With that this egle gan to crye,
“Lat be,” quod he, “thy fantasye!
Wilt thou lere of sterres aught?”
“Nay, certeynly,” quod y, “ryght naught.”
“And why?” “For y am now to old.”
“Elles I wolde thee have told,”
quod he, “the sterres names, lo,
And al the hevenes sygnes therto,
And which they ben.” “No fors,” quod y.
“Yis, pardee!” quod he; “wost’ow why?”
As has been observed, the Eagle (like Chaucer), has achieved and is proud of a bidialectical ability. For phrases like “lat be,” “ryght naught,” “no fors”—which meant “no matter”—and “pardee” (par dieu or “by God!”) were vulgar speech.16
It is the strength of Chaucer that he was conversant with the technical terms in which, for example, lawyers, intellectuals, military men, engineers, etc., talked about their trades; but he also mocked such jargon. Thus the yeoman in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale says, “We seem wonderfully wise” because “Oure terms been so clergial and so queynte.” The Shipman, speaking in the Epilogue to The Man of Law’s Tale, says he will not use scholarly jargon:
Ne phisylas, ne termes queinte of lawe
Ther is but litel Latyn in my mawe!
Sometimes, however, Chaucer gets a character to use technical waffling (as Shakespeare was to do, often) to get a laugh. Thus the alchemist’s vocabulary of the canon is repeated by his yeoman:
As boole armonyak, verdegrees, boras,
And sondry vessels made of erthe and glas,
Oure urynates and oure descensories,
Violes, crosletz, and sublymatories,
Cucurbites and alambikes eek…17
Chaucer’s characters in The Canterbury Tales range from his knight, “a verray, parfit gentil knight,” as he is described—a gentleman remote from vulgarity of any kind—and the extremely genteel prioress, Madame Eglentynes:
Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely,
And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetishly,
Alter the scole of Stratford alte Bowe,
For Frenssh of Paris was to hire unknowe
down to common artisans like the Miller and the Host, the innkeeper Harry Bailly. The fact that the key role of commentator is given to Bailly indicates Chaucer’s leaning toward the plebians for purposes of dramatic impact—they had never before appeared, except symbolically, in English letters. Bailly is a man of “rude speech and boold” but is nonetheless allowed to be bossy, even dominant. Chaucer had already made it clear, in the person of the Eagle, that “I can lewdly to a lewed man speke,” and he insists in the Tales that “The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.” His text abounds in rough phrases: “I rekke not a bene,” “I counte hym nat a flye,” “A straw for your gentilnesse!” There is a good deal of actual swearing, and not just of Madame Eglentyne’s variety—“Hir gretteste ooth was but by Seint Loy”—but lower stuff, “by my fay,” “a Goddes name,” “by Saint Ronyon,” down to what even today would be recognized as actual swearing and obscenity. The Host himself interrupts what he considers a tiresome passage, denouncing it as “drast,” adding, “Thy drasty rymyng is nat woorth a toord!” But although Chaucer has the Parson rebuke the Host for swearing, he also has the Parson use the word “piss” (as does the well-worn Wyf of Bath, who has used up five husbands and is looking forward to a sixth; and, less surprisingly, the Canon’s Yeoman and the Miller).
What is more, Chaucer not only has the Miller tell his shocking tale but affects surprise that the majority enjoyed it: “for the moore part they longhe and pleyde.” In my day The Miller’s Tale was virtually banned for schoolchildren because it was so “rude,” but that did not prevent me from relishing it. It is one of the most accomplished of his stories and, moreover, includes a brilliant little portrait of the Miller himself. “Full big he was of brawn and eek of bones,” says Chaucer, calling him a skilled wrestler who could heave a door off its hinges, “Orbreke it at a renning with his heed.” Broad as a spade, he had a wart on the “top right” of his nose, and, sticking out of it, a tuft of hairs, “Reed as the brustles of a sowis eris.” His nostrils were black and wide and his mouth like “a great forneys,” with which he blew his bagpipe, leading the pilgrims “out of towne.”
Chaucer says the Miller was “a janglere and a goliardes”—a gossip and a comedian—whose stories were “moost of sinne and harlotries,” so it is not surprising that his tale is about a pretty young wife of an elderly and doom-ridden carpenter—a wife who not only commits adultery with a smooth young student but fends off a tiresome parish clerk, who is besotted with her, by tricking him, in the dark, into kissing her exposed bottom, believing it to be her mouth. When the student himself tries the trick, the clerk, prepared, brands him with a hot poker, and this brings the tale to an amazing climax.18 For all its vulgarity, the story is related with great sophistication, and here it is worth noting that Chaucer, having experimented with all the meters then current among poets, is always adept at fitting his verse to his matter. He was a great experimenter but with a purpose, and in all his major works the type of verse he uses is eminently right. His favorite line was decasyllabic, and he uses it almost invariably in his mature work. But whereas in Troilus he favors the seven-line stanza or “rhyme royal,” as befits an epic of moving solemnity, for the fast-moving narrative of The Canterbury Tales he usually prefers the couplet. Chaucer, like all great tale-tellers, aims at deliberate speed; and as with other brilliant comedians who came later—one thinks of Shakespeare himself, Swift, and Waugh—uses enviable economy of means in his funny bits, the couplet of short sharp words being perfect for his purpose. He never uses two words where one will do, and The Miller’s Tale, a virtuoso exercise in brevity and keeping to the point, shows him at his best.
To set the scene for low life, immediately following the Knight’s elegant tale of chivalry and romance, Chaucer has a comic passage, in which the Host calls on the Monk to tell his story, but the Miller rudely interrupts to tell his. The Host objects that the Miller, or Robin as he calls him, is “dronke of ale.” The Miller replies: “That I am dronke, I know it by my speech.” But he insists nevertheless on going ahead with his “legende” of “a carpenter and his wyf” in which a clerk (scholar) “hath set the wright’s cap.” This provokes an explosion from the Reeve: “Stint thy clappe! Let be thy lewed drunken harlotrie!” He says it is outrageous to bring a wife into disrepute. The Miller pooh-poohs the objection: there are a thousand good wives for one bad, and personally he trusts his own wife. So off he starts, and Chaucer apologizes for the nature of the story, adding that if the reader objects to it all he has to do is turn the page (it is one of Chaucer’s many innovations that he speaks directly to the reader in this confidential way). The tale is indeed lewd, although redeemed by the enchanting heroine (or perhaps antiheroine) Alison, the eighteen-year-old wife, “wilde and yong,” her body as lithe and slim as a weasel’s; she was a sight even more “blissful” than a young pear tree. Chaucer dwells lasciviously on how she plucks her eyebrows and dresses in the height of fashion, concluding that it is impossible to imagine “So gay a popelotte or swich a wenche,” skipping and jumping like a lamb, with a sweet mouth, a “joly colt,” “Long as a mast and upright as a bolt,” in short “a primerole, a piggesine, For any Lord to leggen in his bed.”
It is clear that this enchantress is to be allowed to get away with anything, and she does: not only does she cuckold her husband with the student; she also makes a fool of the amorous parish clerk by tricking him into kissing her bottom—which done, “‘Teehee,’ quod she, and clapte the window to.” This is the first teehee in history, a peculiarly feminine expression of malicious laughter. Chaucer’s language in this tale is uncompromising. Alison exposes “hir naked ers” to be kissed, and her lover, in turn, has a hot poker thrust up “amydd the ers.” It is true that Chaucer does not actually u
se the word “cunt,” though in describing the student making a pass at Alison he writes, “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,” which comes to much the same thing. However, Chaucer, feigning surprise, says at the end of his tale that nobody objects to the language—“Ne at this tale I saugh no man hym greve”—though Oswald the Reeve is furious simply because he is a carpenter by trade and objects to someone of his calling getting the worst of it.
However, the Reeve gets his revenge when it comes to telling his tale by making the butt a Miller. This unfortunate man is humbugged not by one student but by two, who seduce his wife and his daughter and ensure that he gets a biff on the boko as well. The interest of his tale, for us, is that it deals in dialect: in fact it has been called “the first dialect story.”19 People in Chaucer’s day were already very conscious of regional speech—Chaucer himself says in Troilus “there is so great diversite in Englissh and in writing of oure tonge”—and he repeatedly draws attention to the antagonisms of accents. The Parson, who objects strongly to northern alliterative styles in verse, replies, when the Host asks him for a tale:
But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man,
I kan nat geeste “rum, ram, ruf” by lettre,
Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre.
Chaucer evidently wanted his poetry to circulate widely north of the Trent. He does not engage in alliteration in the northern manner, but he makes his two triumphant students obvious northerners, not only by stressing their different pronunciation, using a or aa where Southerners would use o and oo, but demonstrating differences in word endings and grammar. Thus for the third person singular of the present tense, the students use an s ending, whereas their southern antagonist, the Reeve, uses the th ending. Indeed Chaucer’s ingenious and consistent use of dialect in this story is beautifully done and, I suspect, was noted by many of his literary successors who wanted to use this device to enliven their own dialogue, notably Shakespeare in both parts of his Henry IV and in Henry V.
The relish with which Chaucer relates tales of low life shows his enormous appetite for comedy and his association, which was to become a staple of English literature from his day till the mid-twentieth century, of buffoonery with the lower classes. He was indeed the first to establish this convention, and he established it in such a masterful fashion that it endured over half a millennium. But bawdry is only a part of his repertoire—his aim is comprehensiveness and a variety of modes. He was the first English poet to deal in a lethal combination of satire, irony, and sarcasm. It emerges strongly in The Pardoner’s Tale. The Pardoner, a seller of indulgences, is a complete and shameless rogue; but Chaucer, not content with exposing his impudence, shows how good he was at his job and how powerfully he preached against sinfulness. The Pardoner had also been taught to use the figure of Death to scare his hearers. But at this point, as often happens with the greatest writers, the creative spirit takes over and Chaucer suddenly produces a passage of intense pathos about an old man who wants to die and cannot. The drunken rioters of the story set out to find and slay Death and, by an ironic twist, meet someone equally anxious to meet Death but for quite different reasons. The passage is great poetry, and worth quoting in full:
Right as they wolde han trodden over a style,
An old man and a poure with hem mette.
This old man ful mekely them grette,
And sayde thus, “now, lordes, god yow see!”
The proudest of thise ryotoures three
Answered agayin, “What, carl, with sory grace,
Why artow al for wrapped save thy face?
Why livestow so longe in so greet age?”
The old man gan loke in his visage,
And sayde thus, “for I ne can nat finde.
A man, though that I walked into Inde,
Nerthr in citee nor in no village,
That would change his youthe for myn age;
And therefore moot I han myn age stille,
As longe time as is goddes wille.
Ne death, alas!, ne wol nat han my lyf;
Thus walke I, lyk a restless caityf,
And on the ground, which is my modres gate,
I knokke with my staf, both erly and late,
And seye, ‘leve, moder, leet me in!’
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin!
Allas! Whan shul my bones been at reste!”20
This image of the old man knocking on mother earth to be let in is typical of Chaucer’s immense power to conjure up visions that tear the heart. Chaucer is a man of all moods and occasions, and not only creates settings but creates the actual vocabulary in which he expresses them. His impact on our language has never been excelled, even by Shakespeare. All his creative life he was looking for words or creating new ones. He had a vocabulary of 8,000 words, twice as many as his contemporary John Gower, and many more times than that of most literates of his age. About half his words are Germanic, half of Romance origin: he ransacked common speech for short Anglo-Saxon words, and French and Italian for more flowery ones. It is true that Shakespeare had three times as many (about 24,000), but Shakespeare was an inheritor of Chaucer’s word bank, as well as a massive depositor in his own right. Chaucer saw French and Italian poetry not so much as models to imitate but as verbal shop windows from which he could steal words that as yet had no English equivalents. He thus added over 1,000 words to our language—that is, these words cannot be found in earlier writers.21 They included these: jubilee, administration, secret, voluptuousness, novelty, digestion, persuasion, erect, moisture, galaxy, philosophical, policy, tranquillity. These are mostly polysyllabic, weighty words, used by scholars and professional men. Chaucer balances these additions by taking from the common stock of ordinary speech thousands of others and putting them into the written language for the first time. Moreover, he uses these words not only to give directness and vivacity to his verse but to ornament and silver it by producing brilliant figures and similes, often alliterative, and always neat and vivid. We do not know how many of these figures he invented or which were sayings in the London and Kentish vernacular he favored. All we know is that they first made their appearance in his work. And they are still current. Among the alliterations are “friend and foe,” “horse and hounds,” “busy as bees,” “fish and flesh,” “soft as silk,” “rose-red,” “gray as glass,” and “still as a stone.” We do not still say “jangled as a jay”; but we say “snow-white,” “dance and sing,” “bright and clear,” “deep and wide,” “more or less,” “old and young,” “hard as iron.” “No doubt” and “out of doubt” are Chaucerisms. So are “as the old books say” and “I dare say.” Chaucer also had a neat way of working proverbs, sayings, and popular witticisms and comparisons into his verses. Thus in The Friar’s Tale we come across the Earl, “who spak one thing but he thoughte another,” and in The Knight’s Tale there is “The smylere with the knyf under the cloke.” In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale we are told “Modre will out, that see we day by day,” and in The Reeve’s Tale there is “So was hir joly whistle wel y wet.” It is Chaucer who first warns us, “It is nought good a sleeping hound to wake” and who writes of setting “the world on six and sevene.”22
Chaucer’s coinage was words—old, new, borrowings, inventions, transformations—but his game was life. He has an affinity with all living things, and brings them before our eyes with astonishing skill. Here (in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale) is the cock:
His combe was redder than the fyn coral,
And batailled as it was a castle wall;
His byle was blak, and as the jet it shoon;
Lyk azure were his legges and his toon;
His nayles whiter than the lylye flower,
And lyk, the burned gold was his colour.
This gentil cok hadde in his governaunce
Seven hennes for to doon at his plesaunce,
Which were his sustres and his paramours,
And wonder lyk to hym, as of colours
Of whiche the fa
ireste hewed on his throte
Was cleped fair damsysele Perlelote.
And here is the household tom:
Lat take a cat, and fostre him wel with milk
And tendre flessh, and make his couch of silk,
And lay him seen a mous go by the wal,
Anon he waiveth milk and flessh and al,
And every dayntie that is in that house,
Swich appetit hath he to ete a mous.
But it is humans who rouse Chaucer’s creative powers to the highest pitch. In a sense he loves them all so long as he can show them in action to delight his readers. It has been well observed that The Canterbury Tales is an allegory of the human race. Chaucer (like Shakespeare) takes people as they come and, as Dryden says, in presenting them, “he is a perpetual fountain of good sense.” What is more, like Shakespeare, Chaucer wants people, wherever possible, to speak for themselves. It is startling, and quite unprecedented, what a large proportion of the Tales is in direct speech. Indeed much is in dialogue. Thus the Friar speaks of a sermon he has just given:
“And there I saw oure dame—ah, where is she?”
“Yord in the yerd I trowe that she be,”
Sayd this man, “and she wol come anon.”
“Ey, maister, welcome be ye, by Seint John!”
Seyde this wyf, “how fayre ye, hertely?”
The friar arises up ful curteisly,
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