by Ian Mortimer
Chaucer writes many works in English, and into all of them he breathes his skill, his love of people, his generosity of spirit, and his lively interest in the ideas and stories of the world. Particularly recommended among his middle period works are The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde. The lament of Anelida, betrayed by her lover in Anelida and Arcite, is heartrending.
Alas what has become of your gentleness,
Your words full of pleasure and humbleness,
Your observance in so modest a manner,
Your waiting, and your close attendance
On me, whom you called your mistress,
Your sovereign lady in the world here?
Alas, is there neither word nor cheer
You vouchsafe upon my heaviness?
Alas your love, I buy it all too dear.
Chaucer is not just a poet of swooning heartbroken women and beautiful dead duchesses. He is also a poet of the living. In what is by far his most famous work. The Canterbury Tales, he takes you through the houses of the poor as well as the rich. In “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” we see “a poor widow, somewhat stooping with age, dwelling in a narrow cottage, beside a wood, standing in a dale.” We hear of her simple life, “for little was her cattle and her rent,” and how she kept herself and her two daughters, with three pigs, three cows and one sheep. We see inside her cottage: “full sooty was her bower, as was her hall, in which she ate many a slender meal.” Thus he conjures up a picture of her two-roomed cottage, with an open central fire and smoke that gets everywhere. Then he turns to the widow herself:
Her diet matched the cottage where she lived
Repletion never made her sick.
A temper diet was all her physic,
And exercise, and heart’s sufficience …
No wine she drank, neither white nor red,
Her board was served with white and black—
Milk and brown bread—in which she found no lack,
Fried bacon and sometimes an egg or two.
This is great description, but readers’ delight in Chaucer’s poetry lies in his descriptions of people. For example, among the Canterbury pilgrims there is a nun, a prioress
That in her smiling was full simple and coy
Her greatest oath was but “By St. Eloy!”
And she was called Madame Eglentyne.
Full well she sang the service divine,
Entuned in her nose full sweetly . . .
In eating she was well taught withall;
She let no morsel from her lips fall
Nor wet her fingers deep in her sauce.
Well could she carry a morsel and ensure
That no drop of it fell upon her breast…
Her upper lip she wiped so clean
That in her cup no grease was seen
When she had drunken up her draught. . .
But then to speak of her conscience
She was so charitable and so piteous
She would weep if she saw a mouse
Caught in a trap, if it were dead or bled.
She had small lap dogs, which she fed
With roasted meat, and milk, and wastel bread.
Such images of character are a real strength of Chaucer’s writing: sometimes he can describe a man in just a few words, as in the brilliant image of “the smiler with the knife beneath his cloak.” And yet he also has the ability to put thoughts into the mouths of the characters he so vividly describes. This is where he goes beyond the readers’ expectations. Not only can he illustrate the backdrop, and not only can he describe the character, he can make the people come alive, with all their desires, fears, deceitfulness, lustfulness, and cheating. In words he paints their souls. Moreover he can do this for any group he chooses, rich or poor, men or women, without prejudice. Just listen to the speech he gives to his Wife of Bath, addressing one of her husbands:
You say that leaking roofs and smoke
And chiding wives make men flee
From their homes. For heaven’s sake!
What’s wrong with you, so to speak?
You say we wives our vices hide
Until we’re wed, and then we show them—
Well, that’s the proverb of a shrew.
You say that oxen, mules, horses and hounds
Can be tried out at the sales stands
And basins, lavers, and things men buy
Like spoons and stools, and such utensils
As pots, and clothes and dresses too—
But wives you’re not allowed to try
Until we’re wedded. Old, dotard shrew!
It’s lively stuff, and it gets livelier, far livelier, as the wife declares that, because she pleases her husband every night in bed, he would be a miser to deny another man “to light a candle at his lantern.” Chaucer even has her go so far as to admit that she seduced a twenty-year-old lad on the day her fourth husband was buried. He shows you the character without judging her. And it is all to good purpose, for, having created such a strong character, he can then put into her mouth all sorts of home truths that cannot possibly be said by a man:
For trusteth well, it is impossible
That any clerk will speak good of wives
(unless they be saints’ holy lives).
Who drew the picture of the lion? Who?
By God! If women had written stories
As clerks do, within their oratories,
They would have described more wickedness
Than all the sons of Adam might redress.
And so he hits his mark. The question of “who drew the picture of the lion” is an allusion to one of Aesop’s fables, in which a lion, seeing a picture of a man killing a lion, remarks that the picture would have been different if the lion had drawn it. And it perfectly suits Chaucer’s wit to use a strident woman to argue on his behalf that women have been badly portrayed in literature because most stories are written by men. There is a certain irony that it is a man writing this, in the Middle Ages—hardly an age of sexual equality.
Chaucer’s brilliance is not lost on his contemporaries. Gower, in his Confessio Amantis, has the goddess Venus address Chaucer as “my disciple and my poet.” Another contemporary calls him “the most noble philosophical poet in English” and praises him for his “goodness of gentle manly speech.”56 All three kings in his lifetime, Edward III, Richard II, and Henry W, appreciate him and give him presents—income, wine, employment, and a free house to live in above Aldgate. His manuscripts are regularly copied and widely circulated; even French writers praise him. This gentle man with a love of good women and good men, and a ready wit and a fluent pen, with an understanding of lust, covetousness, cowardice, envy, guilt, and all the less desirable traits of his contemporaries, is able to win hearts and entertain minds everywhere, and seemingly without effort. How many writers can describe sex in such a way that you know they are smiling as they compose the lines?
They go to bed, as is meet and right
For although wives be full holy things
They must, patiently, undertake at night
Such manner of necessities to please
The folk who wedded them with rings
And lay a little holiness aside.
Picture him in the 1390s, standing about five feet six inches high, with a paunch, and a forked white beard, walking along the street to his house above Aldgate, with a pile of vellum rolls under his arm, as people pass by in their hoods and motley clothes.57 When he gets there, there is no wife waiting for him. Philippa has died a few years earlier. Instead he goes up to his chamber alone, and, as he puts it in his earlier poem, The House of Fame, “there, dumb as any stone, you sit before another book, till fully dazed is your look, and there you live a hermit’s life.” But as he sits there, working out The Canterbury Tales, he has the most incredible vision. For what survives today of his great work is just a small portion of what he envisages writing. He plans that his thirty pilgrims will each tell two stories on th
e way from Southwark to Canterbury and two on the way home again. That is a total of 120 “Canterbury tales.” As it stands, he only completes one tale each for twenty-two of the pilgrims and two for himself. On this basis, it is the greatest unfinished work in the English language.
Envoi
So we come to the end of the fourteenth century. From first setting out on the road and seeing Exeter Cathedral rising high above the city walls, and smelling the smells of Shitbrook, we have encountered all manner of things: irregular measures of time, roast beaver and puffin, medicinal baths of boiled puppies, and traitors’ corpses cut into quarters. We have discussed how young the people are, how credulous and how violent. We have seen the precarious state of justice and how people live constantly on the verge of starvation, illness, and death. We have caught glimpses of the clothes, the musical instruments, and what people do for fun. Although there are many more things we could say about fourteenth-century England, probably enough has been said for you to have an idea of what it is like, prior to setting out. Only one question remains to be answered. Why should you want to set out in the first place? Or, to put it more bluntly, why should you actually want to see the living past? Is the fourteenth century not better left for dead, a pile of parchments, monastic ruins, and museum artifacts?
This book began as a “virtual reality” description of a faraway country. In actual fact it has touched upon a more profound subject, namely the way we see the past. How does a vision of medieval England as a living community differ from one in which it is described as dead? In traditional history, what we can say about the past is dictated by the selection and interpretation of evidence. Paradoxically, this same evidence imposes a series of boundaries, limiting the research questions we can ask and what we can claim to know about the past. Academic historians cannot discuss the past itself; they can only discuss evidence and the questions arising from that evidence. As postmodernist philosophers have repeatedly pointed out—to the great frustration of many historians—the past has gone, never to return. Knowledge of it as it actually was is impossible.1
That is all very well. But, as this book has shown, there is no reason why we cannot consider medieval England as a living community. It is just another place in time, like France in the twenty-first century, or Germany in the twentieth, and so on. Knowledge of it as it actually was might be difficult—impossible even—but so is knowledge of England as it actually was yesterday. If we accept that the evidence available to us in writing about any place in any time is always going to be partial and incomplete—including a modern country which could be physically visited (for you cannot see all of it at once, or meet everyone)—then certainly one can write a guidebook to medieval England which in theory is as comprehensive and accurate as a guidebook to a modern country.
This is the crux of the matter. If medieval England is treated as dead and buried, what one can say about it is strictly limited by the questions arising from the evidence. However, if treated as a living place, the only limits are the experience of the author and his perception of the requirements, interests, and curiosity of his readers. We can ask any question we like about the past and set about answering it to the best of our knowledge and ability. The implications of this for understanding the nature of history itself, and for transcending the postmodern questioning of historical knowledge, are huge. History is no longer just an extended academic exercise—it can be anything you want it to be. If the limits of history are set by the questions that people (not just historians) ask about the past, then history is as wide as the public imagination. As stated in the introduction, the result is a new way of conceiving history—”free history” as I have described it in a theoretical essay, “What Isn’t History?” written alongside this book.2
There lies an even more profound implication of the “living past.” What does it reveal about us individually and collectively in relation to time? This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole concept. Through it we can see ourselves collectively living for hundreds of years, and in so doing we can see ourselves change. Cast your mind back to the different standards of hygiene and justice in the fourteenth century. If we look at these aspects of life and judge them as dirty and cruel, we are really only describing our own perceptions as viewed from the modern world. There is nothing wrong in doing this, it just is very present-centered. It says more about us now than it does about us in the fourteenth century (or any other age for that matter; the past is all dirty and cruel in the modern popular imagination, with the exception of the Romans, who are just cruel). However, if we start to consider medieval people as alive—the women cleaning their houses, for instance, gathering up the dirty rushes in the hall, putting new ones down, shooing the dogs outside, wiping the table, laying out the tablecloth, rinsing the wooden bowls, scouring iron and brass pans, scrubbing the family’s tunics and linen, polishing the silver spoons, and sweeping the yard—we can begin to see these people in relation to their contemporaries. Of course they are not all filthy. Many are proud of the clean state of their houses—like their modern counterparts—regardless of the judgments of people in six hundred years’ time. We may consider them excessively cruel for beating their children and dogs, but this is judging them by our standards, not their own. As we have seen, fourteenth-century parents who do not beat their children are thought to be acting irresponsibly.
In this way we can begin to appreciate the changes in almost every aspect of life, from the age structure of the population to the changing nature of the diseases we suffer. Everything changes. What does not change? Only that these people, like us, are human, and have urges, needs, and challenges; and that these are continually shifting. If we really want to understand what humanity is, and how adaptable we are, we must see ourselves as a constantly living, evolving race—always on the very cusp of a vast and unimaginable future, whether we live in the fourteenth century or the twenty-first—and in no way dead until the whitened bones of the last human being lie abandoned on the sand.
Over the course of the century described in this book, more than ten million people live and die in England. Many die in infancy. Many die young. Some die twitching on the end of a rope. Some die screaming in smoke-filled rooms. Some perish in battle, many in pain and terror. Some die fighting so furiously that, in their moment of glory they want to die heroically. Many more die alone, shivering, scared, and feverish with plague. Whatever the manner of their deaths, at some point in their lives there is also some joy, be it the childhood treat of a spoonful of jam or the thrill of an illicit kiss, or seeing a grandchild. At the end of the day—at the end of the century—this is what history is. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past—to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.
Somewhere in the 1370s, a beautiful young noblewoman is looking at Geoffrey Chaucer. She is teasing him, looking him in the eye, smiling, and laughing. She will remain there like that, forever, just like the Canterbury pilgrims will forever be riding along together on their way to Canterbury, never to return. Men are gathered around the poet, listening as he describes the woman, her smiling laughter, so fresh and fair and free. They can tell he still feels the sadness of her death. What they hear is what we hear. We might interpret the lines differently, and we might misunderstand a few words (we are, after all, strangers in this century), but some inkling of Chaucer’s affection for this woman comes across to his audience—to them, to us, and everyone in between. Whole centuries of us are there in the echoing hall of time, listening to Chaucer’s poem. If Gower takes the storyteller’s place, we may hear about the terror of the Peasants’ Revolt; if Froissart, the chi-valric gloss of knightly warfare in France; if Langland, the injustice of the clergy; if the Gawain poet, his grief for his little girl, his pearl. And in listening we may offer all these men, women, and children a degree of recognition:
the sort of dignified memory and sympathy which today we offer to those who gave their lives in war.
You may not agree. You may think that living for the here and now is all that matters. Or you may think that judging the past as dirty and cruel in some way establishes our superiority over our ancestors. But if you believe that we are the inheritors of a living, vibrant past, and that an understanding of what we have been is vital to an understanding of what we are today, and what we will be in the future, then you may find yourself becoming a thoughtful time traveler, setting out on the highway of human history, guided by Chaucer down all the alleys of fourteenth-century life. You might even consider joining him and his companions in that tavern, the Tabard, in Southwark, and yourself becoming a pilgrim. At the very least you will hear some good stories.
Notes
1. The Landscape
1. These cries are from the early fifteenth-century poem “London Lick-penny” once attributed to John Lydgate. A similar series of fourteenth-century cries appears at the end of the prologue of Langland’s Piers Plowman.
2. The figures in this table come from the poll tax returns of 1377 as tabulated in Hoskins, Local History, pp. 277-78. The population estimates are drawn from the fact that in sixteenth-century England about 32 percent of the population was aged below fourteen, and that this figure is a reasonable estimate for the late fourteenth century. In addition it allows for two other facts: (1) that clergy and beggars were exempt from paying, and (2) some of those who ought to have paid did not. As a result, the approximate population figures are based on the estimate of 6 percent of the total civic population being taxpayers, the remainder being children under fourteen (32 percent), clergy (2 percent), beggars and evaders (6 percent collectively). The areas of doubt are the proportions of beggars and evaders. If 10 percent of the population evaded, and another 10 percent were beggars, then taxpayers amount to only about 46 percent of the population, and the estimates given here should be increased accordingly. Some cities have been ascribed much larger populations than these tax-based figures indicate. Winchester has been calculated to have had a population of about 7,000 to 8,000 in 1400, three times this estimate for 1377. See Dyer, Standards, p. 189. The figure for Plymouth is no longer extant; 1,700 is Professor Hoskins’s estimate. Note: Gloucester and Oxford did not become cities until the sixteenth century