CHAPTER 1. CHAUCER'S TIMES.

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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.

Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his death

in a dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the proudest hope

of both dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, and the Black Prince

had preceded his father to the tomb. The good ship England (so sang a

contemporary poet) was left without rudder or helm; and in a kingdom

full of faction and discontent the future of the Plantagenet throne

depended on a child. While the young king's ambitious uncle, John of

Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (Chaucer's patron), was in nominal retirement,

and his academical ally, Wyclif, was gaining popularity as the

mouthpiece of the resistance to the papal demands, there were

fermenting beneath the surface elements of popular agitation, which had

been but little taken into account by the political factions of Edward

the Third's reign, and by that part of its society with which Chaucer

was more especially connected. But the multitude, whose turn in truth

comes but rarely in the history of a nation, must every now and then

make itself heard, although poets may seem all but blind and deaf to

the tempest as it rises, and bursts, and passes away. Many causes had

concurred to excite the insurrection which temporarily destroyed the

influence of John of Gaunt, and which for long cast a deep shade upon

the effects of the teaching of Wyclif. The acquisition of a measure of

rights and power by the middle classes had caused a general swaying

upwards; and throughout the peoples of Europe floated those dreams and

speculations concerning the equality and fraternity of all men, which

needed but a stimulus and an opportunity to assume the practical shape

of a revolution. The melancholy thought which pervades Langland's

"Vision" is still that of the helplessness of the poor; and the remedy

to which he looks against the corruption of the governing classes is

the advent of a superhuman king, whom he identifies with the ploughman

himself, the representative of suffering humility. But about the same

time as that of the composition of this poem--or not long

afterwards--Wyclif had sent forth among the people his "simple

priests," who illustrated by contrast the conflict which his teaching

exposed between the existing practice of the Church and the original

documents of her faith. The connexion between Wyclif's teaching and

the peasants' insurrection under Richard II is as undeniable as that

between Luther's doctrines and the great social uprising in Germany a

century and a half afterwards. When, upon the declaration of the Papal

Schism, Wyclif abandoned all hope of a reform of the Church from

within, and, defying the injunctions of foe and friend alike, entered

upon a course of theological opposition, the popular influence of his

followers must have tended to spread a theory admitting of very easy

application ad hominem--the theory, namely, that the tenure of all

offices, whether spiritual or temporal, is justified only by the

personal fitness of their occupants. With such levelling doctrine, the

Socialism of popular preachers like John Balle might seem to coincide

with sufficient closeness; and since worthiness was not to be found in

the holders of either spiritual or temporal authority, of either

ecclesiastical or lay wealth, the time had palpably come for the poor

man to enjoy his own again. Then, the advent of a weak government,

over which a powerful kinsman of the king and unconcealed adversary of

the Church was really seeking to recover the control, and the

imposition of a tax coming home to all men except actual beggars, and

filling serfdom's cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the

opportunity, and the insurrection broke out. Its violence fell short

of that of the French Jacquerie a quarter of a century earlier; but no

doubt could exist as to its critical importance. As it happened, the

revolt turned with special fury against the possessions of the Duke of

Lancaster, whose sympathies with the cause of ecclesiastical reform it

definitively extinguished.

After the suppression of this appalling movement by a party of Order

comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction

ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the

ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have

originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt

worse than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with

the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline,

considering the absence from his teaching of any tangible system of

church government; and Lollardry came to be the popular name, or

nickname, for any and every form of dissent from the existing system.

Finally, Henry of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as

a sort of saviour of society,--a favourite character for usurpers to

pose in before the applauding assemblage of those who claim "a stake in

the country." Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the

kind which goes with the times, who was in turn a flatterer of Richard

and (by the simple expedient of a revised second edition of his magnum

opus) a flatterer of Henry, offers better testimony than Chaucer to the

conservatism of the upper classes of his age, and to the single-minded

anxiety for the good times when

Justice of law is held;

The privilege of royalty

Is safe, and all the barony

Worshipped is in its estate.

The people stands in obeisance

Under the rule of governance.

Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician

by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his

incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale"

he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people,"

its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity,

and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale"

he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry

ever put upon paper by a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion:--

So hideous was the noise, ah bencite!

That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie

Not made never shoutes half so shrill,

When that they any Fleming meant to kill.

Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakably conservative tone in the

"Ballad" purporting to have been sent by him "to King Richard," with

its refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and its

admonition to its sovereign to

...shew forth the sword of castigation.

On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the passage,

at once powerful and touching, in the so-called "Parson's Tale" (the

sermon which closes the "Canterbury Tales" as Chaucer left them), in

which certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen

amercements, "which might more reasonably be called extortions than

amercements," while lords in general are commanded to be good to their

thralls (serfs), because "those that they clept thralls, be God's

people; for humble folks be Christ's friends; they be contubernially

with the Lord." The solitary type, however, of the labouring man

proper which Chaucer, in manifest remembrance of Langland's allegory,

produces, is one which, beautiful and affecting as it is, has in it a

flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that things are as they should

be. This is--not of course the "Parson" himself, of which most

significant character hereafter, but--the "Parson's" brother, the

"Ploughman". He is a true labourer and a good, religious and

charitable in his life,--and always ready to pay his tithes. In short,

he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather than the

prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man.

Such were some, though of course some only, of the general currents of

English public life in the latter half--Chaucer's half--of the

fourteenth century. Its social features were naturally in accordance

with the course of the national history. In the first place, the slow

and painful process of amalgamation between the Normans and the English

was still unfinished, though the reign of Edward III went far towards

completing what had rapidly advanced since the reigns of John and Henry

III. By the middle of the fourteenth century English had become, or

was just becoming, the common tongue of the whole nation. Among the

political poems and songs preserved from the days of Edward III and

Richard II, not a single one composed on English soil is written in

French. Parliament was opened by an English speech in the year 1363,

and in the previous year the proceedings in the law courts were ordered

to be conducted in the native tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his

"Canterbury Tales," it seems still to have continued the pedantic

affectation of a profession for its members, like Chaucer's "Man of

Law," to introduce French law-terms into common conversation; so that

it is natural enough to find the "Summoner" following suit, and

interlarding his "Tale" with the Latin scraps picked up by him from the

decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts. Meanwhile, manifold

difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion between the two

races, before the victory of the English language showed this fusion to

have been in substance accomplished. One of these difficulties, which

has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has doubtless been

exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it existed is

not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character and

temperament of French and English differed largely from one another;

though the reasons why they so differed, remain a matter of argument.

In a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the

French interlocutor attributes this difference to the respective

national beverages: "WE are nourished with the pure juice of the grape,

while naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take

anything for liquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely

greater politeness by a living French critic of high repute, according

to whom the English, still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were

drunken gluttons, agitated at intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the

Normans, on the other hand, lightened by their transplantation, and by

the admixture of a variety of elements, already found the claims of

esprit developing themselves within them. This is an explanation which

explains nothing--least of all, the problem: why the lively strangers

should have required the contact with insular phlegm in order to

receive the creative impulse--why, in other words, Norman-French

literature should have derived so enormous an advantage from the

transplantation of Normans to English ground. But the evil days when

the literary labours of Englishmen had been little better than

bond-service to the tastes of their foreign masters had passed away,

since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons

of England to take a share with them in the national councils. After

this, the question of the relations between the two languages, and the

wider one of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be

decided by the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the

one side upon the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the

expression they found in forms of life and literature, had henceforth,

so to speak, to stand on their merits; the days of their dominion as a

matter of course had passed away.

Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles

of Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order.

Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a

difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in

these degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the

Holy Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against

the pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an

English knight--in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster,

fought there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV, did forty

years later--yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the

great mediaeval companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the

century, perished under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul

fictions, but at the same time were only too much in accord with facts

betokening an unmistakable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before

the century closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the

Templars by the Thames. Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet

ended, its supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing

dim. In the history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III is

memorable, not only for the foundation of our most illustrious order of

knighthood, but likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and

courtesy, as well on the part of the King when in his better days, as

on that of his heroic son. Yet it cannot be by accident that an

undefinable air of the old-fashioned clings to that most delightful of

all Chaucer's character-sketches, the "Knight" of the "Canterbury

Tales." His warlike deeds at Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere,

may be illustrated from those of more than one actual knight of the

times; and the whole description of him seems founded on one by a

French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at least the external

features of a knight of the old school. The chivalry, however, which

was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly far removed

from the sturdy simplicity of Chaucer's "Knight," and inwardly often

rotten in more than one vital part. In show and splendour a higher

point was probably reached in Edward III's than in any preceding reign.

The extravagance in dress which prevailed in this period is too well

known a characteristic of it to need dwelling upon. Sumptuary laws in

vain sought to restrain this foible; and it rose to such a pitch as

even to oblige men, lest they should be precluded from indulging in

gorgeous raiment, to abandon hospitality, a far more amiable species of

excess. When the kinds of clothing respectively worn by the different

classes served as distinctions of rank, the display of splendour in one

class could hardly fail to provoke emulation in the others. The

long-lived English love for "crying" colours shows itself amusingly

enough in the early pictorial representations of several of Chaucer's

Canterbury pilgrims, though in floridity of apparel, as of speech, the

youthful "Squire" bears away the bell:--

Embroidered was he, as it were a mead

All full of freshest flowers, white and red.

But of the artificiality and extravagance of the costumes of these

times we have direct contemporary evidence, and loud contemporary

complaints. Now, it is the jagged cut of the garments, punched and

shredded by the man-milliner; now, the wide and high collars and the

long-pointed boots, which attract the indignation of the moralist; at

one time he inveighs against the "horrible disordinate scantness" of

the clothing worn by gallants, at another against the "outrageous

array" in which ladies love to exhibit their charms. The knights'

horses are decked out with not less finery than are the knights

themselves, with "curious harness, as in saddles and bridles, cruppers,

and breast-plates, covered with precious clothing, and with bars and

plates of gold and silver." And though it is hazardous to stigmatize

the fashions of any one period as specially grotesque, yet it is

significant of this age to find the reigning court beauty appearing at

a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun; while even a lady from a

manufacturing district, the "Wife of Bath," makes the most of her

opportunities to be seen as well as to see. Her "kerchiefs" were "full

fine" of texture, and weighed, one might be sworn, ten pound--

That on a Sunday were upon her head.

Her hosen too were of fine scarlet red,

Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new.

...

Upon an ambler easily she sat,

Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,

As broad as is a buckler or a targe.

So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her

feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of any period.

It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than

fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and

moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded

declares itself in what we know concerning the social life of the

nobility, as, for instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of

Froissart, whose counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor

to feed themselves, nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals.

The "Vows of the Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward

III's reign, contains a choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths;

and in a humbler way the rest of the population very naturally imitated

the parlance of their rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale,"

"dismembered Christ by soul, heart, bones, and body."

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the

social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have

largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted.

The relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history

as well as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and

incontestably its conceptions of this relation still retained much of

the pure sentiment belonging to the best and most fervent times of

Christian chivalry. The highest religious expression which has ever

been given to man's sense of woman's mission, as his life's comfort and

crown, was still a universally dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin,

King Edward III dedicated his principal religious foundation; and

Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in

accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious

devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled

the "Praise of Women," in which she is enthusiastically recognized as

the representative of the whole of her sex, is generally rejected as

not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," beginning

Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,

seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in

"Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by

him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed

Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the

letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succession. Nor, apart from

this religious sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the

ideal of true knightly love, destined though this ideal was to be

obscured in the course of time, until at last the "Mort d'Arthure" was

the favourite literary nourishment of the minions and mistresses of

Edward IV's degenerate days. In his "Book of the Duchess" Chaucer has

left us a picture of true knightly love, together with one of true

maiden purity. The lady celebrated in this poem was loth, merely for

the sake of coquetting with their exploits, to send her knights upon

errands of chivalry--

into Walachy,

To Prussia, and to Tartary,

To Alexandria or Turkey.

And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might

have been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's

"Troilus and Cressid" of her lover, and of that which attracted her in

him:--

For trust ye well that your estate royal,

Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness

Of you in war or tourney martial,

Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches,

Of these none made me rue on your distress,

BUT MORAL VIRTUE, GROUNDED UPON TRUTH,

THAT WAS THE CAUSE I FIRST HAD ON YOU RUTH.

And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had,

And that ye had (as methought) in despite

Everything that tended unto bad,

As rudeness, and as popular appetite,

And that your reason bridled your delight,

'Twas these did make 'bove every creature,

That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure.

And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the

better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon

female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their

conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the companies which in

the "House of Fame" sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer

vigorously satirises the would-be-lady-killers, who were content with

the REPUTATION of accomplished seducers; and in "Troilus and Cressid" a

shrewd observer exclaims with the utmost vivacity against

Such sort of folk,--what shall I clepe them? what?

That vaunt themselves of women, and by name,

That yet to them ne'er promised this or that,

Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat.

The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes, that the

harm which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice.

But a deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the

Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," that among men the betrayal of

women is now "held a game." So indisputably it was already often

esteemed, in too close an accordance with examples set in the highest

places in the land. If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in

which Chaucer narrates the amours of Mars and Venus was written by him

at the request of John of Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the

duke's sister-in-law with a nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman

afterwards married one of his own daughters! But nowhere was the

deterioration of sentiment on this head more strongly typified than in

Edward III himself. The King, who (if the pleasing tale be true which

gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old English drama) had in his

early days royally renounced an unlawful passion for the fair Countess

of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once violating his conjugal duty

and neglecting his military glory for the sake of strange women's

charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter--the device of which

enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct--died in the

hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in France, the

ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation between

the sexes,--a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed a

great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the

most influential class of any nation, the social health of that nation

must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the

artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the

fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of

sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies,

likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree.

Here the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our

poetic literature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the

praise and worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to

Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," and in the "Flower and the Leaf," a

most pleasing poem (suggested by a French model), which it is

unfortunately no longer possible to number among his genuine works.

The poem of the "Court of Love," which was likewise long erroneously

attributed to him, may be the original work of an English author; but

in any case its main contents are a mere adaptation of a peculiar

outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions common to chivalry in

general.

Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry (though

not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would certainly

be rash to assert that its day was passing away in the latter half of

the fourteenth century. It has indeed been pointed out that the date

at which Wyclif's career as a reformer may be said to have begun almost

coincides with that of the climax and first decline of feudal chivalry

in England. But, without seeking to interpret coincidences, we know

that, though the influence of the Christian Church and that of its

Roman branch in particular, has asserted and reasserted itself in

various ways and degrees in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere,

the epoch of its moral omnipotence had come to an end many generations

before the disruption of its external framework. In the fourteenth

century men had long ceased to look for the mediation of the Church

between an overbearing Crown and a baronage and commonalty eager for

the maintenance of their rights or for the assertion of their claims.

On the other hand, the conflicts which still recurred between the

temporal power and the Church had as little reference as ever to

spiritual concerns. Undoubtedly, the authority of the Church over the

minds of the people still depended in the main upon the spiritual

influence she exercised over them; and the desire for a reformation of

the Church, which was already making itself felt in a gradually

widening sphere, was by the great majority of those who cherished it

held perfectly compatible with a recognition of her authority. The

world, it has been well said, needed an enquiry extending over three

centuries, in order to learn to walk without the aid of the Church of

Rome. Wyclif, who sought to emancipate the human conscience from

reliance upon any earthly authority intermediate between the soul and

its Maker, reckoned without his generation; and few, except those with

whom audacity took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme

results of his speculations. The Great Schism rather stayed than

promoted the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was

now no longer necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the henchman

of the arch-foe across the narrow seas.

But although the progress of English sentiment towards the desire for

liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a long and seemingly

decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth as in the sixteenth century

the most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church

was the conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves. The

Reformation has most appropriately retained in history a name at first

unsuspiciously applied to the removal of abuses in the ecclesiastical

administration and in the life of the clergy. What aid could be

derived by those who really hungered for spiritual food, or what

strength could accrue to the thoughtless faith of the light-hearted

majority, from many of the most common varieties of the English

ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages? Apart from the Italian and other

foreign holders of English benefices, who left their flocks to be

tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of the most offensive kind

of tax-gatherers, the native clergy included many species, but among

them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a high ideal of

religious life. The times had by no means come to an end when many of

the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in warlike prowess.

Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting the

heretics at home, had commanded in army of crusaders in Flanders,

levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI against the anti-Pope Clement VII and

his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while

the law is ruled so,

That clerks unto the war intend,

I wot not how they should amend

The woeful world in other things,

And so make peace between the kings

After the law of charity,

Which is the duty properly

Belonging unto the priesthood.

A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself against

the extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy

indulged. The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates

had ample means for defraying in the revenues of their sees; while

lesser dignitaries had to be active in levying their dues or the fines

of their courts, lest everything should flow into the receptacles of

their superiors. So in Chaucer's "Friar's Tale" an unfriendly Regular

says of an archdeacon,--

For small tithes and for small offering

He made the people piteously to sing.

For ere the bishop caught them on his hook,

They were down in the archdeacons book.

As a matter of course, the worthy who filled the office of "Summoner"

to the court of the archdeacon in question, had a keen eye for the

profitable improprieties subject to its penalties, and was aided in his

efforts by the professional abettors of vice whom he kept "ready to his

hand." Nor is it strange that the undisguised worldliness of many

members of the clerical profession should have reproduced itself in

other lay subordinates, even in the parish clerks, at all times apt to

copy their betters, though we would fain hope such was not the case

with the parish clerk, in "the jolly Absalom" of the "Miller's Tale."

The love of gold had corrupted the acknowledged chief guardians of

incorruptible treasures, even though few may have avowed this love as

openly as the "idle" "Canon," whose "Yeoman" had so strange a tale to

tell to the Canterbury pilgrims concerning his master's absorbing

devotion to the problem of the multiplication of gold. To what a point

the popular discontent with the vices of the higher secular clergy had

advanced in the last decennium of the century, may be seen from the

poem called the "Complaint of the Ploughman"--a production pretending

to be by the same hand which in the "Vision" had dwelt on the

sufferings of the people and on the sinfulness of the ruling classes.

Justly or unjustly, the indictment was brought against the priests of

being the agents of every evil influence among the people, the soldiers

of an army of which the true head was not God, but Belial.

In earlier days the Church had known how to compensate the people for

the secular clergy's neglect, or imperfect performance, of its duties.

But in no respect had the ecclesiastical world more changed than in

this. The older monastic Orders had long since lost themselves in

unconcealed worldliness; how, for instance, had the Benedictines

changed their character since the remote times when their Order had

been the principal agent in revivifying the religion of the land! Now,

they were taunted with their very name, as having been bestowed upon

them "by antiphrasis," i.e. by contraries. From many of their

monasteries, and from the inmates who dwelt in these comfortable halls,

had vanished even all pretence of disguise. Chaucer's "Monk" paid no

attention to the rule of St. Benedict, and of his disciple St. Maur,

Because that it was old and somewhat strait;

and preferred to fall in with the notions of later times. He was an

"outrider, that loved venery," and whom his tastes and capabilities

would have well qualified for the dignified post of abbot. He had

"full many a dainty horse" in his stable, and the swiftest of

greyhounds to boot; and rode forth gaily, clad in superfine furs and a

hood elegantly fastened with a gold pin, and tied into a love-knot at

the "greater end," while the bridle of his steed jingled as if its

rider had been as good a knight as any of them--this last, by the way,

a mark of ostentation against which Wyclif takes occasion specially to

inveigh. This Monk (and Chaucer must say that he was wise in his

generation) could not understand why he should study books and unhinge

his mind by the effort; life was not worth having at the price; and no

one knew better to what use to put the pleasing gift of existence.

Hence mine host of the Tabard, a very competent critic, had reason for

the opinion which he communicated to the Monk:--

It is a noble pasture where thou go'st;

Thou art not like a penitent or ghost.

In the Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becoming

usual. But little in the way of religious guidance could fall to the

lot of a sisterhood presided over by such a "Prioress" as Chaucer's

Madame Eglantine, whose mind--possibly because her nunnery fulfilled

the functions of a finishing school for young ladies--was mainly

devoted to French and deportment, or by such a one as the historical

Lady Juliana Berners, of a rather later date, whose leisure hours

produced treatises on hunting and hawking, and who would probably have

on behalf of her own sex echoed the "Monk's" contempt for the prejudice

against the participation of the Religious in field-sports:--

He gave not for that text a pulled hen

That saith, that hunters be no holy men.

On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at a

later date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as the

secular clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, any

longer satisfy the reason of their being. In the fourteenth century

the Dominicans or Black Friars, who at London dwelt in such

magnificence that king and Parliament often preferred a sojourn with

them to abiding at Westminster, had in general grown accustomed to

concentrate their activity upon the spiritual direction of the higher

classes. But though they counted among them Englishmen of eminence

(one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the philosophical Strode"), they

in truth never played a more than secondary part in this country, to

whose soil the delicate machinery of the Inquisition, of which they

were by choice the managers, was never congenial. Of far greater

importance for the population of England at large was the Order of the

Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call themselves or to be

called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor had habitually

looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring and consoling

eloquence of the pulpit; and they had carried their labours into the

midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with that

poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or of

contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing from the

short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a

learned, as well as a ministering and preaching Order; and it was

precisely from among them that, at Oxford and elsewhere, sprang a

succession of learned monks, whose names are inseparably connected with

some of the earliest English growths of philosophical speculation and

scientific research. Nor is it possible to doubt that in the middle of

the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised

an appreciable influence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of

unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But

in the Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change,

which may be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which

they had been honourably distinguished; and in England, as elsewhere,

the spirit of the words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Francis

of Assisi was being verified by his degenerate Children:--

So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth

A good beginning doth no longer last

Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth.

Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what their

predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over

the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to

represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations;

"Preach not," says Chaucer's "Host,"

"as friars do in Lent,

That they for our old sins may make us weep,

Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep."

But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well as to

deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying against St.

Francis, and to desiderate for them an actual abode of fire, resembling

that of which in their favourite religious shows they were wont to

present the mimic semblance to the multitude. It was they who became

in England as elsewhere the purveyors of charms and the organisers of

pious frauds, while the learning for which their Order had been famous

was withering away into the yellow leaf of scholasticism. The Friar in

general became the common butt of literary satire; and though the

populace still remained true to its favourite guides, a reaction was

taking place in favour of the secular as against the regular clergy in

the sympathies of the higher classes, and in the spheres of society

most open to intellectual influences. The monks and the London

multitude were at one time united against John of Gaunt, but it was

from the ranks of the secular clergy that Wyclif came forth to

challenge the ascendancy of Franciscan scholasticism in his university.

Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor Parson of the Town" paints his

ideal of a Christian minister--simple, poor, and devoted to his holy

work,--has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the

whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and

altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that accurate and

unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled with

fairies--NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of

the sun. Among them there is the "Pardoner," i.e. seller of pardons

(indulgences)--with his "haughty" sermons, delivered "by rote" to

congregation after congregation in the self-same words, and everywhere

accompanied by the self-same tricks of anecdotes and jokes,--with his

Papal credentials, and with the pardons he has brought from Rome "all

hot,"--and with precious relics to rejoice the hearts of the faithful,

and to fill his own pockets with the proceeds: to wit, a pillowcase

covered with the veil of Our Lady, and a piece of the sail of the ship

in which St. Peter went out fishing on the Lake of Gennesareth. This

worthy, who lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical

brutality, is manifestly drawn from the life;--or the portrait could

not have been accepted which was presented alike by Chaucer, and by his

contemporary Langland, and (a century and a half later) in the

plagiarism of the orthodox Catholic John Heywood. There, again, is the

"Limitour," a friar licensed to beg, and to hear confession and grant

absolution, within the LIMITS of a certain district. He is described

by Chaucer with so much humour, that one can hardly suspect much

exaggeration in the sketch. In him we have the truly popular

ecclesiastic who springs from the people, lives among the people, and

feels with the people. He is the true friend of the poor, and being

such, has, as one might say, his finger in every pie: for "a fly and a

friar will fall in every dish and every business." His

readily-proffered arbitration settles the differences of the humbler

classes at the "love-days," a favourite popular practice noted already

in the "Vision" of Langland; nor is he a niggard of the mercies which

he is privileged to dispense:--

Full sweetly did he hear confession,

And pleasant was his absolution.

He was an easy man to give penance,

Whereso wist to have a good pittance;

For unto a poor Order for to give,

Is signe that a man is well y-shrive;

For if he gave, he durste make a vaunt

He wiste that a man was repentant.

For many a man so hard is of his heart

He can not weep although he sorely smart.

Therefore instead of weeping and of prayers

Men must give silver to the poore Freres.

Already in the French "Roman de la Rose" the rivalry between the Friars

and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, evidently

unfavourable to the former and favourable to the latter; but in

England, where Langland likewise dwells upon the jealousy between them,

it was specially accentuated by the assaults of Wyclif upon the

Mendicant Orders. Wyclif's Simple Priests, who at first ministered

with the approval of the Bishops, differed from the Mendicants, first

by not being beggars, and secondly by being poor. They might perhaps

have themselves ultimately played the part of a new Order in England,

had not Wyclif himself by rejecting the cardinal dogma of the Church

severed these followers of his from its organism and brought about

their suppression. The question as to Chaucer's own attitude towards

the Wycliffite movement will be more conveniently touched upon below;

but the tone is unmistakable of the references or allusions to

Lollardry which he occasionally introduces into the mouth of his

"Host," whose voice is that vox populi which the upper and middle

classes so often arrogate to themselves. Whatever those classes might

desire, it was not to have "cockle sown" by unauthorised intruders "in

the corn" of their ordinary instruction. Thus there is a tone of

genuine attachment to the "vested interest" principle, and of aversion

from all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the

"Host's" exclamation, uttered after the "Reeve," has been (in his own

style) "sermoning" on the topic of old age:--

What availeth all this wit?

What? should we speak all day of Holy Writ?

The devil surely made a reeve to preach;

for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning

mariner or physician!

Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the Church still

in possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power and

privileges,--as well as of means for enforcing unity of profession

which the legislation of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated by the

prevailing fears of heresy, was still further to increase. On the

other hand, we find the influence of the clergy over the minds of the

people diminished though not extinguished. This was, in the case of

the higher secular clergy, partly attributable to their self-indulgence

or neglect of their functions, partly to their having been largely

superseded by the Regulars in the control of the religious life of the

people. The Orders we find no longer at the height of their influence,

but still powerful by their wealth, their numbers, their traditional

hold upon the lower classes, and their determination to retain this

hold even by habitually resorting to the most dubious of methods.

Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, and doubtless may also

assume it to have lingered among some of the regular, some of the salt

left whose savour consists in a single-minded and humble resolution to

maintain the highest standard of a religious life. But such "clerks"

as these are at no times the most easily found, because it is not they

who are always running it "unto London, unto St. Paul's" on urgent

private affairs. What wonder, that the real teaching of Wyclif, of

which the full significance could hardly be understood, but by a select

few, should have virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which

the various agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious

reform with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in

character and alike to require suppression! In truth, of course, these

movements and their agents were often very different from one another

in their ends, and were not to be suppressed by the same processes.

It should not be forgotten that in this century learning was, though

only very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy alone.

Much doubt remains as to the extent of education--if a little reading,

and less writing deserve the name--among the higher classes in this

period of our national life. A cheering sign appears in the

circumstance that the legal deeds of this age begin to bear signatures,

and a reference to John of Trevisa would bear out Hallam's conjecture,

that in the year 1400 "the average instruction of an English gentleman

of the first class would comprehend common reading and writing, a

considerable knowledge of French, and a slight tincture of Latin."

Certain it is that in this century the barren teaching of the

Universities advanced but little towards the true end of all academical

teaching--the encouragement and spread of the highest forms of national

culture. To what use could a gentleman of Edward III's or Richard II's

day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of Oxenford" in Aristotelian

logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the

rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however much his

learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend

him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in

which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means

with which to purchase more of his beloved books. Probably no

trustworthier conclusions as to the literary learning and studies of

those days are to be derived from any other source than from a

comparison of the few catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to

us; and these help to show that the century was approaching its close

before a few sparse rays of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence

reached England. But this ray was communicated neither through the

clergy nor through the Universities; and such influence as was

exercised by it upon the national mind, was directly due to profane

poets,--men of the world, who like Chaucer quoted authorities even more

abundantly than they used them, and made some of their happiest

discoveries after the fashion in which the "Oxford Clerk" came across

Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel: as it were by

accident. There is only too ample a justification for leaving aside

the records of the history of learning in England during the latter

half of the fourteenth century in any sketch of the main influences

which in that period determined or affected the national progress. It

was not by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living

contact with the current of popular thought and feeling. The

Universities were thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of

previous ages; but the ascendancy was passing away to which Oxford had

attained over Paris--during the earlier middle ages, and again in the

fifteenth century until the advent of the Renascence, the central

university of Europe in the favourite study of scholastic philosophy

and theology.

But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to the whole

body of the population, exclusively of that great section of it which

unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very few

writers--whether poets or historians. In the people at large we may,

indeed, easily discern in this period the signs of an advance towards

that self-government which is the true foundation of our national

greatness. But on the other hand it is impossible not to observe how,

while the moral ideas of the people wore still under the control of the

Church, the State in its turn still ubiquitously interfered in the

settlement of the conditions of social existence, fixing prices,

controlling personal expenditure, regulating wages. Not until England

had fully attained to the character of a commercial country, which it

was coming gradually to assume, did its inhabitants begin to understand

the value of that which has gradually come to distinguish ours among

the nations of Europe, viz. the right of individual Englishmen, as well

as of the English people, to manage their own affairs for themselves.

This may help to explain what can hardly fail to strike a reader of

Chaucer and of the few contemporary remains of our literature. About

our national life in this period, both in its virtues and in its vices,

there is something--it matters little whether we call it--childlike or

childish; in its "apert" if not in its privy sides it lacks the

seriousness belonging to men and to generations, who have learnt to

control themselves, instead of relying on the control of others.

In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several of

the most salient features in the social life of the period. The

extravagant expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of

various kinds encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has been

already referred to; it was by no means distinctive of any one class of

the population. Among the friars who went about preaching homilies on

the people's favourite vices some humorous rogues may, like the

"Pardoner" of the "Canterbury Tales," have made a point of treating

their own favourite vice as their one and unchangeable text:--

My theme is always one, and ever was:

Radix malorum est cupiditas.

But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins; and these

moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on dress

the impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting in their ignorance of

political economy and defiance of common sense, that this result was

really due to the endless foreign wars. Yet in contrast with the pomp

and ceremony of life, upon which so great an amount of money and time

and thought was wasted, are noticeable shortcomings by no means

uncommon in the case of undeveloped civilisations (as for instance

among the most typically childish or childlike nationalities of the

Europe of our own day), viz. discomfort and uncleanliness of all sorts.

To this may be added the excessive fondness for sports and pastimes of

all kinds, in which nations are aptest to indulge before or after the

era of their highest efforts,--the desire to make life one long

holiday, dividing it between tournaments and the dalliance of courts of

love, or between archery-meetings (skilfully substituted by royal

command for less useful exercises), and the seductive company of

"tumblers," "fruiterers," and "waferers." Furthermore, one may notice

in all classes a far from eradicated inclination to superstitions of

every kind,--whether those encouraged or those discouraged by the Church

(For holy Church's faith, in our belief,

Suffereth no illusion us to grieve.

"The Franklin's Tale."),

--an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the

uncertain gropings of contemporary science. Hence, the credulous

acceptance of relics like those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends

like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the

numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the

"Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the

other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy,

notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class

represented by Chaucer's "Franklin" towards

such folly

As in our days is not held worth a fly,

and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened

accomplices, such as the gold-making "Canon's Yeoman." Hence, again,

the vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of

which miraculous instrument the "Squire's" "half-told story" describes

a specimen, referring to the incontestable authority of Aristotle and

others, who write "in their lives" concerning quaint mirrors and

perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have "heard the

books" of these sages. Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to

eschew the consideration of serious religious questions, and to leave

them to clerks, as if they were crabbed problems of theology. For in

truth, while the most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages

had exhausted, or were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon

the people, the forms of the doctrines of the Church--even of the most

stimulative as well as of the most solemn among them,--had grown hard

and stiff. To those who received if not to those who taught these

doctrines they seemed alike lifeless, unless translated into the terms

of the merest earthly transactions or the language of purely human

relations. And thus, paradoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and

conscientious rulers of the Church thought themselves on occasion

called upon to restrain rather than to stimulate the religious ardour

of the multitude--fed as the flame was by very various materials.

Perhaps no more characteristic narrative has come down to us from the

age of the Poet of the "Canterbury Tales," than the story of Bishop

(afterwards Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury Pilgrims. In the

year 1370 the land was agitated through its length and breadth, on the

occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint, Thomas the

Martyr. The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the familiar

Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their

companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London. They demanded

his blessing; but to their astonishment and indignation he seized the

occasion to read a lesson to the crowd on the uselessness to

unrepentant sinners of the plenary indulgences, for the sake of which

they were wending their way to the Martyr's shrine. The rage of the

multitude found a mouthpiece in a soldier, who loudly upbraided the

Bishop for stirring up the people against St. Thomas, and warned him

that a shameful death would befall him in consequence. The multitude

shouted Amen--and one is left to wonder whether any of the pious

pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's manly truthfulness, swelled the

mob which eleven years later butchered "the plunderer" as it called

him, "of the Commons." It is such glimpses as this which show us how

important the Church had become towards the people. Worse was to ensue

before the better came; in the meantime, the nation was in that stage

of its existence when the innocence of the child was fast losing

itself, without the self-control of the man having yet taken its place.

But the heart of England was sound the while. The national spirit of

enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to shipman; and

faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed the highest

though not the universal virtues of her sex. The value of such

evidence as the mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes

for a knowledge of the times to which he belongs is inestimable. For

it shows us what has survived, as well as what was doomed to decay, in

the life of the nation with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy.

And it therefore seemed not inappropriate to approach, in the first

instance, from this point of view the subject of this biographical

essay,--Chaucer, "the poet of the dawn." For in him there are many

things significant of the age of transition in which he lived; in him

the mixture of Frenchman and Englishman is still in a sense incomplete,

as that of their language is in the diction of his poems. His gaiety

of heart is hardly English; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not

invariably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of

which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of

ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; nor his

light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an immoral

writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no share in

qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts unknown to and

unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately made

characteristic of Englishmen. But he IS English in his freedom and

frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for

the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be;

in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement

which was to mould the national character for at least a long series of

generations he displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements

already preparing to affect the course of that movement he shows a very

incomplete consciousness. But of the health and strength which, after

struggles many and various, made that movement possible and made it

victorious, he, more than any one of his contemporaries, is the living

type and the speaking witness. Thus, like the times to which he

belongs, he stands half in and half out of the Middle Ages, half in and

half out of a phase of our national life, which we can never hope to

understand more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken

together with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom

is to enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our

literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal

freshness,--which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery

of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so

inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.