This implies no very high standard of domestic comfort. The hall, it must be remembered, had no chimney in the modern sense, but a hole in the roof to which the smoke went up from an open hearth in the centre of the room, more or less assisted in most cases by a funnel-shaped erection of lath and plaster.[96] It is not generally realized what draughts our ancestors were obliged to accept as unavoidable, even when they sat partially screened by their high-backed seats, as in old inn kitchens. A man needed his warmest furs still more for sitting indoors than for walking abroad; and to Montaigne, even in 1580, one of the most remarkable things in Switzerland was the draughtless comfort of the stove-warmed rooms. “One neither burns one’s face nor one’s boots, and one escapes the smoke of French houses. Moreover, whereas we [in France] take our warm and furred robes de chambre when we enter the house, they on the contrary dress in their doublets, with their heads uncovered to the very hair, and put on their warm clothes to walk in the open air.”[97] The important part played by furs of all kinds, and the matter-of-course mention of dirt and vermin, are among the first things that strike us in medieval literature.
But the worst discomfort of the house, to the modern mind, was the want of privacy. There was generally but one bedroom; for most of the household the house meant simply the hall; and some of those with whom the rest were brought into such close contact might indeed be “gey ill to live wi’.”[98] We have seen that, even as a King’s squire, Chaucer had not a bed to himself; and sometimes one bed had to accommodate three occupants. This was so ordered, for instance, by the 15th-century statutes of the choir-school at Wells, which provided minutely for the packing: “two smaller boys with their heads to the head of the bed, and an older one with his head to the foot of the bed and his feet between the others’ heads.” A distinguished theologian of the same century, narrating a ghost-story of his own, begins quite naturally: “When I was a youth, and lay in a square chamber, which had only a single door well shut from within, together with three more companions in the same bed....” One of these, we presently find, “was of greater age, and a man of some experience.”[99] The upper classes of Chaucer’s later days had indeed begun to introduce revolutionary changes into the old-fashioned common life of the hall; a generation of unparalleled success in war and commerce was already making possible, and therefore inevitable, a new cleavage between class and class. The author of the B. text of “Piers Plowman,” writing about 1377, complains of these new and unsociable ways (x., 94).
| “Ailing is the Hall each day in the week, Where the lord nor the lady liketh not to sit. Now hath each rich man a rule to eaten by himself In a privy parlour, for poor men’s sake, Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief Hall, That was made for meals, and men to eaten in.” |
Few men, however, could afford even these rudiments of privacy; people like Chaucer, of fair income and good social position, still found in their homes many of the discomforts of shipboard; and their daily intercourse with their fellow-men bred the same blunt familiarity, even beneath the most ceremonious outward fashions. It was not only starveling dependents like Lippo Lippi, whose daily life compelled them to study night and day the faces and outward ways of their fellow-men.
But let us get back again into the street, where all the work and play of London was as visible to the passer-by as that of any colony of working ants under the glass cases in a modern exhibition. Often, of course, there were set pageants for edification or distraction—Miracle Plays and solemn church processions twice or thrice in the year,—the Mayor’s annual ride to the palace of Westminster and back,—the King’s return with a new Queen or after a successful campaign, as in 1357, when Edward III. “came over the Bridge and through the City of London, with the King of France and other prisoners of rich ransom in his train. He entered the city about tierce [9 a.m.] and made for Westminster; but at the news of his coming so great a crowd of folk ran together to see this marvellous sight, that for the press of the people he could scarce reach his palace after noonday.” Frequent again were the royal tournaments at Smithfield, Cheapside, and Westminster, or “trials by battle” in those same lists, when one gentleman had accused another of treachery, and London citizens might see the quarrel decided by God’s judgment.[100] Here were welcome contrasts to the monotony of household life; for there was in all these shows a piquant element of personal risk, or at least of possible broken heads for others. Even if the King threw down his truncheon before the bitter end of the duel, even if no bones were broken at the tournament, something at least would happen amongst the crowd. Fountains ran wine in the morning, and blood was pretty sure to be shed somewhere before night. In 1396, when the little French Princess of eight years was brought to her Royal bridegroom at Westminster, nine persons were crushed to death on London Bridge, and the Prior of Tiptree was among the dead. Even the church processions, as episcopal registers show, ended not infrequently in scuffling, blows, and bloodshed; and the frequent holy days enjoyed then, as since, a sad notoriety for crime. Moreover, these things were not, as with us, mere matters of newspaper knowledge; they stared the passer-by in the face. Chaucer must have heard from his father how the unpopular Bishop Stapledon was torn from his horse at the north door of St. Paul’s and beheaded with two of his esquires in Cheapside; how the clergy of the cathedral and of St. Clement’s feared to harbour the corpses, which lay naked by the roadside at Temple Bar until “women and wretched poor folk took the Bishop’s naked corpse, and a woman gave him an old rag to cover his belly, and they buried him in a waste plot called the Lawless Church, with his squires by his side, all naked and without office of priest or clerk.”[101] Chaucer himself must have seen some of the many similar tragedies in 1381, for they are among the few events of contemporary history which we can definitely trace in his poems—
| Have ye not seen some time a palë face Among a press, of him that hath been led Toward his death, where as him gat no grace, And such a colour in his face hath had, Men mightë know his face that was bestead Amongës all the faces in that rout?[102] |
What modern Londoner has witnessed this, or anything like it? Yet to all his living readers Chaucer appealed confidently, “Have ye not seen?” Scores of wretched lawyers and jurors were hunted down in that riot, and hurried through the streets to have their heads hacked off at Tower Hill or Cheapside, “and many Flemings lost their head at that time, and namely [specially] they that could not say ‘Bread and Cheese,’ but ‘Case and Brode.’”[103] It may well have been Simon of Sudbury’s white face that haunted Chaucer, when the mob forgot his archbishopric in the unpopularity of his ministry, forgot the sanctity of the chapel at whose altar he had taken refuge, “paid no reverence even to the Lord’s Body which the priest held up before him, but worse than demons (who fear and flee Christ’s sacrament) dragged him by the arms, by his hood, by different parts of the body towards their fellow-rioters on Tower Hill without the gates. When they had come thither, a most horrible shout arose, not like men’s shouts, but worse beyond all comparison than all human cries, and most like to the yelling of devils in hell. Moreover, they cried thus whensoever they beheaded men or tore down their houses, so long as God permitted them to work their iniquity unpunished.”[104] De Quincey has noted how such cries may make a deeper mark on the soul than any visible scene. And here again Chaucer has brought his own experience, though half in jest, as a parallel to the sack of Ilion and Carthage or the burning of Rome—
| So hideous was the noise, benedicite! Certës, he Jacke Straw, and his meinie Ne madë never shoutës half so shrill, When that they woulden any Fleming kill ...[105] |
Last tragedy of all—but this time, though he may well have seen, the poet could no longer write—Richard II.’s corpse “was brought to St. Paul’s in London, and his face shown to the people,” that they might know he was really dead.[106]
Nor was there less comedy than tragedy in the London streets; the heads grinned down from the spikes of London Bridge on such daily buffooneries as scarcely survive nowadays except in the amenities of cabdrivers and busmen. The hue and cry after a thief in one of these narrow streets, encumbered with show-benches and goods of every description, must at any time have been a Rabelaisian farce; and still more so when it was the thief who had raised the hue and cry after a true man, and had slipped off himself in the confusion. The crowds who gather in modern towns to see a man in handcuffs led from a dingy van up the dingy court steps would have found a far keener relish in the public punishments which Chaucer saw on his way to and from work; fraudulent tradesmen in the pillory, with their putrid wares burning under their noses, or drinking wry-mouthed the corrupt wine which they had palmed off on the public; scolding wives in the somewhat milder “thewe”; sometimes a penitential procession all round the city, as in the case of the quack doctor and astrologer whose story is so vividly told by the good Monk of St. Alban’s. The impostor “was set on a horse [barebacked] with the beast’s tail in his hand for a bridle, and two pots which in the vulgar tongue we call Jordans bound round his neck, with a whetstone in sign that he earned all this by his lies; and thus he was led round the whole city.”[107] A lay chronicler might have given us the reverse of the medal; some priest barelegged in his shirt, with a lighted taper in his hand, doing penance for his sins before the congregation of his own church. The author of “Piers Plowman” knew this well enough; in introducing us to his tavern company, it is a priest and a parish clerk whom he shows us cheek-by-jowl with the two least reputable ladies of the party. The whole passage deserves quoting in full as a picture of low life indeed, but one familiar enough to Chaucer and his friends in their day; for it is a matter of common remark that even the distance which separated different classes in earlier days made it easier for them to mix familiarly in public. The very catalogue of this tavern company is a comedy in itself, and may well conclude our survey of common London sights. Glutton, on his way to morning mass, has passed Bett the brewster’s open door; and her persuasive “I have good ale, gossip” has broken down all his good resolutions—