Chaucer and His Times

"The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities" according to one of the most famous of Chaucer scholars, and the more carefully we consider the evidence upon which this statement is based, the more fully do we find it endorsed. The name Chaucer itself has been variously derived from the Latin calcearius, a shoemaker, the French chaussier, a maker of long hose, and the French chaufecire, chafe-wax (i. e. a clerk of the court of Chancery whose duty consisted in affixing seals to royal documents).

The one point of agreement seems to be that the family was undoubtedly of French origin, though whether the founder of the English branch came over with the Conqueror or in Henry III's reign, cannot be decided. Most scholars are now agreed that Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1340, and that his father was John Chaucer, a vintner of Thames Street, London, though at one time his birth was dated as early as 1328, and Mr. Snell, in his Age of Chaucer, endeavours further to darken counsel-already sufficiently obscure-by suggesting that there may have been two contemporary Geoffreys, and that the facts which are usually accepted as throwing light on the history of the poet may really apply to his unknown namesake. This theory, however, has at present no evidence to support it, and it is reasonable to assume that Chaucer was a native of London. Possibly it was his early association with the wine-trade that gave him such insight into its mysteries, and called forth the Pardoner's warning:-

Now kepe yow fro the whyte and fro the rede,

And namely fro the whyte wyn of Lepe,

That is to selle in Fish-strete or in Chepe.

This wyn of Spayne crepeth subtilly

In othere wynes, growing faste by,

Of which there ryseth swich fumositee

That when a man hath dronken draughtes three

And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe,

He is in Spayne, right at the toune of Lepe.

(Pardoners Tale, l. 562, etc.)

And it is noteworthy that more than once Chaucer goes out of his way to inveigh against drunkenness:-

A lecherous thing is wyn, and dronkenesse

Is ful of stryving and of wrecchednesse

······

For dronkenesse is verray sepulture

Of mannes wit and his discrecioun.

(Pardoners Tale, l. 549-559.)

Of his early years we know nothing. Probably he lived the life of other boys of that time: Lydgate's portrait of the medi?val school-boy may well stand for a type:-

I had in custom to come to school late

Not for to learn but for a countenance,

With my fellows ready to debate,

To jangle and jape was set all my pleasaunce.

Whereof rebuked was my Chevisaunce[1]

To forge a lesyng and thereupon to muse

When I trespassed myselfe to excuse.

······

Loth to rise, lother to bed at eve;

With unwashed handes ready aye to dinner;

My Paternoster, my Creed, or my Believe

Cast at the Cook; lo! this was my manner;

Waved with each wind, as doth a reede-spear;

Snibbed[2] of my friends such taches[3] for to amend

Made deaf eare list nat to them attend.

(Testament.)

Leland, with that sublime disregard for anything so prosaic as evidence which characterises sixteenth-century biographers, declares that "Geoffrey Chaucer, a youth of noble birth and highest promise, studied at Oxford University with all the earnestness of those who have applied themselves most diligently to learning.... He left the University an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician"; and to this list of accomplishments he afterwards adds, "and a devout theologian." Fifty years later, Speght-to whom lovers of Chaucer are deeply indebted in other respects-equally authoritatively asserts that he was at Cambridge, but as he bases this assertion on a remark-

Philogenet I called am far and near

Of Cambridge clerk-

made by one of the characters in the Court of Love, a poem which scholars are now universally of opinion is not Chaucer's work, it has little weight. As a matter of fact Chaucer's name does not appear in the records of any college at either university, and, as Professor Lounsbury has conclusively shown, wide as are the poet's interests, and great as his knowledge undoubtedly is, the scholarship shown by his works is not so remarkable as necessarily to imply close and protracted study. Classical legends were frequently embodied in the romances of an age in which, if we may believe Jean Bodel, himself a poet,

Ne sont que trois matières à nul homme entendant,

De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la grant,[4]

and the habit of treating Alexander the Great as if he were brother-in-arms to Roland and Oliver naturally opened the door to all sorts of embellishments and modifications. A veil of romance covers and colours the history of Greece and Rome. To Chaucer, Cleopatra is akin to the Lady of the Hideous Pass, or Morgan le Fay. The account of her death given in the Legend of Good Women (l. 671, etc.) is purely medi?val:-

(She) made her subtil workmen make a shryne

Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne

In all Egipte that she coude espye;

And putte ful the shryne of spycerye,

And leet the cors embaume;[5] and forth she fette

This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.[6]

And next the shryne a pit than doth she grave;

And alle the serpents that she mighte have

She putte hem in that grave....

······

And with that word, naked, with ful good herte,

Among the serpents in the pit she sterte.[7]

Nor is this devout theologian always accurate in his references to Bible history. His allusions to Old Testament stories are full of mistakes, as, for instance, when he speaks (in Book of Duchesse, l. 738) of Samson slaying himself with a pillar for love of Delila. It was not an age of nice scholarship, or care for detail. Men used stories as they found them, and repeated them as they happened to remember them, and no one was hyper-critical enough to refer to the original. More than half a century after Chaucer's death Caxton translates the ?neid, not from the Latin of Virgil, but from "a little book in French," and Gawain Douglas, the most scholarly of all the Scottish poets of the early sixteenth century, regards it as a moral allegory of the soul's progress, cast in the form of an epic. But while Chaucer's occasional mistranslations of Latin words and misrenderings of classical legends cannot be said to disprove his residence at one of the universities, they certainly cannot be said to support Leland's statement, and the probability is that he early became attached to the court. The reign of Edward III witnessed a marked increase in the prosperity of the merchant class. The members of the great trade guilds were men of wealth and importance and there is nothing surprising in finding a vintner's son one of the household of Elizabeth, wife of the king's son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In fact the seals of John Chaucer and Agnes his wife show that both bore arms. In 1357 we find, from the royal accounts, that Geoffrey Chaucer was provided with a paltok (cloak) costing four shillings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of shoes, valued at three shillings, and in December of the same year he received a grant of 2s. 6d. "for necessaries against the feast of the Nativity" (Chaucer Soc., Life Records of Chaucer, p. xiv). The Canterbury Tales give abundant proof that their author had a keen eye for the niceties of dress, and at seventeen he had doubtless a proper appreciation of new shoes and red and black breeches.

Two years later (1359) he served in the French wars and was taken prisoner at "Retters," a place which has been variously identified as Retiers, near Rennes, and Rethel, near Reims. He was liberated in March 1360, Edward III paying ￡16 (over ￡200 of our money) towards his ransom, which looks as if he were considered a person of some importance. Apparently he returned to court life in England, and to the duties of valettus camerae regis. A valet of the King's Chamber had to "make beddis, to beare or hold torches, to sett boardis, to apparell all chambres, and such othir seruices as the Chamberlain, or Vshers of the Chambre, comaunde or assigne, to attend the Chambre, to watch the King by course, to go in messages, etc." (Life Records, Pt. II, p. xi), and holders of the office must have had ample opportunity of acquiring the wisdom of Placebo:-

I have now been a court-man al my lyf.

And god it woot,[8] though I unworthy be,

I have stonden in ful greet degree

Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat;

Yet hadde I never with noon of hem debaat.

I never hem contraried,[9] trewely;

I woot wel that my lord can[10] more than I.

What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable;

I say the same, or elles thing semblable.[11]

A ful gret fool is any conseillour,

That serveth any lord of heigh honour,

That dar presume, or elles thenken it,

That his conseil sholde passe his lordes wit.

Nay, lordes been no foles,[12] by my fay.

(Marchantes Tale, l. 1492, etc.)

In 1366 a pension was granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of the Queen's Chamber, and it is usually thought that this indicates Chaucer's marriage about this time, since in 1381 the money was paid "to Geoffrey Chaucer, her husband." Philippa seems to have been the sister-the Chaucer Society suggests, the sister-in-law-of Katherine Swynford, who became John of Gaunt's third wife, and this connection possibly helps to explain the consistent kindness shown to Chaucer by the House of Lancaster. Various attempts have been made to show that the marriage was an unhappy one. Some of these will be noticed later in treating of Chaucer's women, here it may suffice to say that although it is true that he paints a sufficiently gloomy picture of married life in the Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, that neither the host nor the merchant are happy in their choice, and that the Lenvoy which concludes the Clerkes Tale warns husbands that if they expect to find their wives patient Griseldas they will certainly be disappointed, we have to remember that the shrewish wife was as stock a comic convention of those days as the shrewish mother-in-law of later times, and when it comes to taking away the character of Philippa Chaucer on the ground that her husband complains in the Hous of Fame that he is unaccustomed to be awakened gently, it is impossible not to feel that she is receiving unnecessarily harsh treatment. Equally slight is the evidence for his suffering from an unhappy love affair. In the Parlement of Foules (ll. 89, 90) he speaks of himself as

Fulfild of thought and besy hevinesse;

For bothe I hadde thing which that I nolde,[13]

And eek I ne hadde that thing that I wolde,

and commentators have leaped to the conclusion that he is here referring to his wife and a lady of high rank for whom he sighed in vain. In the same way when, in the Book of the Duchesse, he speaks of having suffered for eight years from a sickness which one physician alone can cure, this is taken as an unmistakable reference to the same unrequited passion. But we have nothing to show that in these passages Chaucer is revealing his actual feelings. To be crossed in love is proper to every poet, and if his wife might have been justly annoyed when in 1382-at least sixteen years after his marriage-he wrote

... I knowe not love in dede

Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre,[14]

(Parlement of Foules, ll. 8, 9.)

"Rosemounde"-if she had any real existence-can hardly have felt complimented by the affection of a poet who told her-and the world at large-

Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne

As I in love am walwed and y-wounde.[15]

There is no proof one way or the other.

We know nothing of his children, except that in 1391 he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his little son Lewis, then ten years of age. Gascoigne, a generation after Chaucer's death, speaks of Thomas Chaucer, a well-known man of wealth and position in the early fifteenth century, more than once Speaker of the House of Commons, as Geoffrey's son, but no mention is made of him by Chaucer himself or by any of his contemporaries or immediate successors. John of Gaunt paid a considerable sum of money to place a certain Elizabeth Chaucer in the nunnery of Barking in 1381, but she is usually considered to have been the poet's sister.

In 1367 Chaucer himself was granted a pension of twenty marks a year for life, in recognition of his services, and in 1368 (or, according to Mr. G. C. Coulton, 1372) he was promoted to be an Esquire of the royal household. The duties of an esquire seem better suited to a poet than those of a valet: "These Esquires of houshold of old be accustumed winter & summer in afternoons & in eunings to drawe to Lordes Chambres within Court, there to keep honest company after there Cunninge, in talking of Cronicles of Kinges & of others pollicies, & in pipeing or harpinge, songinges or other actes marcealls, to helpe to occupie the Court, & accompanie estraingers till the time require of departing."

In 1369 a Geoffrey Chaucer was again with the army in France, but no particular adventures seem to have befallen him.

At this time John of Gaunt's influence was paramount at the English court, which may partly account for Chaucer's steady and rapid promotion. In 1370 he was sent abroad on an important mission-the exact nature of which we do not know-and two years later he went to Genoa to arrange which English port should become the headquarters of the Genoese trade. From Genoa he went to Florence, and by November 1373 he was back in England again.

When Chaucer went to Italy, Dante had already been dead for over fifty years, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, the other members of that great trilogy of the earlier Renaissance, were both alive. Chaucer makes his clerk declare that he learned the tale of Griselda

... at Padowe of a worthy clerk,

······

Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,

Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke sweete

Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,[16]

(Clerkes Prologue, ll. 31-33.)

but it is impossible to say whether this is autobiographical or not. The two poets may well have met, but in this, as in so many other cases, we cannot be certain. It is improbable that he ever met Boccaccio, since, largely as he borrows from the Filostrato and the Teseide, he never once mentions Boccaccio's name, and when, in Troilus and Criseyde, he confesses that he is indebted to an earlier poet for his story, he gives him the apparently fictitious name of Lollius. Mr. Coulton suggests that Boccaccio's works may have been published anonymously and that Chaucer may have been ignorant of their real author, and this could hardly have been the case if the two had met. But whether Chaucer had, or had not, any personal intercourse with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both their work and Dante's exercised marked influence upon him. More of this will be said in the next chapter; here it is sufficient to note that the Italian mission affected not only his material prosperity but also his literary development.

Meanwhile he continued to grow in favour at court. On St. George's Day, 1374, he was granted a daily pitcher of wine from the royal cellars-later commuted for a payment in money. In the following May he rented the gate-house of Aldgate from the corporation of London. A month later he was appointed controller of customs for wool, etc., in the port of London, receiving a few days afterwards an additional pension of ￡10 a year from John of Gaunt and his wife. Office work seems to have weighed heavily on the poet, and there may well be truth in the complaint of the Hous of Fame (Bk. II, l. 644, etc.) that it cut him off from all intercourse with the world:-

... thou hast no tydinges

Of Loves folk, if they be glade,

Ne of noght elles that god made;

And noght only fro fer contree

That ther no tyding comth to thee,

But of thy verray neyghebores,

That dwellen almost at thy dores,

Thou herest neither that ne this;

For whan thy labour doon al is,

And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,

In stede of reste and newe thinges,

Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon;

And, also domb as any stoon,

Thou sittest at another boke,

Til fully daswed is thy loke,[17]

And livest thus as an hermyte

Although thyn abstinence is lyte.

In November 1375 Chaucer was granted the wardship of Edmund Staplegate of Kent. Few persons nowadays would welcome such a charge, but in the fourteenth century the position of guardian was highly coveted, and not infrequently bought for a good round sum, since the holder had a right to a certain percentage (sometimes amounting to as much as 10%) of the ward's property, to say nothing of the power of selling him (or her) in marriage. This particular wardship brought in ￡103.

In 1376-7 Chaucer was again employed on various secret missions abroad. In April 1377 he was sent to France to treat for peace with Charles V, for which service he received ￡48 13s. 4d. In June of this year Edward III died, but for a time John of Gaunt still retained his power, and soon after the accession of the boy king, Richard II, we find Chaucer sent on an embassy to

Barnabo Viscounte,

God of delyt, and scourge of Lumbardye.

(Monkes Tale, ll. 408-409.)

Amongst those whom he appointed to act for him during his absence, was his friend and fellow-poet, John Gower.

In May 1380 occurred a curious incident, of which no full and satisfactory explanation has yet been found. By a deed dated May 1st, one Cecilia de Chaumpaigne releases Geoffrey Chaucer from a charge which she had brought against him de raptu meo. It has been suggested (Camb. Hist. Lit., Vol. II) that this may refer to one of those attempts to carry off an heir or heiress and marry them forcibly to some relation of the abductor, which were not infrequent at the time. Chaucer's own father had been the victim of such an attempt, being kidnapped in order that he might be married to Joan de Westhale. The case had come before the courts and the jury found that "the defendants had by night forcibly abducted John le Chaucer from the plaintiff's custody, but did not marry him," and assessed the damages at ￡250. John Chaucer was under fourteen at the time, and there are instances of mere babies of four and five being carried off in the same way. One poor little lady was twice widowed and thrice married before she was nine. Whatever the facts may have been in connection with Cecilia de Chaumpaigne it is evident that Chaucer's influence at court was sufficient to protect him from any unpleasant consequences.

A year later (May 1382) to his controllership of wool was added that of petty customs. This probably meant a substantial increase of income, but the poet, who found his original duties sufficiently irksome, does not seem to have looked with favour upon a corresponding increase in office hours. In February 1385 he was granted the privilege of appointing a permanent deputy to perform his official duties. Professor Skeat suggests that the expressions of gratitude towards the queen which are inserted in the later version of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, point to the probability that he owed this unusual concession to her intervention.

About this time Chaucer seems to have given up his house over Aldgate and to have moved to Greenwich. The lease of the Aldgate house was made over to a certain Richard Foster in 1386, and in the Lenvoy a Scogan (written probably about 1393) Chaucer contrasts the lot of his friend,

... that knelest at the stremes heed

Of grace, of alle honour and worthinesse,

with his own fate at the other end of the same stream,

Forgete in solitarie wildernesse,

and adds two footnotes to explain that he is referring in the first place to Windsor and in the second to Greenwich. If the description in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women is not mere poetic fiction, it would seem that the poet had a pleasant country house and garden in his "solitarie wildernesse," and that he cultivated the excellent habit of sleeping out of doors in the summer.

Meanwhile his activity found scope in various directions. He had been appointed a Justice of the Peace for Kent in 1381, and in 1386 he entered Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for the same county. In August of this year Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt, went to Spain, and during his absence his brother and rival, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, succeeded in establishing his ascendancy over the king. Chaucer felt the change at once. He was deprived of both his controllerships, and the money loss must have been considerable. In 1387 his wife died, so that her pension must also have lapsed. Evidently the poet was in straits, for in 1388 he was driven to raising money on his pensions and allowances, making them over to John Scalby of Lincolnshire. His abstinence, as we have seen, was "lyte," and the necessity for retrenchment must have been extremely galling.

The fall of Gloucester in 1389 swept away the clouds which had darkened the poet's sky. Once more we find him filling one office after another, and engaged in such useful and prosaic occupations as superintending the repairs done to the banks of the Thames or the erection of scaffolds in Smithfield for the king and queen to view the tournament held there in May 1390. One of his appointments was that of Clerk of the Works to his Majesty, which gave him charge of the fabric of the Tower, Westminster Palace, Windsor Castle, and other royal residences. He was commissioner of the roads between Greenwich and Woolwich, and the post of sub-forester of North Pemberton Park (in Somerset) must have given him ample opportunity for studying

The bilder ook, and eek the hardy asshe;

The piler elm, the cofre unto careyne;[18]

The boxtree piper;[19] holm[20] to whippes lasshe;

The sayling firr;[21] the cipres, deth to pleyne;[22]

The sheter ew,[23] the asp for shaftes pleyne,[24]

if not-

The olyve of pees, and eek the drunken vyne

or-

The victor palm.

(Parlement of Foules, l. 176, etc.

The whole passage is taken from Boccaccio's Teseide.)

The commissionership of roads can have been no sinecure. In 1499-after nearly a century more of development and civilisation-"a glover from Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig clay called 'Ramming clay' for him on the highway, and was in no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had no malicious intent and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the highroad" (Mrs. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Vol. II, pp. 31-2). The modern traveller in the United States is sometimes surprised at dusk by finding the highway temporarily blocked by a house which is being moved from one side to the other and has been dumped down at the end of the day's work, but this is nothing to finding that the road itself has been removed bodily. It is true that the corporation of Nottingham issued an order in 1507 forbidding people to dig holes in the market-place without leave, but this was long after Chaucer's day, and if such ordinances were necessary to protect the actual market-place of a busy commercial city, it is not difficult to imagine the condition of country roads. The keeping of bridges in repair was looked upon, not as a matter of ordinary business, but as an act of piety, so that on the Continent special "Bridge Friars" existed, part of whose religious duties consisted in such work. In 1311-16 Richard of Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, offered forty days' indulgence to all those "who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily labour" in repairing various roads and bridges (Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, p. 4). And in 1353 a patent of Edward III had ordered the paving of the highroad from Temple Bar to Westminster, since "it is so full of holes and bogs ... and the pavement is so damaged and broken" that traffic has become dangerous to man and beast. No wonder that robbers abounded, and that pilgrims found safety in numbers.

In 1390 highwaymen seem to have been particularly active, and the commissioner of roads himself was robbed more than once. Richard Brerelay was indicted for having "with others unknown" robbed Geoffrey Chaucer at Westminster of the sum of ￡10, on the Tuesday after the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (i. e. September 6); and in the same year "near the Fowle Ok" at Hatcham, in Surrey, Chaucer was robbed of a horse worth ￡10, goods worth 100 shillings, and ￡20 6s. 8d. in cash. Some, at least, of this seems to have been public money, for he was granted a royal pardon for the loss of ￡20 of the King's money taken from him "by some notable robbers."

In 1391 he lost his post as Clerk of the Works, but this does not seem to imply any serious loss of the royal favour, for three years later the king granted him a pension of ￡20 (about ￡300 of our money) a year for life. During the interval he seems to have got into money difficulties, for no sooner was this grant made than his creditors promptly sued him for debt.

In 1398 he received an additional grant of wine-a tun a year for life-and was also promoted to be sole, instead of sub-, forester of North Pemberton. In 1399 the son of his earliest and most powerful patron came to the throne, and Chaucer, who was still struggling with his creditors, addressed an impassioned appeal to him. Already, in 1398, the poet had been threatened with legal proceedings, and although the king had entrusted him with various commissions in the country, he had not dared to leave his house for fear of arrest (Ten Brink, History of English Literature, Vol. II, p. 198). No wonder he sang:-

To you, my purse, and to non other wight

Compleyne I, for ye be my lady dere!

I am so sory, now that ye be light;

For certes, but ye make me hevy chere.

(The Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse.

Professor Ten Brink believes this poem to have been

addressed to King Richard, but Professor Skeat has

no doubt that it was addressed to Henry.)

It is consoling to learn that Henry IV added forty marks a year to the pension granted by King Richard, thus bringing Chaucer's income up to ￡600 or ￡700 of our money. This new outburst of good fortune promised well for the future, and Chaucer evidently looked forward to a prosperous and comfortable old age, for, on December 24, 1399, he took the lease of a house in the garden of St. Mary's, Westminster, for fifty-four years. He was not, however, to make long use of his new possession, for on October 25, 1400, he died, and his grave was the first to mark the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. One of his later ballades, Truth may well serve as epitaph for the poet whom court life could never corrupt into a courtier, and whose clear sight and sharp wit never led him into bitterness or cynicism:-

That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,[25]

The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.

Her nis non hoom,[26] her nis but wildernesse:

Forth pilgrim, forth! Forth beste out of thy stal!

Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

Hold the hye way, and lat thygost thee lede:[27].

And trouthe shal delivre, hit is no drede.[28]

* * *