BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
"Jeunes amours, si vite epanouies,
Vous etes l'aube et le matin du coeur.
Charmez l'enfant, extases inouies
Et, quand le soir vient avec la douleur,
Charmez encor nos ames eblouies,
Jeunes amours, si vite evanouies!"
VICTOR HUGO
The name _Chaucer_ was in some cases a corruption of _chauffecire_, _i.e._
"chafewax," or clerk in the Chancery, whose duty it was to help in the
elaborate operation of sealing royal documents.[13] But Mr. V. B. Redstone
seems to have shown conclusively that the poet's ancestors were
_chaussiers_, or makers of long hose, and that they combined this business
with other more or less extensive mercantile operations, especially as
vintners. The family, like others in the wine trade, may well have come
originally from Gascony; but in the 13th and 14th centuries it seems to
have thriven mainly in London and East Anglia, and recent research has
definitely traced the poet's immediate ancestry to Ipswich.[14] His
grandfather, Robert Malyn, surnamed le Chaucer, came from the Suffolk
village of Dennington, and set up a tavern in Ipswich. Robert left a
child named John, who was forcibly abducted one night in 1324 by Geoffrey
Stace, apparently his uncle. When Stace "stole and took away by force and
arms--viz. swords, bows, and arrows--the said John," his object was to
settle possible difficulties of succession to a certain estate by forcing
the boy to marry Joan de Westhale; and he pleaded in his justification the
custom of Ipswich, by which "an heir became of full age at the end of his
twelfth year, if he knew how to reckon and measure";[15] but he was very
heavily fined for his breach of the peace. We learn from the pleadings in
this case that John Chaucer was still unmarried in 1328; that he lived in
London with his stepfather, namesake, and fellow-vintner, Richard Chaucer,
and that his patrimony was very small. Richard, dying twenty-one years
later, left his house and his tavern to the Church; but he had very likely
given his stepson substantial help during his lifetime. In any case, John
must have thriven rapidly, for we find him, in 1338, at the age of
twenty-six or thereabouts, among the distinguished company which followed
Edward III. on his journey up the Rhine to negociate an alliance with the
Emperor Louis IV. The Royal Wardrobe Books give many interesting details
of this journey.[16] Queen Philippa accompanied the King half-way across
Brabant, and then returned to Antwerp, where she gave birth to Lionel of
Clarence, the poet's first master. Among the party were also several of
the household of the Earl of Derby, father-in-law to that John of Gaunt
with whom Geoffrey Chaucer's fortunes were to be closely bound. The
travellers had started from Antwerp on Sunday, August 16; and on the
following Sunday a long day's journey brought them within sight of the
colossal choir which, until sixty years ago, was almost all that existed
of Cologne Cathedral. Here the King gave liberally to the building fund;
and here John Chaucer probably stayed behind, since he and his
fellow-citizens had come to promote closer commercial relations between
the Rhine cities and London. The King was towed up the Rhine by sixty-two
boatmen, sat in the Diet at Coblenz as Vicar Imperial, formed a seven
years' alliance with the Emperor, and sent on his five-year-old daughter
Joan to Munich, where she waited many months vainly, but probably without
impatience, for the young Duke of Austria, who was at present bespoken for
her, but who finally turned elsewhere. Meanwhile Edward came back to Bonn,
where he had to pay the equivalent of about L330 modern money for damage
done in a quarrel between the citizens and those of his suite whom he had
left behind--John Chaucer probably included. The Queen met the party again
in Brabant, and they returned to Antwerp after a journey of exactly four
weeks. We meet with several further allusions to John Chaucer among the
London city records. It was very likely he who, in July, 1349, brought a
valuable present from the Bishop of Salisbury to Queen Philippa at
Devizes, at the time when the ravages of the Black Death in London supply
a very probable reason for his absence from town, so that he might well
have had his wife and son with him on this occasion. Certainly it was he
who, with fourteen other principal vintners of the city, assented in 1342
to an ordinance providing that "no taverner should mix putrid and corrupt
wine with wine that is good and pure, or should forbid that, when any
company is drinking wine in his tavern, one of them, for himself and the
rest of the company, shall enter the cellar where the tuns or pipes are
then lying, and see that the measures or vessels into which the wine is
poured are quite empty and clean within; and in like manner, from what tun
or what pipe the wine is so drawn." This salutary ordinance was set at
nought afterwards, as it had been before; but this and other records bear
witness to John Chaucer's standing in his profession.
[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY
(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE
RIGHT-HAND COW. THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER]
Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father's
London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as "a
certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between
the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged
to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the
King's highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook
northwards."[17] The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of
Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields,
divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish
waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands.
Similar streams, or "fleets," creeping between overhanging houses, are
still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and
there even in England.[18] Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign,
describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving
it still "a fair brook of sweet water" in its upper course; and he takes
pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, "a Roman
captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled."
In Chaucer's time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and
Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret's, Lothbury, and ran under the kitchen
of Grocer's Hall, and again under St. Mildred's church; "from thence
through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called
the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far
into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street." In
this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly
upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream
for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous
documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to
reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the
Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically "stopped up by divers
filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said
course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city." The "King's
highway of Thames Street," though one of the chief arteries of the city,
cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only
just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when
Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired
houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and
sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of
tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside
lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots
of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst
quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted
the "Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne," many of whom were mayors of the city;
and Stow's survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First,
the headquarters of the wine trade, "a large house built of stone and
timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry.
There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the
town." Here also "Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363,
did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III., King of England, John, King
of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England),
Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall
for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady
Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect." Picard, as Mr.
Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer's fellow-vintners on Edward III.'s
Rhine journey in 1338.[19] Then there were the Vintner's Hall and
almshouses, which were built in Chaucer's lifetime; the three Guild Halls
of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of
Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which
John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that
London was up in arms against him, "and unless he took great heed, that
day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his
oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but
he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out
at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they
came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the
princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made
his complaint."
[Illustration: MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL
(From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")]
Of Chaucer's childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with
other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the
serious risk of other people's windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his
cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday,
and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of
football, or at "leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the
stone." In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he
would be sure to flock out with the rest to "play upon the ice; some,
striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves
seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to
draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones
to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little
piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow
out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one
the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their
arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort
exerciseth itself against the time of war."[20] In spring he would watch
the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk
abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of
Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this.
Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as
the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily
to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty
survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet's Tower
flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and
between them, close by Chaucer's own home, the "Tower Royal," in which the
Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler's revolt. But the Thames
itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among
the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, "where the merchants of
Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels," and
finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the
cooks' shops; "for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that
upon the river's side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold
in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks' row." Here, then, Chaucer would
loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of
strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native
craft from "far by west," but broad-sailed vessels from every country of
Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone's
throw from his father's house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of
the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard
coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Luebeck,
Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21] Chief among the Easterlings at this
time were the Cologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially
close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in
with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty
Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off
Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic,
half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their
high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of "a Dutch bun and
a keg of sturgeon," or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of
Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very
considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would
pick up easily enough among this colony of "Merchant Vintners of
Gascoyne"; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools
attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul's lay nearest
to Chaucer's home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks
in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty
income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a
contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great
merchant city. "When they put me to school," writes Froissart, "there were
little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would
serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring;
and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace ... and then
would I say to myself, 'When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be
able to love in earnest?'... When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved
me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in
repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod.... I could not be at rest; I
was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes
I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but
all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw
my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go
and tumble with them again."[22] Is not childhood essentially the same in
all countries and in all ages?
The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of
seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems
by Chaucer's contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and
the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two
sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously
preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to
contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince
Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer's continental
journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet.
Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members
of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey
Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and
black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the
first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling
payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the
remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess's
movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great
Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her
train had an equally varied experience. "We may catch glimpses of Chaucer
in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great
pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in
London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost,
at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again
at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of
Queen Isabella at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358),
at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower."[23]
Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun
even before his birth,[24] was the tallest and handsomest of all the
King's sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says--
"In all the world was then no prince hym like,
Of his stature and of all semelynesse
Above all men within his hole kyngrike
By the shulders he might be seen doutlesse,
[And] as a mayde in halle of gentilnesse."
His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may
be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no
shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for
a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among
other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be
Chaucer's and Wycliffe's best patron. For all John Chaucer's favour with
the King, the vintner's son could never have found a place in this great
society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like
his own squire--singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May;
already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while
staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an
unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under
those conditions. Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily
intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more
indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could
seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more
complacently to the page's love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their
messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is
far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit
Jean de Saintre and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the
best possible commentary on Chaucer's Court life.
Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early
poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first
year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that
(as in Shakespeare's case) differences of rank added to his despair. It
may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no
reason to suppose that Chaucer's affections were less mercurial than those
of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places
at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369,
that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness--
I hold it to be a sickness
That I have suffered this eight year,
And yet my boote is never the nere;
For there is physician but one
That may me heal; but that is done.
Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty, Beauty, and Pleasance;
but her surname is Fair-Ruthless. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity
with his complaints of Love's tyranny; but, alas!
I found her dead, and buried in an heart....
And no wight wot that she is dead but I.
The cruel fair stands high above him, a lady of royal excellence, humble
indeed of heart, yet he scarce dares to call himself her servant--
Have mercy on me, thou serenest queen,
That you have sought so tenderly and yore,
Let some stream of your light on me be seen,
That love and dread you ever longer the more;
For, soothly for to say, I bear the sore,
And though I be not cunning for to plain,
For Goddes love, have mercy on my pain!
But all is vain, for in the end "Ye recke not whether I float or sink."
Like the contemporary poets of Piers Plowman, Chaucer discovered soon
enough that the high road to wisdom lies through
"Suffer-both-well-and-woe;" and that, before we can possess our souls, we
must "see much and suffer more."[25] There is more than mere graceful
irony in the beautiful lines with which, a few years later, he begins his
"Troilus and Criseyde." He is (he says) the bondservant of Love, one whose
own woes help him to comfort others' pain, or again, to enlist the
sympathy of Fortune's favourite--
But ye loveres, that bathen in gladness,
If any drop of pity in you be,
Remembreth you on passed heaviness
That ye have felt, and on th' adversitie
Of other folk, and thinketh how that ye
Have felt that Love durste you displease,
Or ye have won him with too great an ease.
And prayeth for them that be in the case
Of Troilus, as ye may after hear,
That Love them bring in heaven to solace;
And eke for me prayeth to God so dear....
And biddeth eke for them that be despaired
In love, that never will recovered be....
And biddeth eke for them that be at ease,
That God them grant aye good perseverance,
And send them might their ladies so to please
That it to Love be worship and pleasance.
For so hope I my soule best t' advance,
To pray for them that Love's servants be,
And write their woe, and live in charitie.