TOWN AND COUNTRY
"For never to my mind was evening yet
But was far beautifuller than its day."
BROWNING
"Wherefore is the sun red at even? For he goeth toward hell."
("The Master of Oxford's Catechism" (XV. cent.);
"Reliquiae Antiquae," i., 232.)
That which in Chaucer's day passed for rank "sluggardy a-night" might yet
be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he
needed Philippa's shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character
given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, "that he had seen the sun
rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together." It is indeed
startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five
hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a
lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever
seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night's
dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner's mood: "the
sun, my dear, that's God!" In the days when a tallow candle cost four
times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and
His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning
your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict
dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to
have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset
as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his
"Playground of Europe," has brought a wealth of illustration and
penetrating comment to show how strictly men's ideas of the picturesque
are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even
more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular
religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was
a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had
special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and
the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest
monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by
love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Suelte, for instance,
in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery
beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, "who oft-times
affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the
air." The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so
that "many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the
Buergermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred
measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity
to a herring-barrel." What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or
Tintern was not the beauty of "these steep woods and lofty cliffs," but
their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks' own labours and those of their
servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to
listen how "the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of
birds," then they felt their forefathers to have been right in "noting
fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds."[118] After
all, the earth was cursed for Adam's sake, and even its apparent beauty
was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang
in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists--
"The world is fair to gaze on, white and green and red,
But inly foul and black of hue, and dismal as the dead."
Ruskin's famous passage on this subject ("M. P.," iii., 14, 15) is, on the
whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two
remarkable exceptions. The poet of "Pearl," who probably knew Wales well,
describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas anticipated
Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also
with apparent sympathy.[119] Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its
different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident
delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of
daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our
eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or
think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil's tomb.[120] The scenic
splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul
turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the
broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even
Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and
variety of the sunrises in the "Decameron" is equalled only by the bald
brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects
mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be
equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer;
Criseyde's "Ywis, it will be night as fast," is quite a characteristic
epitaph for the dying day.
On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its
sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant
conventional repetition; and here Chaucer is at his best. He may well
have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard
de Bury calls "a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever
taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk," yet no poet was ever
farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature--
On bookes for to read I me delight,
And to them give I faith and full credence,
And in mine heart have them in reverence
So heartily, that there is game none
That from my bookes maketh me to go'n
But it be seldom on the holyday;
Save, certainly, when that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the fowles sing,
And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring,
Farewell my book and my devotion![121]
Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop's wood within a mile's walk of
Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the "Great Shaft of
Cornhill," the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared
at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and
which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple
it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring
row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the
reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122] These May-day festivities,
which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in
popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When
we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of
winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we
consider that even in castles and manor-houses men's lives differed from
this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the
monotony of woman's life under these conditions, doubly bound as she was
to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame,
with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Mass and gossip with a few
neighbours--only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day
meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the
brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three
or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long
failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of
last year's fruit--in that position, men watched the first green buds with
the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was
proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have
recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports
under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism
itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval
ideal. Fenelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he
protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called
interests of religion.[123] It would be difficult to find a single great
preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say
in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the
parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods
and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar
attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with
women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the
roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but
even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the
disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted
to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions snow, sawdust,
and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old
shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly
forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124] These and other
similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain
the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in
the streets. "If any man speak to thee," writes the Good Wife for her
Daughter, "swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way"; and again--
"Go not to the wrestling, nor to shooting at the cock
As it were a strumpet, or a giggelot,
Stay at home, daughter."
"When thou goest into town or to church," says the author of the "Menagier
de Paris" to his young wife, "walk with thine head high, thine eyelids
lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front
of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to
the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards." Even Chaucer tells us of
his Virginia--
She hath full oftentimes sick her feigned,
For that she woulde flee the companye
Where likely was to treaten of follye--
As is at feastes, revels, and at dances,
That be occasions of dalliances.[125]
These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond
all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an
objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a
series of Christmastide proclamations "that no one shall go in the streets
of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of
imprisonment." Similarly severe measures were threatened against football
in the streets, against the game of "taking off the hoods of people, or
laying hands on them," and against "hocking" or extorting violent
contributions from passers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter.
But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their
inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly
"charging on the King's behalf and his City, that no man or person ...
during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by
night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings
with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in
any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after
the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen."[126] Much of this mumming was
not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely
anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined
in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the
Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for
Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a
very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern
times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to
suppress all natural enjoyment of life--even Madame Eglantyne's lapdogs
were definitely contraband--but the girls were trammelled at every turn
with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental
harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches
provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often
obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of
medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and
unreal "other-worldliness" of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best
explain certain of Chaucer's least edifying tales by referring, on the
other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his "A. B. C."
[Illustration: MEDIEVAL MUMMERS. (From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")]
But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the
elvish and retiring poet of the "Canterbury Tales" mentions the sports of
the townsfolk only with gentle irony. "Merry Absolon," the parish clerk,
who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well
"after the school of Oxenford ... and with his legges casten to and fro,"
and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the 'prentice class to
which he essentially belonged--all these small perfections are enumerated
only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought
by woman's guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the
Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to
and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggelots,
around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the
country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields--young men and
maidens, old men and children--but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by
himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun--
Upon the smalle softe sweete grass,
That was with flowres sweet embroidered all.
At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone
with the birds--
A wind, so small it scarcely might be less,
Made in the leaves green a noise soft,
Accordant to the fowles' song aloft.
Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun--
Right as the freshe, redde rose new
Against the Summer sunne coloured is!
But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is
difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh
and blood--
... of all the flowers in the mead
Then love I most these flowers white and red
Such as men callen daisies in our town.
To them I have so great affectioun,
As I said erst, when comen is the May,
That in my bed there dawneth me no day
But I am up and walking in the mead,
To see this flower against the sunne spread; ...
As she that is of alle flowers flower,
Fulfilled of all virtue and honour,
And ever y-like fair and fresh of hue.
And I love it, and ever y-like new,
And ever shall, till that mine hearte die....
I fell asleep; within an hour or two
Me dreamed how I lay in the meadow tho [then
To see this flower that I love so and dread;
And from afar came walking in the mead
The God of Love, and in his hand a Queen,
And she was clad in royal habit green;
A fret of gold she hadde next her hair,
And upon that a white crown she bare
With fleurons smalle, and I shall not lie,
For all the world right as a daysye
Y-crowned is with white leaves lite,
So were the fleurons of her coroune white;
For of one pearle, fine, oriental
Her white coroune was y-maked all.
Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving
nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only
essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities
almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that
Chaucer's sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises,
than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even
so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is
their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, "Canterbury Tales," A.,
1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and "Book of Duchess," 291,
where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens
the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens,
though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration
of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common
things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly
remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly
studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed
inferiority. Chaucer's triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun's
Priest's tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny
garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens
himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with
Chanticleer--all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy
with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how
glorious a part of God's creation is even a barn-door cock?
His voice was merrier than the merry orgon
On masse-days that in the churche go'n ...
His comb was redder than the fine coral,
Embattled as it were a castle wall;
His bill was black, and like the jet it shone,
Like azure were his legges and his toen;
His nailes whiter than the lily flower,
And like the burnished gold was his colour!
Nothing but Chaucer's directness of observation and truth of colouring
could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van
Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of
youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and
freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.
In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was
already becoming in a manner cockneyfied; although she already imported
sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food,
and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her
bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the
ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life.
Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of
agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a
conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long
Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and
corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison
with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town
and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great
as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded
quarters, the mass of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the
natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river
and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul's was plainly set on a
hill, and nobody could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn
down the present Gray's Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued)
Boadicea's chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames,
though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only "in parts,"
still ran at low tide over native shingle and mud; the Southwark shore was
green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their
gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of
course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred
yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural
landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted
with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a
distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and
the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later
social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country.
Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as
two miles from the walls, "but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On
all sides," he continues, "without the houses of the suburb, are the
citizens' gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly,
and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows,
with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise.
Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for
harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a
hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful
increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the
north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear.
Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement's Well are most
famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer
evenings, when they walk forth to take the air." No doubt in Chaucer's
time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether
the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward
from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering
the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop's Wood in Stepney parish and the
fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the "Great
Forest" of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a
corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and
which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and
beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley's "Memorials" contain
frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, "a
little herber[129] that I have," in which Chaucer laid the scene of his
"Legend of Good Women." These gardens seem to have made a fairly
continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and
made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer
home, however, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street,
Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln's twenty carefully-tilled
acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate
paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and
rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that
pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was
then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages
which clustered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to
himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence
in which Becket's chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the
city. "Many citizens," writes Fitzstephen, "do delight themselves in hawks
and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire,
all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray." The city huntsman was, in
those days, a salaried official of some dignity.
So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the
other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a
company of nature-poets unsurpassed in any language. May we not hope that
his companions in the "little herber," or on his wider excursions, were
sometimes "the moral Gower" or "the philosophical Strode?" And may we not
picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his
contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer's friend was probably the Ralph
Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite
controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a
lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as
public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the
house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into
Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer
from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability
as the author of "Pearl" and other 14th-century poems second only to
Chaucer's. However that may be, "the philosophical Strode" must
unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his
"Troilus," and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer's own
reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter--
O younge freshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love upgroweth with your age,
Repair ye home from worldly vanitie,
And of your heart upcast ye the visage
To that same God that after His image
You made; and think that all is but a fair,
This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair.
But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere
suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the
long day wanes at last; and now--
When that the sun out of the south 'gan west
And that this flower 'gan close, and go to rest,
For darkness of the night, the which she dread,
Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped
To go to rest, and early for to rise.
The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows
thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the
laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious
revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or
so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors
round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the
pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he
must surely have read: "The only pests of London are the immoderate
drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires."