During those fifteen years the ports of the south coast were constantly harried by privateers. The Isle of Wight was taken and plundered. The Prior of Lewes, heading a hastily raised force against the invaders, was taken prisoner at Rottingdean; and such efforts to clear the seas as were made on our part were not public, but merely civic, or even private. The men of Winchelsea and Rye burned a couple of Norman ports, after plundering the very churches; and the sailors of Portsmouth and Dartmouth collected a fleet which for a short while swept the Channel. This may be the reason why Chaucer, writing two years later, makes his bold Shipman hail from Dartmouth. But, seven years before this raid, a single London merchant had done still more. A Scottish pirate named Mercer, reinforced by French and Spanish ships, infested the North Sea until “God raised up against him one of the citizens of Troynovant.” “John Philpot, citizen of London, a man of great wit, wealth and power, narrowly considering the default or treachery of the Duke of Lancaster and the other Lords who ought to have defended the realm, and pitying his oppressed countrymen, hired with his own money a thousand armed men.... And it came to pass that the Almighty, who ever helpeth pious vows, gave success to him and his, so that his men presently took the said Mercer, with all that he had taken by force from Scarborough, and fifteen more Spanish ships laden with much riches. Whereat the whole people exulted ... and now John Philpot alone was praised in all men’s mouths and held in admiration, while they spake opprobriously and with bitter blame of our princes and the host which had long ago been raised, as is the wont of the common herd in their changing moods.”[146]

Walsingham’s final moral here is, after all, that of Chaucer: “O stormy people, unsad and ever untrue, Aye indiscreet, and changing as a vane!”[147] English writers seem, indeed, to speak of their countrymen as especially fickle and inconstant; and there was no doubt more reason for the charge in those days, when men in general were far more swayed by impulse and less by reflexion—when indeed the fundamental insecurity of the social and political fabric was such as to thwart even the ripest reflexion at every turn. It is striking how short-lived were the London trading families until after Chaucer’s time: no such succession as the Rothschilds and Barings was as yet possible. Moreover, in civic as in national politics, it was still possible to lose one’s head for the crime of having shown too much zeal in a losing cause, as the career of Chaucer’s colleague Brembre may testify.[148] Walsingham loses no opportunity of jeering at the inconstancy of the London citizens; he portrays their panic during the invasion scare of 1386, and during the King’s suppression of their liberties in 1389-92, with all the superiority of a monk whose own skin was safe enough in the cloister of St. Alban’s. On this latter occasion the citizens had to pay Richard the enormous fine of £20,000—or, according to a Malmesbury monk, £40,000—for the restoration of their privileges; and even then they were glad to welcome him on his first gracious visit “as an angel of God.”[149] But they bided their time, and Richard was to learn, like other sovereigns before and since, how heavy a sword the Londoners could throw into the political scale. Froissart noted that “they ever have been, are, and will be so long as the City stands, the most powerful of all England”; that what London thought was also what England thought; and that even a king might find he had gained but a Pyrrhic victory over them. “For where the men of London are at accord and fully agreed, no man dare gainsay them. They are of more weight than all the rest of England, nor dare any man drive them to bay, for they are most mighty in wealth and in men.”[150]

However little Chaucer may have interested himself in his neighbours, here were things which no poet could help seeing. The real history of Medieval London is yet to be written; it will be a story of strange contrasts, gold and brass and iron and clay. But there was a greatness in the very disquiet and inconstancy of the city; some ideals were already fermenting there which, realized only after centuries of conflict, have made modern England what we are proud to see her; and other ideals of which we, like our forefathers, can only say that we trust in their future realization.

CHAPTER XI

“CANTERBURY TALES”—THE DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

“Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together
To seek St. James, and saints in Rome.
They went forth in their way with many wise tales,
And had leave to lie all their life after ...
Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves,
Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after;
Great lubbers and long, that loth were to labour,
Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other,
And shaped themselves as hermits, their ease to have.”
“Piers Plowman,” B., Prol. 46

During those twelve years in Aldgate Tower, Chaucer’s genius fought its way through the literary conventions of his time to the full assertion of its native originality. He had begun with allegory and moralization, after the model of the “Roman de la Rose”; shreds of these conventions clung to him even to the end of the Aldgate period; but they were already outworn. In “Troilus and Cressida” we have real men and women under all the classical machinery: they think and act as men thought and acted in Chaucer’s time; and Pandarus especially is so lifelike and individual that Shakespeare will transfer him almost bodily to his own canvas. In the “House of Fame” and the “Legend of Good Women” the form indeed is again allegorical, but the poet’s individuality breaks through this narrow mask; his self-revelations are franker and more direct than at any previous time; and in each case he wearied of the poem and broke off long before the end. With the humility of a true artist, he had practised his hand for years to draw carefully after the old acknowledged models; but these now satisfied him less and less. His mind was stored with images which could not be forced into the narrow framework of a dream; he must find a canvas broad enough for all the life of his time; for the cream of all that he had seen and heard in Flanders and France and Italy, in the streets of London and on the open highways of a dozen English counties. Boccaccio, for a similar scheme, had brought together a company of young Florentines of the upper class, and of both sexes, in a villa-garden. Chaucer’s plan of a pilgrim cavalcade gave him a variety of character as much greater as the company in a third-class carriage is more various than that in a West-end club.