jury found that “the defendants had by night forcibly abducted John le Chaucer from the plaintiff’s custody, but did not marry him,” and assessed the damages at £250. John Chaucer was under fourteen at the time, and there are instances of mere babies of four and five being carried off in the same way. One poor little lady was twice widowed and thrice married before she was nine. Whatever the facts may have been in connection with Cecilia de Chaumpaigne it is evident that Chaucer’s influence at court was sufficient to protect him from any unpleasant consequences.
A year later (May 1382) to his controllership of wool was added that of petty customs. This probably meant a substantial increase of income, but the poet, who found his original duties sufficiently irksome, does not seem to have looked with favour upon a corresponding increase in office hours. In February 1385 he was granted the privilege of appointing a permanent deputy to perform his official duties. Professor Skeat suggests that the expressions of gratitude towards the queen which are inserted in the later version of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, point to the probability that he owed this unusual concession to her intervention.
About this time Chaucer seems to have given up his house over Aldgate and to have moved to Greenwich. The lease of the Aldgate house was made over to a certain Richard Foster in 1386, and in the Lenvoy a Scogan (written probably about 1393) Chaucer contrasts the lot of his friend,
... that knelest at the stremes heed
Of grace, of alle honour and worthinesse,
with his own fate at the other end of the same stream,
Forgete in solitarie wildernesse,
and adds two footnotes to explain that he is referring in the first place to Windsor and in the second to Greenwich. If the description in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women is not mere poetic fiction, it would seem that the poet had a pleasant country house and garden in his “solitarie wildernesse,” and that he cultivated the excellent habit of sleeping out of doors in the summer.
Meanwhile his activity found scope in various directions. He had been appointed a Justice of the Peace for Kent in 1381, and in 1386 he entered Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for the same county. In August of this year Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt, went to Spain, and during his absence his brother and rival, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, succeeded in establishing his ascendancy over the king. Chaucer felt the change at once. He was deprived of both his controllerships, and the money loss must have been considerable. In 1387 his wife died, so that her pension must also have lapsed. Evidently the poet was in straits, for in 1388 he was driven to raising money on his pensions and allowances, making them over to John Scalby of Lincolnshire. His abstinence, as we have seen, was “lyte,” and the necessity for retrenchment must have been extremely galling.
The fall of Gloucester in 1389 swept away the clouds which had darkened the poet’s sky. Once more we find him filling one office after another, and engaged in such useful and prosaic occupations as superintending the repairs done to the banks of th
e Thames or the erection of scaffolds in Smithfield for the king and queen to view the tournament held there in May 1390. One of his appointments was that of Clerk of the Works to his Majesty, which gave him charge of the fabric of the Tower, Westminster Palace, Windsor Castle, and other royal residences. He was commissioner of the roads between Greenwich and Woolwich, and the post of sub-forester of North Pemberton Park (in Somerset) must have given him ample opportunity for studying
The bilder ook, and eek the hardy asshe;
The piler elm, the cofre unto careyne;[18]
The boxtree piper;[19] holm[20] to whippes lasshe;
The sayling firr;[21] the cipres, deth to pleyne;[22]
The sheter ew,[23] the asp for shaftes pleyne,[24]
if not—
The olyve of pees, and eek the drunken vyne
or—
The victor palm.
(Parlement of Foules, l. 176, etc.
The whole passage is taken from Boccaccio’s Teseide.)
The commissionership of roads can have been no sinecure. In 1499—after nearly a century more of development and civilisation—“a glover from Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig clay called ‘Ramming clay’ for him on the highway, and was in no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had no malicious intent and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the highroad” (Mrs. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Vol. II, pp. 31-2). The modern traveller in the United States is sometimes surprised at dusk by finding the highway temporarily blocked by a house which is being moved from one side to the other and has been dumped down at the end of the day’s work, but this is nothing to finding that the road itself has been removed bodily. It is true that the corporation of Nottingham issued an order in 1507 forbidding people to dig holes in the market-place without leave, but this was long after Chaucer’s day, and if such ordinances were necessary to protect the actual market-place of a busy commercial city, it is not difficult to imagine the condition of country roads. The keeping of bridges in repair was looked upon, not as a matter of ordinary business, but as an act of piety, so that on the Continent special “Bridge Friars” existed, part of whose religious duties consisted in such work. In 1311-16 Richard of Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, offered forty days’ indulgence to all those “who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily labour” in repairing various roads and bridges (Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, p. 4). And in 1353 a patent of Edward III had ordered the paving of the highroad from Temple Bar to Westminster, since “it is so full of holes and bogs ... and the pavement is so damaged and broken” that traffic has become dangerous to man and beast. No wonder that robbers abounded, and that pilgrims found safety in numbers.
In 1390 highwaymen seem to have been particularly active, and the commissioner of roads himself was robbed more than once. Richard Brerelay was indicted for having “with others unknown” robbed Geoffrey Chaucer at Westminster of the sum of £10, on the Tuesday after the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (i. e. September 6); and in the same year “near the Fowle Ok” at Hatcham, in Surrey, Chaucer was robbed of a horse worth £10, goods worth 100 shillings, and £20 6s. 8d. in cash. Some, at least, of this seems to have been public money, for he was granted a royal pardon for the loss of £20 of the King’s money taken from him “by some notable robbers.”
In 1391 he lost his post as Clerk of the Works, but this does not seem to imply any serious loss of the royal favour, for three years later the king granted him a pension of £20 (about £300 of our money) a year for life. During the interval he seems to have got into money difficulties, for no sooner was this grant made than his creditors promptly sued him for debt.
In 1398 he received an additional grant of wine—a tun a year for life—and was also promoted to be sole, instead of sub-, forester of North Pemberton. In 1399 the son of his earliest and most powerful patron came to the throne, and Chaucer, who was still struggling with his creditors, addressed an impassioned appeal to him. Already, in 1398, the poet had been threatened with legal proceedings, and although the king had entrusted him with various commissions in the country, he had not dared to leave his house for fear of arrest (Ten Brink, History of English Literature, Vol. II, p. 198). No wonder he sang:—
To you, my purse, and to non other wight
Compleyne I, for ye be my lady dere!
I am so sory, now that ye be light;
For certes, but ye make me hevy chere.
(The Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse.
Professor Ten Brink believes this poem to have been
addressed to King Richard, but Professor Skeat has
no doubt that it was addressed to Henry.)
It is consoling to learn that Henry IV added forty marks a year to the pension granted by King Richard, thus bringing Chaucer’s income up to £600 or £700 of our money. This new outburst of good fortune promised well for the future, and Chaucer evidently looked forward to a prosperous and comfortable old age, for, on December 24, 1399, he took the lease of a house in the garden of St. Mary’s, Westminster, for fifty-four years. He was not, however, to make long use of his new possession, for on October 25, 1400, he died, and his grave was the first to mark the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. One of his later ballades, Truth may well serve as epitaph for the poet whom court life could never corrupt into a courtier, and whose clear sight and sharp wit never led him into bitterness or cynicism:—
That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,[25]
The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
Her nis non hoom,[26] her nis but wildernesse:
Forth pilgrim, forth! Forth beste out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the hye way, and lat thygost thee lede:[27].
And trouthe shal delivre, hit is no drede.[28]
* * *
CHAPTER II
CHAUCER’S WORKS
When Chaucer began to write, English literature was at a low ebb. The Norman Conquest had practically killed the old alliterative poetry, and the passion and mysticism of Old English epic and lament had given way to the prim didacticism of interminable homilies in verse, or the jog-trot respectability of rhymed chronicles. “For a long time before and after 1100,” says Professor Ker, “there is a great scarcity of English production,” and the more ambitious attempts at verse which appeared in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, are entirely lacking in the charm and dignity of pre-Conquest poetry. “The verse of Layamon’s Brut is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a most uncomfortable way.” Nor as a rule is the matter greatly superior to the manner. Such interest as is possessed by the majority of the poems of this period (apart from the definitely historical or philological point of view) arises largely from the unconscious naïveté and simplicity of their authors. What hard heart could refuse to be touched by the difficulties which that saintly hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole had evidently experienced in distinguishing the sex of a baby, or to share in the triumph with which he suggests a solution of the difficulty:—
For unethes[29] is a child born fully
That it ne beginnes to yowle and cry;
And by that cry men may know then
Whether it be man or woman,
For when it is born it cries swa;[30]
If it be man it says “a, a.”
/> That the first letter is of the nam(e)
Of our fore-father Adam.
And if the child a woman be,
When it is born it says “e, e,”
E is the first letter and the hede[31]
Of the name of Eve that began our dede.[32]
But delightful as this is, it is not poetry. In the middle of the fourteenth century come the notable exceptions of Sir Gawayne, The Pearl, and Piers Plowman, but by this time we are already drawing near the era of Chaucer himself. His poor Parson dismisses the popular alliterative verse of the day contemptuously enough:—
I can nat geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre—
but perhaps his strictures must not be taken too seriously, as he goes on to say:—
Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre—
a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. Sumer is icumen in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair and bright, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway.
One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English, beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33]
To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon idea of repartee seems—if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature—to have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your enemy’s son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness, passion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as Beowulf, the Husband’s Lament, Judith, but it is not until French wit flashes across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of Cokaygne, where
Chaucer and His Times Page 2