Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this, so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.

It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant circumstances of these later embassies, important as they are for showing the high estimate put on Chaucer’s business talents, and much as they must have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully matured at last in the poet of the “Canterbury Tales.” But they show us that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate sister of Clarence’s Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins. These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he became no longer the mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a genius) of French and Italian classics, but a classic himself, master of a style that could express all the accumulated observations of half a century—Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English men and women, and no other man. The analysis and criticism of the works which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough, strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare has been to us ever since.

It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at court. On St. George’s day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of wine daily for life, “to be received in the port of London from the hands of the King’s butler.” Such grants were common enough; but they take us back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition had come down. St. George’s was a day of solemn feasting in the Round Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services rendered during the past year. But the grant was already in those days more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was commuted for a life-pension of about £200 modern value.

Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune. Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however, are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household amounted to some £1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wardships and a large share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer’s financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another comptrollership which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollership also; and in this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the Shire for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues. Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years. In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet “de raptu meo.” Raptus often means simply abduction, and it may well be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia as had been made upon his own father, who, as it will be remembered, had narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the gratification of other people’s private interests. This is rendered all the more probable by two other documents connected with the same matter which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57] It is, however, possible that the raptus was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer’s “little son Lowis” was just ten years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation, have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on Cecilia’s part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pass a law exacting that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pass on to the next of kin.[58] But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into a case of raptus, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]

During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer occupied those lodgings over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary point of view. Here he studied with an assiduity which would have been impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in his later years of want and sordid shifts. Here he translated Boethius, of whose philosophical “Consolations” he was so soon to stand in bitter need. Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that “Troilus and Cressida” which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In 1382 he composed his “Parliament of Fowls” in honour of Richard II.’s marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the “House of Fame” and the “Legend of Good Women.” These two poems, like most of Chaucer’s work, are unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind ourselves that he was no professional litterateur, but a courtier, diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their gratitude for what he told them, few in those days would have been inclined to complain of all that Chaucer “left half-told.” So the poet freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness after all these centuries.

This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. His contemporary, Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, “at the palace of Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, nobles, and counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease. And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports, and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin, French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days before in all that he should say.” Chaucer’s Parliament sat more probably in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly passed off with less order and unanimity than Froissart’s of 1337, though the main theme was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crécy and Poitiers and a dozen other victories in pitched battles, our ships had been destroyed off La Rochelle in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60] and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and his fellow-members assembled on October 1, “it had still seemed possible that any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of the Thames.”[61] The militia of the southern counties was still assembled to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out any longer. As a contemporary puts it, “The King would not come to Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to attend.”[62] The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed preparations.

Meanwhile, however, other protégés of his had suffered besides the great men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted from Richard a commission for a month “to receive and dispose of all crown revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and set up others in their stead.”[63] Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls of this Parliament that the commission was issued “for inquiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the Subsidies and Customs; and as the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed to that investigation.” It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so, and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the poet’s character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then, when Richard’s patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer’s other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile—at such a moment it was almost inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in December both his comptrollerships were in other men’s hands. Even in his best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse would very naturally drive him to desperate shifts. It is not surprising, therefore, that we soon find him assigning his two pensions to one John Scalby (May 1, 1388).

But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV.[64] At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter’s pension as usual, but not at Michaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet’s already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he probably wrote the greater part of the “Canterbury Tales.”

Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain attempt to reassert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer’s old colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world, he struck his blow. In May, 1389, “he suddenly entered the privy council, took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, ‘What age am I?’ They answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am of full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.’” He at once dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John’s factious younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester.

With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was natural that Chaucer’s luck should turn. Two months after this scene in Council he was appointed by Richard II. “Clerk of our Works at our Palace of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern Langley, and Feckenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages.” Our poet had also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the King’s prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back runaways, and “to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the injunctions given in our name.” That these time-honoured clauses were no dead letter, is shown by the still surviving documents in which Chaucer deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen and impounding materials, by the constant petitions of medieval Parliaments against this system of “Purveyance” for the King’s necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short while by “pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of Windsor.”[65]