2. PLAN OF ALDGATE TOWER AS IT WAS IN CHAUCER’S TIME

Professor Lounsbury (“Studies in Chaucer,” chap. v.) has discoursed exhaustively, and very judicially, on Chaucer’s learning; he shows clearly what books the poet knew only as nodding acquaintances, and how many others he must at one time have possessed, or at least have had at hand for serious study; and it would be impertinent to go back here over the same ground. But Professor Lounsbury is less clear on the subject which most concerns us here—the average price of books; for the three volumes which he instances from the King’s library were no doubt illuminated, and he follows Devon in the obvious slip of describing the French Bible as “written in the Gaelic language.” (II., 196; the reference to Devon should be p. 213, not 218.) But, at the lowest possible estimate, books were certainly an item which would have swelled any budget seriously in the 14th century. This was indeed grossly overstated by Robertson and other writers of a century ago; but Maitland’s “Dark Ages,” while correcting their exaggerations, is itself calculated to mislead in the other direction. A small Bible was cheap at forty shillings, i.e. the equivalent of £30 in modern money; so that the twenty volumes of Aristotle which Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford had at his bed’s head could scarcely have failed to cost him the value of three average citizens’ houses in a great town.[113] Among all the church dignitaries whose wills are recorded in Bishop Stafford’s Register at Exeter (1395-1419) the largest library mentioned is only of fourteen volumes. The sixty testators include a Dean, two Archdeacons, twenty Canons or Prebendaries, thirteen Rectors, six Vicars, and eighteen layfolk, mostly rich people. The whole sixty apparently possessed only two Bibles between them, and only one hundred and thirty-eight books altogether; or, omitting church service-books, only sixty; i.e. exactly one each on an average. Thirteen of the beneficed clergy were altogether bookless, though several of them possessed the baselard or dagger which church councils had forbidden in vain for centuries past; four more had only their Breviary. Of the laity fifteen were bookless, while three had service-books, one of these being a knight, who simply bequeathed them as part of the furniture of his private chapel. Any similar collection of wills and inventories would (I believe) give the same results, which fully agree with the independent evidence of contemporary writers. Bishop Richard de Bury (or possibly the distinguished theologian, Holcot, writing in his name) speaks bitterly of the neglect of books in the 14th century. Not only (he says) is the ardent collector ridiculed, but even education is despised, and money rules the world. Laymen, who do not even care whether books lie straight or upside down, are utterly unworthy of all communion with them; the secular clergy neglect them; the monastic clergy (with honourable exceptions among the friars) pamper their bodies and leave their books amid the dust and rubbish, till they become “corrupt and abominable, breeding-grounds for mice, riddled with worm-holes.” Even when in use, they have a score of deadly enemies—dirty and careless readers (whose various peculiarities the good Bishop describes in language of Biblical directness)—children who cry for and slobber over the illuminated capitals—and careless or slovenly servants. But the deadliest of all such enemies is the priest’s concubine, who finds the neglected volume half-hidden under cobwebs, and barters it for female finery. There is an obvious element of exaggeration in the good Bishop’s satire; but the Oxford Chancellor, Gascoigne, a century later, speaks equally strongly of the neglect of writing and the destruction of literature in the monasteries of his time; and there is abundant official evidence to prove that our ancestors did not atone for natural disadvantages by any excessive zeal in the multiplication, use, or preservation of books.[114]

Chaucer was scarcely born when the “Philobiblon” was written; and already in his day there was a growing number of leisured laymen who did know the top end of a book from the bottom, and who cared to read and write something beyond money accounts. Gower, who probably made money as a London merchant before he became a country squire, was also a well-read man; but systematic readers were still very rare outside the Universities, and Mrs. Green writes, even of a later generation of English citizens, “So far as we know, no trader or burgher possessed a library.”[115] Twenty-nine years after Chaucer’s death, the celebrated Whittington did indeed found a library; yet this was placed not at the Guildhall, to which he was a considerable benefactor, but in the Greyfriars’ convent. The poet’s bookishness would therefore inevitably have made him something of a recluse, and we have no reason to tax his own description with exaggeration.

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ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS AS RECONSTITUTED IN
W. NEWTON’S “LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME”

12. ST. MICHAEL’S, ALDGATE; 25. BLANCH APPLETON; 26. ST. CATHERINE, COLEMAN STREET;
27. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE; 28. PRIOR OF HORNCHURCH’S LODGING; 29. SARACEN’S HEAD

London has never been a silent city, but Chaucer enjoyed at least one of the quietest spots in it. If (as we have every reason to suppose) the Ordinance of 1345 was far from putting an end to the nuisances which it indicates, then Chaucer must have heaved a sigh of relief when he had seen the Custom-House locked up, and turned his back on Spurrier Lane. The Spurriers were addicted to working after dark for nefarious ends of their own; “and further, many of the said trade are wandering about all day, without working at all at their trade; and then, when they have become drunk and frantic, they take to their work, to the annoyance of the sick and of all their neighbourhood, as well as by reason of the broils that arise between them and the strange folks who are dwelling among them. And then they blow up their fires so vigorously, that their forges begin all at once to blaze, to the great peril of themselves and of all the neighbourhood around. And then too, all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks, which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges.”[116] We may trust that no such offensive handiwork was carried on round Aldgate, whither the poet would arrive about five o’clock in the evening, and sit down forthwith to supper, as the sun began to slant over the open fields. We may hope, at least, that he was wont to sup at home rather than at those alluring cook-shops which alternated with wine-taverns along the river bank; and that, as he “defyed the roast” with his Gascon wine, Philippa sat and sipped with him from one of time-honoured Lancaster’s silver-gilt cups. Even if we accept the most pessimistic theories of Chaucer’s married life, we need scarcely doubt that the pair sat often together at their open window in the twilight—

Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through.

The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out from Bow steeple.[117] Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in “Troilus and Criseyde,” written during this very Aldgate time. The hero watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the evening shadows leave most to the imagination—