Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

CHAPTER X

THE LAWS OF LONDON

“Del un Marchant au jour present L’en parle molt communement, Il ad noun Triche plein de guile, Qe pour sercher del orient Jusques au fin del occident, N’y ad cité ne bonne vile U Triche son avoir ne pile. Triche en Bourdeaux, Triche en Civile, Triche en Paris achat et vent; Triche ad ses niefs et sa famile, Et du richesce plus nobile Triche ad disz foitz plus q’autre gent. Triche a Florence et a Venise Ad son recet et sa franchise, Si ad a Brugges et a Gant; A son agard auci s’est mise La noble Cité sur Tamise, La quelle Brutus fuist fondant; Mais Triche la vait confondant.” Gower, “Mirour,” 25273 ff.

But the picturesque side of things was only the smaller half of Chaucer’s life, as it is of ours. We must not be more royalist than the King, or claim more for Chaucer and his England than he himself would ever have dreamed of claiming. That which seems most beautiful and romantic to us was not necessarily so five hundred years ago. The literature of Chivalry, for instance, seems to have touched Chaucer comparatively little: he scarcely mentions it but in more or less open derision. Again, while Ruskin and William Morris seem at times almost tempted to wish themselves back to the 14th century for the sake of its Gothic architecture, Chaucer in his retrospective mood is not ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet uncorrupted by architects of any description whatever—

No trumpës for the warrës folk ne knew, Nor towers high and wallës round or square ... Yet were no palace chambers, nor no halls; In cavës and in woodës soft and sweet Slepten this blessed folk withouten walls.[131]

No doubt he would as little have chosen seriously to go back to hips and haws as Morris would seriously have wished to live in the Middle Ages. But his words may warn us against over-estimating the picturesque side of his age. The most important is commonly what goes on under the surface; and this was eminently true of Chaucer’s native London. When we look closely into the social and political ideals of those motley figures which thronged the streets, we may see there our own modern liberties in the making, and note once more how slowly, yet how surely, the mills of God grind. It was once as hard for a community of a few thousand souls to govern itself as it is now for a nation; and parts of what seem to us the very foundations of civilized society were formerly as uncertain and tentative as Imperial Federation or the International Peace Congress.

The ordinary English town after the Conquest was originally simply part of a feudal estate: a rather denser aggregation than the ordinary village, and therefore rather more conscious of solidarity and power. The householders, by dint of holding more and more together, became increasingly capable of driving collective bargains, and of concentrating their numerical force upon any point at issue. They thus throve better than the isolated peasant; and their growing prosperity made them able to pay heavier dues to their feudal lords, who thus saw a prospect of immediate pecuniary gain in selling fresh liberties to the citizens. This process, which was still in its earlier stages in many towns during Chaucer’s lifetime, was, however, already far advanced in London, which claimed over other cities a superiority symbolized by the legend of its origin: Brut, the son of Æneas, had founded it, and named it Troynovant, or New Troy. But the city had far more tangible claims to supremacy than this: it had obtained from Henry I.—earlier by nearly a century than any other—the right of electing its own sheriff and justiciar; and from a still earlier time than this it had been almost as important politically as it is now. Mr. Loftie, whose “London” in the “Historic Towns” series gives so clear a view of its political development, shows us the city holding out against Canute long after the rest of the kingdom had been conquered; and making, even after Hastings, such terms with the Conqueror as secured to the citizens their traditional liberties. Even thus early, the city fully exemplified the dignity and enduring power of commerce and industry in an age of undisguised physical force. Its foreign trade was considerable, and foreign settlers numerous. “Already there was trade with the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee; and Norman ships, so far back as the days of Æthelred and even of his father, had brought the wines of the south to London. The [German] emperor’s men had already established their stafelhof, or steelyard, and traded under jealous rules and almost monastic discipline, but with such money that to this day ‘sterling’ stands beside ‘real’ as an adjective, for the Royal credit was not better than that of the Easterling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong to the ‘Gildhalda Theutonicorum,’ as it was called in the 13th century, settled in the city beside the Normans of the Conquest, the Frenchmen mentioned in the charter, and the old English stock of law-worthy citizens.”[132]

The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D., Fitzstephen boasted that London traded “with every nation under heaven”; and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing picture of English commerce; “Could the ships of Tharshish” (he exclaims), “so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?” Our fortunate insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer’s birth. French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs, placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time even formally forbade “all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and Provence.” All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; “robbed like a merchant” became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I., though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says, almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent Chaucer’s father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer’s grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King commanded on account of “certain outrages and despites” done to the Gascon merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have seen, were massacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers, and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury—a hateful term, which, in the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of human nature. “He who taketh usury goeth to hell, and he who taketh none, liveth on the verge of beggary”; so wrote an Italian contemporary of Chaucer’s. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly accepted his chance of damnation, and who would point to his big belly and fat cheeks with a scoffing “See how the priest’s curses shrivel me up!” Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been opened, he would have seen how “God had in fact fattened him for everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter”; but there remained many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. “Usurers’ bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred in front of the High Altar in churches”; so writes a great Franciscan preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady Meed in “Piers Plowman”—the incarnation of Illicit Gain—has scarcely come up to London when—

“Then came there a confessor, coped as a Friar ... Then he absolved her soon, and sithen he said ‘We have a window a-working, will cost us full high; Wouldst thou glaze that gable, and grave therein thy name, Sure should thy soul be heaven to have.’”[135]