Chaucer

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This etext was produced by
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From: ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

CHAUCER

BY ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD

NOTE.

The peculiar conditions of this essay must be left to explain themselves.
It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications
of the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the
Society's Director, Mr. Furnivall. To other recent writers on Chaucer--
including Mr Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation--I have
referred, in so far as it was in my power to do so. Perhaps I may take
this opportunity of expressing a wish that Pauli's "History of England," a
work beyond the compliment of an acknowledgement, were accessible to every
English reader.

A.W.W.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 1. CHAUCER'S TIMES.

CHAPTER 2. CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

CHAPTER 3. CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

CHAPTER 4.
EPILOGUE.

GLOSSARY.

INDEX.

CHAUCER.

CHAPTER 1. CHAUCER'S TIMES.

The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted
facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are
the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and
doubtful as many important passages of it remain--in vexatious contrast
with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data--we have at
least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account
of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though
gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in
public documents,--in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the
Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records--partly of the
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence
of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few
references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate
successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily
forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree
of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with
regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now
accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process
which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour
stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited
number of results has been safely established, and others have at all
events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of
conclusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages; and
even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through
a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to
sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.

A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written. They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately in
view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose services to
the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar,
would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he not
been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date
of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date
Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the
voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at the
desire of Caxton), appears to have merely borne a Latin inscription
without any dates; and the marble monument erected in its stead "in the
name of the Muses" by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th,
1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date
of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed,
promises no more information than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary,
the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as "now in
his days old," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially
as it is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's own birth is placed
as far back as 1320. Still less weight can be attached to the
circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself as
the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accordance with the
common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the
older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In a coloured portrait
carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a manuscript,
Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard; but this could not of
itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age
of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-
evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born more than a century
after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of
undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject. His poem,
the "House of Fame," has been variously dated; but at any period of his
manhood he might have said, as he says there, that he was "too old" to
learn astronomy, and preferred to take his science on faith. In the
curious lines called "L'Envoy de Chaucer a Scogan," the poet, while
blaming his friend for his want of perseverance in a love-suit, classes
himself among "them that be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of
himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty. But there seems no
sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines
to an earlier year than 1393; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer
have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark
might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age "which
dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally
ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the
evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem
of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that
there is no reason for demurring to the only direct external evidence in
existence as to the date of Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause
of chivalry held at Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through
part of a campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness; and
on this occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, recorded as
that of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had borne arms for twenty-
seven years. A careful enquiry into the accuracy of the record as to the
ages of the numerous other witnesses at the same trial has established it
in an overwhelming majority of instances; and it is absurd gratuitously to
charge Chaucer with having understated his age from motives of vanity.
The conclusion, therefore, seems to remain unshaken, that he was born
about the year 1340, or some time between that year and 1345.

Now, we possess a charming poem by Chaucer called the "Assembly of Fowls,"
elaborately courtly in its conception, and in its execution giving proofs
of Italian reading on the part of its author, as well as of a ripe humour
such as is rarely an accompaniment of extreme youth. This poem has been
thought by earlier commentators to allegorise an event known to have
happened in 1358, by later critics another which occurred in 1364.
Clearly, the assumption that the period from 1340 to 1345 includes the
date of Chaucer's birth, suffices of itself to stamp the one of these
conjectures as untenable, and the other as improbable, and (when the style
of the poem and treatment of its subject are taken into account) adds
weight to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in
question. Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in Chaucer's
biography and the question of his works are affected by one another.

--------------------------------------------------

Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of the
fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the year of
his death. In other words, it covers rather more than the interval
between the most glorious epoch of Edward III's reign--for Crecy was
fought in 1346--and the downfall, in 1399, of his unfortunate successor
Richard II.

The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be the test
of greatness--but in Edward III's time as in that of Henry V, who
inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory,
there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. It is only of a small
population that the author of the "Vision concerning Piers Plowman" could
have gathered the representatives into a single field, or that Chaucer
himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though
not altogether exhausting, the chief national character-types. In the
year of King Richard II's accession (1377), according to a trustworthy
calculation based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total
number of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and a
half. A quarter of a century earlier--in the days of Chaucer's boyhood--
their numbers had been perhaps twice as large. For not less than four
great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6) had swept over the
land, and at least one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the
inhabitants of the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the
obstinate epidemic--"the foul death of England," as it was called in a
formula of execration in use among the people. In this year 1377, London,
where Chaucer was doubtless born as well as bred, where the greater part
of his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the historic
river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently numbered not more than
35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the case, no place was more
exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was any
other so likely elastically to recover from them. For the reign of Edward
III had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital,--
an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the
same period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had grown
larger as its houses had grown higher; and mediaeval London, such as we
are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those leading
features which it so long retained, from the days when Chaucer, with
downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its streets between
Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in England the
remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which have ever
befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been
said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly
scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the
Plague:--once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of
French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages
of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a
thousand slain this pestilence,"--

he hath slain this year
Hence over a mile, within a great village
Both men and women, child and hind and page.

The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the
description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple
surcoat and blue white-furred hood; nor, by the way, may this portrait
itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the
helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. For though in all the
world there was none like this doctor to SPEAK of physic and of surgery;--
though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a loss for telling
the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient with the appropriate
drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful friends the apothecaries;--
though he was well versed in all the authorities from Aesculapius to the
writer of the "Rosa Anglica" (who cures inflammation homeopathically by
the use of red draperies);--though like a truly wise physician he began at
home by caring anxiously for his own digestion and for his peace of mind
("his study was but little in the Bible"):--yet the basis of his
scientific knowledge was "astronomy," i.e. astrology, "the better part of
medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it; together with that "natural magic" by
which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells us, the famous among the learned have
known how to make men whole or sick. And there was one specific which,
from a double point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very
highly, and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts. He was but easy
(i.e. slack) of "dispence":--

He kepte that he won in pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.

Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart by
these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first smitten
the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if the Plague of
1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck down among others
Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chaucer's Duchess Blanche).
Calamities such as these would assuredly have been treated as warnings
sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a Church better braced for
the due performance of its never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful
ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in
spirit by the self-searching morality of Puritanism. But from the sorely-
tried third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of
Langland cries, as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, that
"these pestilences" are the penalty of sin and of naught else. It is
assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the fullest proof, to
accuse another of thoughtlessness or heartlessness; and though the classes
for which Chaucer mainly wrote and with which he mainly felt, were in all
probability as little inclined to improve the occasions of the Black Death
as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on their knees
after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the
later years of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not
unfrequently spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth
moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed
lamentation in Latin; and at different dates in King Richard's reign the
poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and
in English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption
and sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant
insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain
deaf.

A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes. On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of Edward
III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from the period
of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the king's
unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the overburdened and
enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the King himself to
renounce the proud position of a conquering power. In 1363 he had
celebrated the completion of his fiftieth year; and three suppliant kings
had at that time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success.
By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained by
himself and the valiant Prince of Wales; and during the years remaining to
him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed his favourites. From
being a conquering power the English monarchy was fast sinking into an
island which found it difficult to defend its own shores. There were
times towards the close of Edward's and early in his successor's reign
when matters would have gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous
of having their money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage,
and anxious, like their type the "Merchant" in Chaucer, that "the sea were
kept for anything" between Middelburgh and Harwich, had not some of them,
such as the Londoner John Philpot, occasionally armed and manned a
squadron of ships on their own account, in defiance of red tape and its
censures. But in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which he
grew up were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in
the land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the
burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a
civilised people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time when
the decline in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is evident
from the answer given to the application from Rome for the arrears of
thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or rather from
what must unmistakeably have been the drift of that answer. Its terms are
unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated.

The power of England in the period of an ascendancy to which she so
tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of
her arms. Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most
others in Europe. Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer for
a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed
proprietors, and of the "worthy vavasours" (smaller landowners) who, like
Chaucer's "Franklin"--a very Saint Julian or pattern of hospitality--knew
not what it was to be "without baked meat in the house," where their

tables dormant in the hall alway
Stood ready covered all the longe day.

From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders came the
laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did so much to
consolidate national feeling in England. The foreign companies of
merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the banking business
and export trade assigned to them by the short-sighted commercial policy
of Edward III, and the weaving and fishing industries of Hanseatic and
Flemish immigrants had established an almost unbearable competition in our
own ports and towns. But the active import trade, which already connected
England with both nearer and remoter parts of Christendom, must have been
largely in native hands; and English chivalry, diplomacy, and literature
followed in the lines of the trade-routes to the Baltic and the
Mediterranean. Our mariners, like their type the "Shipman" in Chaucer (an
anticipation of the "Venturer" of later days, with the pirate as yet,
perhaps, more strongly marked in him than the patriot),--

knew well all the havens, as they were
From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre,
And every creek in Brittany and Spain.

Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on the part
of our shipmen in this period to self-help in offence as well as in
defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently
employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized or
impressed for the purpose by order of the Crown. On one of these
occasions the port of Dartmouth, whence Chaucer at a venture ("for aught I
wot") makes his "Shipman" hail, is found contributing a larger total of
ships and men than any other port in England. For the rest, Flanders was
certainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth, and in mercantile
and industrial activity; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and
in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the German Hansa.
Chaucer's "Merchant" characteristically wears a "Flandrish beaver hat;"
and it is no accident that the scene of the "Pardoner's Tale," which
begins with a description of "superfluity abominable," is laid in
Flanders. In England, indeed the towns never came to domineer as they did
in the Netherlands. Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be
ruled by the landed interest only, so in proportion as the English towns,
and London especially, grew richer, their voices were listened to in the
settlement of the affairs of the nation. It might be very well for
Chaucer to close the description of his "Merchant" with what looks very
much like a fashionable writer's half sneer:--

Forsooth, he was a worthy man withal;
But, truly, I wot not how men him call.

Yet not only was high political and social rank reached by individual
"merchant princes," such as the wealthy William de la Pole, a descendant
of whom is said (though on unsatisfactory evidence) to have been Chaucer's
grand-daughter, but the government of the country came to be very
perceptibly influenced by the class from which they sprang. On the
accession of Richard II, two London citizens were appointed controllers of
the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a
committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a
merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the
smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great
merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his
quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new
Troy," he was welcomed, according to the Friar who has commemorated the
event in Latin verse, by the trades in an array resembling an angelic
host; and among the crafts enumerated we recognise several of those
represented in Chaucer's company of pilgrims--by the "Carpenter," the
"Webbe" (Weaver), and the "Dyer," all clothed

in one livery
Of a solemn and great fraternity.

The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up its head, collectively
and individually. The historical original of Chaucer's "Host"--the actual
Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark,
was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of
himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its
fictitious reproduction. And he and his fellows, the "poor and simple
Commons"--for so humble was the style they were wont to assume in their
addresses to the sovereign,--began to look upon themselves, and to be
looked upon, as a power in the State. The London traders and
handicraftsmen knew what it was to be well-to-do citizens, and if they had
failed to understand it, home monition would have helped to make it clear
to them:--

Well seemed each of them a fair burgess,
For sitting in a guildhall on a dais.
And each one for the wisdom that he can
Was shapely for to be an alderman.
They had enough of chattels and of rent,
And very gladly would their wives assent;
And, truly, else they had been much to blame.
It is full fair to be yclept madame,
And fair to go to vigils all before,
And have a mantle royally y-bore.

The English State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy --the ramification
of contributory courts and camps--of the crude days of William the
Conqueror and his successors. The Norman lords and their English
dependants no longer formed two separate elements in the body politic. In
the great French wars of Edward III, the English armies had no longer
mainly consisted of the baronial levies. The nobles had indeed, as of
old, ridden into battle at the head of their vassals and retainers; but
the body of the force had been made up of Englishmen serving for pay, and
armed with their national implement, the bow--such as Chaucer's "Yeoman"
carried with him on the ride to Canterbury:--

A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bare full thriftily.
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows drooped not with feathers low,
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.

The use of the bow was specially favoured by both Edward III and his
successor; and when early in the next century the chivalrous Scottish
king, James I (of whom mention will be made among Chaucer's poetic
disciples) returned from his long English captivity to his native land, he
had no more eager care than that his subjects should learn to emulate the
English in the handling of their favourite weapon. Chaucer seems to be
unable to picture an army without it, and we find him relating how, from
ancient Troy,--

Hector and many a worthy wight out went
With spear in hand, and with their big bows bent.

No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, and when
the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed by its self-
imposed contributions, the Scottish and French campaigns should have
called forth that national enthusiasm which found an echo in the songs of
Lawrence Minot, as hearty war-poetry as has been composed in any age of
our literature. They were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual
popularity they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they
may have reached Chaucer's ears in his boyhood.

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