Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

In other words, the Canon Law practically compelled the taker of interest to become a villain, as the old penal laws encouraged the thief to commit murder. Gower, if we make a little obvious allowance for a satirist’s rhetoric, will show us how ordinary citizens regarded the usurious Lombards.[136] “They claim to dwell in our land as freely, and with as warm a welcome, as if they had been born and bred amongst us.... But they meditate in their heart how to rob our silver and gold.” They change (he says) their chaff for our corn; they sweep in our good sterling coin so that there is little left in the country. “To-day I see such Lombards come [to London] as menials in mean attire; and before a year is past, by dint of deceit and intrigue, they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our city.... It is great shame that our Lords, who ought to keep our laws, should treat our merchants as serfs, and quietly free the hands of strange folk to rob us. But Covetise hath dominion over all things: for bribery makes friends and brings success: that is the custom in my country.” Nor “in my country” only, but in other lands too; for the best-known firm of merchants now-a-days is Trick and Co. “Seek from East to the going out of the West, there is no city or good town where Trick does not rob to enrich himself. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and sells; Trick has his ships and servants, and of the noblest riches Trick has ten times more than other folk. At Florence and Venice, Trick has his fortress and freedom of trade; so he has at Bruges and Ghent; under his care too has the noble City on the Thames put herself, which Brutus founded, but which Trick is on the way to confound....” Why not, indeed, in an age in which all the bonds of society are loosed? “One [merchant] told me the other day how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly who, being able to get the delights of this life, should pass them by: for after this life is over, no man knoweth for truth which way or by what path we go. Thus do the merchants of our present days dispute and say and answer for the most part.”

Much of Gower’s complaint about Trick might be equally truly applied to any age or community; but much was due also to the growth of large and complicated money transactions, involving considerable speculation on credit. Gower complains that merchants talked of “many thousands” where their fathers had talked of “scores” or “hundreds”; and he, like Chaucer, describes the dignified trader as affecting considerable outward show to disguise the insecurity of his financial position.[137] Edward III. set here a Royal example by failing for a million florins, or more than £4,000,000 of modern money, and thus ruining two of the greatest European banking firms, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence. Undeterred by similar risks, the de la Poles of Hull undertook to finance the King, and became the first family of great merchant-princes in England. Operations such as these opened a new world of possibilities for commerce—vast stakes on the table, and vast prizes to the winners. Moreover, city politics grew complicated in proportion with city finance. The mass of existing documents shows a continual extension of the Londoner’s civic authorities, until the townsfolk were trammeled by a network of byelaws not indeed so elaborate as those of a modern city, but incomparably more hampering and vexatious. On this subject, which is of capital importance for the comprehension of life in Chaucer’s time, it would be difficult on the whole to put the facts more clearly than they have already been put by Riley on pp. cix. ff. of his introduction to the “Liber Albus.” “Such is a sketch of some few of the leading features of social life within the walls of London in the 13th and 14th centuries. The good old times, whenever else they may have existed, assuredly are not to be looked for in days like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated the lawmakers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these were times, the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws both national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately they created or protected comparatively few real valuable rights, gave birth to many and grievous wrongs. That the favoured and so-called free citizen of London even—despite the extensive privileges in reference to trade which he enjoyed—was in possession of more than the faintest shadow of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance of the pages just submitted to the reader’s notice, filled as they are with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive: laws, for example, which compelled each citizen,[138] whether he would or no, to be bail and surety for a neighbour’s good behaviour, over whom perhaps it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for the King and the great lords of the land had stripped the stalls of all that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pass the city walls for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and artisans; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they permitted ‘genteel dogs’ to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the city officials on various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules, at what hours he was to walk in the streets, and incidentally, what he was to eat and what to drink. Viewed individually, laws and ordinances such as these may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but ‘trifles make life,’ the poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like these, must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man, and a burden hard to be borne. Every dark picture, however, has its reverse, and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too often treated little better than a slave; but, on the other hand, the price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour appear—at times, at least—to have been regulated on a very fair and liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be protected, in their dealings, against the artifices of adulteration, deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity, to some extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present day.”

The words about the purity of the Thames need some modification in the light of such incidents as those recorded (for instance) in Mr. Sharpe’s calendar of “Letter Book” G, pp. xxvii. ff.;[139] but the most serious gap in Riley’s picture is the absence of any clear allusion to the almost incredible gulfs which are frequently to be found between 14th-century theory and practice. We have already seen how openly the city officials broke their own brand-new resolution about lodgings over the city gates; and the surviving records of all medieval cities tell the same tale, for which we might indeed be prepared by the wearisome iteration with which we find the same enactments re-enacted again and again, as if they had never been thought of before. As Dean Colet said, when the world of the Middle Ages was at its last gasp, it was not new laws that England needed, but a new spirit of justice in enforcing the old laws. Seldom, indeed, had these become an absolute dead letter—we find them invoked at times where we should least have expected it—but at the very best they were enforced with a barefaced partiality which cannot be paralleled in modern civilized countries even under the most unfavourable circumstances. From Norwich, one of the greatest towns in the kingdom, and certainly not one of the worst governed, we have fortunately surviving a series of Leet Court Rolls, which have been admirably edited by Mr. Hudson for the Selden Society, and commented on more briefly in his “Records of the City of Norwich.”[140] He shows that, whereas the breach of certain civic regulations should nominally have been punished by a fine for the first offence, pillory for the second, and expulsion for the third, yet in fact there was no pretence, in an ordinary way, of taking the law literally. “The price of ale was fixed according to the price of wheat. Almost every housewife of the leading families brewed ale and sold it to her neighbours, and invariably charged more than the fixed price. The authorities evidently expected and wished this course to be taken, for these ladies were regularly presented and amerced every year for the same offence, paid their amercements and went away to go through the same process in the future as in the past. Much the same course was pursued by other trades and occupations. Fishmongers, tanners, poulterers, cooks, etc., are fined wholesale year after year for breaking every by-law that concerned their business. In short, instead of a trader (as now) taking out a license to do his business on certain conditions which he is expected to keep, he was bound by conditions which he was expected to break and afterwards fined for the breach. The same financial result was attained or aimed at by a different method.” Moreover, the fines themselves were collected with the strangest irregularity. “Some are excused by the Bailiffs without reason assigned; some ‘at the instance’ of certain great people wishing to do a good turn for a friend. Again, others make a bargain with the collector, thus expressed, as for instance, ‘John de Swaffham is not in tithing. Amercement 2s. He paid 6d., the rest is excused. He is quit.’ Sometimes an entry is marked ‘vad,’ i.e. vadiat, or vadiatur, ‘he gives a pledge,’ or, ‘it is pledged.’ The Collector had seized a jug, or basin, or chair. But by far the larger number of entries are marked ‘d,’ i.e. debet, ‘he owes it.’ The Collector had got nothing. At the end of each (great) Leet is a collector’s account of moneys received and paid in to the Bailiffs or the City Chamberlain in three or four or more payments. By drawing out a balance sheet for the whole city in this year it appears that the total amount of all the amercements entered is £72 18s. 10d. This is equivalent to more than £1000 at the present value of money. But all that the Collectors can account for, even after Easter, is £17 0s. 2d. It is clear that however efficient the system was in preventing offences from passing undetected, it did not do much to deter offenders from repeating them.”

The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book; and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman, they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends. Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences; yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe was “out at cockcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Mass, so that by six o’clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town.”[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer’s sarcasm as to the unwholesome fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a reduction in price “because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for these last seven years.” “What!” replied the Cook, “for so long a time, and you are yet alive!” The author of “Piers Plowman” exhorts mayors to apply the pillory more strictly to—

“Brewsters and bakers, butchers and cooks; For these are men on this mould that most harm worken To the poor people that piece-meal buyen: For they poison the people privily and oft ...”

A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. “All the men of Sprowston sell sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human bodies.”[143]

This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and partial as city justice still was in Chaucer’s days, overstrained in theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real self-government and of real apprenticeship to higher things in politics, not only civic but national. The constitution of the city was frankly oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or even at the risk of bloodshed—this in itself was the thin end of the democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed, domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country squires,[144] successfully asserted in Parliament the power of the purse, and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation’s money, before they voted it for his use.

Moreover, it was due enormously to London and the great cities that our national liberties were safeguarded from the foreign invader. The considerable advance in national wealth between 1330 and 1430 was partly due to our success in war. While English cities multiplied, French cities had even in many cases to surrender into their King’s hands those liberties for which they were now too poor to render the correspondent services. Yet, even before the first blow had been struck, those wars were already half-won by English commerce. “The secret of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers lies in the merchants’ counting-houses of London, Bordeaux, and Bruges.”[145] Apart from those habits and qualities which successful commerce implies, the amount of direct supplies in men and money contributed by the English towns during Edward’s wars can only be fully realized by reading Dr. Sharpe’s admirable prefaces to his “Calendars of Letter-Books.” But a single instance is brief and striking enough to be quoted here.

Our crushing defeat by the combined French and Spanish navies off La Rochelle in 1372 lost us the command of the sea until our victory at Cadzand in 1387; and Chaucer’s Merchant rightly voiced the crying need of English commerce during that time—

He would the sea were kept, for any thing, Betwixtë Middelburgh and Orëwell.