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CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE.
"A more enlightening picture than any we have yet read."--_Times._
"It will, I hope, be read by every one who wants to know what the
Middle Ages were really like."--DR. RASHDALL in _Independent Review_.
"Extraordinarily vivacious, fresh, and vivid."--MR. C. F. G.
MASTERMAN, M.P., in _Speaker_.
FRIAR'S LANTERN: A Mediaeval Fantasia.
"Written with undeniable ability."--_Times._
"Worthy of a place beside the 'Cloister and the Hearth' as a true work
of art."--_Commonwealth._
FATHER RHINE; with 14 Illustrations.
"This is a very pleasant book of journeying."--_Spectator._
PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND PUBLIC NEEDS.
"If the 'man in the street,' who and whoever he be, will take the
trouble to read it, his eyes will be opened."--_Times._
MEDIAEVAL STUDIES: Seven Essays mostly reprinted from the monthly and
quarterly reviews.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER
PAINTED BY ORDER OF HIS PUPIL THOMAS HOCCLEVE, IN A COPY OF THE LATTER'S
"REGEMENT OF PRINCES." THE HAIR AND BEARD ARE GREY, THE EYES HAZEL: HE HAS
A ROSARY IN HIS LEFT HAND AND A BLACK PENCASE OR PENKNIFE HANGS FROM HIS
NECK]
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
BY G. G. COULTON, M.A.
AUTHOR OF "FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE," ETC.
WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1908_
PREFACE
No book of this size can pretend to treat exhaustively of all that
concerns Chaucer and his England; but the Author's main aim has been to
supply an informal historical commentary on the poet's works. He has not
hesitated, in a book intended for the general public, to modernize
Chaucer's spelling, or even on rare occasions to change a word.
His best acknowledgments are due to those who have laboured so fruitfully
during the last fifty years in publishing Chaucerian and other original
documents of the later Middle Ages; more especially to Dr. F. J.
Furnivall, the indefatigable founder of the Chaucer Society and the Early
English Text Society; to Professor W. W. Skeat, whose ungrudging
generosity in private help is necessarily known only to a small percentage
of those who have been aided by his printed works; to Dr. R. R. Sharpe,
archivist of the London Guildhall; to Prebendary F. C. Hingeston-Randolph
and other editors of Episcopal Registers; to Messrs. W. Hudson and Walter
Rye for their contributions to Norfolk history; and to Mr. V. B.
Redstone's researches in Chaucerian genealogy. His proofs have enjoyed the
great advantage of revision by Dr. Furnivall, who has made many valuable
suggestions and corrections, but who is in no way responsible for other
possible errors or omissions. The many debts to other writers are, it is
hoped, duly acknowledged in their places; but the Author must here confess
himself specially beholden to the writings of M. Jusserand, whose rare
sympathy and insight are combined with an equal charm of exposition.
He has also to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall, Messrs. E. Kelsey and H. R.
Browne of Eastbourne, and the Librarian of Uppingham School, for kind
permission to reproduce seven of the illustrations; also the Editor of the
_Home and Counties Magazine_ for similar courtesy with regard to the plan
of Chaucer's Aldgate included in a 16th-century survey published for the
first time in that magazine (vol. i. p. 50).
EASTBOURNE
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi
CHAPTER I
ENGLAND IN EMBRYO 1
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 12
CHAPTER III
THE KING'S SQUIRE 25
CHAPTER IV
THE AMBASSADOR 36
CHAPTER V
THE MAN OF BUSINESS 51
CHAPTER VI
LAST DAYS 64
CHAPTER VII
LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE 76
CHAPTER VIII
ALDGATE TOWER 93
CHAPTER IX
TOWN AND COUNTRY 104
CHAPTER X
THE LAWS OF LONDON 119
CHAPTER XI
"CANTERBURY TALES"--THE _DRAMATIS PERSONAE_ 137
CHAPTER XII
"CANTERBURY TALES"--FIRST AND SECOND DAYS 151
CHAPTER XIII
"CANTERBURY TALES"--THIRD AND FOURTH DAYS 160
CHAPTER XIV
KING AND QUEEN 173
CHAPTER XV
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 188
CHAPTER XVI
HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR 202
CHAPTER XVII
THE GAY SCIENCE 217
CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREAT WAR 232
CHAPTER XIX
THE BURDEN OF THE WAR 245
CHAPTER XX
THE POOR 257
CHAPTER XXI
MERRY ENGLAND 272
CHAPTER XXII
THE KING'S PEACE 282
CHAPTER XXIII
PRIESTS AND PEOPLE 294
CHAPTER XXIV
CONCLUSION 304
INDEX 317
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
PAGE
MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL 18
_From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes"_
PLANS OF MEDIEVAL DWELLINGS 97
MEDIEVAL MUMMERS 110
_From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes"_
PILGRIMS IN BED AT INN 139
_From T. Wright's "Homes of other Days"_
THE SQUIRE OF THE "CANTERBURY TALES" 146
_From the Ellesmere MS. (15th century)_
THE MILLER 150
_From the Ellesmere MS._
THE WIFE OF BATH 162
_From the Ellesmere MS._
THE FRIAR 165
_From the Ellesmere MS._
PEACOCK FEAST OF LYNN 177
_From Stothard's Facsimile of the Original Brass_
A KNIGHT AND HIS LADY 203
_From Boutell's "Monumental Brasses"_
A BEVY OF LADIES 220
_From T. Wright's "Womankind in Western Europe"_
LIST OF PLATES
THE HOCCLEVE PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER _Frontispiece_
_From the Painting in "The Regement of Princes"_
FACING PAGE
LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY 15
_From Vertue's Engraving of Aggas's Map_
WESTMINSTER HALL 32
_From a Photograph by J. Valentine & Sons_
A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE 35
_From the Louterell Psalter_
WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY 72
_From Vertue's Engraving of Aggas's Map_
WESTMINSTER ABBEY 73
_From a Photograph by S. B. Bolas & Co._
THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND 82
_From MS. Roy. 16 F. ii. f. 73_
A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE 14TH CENTURY 92
_From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6, f. 503 b_
ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS, AS RECONSTITUTED IN W.
NEWTON'S "LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME" 101
A PARTY OF PILGRIMS 148
_From MS. Roy. 18 D. ii. f. 148_
CANTERBURY 170
_From W. Smith's Drawing of 1588. (Sloane MS. 2596)_
EDWARD III. 173
_From his Tomb in Westminster Abbey_
PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT 181
_From her Tomb in Westminster Abbey_
SIR GEOFFREY LOUTERELL, WITH HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER 194
_From the Louterell Psalter (Early 14th Century)_
SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL 216
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH CENTURY CLASSROOM 216
_From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6, f. 214_
WILLIAM OF HATFIELD, SON OF EDWARD III. AND PHILIPPA 224
_From his Tomb in York Minster (1336)_
BODIAM CASTLE, KENT 245
THE PLOUGHMAN 268
_From the Louterell Psalter (Early 14th Century)_
THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSSEX, BEFORE ITS RECENT
RESTORATION 298
WESTMINSTER ABBEY--VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER'S TOMB 313
_From a Photograph by S. B. Bolas & Co._
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
ENGLAND IN EMBRYO
"O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames!"
Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of
birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain
from pressing too literally the poet's fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer's
times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them;
but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a
genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the
20th century. There is indeed a glory over the distant past which is (in
spite of the paradox) scarcely less real for being to a great extent
imaginary; scarcely less true because it owes so much to the beholder's
eye. It is like the subtle charm we feel every time we set foot afresh on
a foreign shore. It is just because we should never dream of choosing
France or Germany for our home that we love them so much for our holidays;
it is just because we are so deeply rooted in our own age that we find so
much pleasure and profit in the past, where we may build for ourselves a
new heaven and a new earth out of the wreck of a vanished world. The very
things which would oppress us out of all proportion as present-day
realities dwindle to even less than their real significance in the long
perspective of history. All the oppressions that were then done under the
sun, and the tears of such as were oppressed, show very small in the
sum-total of things; the ancient tale of wrong has little meaning to us
who repose so far above it all; the real landmarks are the great men who
for a moment moulded the world to their own will, or those still greater
who kept themselves altogether unspotted from it. Human nature gives the
lie direct to Mark Antony's bitter rhetoric: it is rather the good that
lives after a man, and the evil that is oft interred with his bones. The
balance may not be very heavy, but it is on the right side; man's
insatiable curiosity about his fellow-men is as natural as his appetite
for food, which may on the whole be trusted to refuse the evil and choose
the good; and, in both cases, his taste is, within obvious limits, a true
guide. It is a healthy instinct which prompts us to dwell on the beauties
of an ancient timber-built house, or on the gorgeous pageantry of the
Middle Ages, without a too curious scrutiny of what may lie under the
surface; and at this distance the 14th century stands out to the modern
eye with a clearness and brilliancy which few men can see in their own
age, or even in that immediate past which must always be partially dimmed
with the dust of present-day conflicts. Those who were separated by only a
few generations from the Middle Ages could seldom judge them with
sufficient sympathy. Even two hundred years ago, most Englishmen thought
of that time as a great forest from which we had not long emerged; they
looked back and saw it in imagination as Dante saw the dark wood of his
own wanderings--bitter as death, cruel as the perilous sea from which a
spent swimmer has just struggled out upon the shore. Then, with Goethe and
Scott, came the Romantic Revival; and these men showed us the Middle Ages
peopled with living creatures--beasts of prey, indeed, in very many cases,
but always bright and swift and attractive, as wild beasts are in
comparison with the commonplace stock of our fields and farmyards--bright
in themselves, and heightened in colour by the artificial brilliancy which
perspective gives to all that we see through the wrong end of a telescope.
Since then men have turned the other end of the telescope on medieval
society, and now, in due course, the microscope, with many curious
results. But it is always good to balance our too detailed impressions
with a general survey, and to take a brief holiday, of set purpose, from
the world in which our own daily work has to be done, into a race of men
so unlike our own even amid all their general resemblance.
For the England of Edward III. was already, in its main national features,
the England in which we live to-day. "In no country of Europe are the
present-day institutions and manners and beliefs so directly derived from
the social state of five centuries ago."[1] The year 1340, which saw the
abolition of the law of Englishry, was very likely the exact year of
Chaucer's birth; and from that time forward our legislation ceased to
recognize any distinction of races: all natives of England were alike
Englishmen. Sixteen years later it was first enacted that cases in the
Sheriff's Courts of London should be pleaded in English; seven years
later, again, this became in theory the language not only of the King's
law courts, but also to some extent of Parliament; and Nicolas quotes an
amusing instance of two ambassadors to France, a Knight and a Doctor of
Laws, who confessed in 1404 "we are as ignorant of French as of Hebrew."
The contemporary Trevisa apparently attributes this rapid breakdown to the
Great Pestilence of 1349; but even before this the French language must
have been in full decay among us, for at the Parliament which Edward III.
called in 1337 to advise him about declaring war on France, the ambassador
of Robert d'Artois took care to speak "in English, in order to be
understanded of all folk, for a man ever knoweth better what he would say
and propose in the language of his childhood than in any other." Later in
the same year, in the famous statute which forbade all sports except the
longbow, it was further ordained "that all lords, barons, knights, and
honourable men of good towns should be careful and diligent to teach and
instruct their children in the French tongue, whereby they might be the
more skilful and practised in their wars."[2] But Acts of Parliament are
not omnipotent even in the 20th century; and in the 14th they often
represented rather pious aspirations than workaday facts. It was easier to
foster a healthy pastime like archery than to enforce scholastic
regulations which parents and masters were alike tempted to neglect; and
certainly the French language lost ground very rapidly in the latter half
of the century. In 1362 English superseded French as the spoken language
of the law courts; next year the Chancellor opened Parliament in an
English speech; and in 1385 Trevisa complained that boys at
grammar-schools "know no more French than their left heel." The language
lingered, of course. Chaucer's friend and contemporary, Gower, wrote as
much in French as in English. French still kept the upper hand in
Parliament till about fifty years after Chaucer's death, nor did the
statutes cease altogether to be published in that language until the reign
of Henry VIII. But though it was still the Court tongue in Chaucer's time,
and though we do not know that Edward III. was capable of addressing his
Commons in their native tongue, yet Henry IV. took care to claim the
throne before Parliament in plain English;[3] and even before that time
French had already become an exotic, an artificial dialect needing
hothouse culture--no longer French of Paris, but that of "Stratford atte
Bowe."[4] The tongue sat ill on a nation that was already proud of its
insularity and unity. Even while labouring to write in French, Gower
dedicates his work to his country: "O gentile Engletere, a toi j'escrits."
It is not the least of Chaucer's claims on our gratitude that, from the
very first, he wrote for the English people in English--that is, in the
mixed dialect of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French which was habitually spoken
in London by the upper middle classes of a mingled Norman and Teutonic
population[5]--and that in so doing he laid the foundations of a national
literary language. Much, of course, still remained to be done. Caxton, in
1490, shows us how an Englishman might well be taken for a Frenchman
outside his own country,[6] as in modern Germany a foreigner who speaks
fluently, however incorrectly, passes easily for a German of some remote
and barbarous province. Indeed, English unity in Chaucer's time was as
recent as that of the modern German empire. Men would still go before
bishops and magistrates to purge themselves by a solemn oath from the
injurious suspicion of being Scots, and therefore enemies to the realm;
and a couple of generations earlier the suspected Welshman had found
himself under the same necessity. The articles of peace drawn up in 1274
at Oxford between the northern and Irish scholars "read like a treaty of
peace between hostile nations rather than an act of University
legislation"; and even at the end of Chaucer's life we may find royal
letters "licensing John Russell, born in Ireland, to reside in England,
notwithstanding the proclamation that all Irish-born were to go and stay
in their own country." But the Oxford _Concordia_ of 1274 was the last
which recognized that division of students into "nations" which still
remained so real at Paris and other continental universities; and though
blood still reddened Oxford streets for a century longer in the ancient
quarrel of north and south, yet the "great slaughter" of 1354 was entirely
a town and gown affray.[7]
The foundations of modern England were laid by Edward I., who did more
than any other king to create a national parliament, a national system of
justice, and a national army.[8] Edward III., with far less creative
power, but with equal energy and ambition, inherited the ripe fruits of
his grandfather's policy, and raised England to a place in European
politics which she had never reached before and was seldom to reach again.
"That which touches all," said Edward I., "should be approved by all";
and, though continental sovereigns might use similar language as a subtle
cloke for their arbitrary encroachments, in England the maxim had from the
first a real meaning. The great barons--themselves steadily dwindling in
feudal power--no longer sat alone in the King's councils; by their side
sat country gentlemen and citizens elected to share in the
responsibilities of government; and the clergy, but for their own
persistent separatism, might have sent their chosen representatives to sit
with the rest. Moreover, already in Chaucer's time we find precedents for
the boldest demands of the Long Parliament. The Commons claimed, and for a
time obtained, the control of taxation; and five of Richard II.'s
ministers were condemned as traitors for counselling him to measures which
Parliament branded as unconstitutional. Professor Maitland has well
described the "omnicompetence" of Parliament at this time. Nothing human
was alien to its sphere of activity, from the sale of herrings at Yarmouth
fair and the fashion of citizens' girdles to those great constitutional
questions which remained in dispute for three centuries longer, and were
only settled at last by a civil war and a revolution.
Nor was the judicial system less truly national than the Parliament.
Maitland has pointed out that the years 1272-1290 were more fruitful in
epoch-making legislation than any other period of English history, except
perhaps that which succeeded the Reform Bill of 1832. Chaucer, like
ourselves, lived in an age which was consolidating the great achievements
of two generations past, and looking forward to far-reaching social
changes in the future. Already in his time the Roman Law was outlandish in
England; our land laws were fixed in many principles which for centuries
remained unquestioned, and which are often found to underlie even the
present system. Already under Edward III., as for many centuries
afterwards, men looked upon the main principles of English jurisprudence
as settled for ever, and strove only by a series of ingenious
accommodations to fit them in with the requirements of a changing world.
The framework of the law courts, again, was roughly that of modern
England. The King's judges were no longer clerics, but laymen chosen from
among the professional pleaders in the courts; and here again "one
remarkable characteristic of our legal system is fixed."
In many other ways, too, the kingdom had outgrown its clerical tutelage.
Learning and art had long since ceased to be predominantly monastic; for
at least two centuries before Chaucer's birth they had left the protection
of the cloister, and flourished far more luxuriantly in the great world
than they ever could have done under strictly monastic conditions. True
monasticism was predominantly puritan, and therefore unfavourable to free
development in any direction but that of mystic contemplation; if the
spirit of St. Bernard had lived among the Cistercians, the glories of
Tintern and Rievaulx would have been impossible; and even our cathedrals
and parish churches owed more of their beauties to laymen than to clerics.
So also with our universities, which rose on the ruins of monastic
learning; and in which, despite the fresh impetus received from the
Friars, the lay spirit still grew rapidly under the shelter of the Church.
In the 14th century, when Oxford could show such a roll of philosophers
that "not all the other Nations and Universities of Europe between them
could muster such a list," a growing proportion of these were not
cloistered, but secular clergy. At no earlier time could these latter have
shown three such Oxford doctors as Bradwardine, Richard of Armagh, and
Wycliffe. The General Chapter of the Benedictines strove repeatedly, but
in vain, to compel a reasonable proportion of monks to study at Oxford or
Cambridge.[9] Before the end of Edward III.'s reign, the English
Universities had become far more truly national than at any previous time;
their training and aims were less definitely ecclesiastical, and their
culture overflowed to laymen like Chaucer and Gower.[10] Moreover, the
Inns of Court had become practically lay universities of law: and, quite
apart from Wycliffism, there was a rapid growth not only of the
non-clerical but even of anti-clerical spirit. Blow after blow was struck
at Papal privileges by successive Parliaments in which the representatives
of the lower clergy no longer sat. The Pope's demand for arrears of John's
tribute from England was rejected so emphatically that it was never
pressed again; Parliament repudiated Papal claims of presentation to
vacant benefices, and forbade, under the severest penalties, all
unlicensed appeals to Rome from English courts. It is true that our kings
constantly gave way on these two last points, but only because it was
easier to share the spoils by connivance with the Popes; and these
statutes mark none the less an epoch in English history. In 1371, again,
Edward III. assented to a petition from Parliament which pleaded "inasmuch
as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of the men of
Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for their acts,
whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may happen in times
to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of his own realm be
elected to replace them, and that none but laymen henceforth be
chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of privy seal, or
other great officers of the realm." Already the partial sequestration of
the Alien Priories by the three Edwards, and the total suppression and
spoliation of the Templars in 1312, had accustomed men's minds to schemes
of wholesale disendowment which were advocated as earnestly by an
anti-Lollard like Langland[11] as by Wycliffe himself; and indeed this
writer, the most religious among the three principal poets of that age,
was also the most anticlerical. In Edward III.'s reign the Reformation was
already definitely in sight.
In short, Chaucer's lot was cast in an epoch-making age. Then began our
definite claim to the lordship of the sea; Sluys, our first great maritime
victory, the Trafalgar of the Middle Ages, was won in the same year in
which the poet was probably born; six years later we captured Calais, our
first colony; and it was noted even in those days that the Englishman
prospered still more abroad than at home. Never before or since have
English armies been so frequently and so uniformly victorious as during
the first thirty years of Chaucer's life; seldom have our commerce and our
liberties developed more rapidly; and if the disasters which he saw were
no less strange, these also helped to ripen his many-sided genius. The
Great Pestilence of 1349, more terrible than any other recorded in
history; the first pitched battle between Labour and Capital in 1381; the
first formal deposition of an English King in 1327, to be repeated still
more solemnly in 1399; all these must have affected the poet almost as
deeply as they affected the State, notwithstanding the persistency with
which he generally looks upon the brighter side. Professor Raleigh has
wittily applied to him the confession of Dr. Johnson's friend, "I have
tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness
was always breaking in." It is difficult, however, not to surmise a great
deal of more or less unwilling philosophy beneath Chaucer's delightful
flow of good-humour. His subtle ironies may tell as plain a tale as other
men's open complaints; and sometimes he hastens to laugh where we might
suspect a rising lump in his throat. But the laugh is there, or at least
the easy, good-natured smile. Where Gower sees an England more hopelessly
given over to the Devil than even in Carlyle's most dyspeptic
nightmares--where the robuster Langland sees an impending religious
Armageddon, and the honest soul's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction
towards a New Jerusalem rather hoped for than seen even by the eye of
faith--there Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry
England to which the horrors of the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death
and Tyler's revolt are but a foil. Like many others in the Middle Ages, he
seems convinced of the peculiar instability of the English character. He
knew that he was living--as all generations are more or less conscious of
living--in an uncomfortable borderland between that which once was, but
can be no longer, and that which shall be, but cannot yet come to pass;
yet all these changes supplied the artist with that variety of colour and
form which he needed; and the man seems to have gone through life in the
tranquil conviction that this was a pleasant world, and his own land a
particularly privileged spot. The England of Chaucer is that of which one
of his most noted predecessors wrote, "England is a strong land and a
sturdy, and the plenteousest corner of the world, so rich a land that
unneth it needeth help of any land, and every other land needeth help of
England. England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft times able to
mirth and game, free men of heart and with tongue, but the hand is more
better and more free than the tongue."[12]