A HOSTELRY AT NIGHT
(From a 15th-century MS. of “Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles” in the Hunterian Library at Glasgow)

In earlier ages, a pilgrimage had of course been a very solemn matter, involving the certainty of great labour and heavy privations, and with very considerable risk to life or limb. The crusades themselves were pilgrimages en masse, as contemporary chroniclers often remind us. At the commencement of an undertaking so serious, the pilgrims naturally sought the blessing of the Church; and there was a special service for their use. It is probable, however, that Chaucer’s pilgrims troubled themselves as little about this service as about the special pilgrim’s dress, the absence of which appears very plainly from his descriptions of their costume. For a century at least before he wrote, pilgrimages had been gradually becoming journeys rather of pleasure than of duty, for those who could afford the necessary expense which they entailed. Travelling indeed was not always safe; but when the pilgrim went alone and on foot he could always protect himself from most evil-doers by taking the traditional scrip and staff and gown which marked him as sacred; and often, as in Chaucer’s case, a caravan was formed which might well defy all the ordinary perils of the road. The “mire” and “slough,” which Chaucer more than once mentions, had always been as much a matter of common routine to everybody, even on his journey from farm to farm or village to village, as a puncture is to the modern cyclist, or occasional external traction to the motorist.[151] Moreover, though the inns might not be what we should call luxurious, they offered abundant good cheer and good fellowship to all who could pay the price. A certain Count of Poitou went about in disguise to find what class of his subjects led the happiest life; he judged at last “that the merchants at fair-time, who go to taverns and find all the delicacies they can desire ready prepared, would lead the most delightful life of all, but for this one drawback, that they must at last settle the score for all that they have consumed.”[152] If, at these inns, the pilgrims often found themselves packed into great dormitories fitted with berths like a ship’s cabin, this was far less of a change from their ordinary habits than are those hardships to which modern mountain tourists cheerfully submit on occasion.[153] Any great change from the ordinary routine marks a bright spot in most men’s minds, even in these days of many amusements and much locomotion; so that, in proportion as the King’s peace grew more effectual in England, and places of pilgrimage multiplied, and the middle classes could better afford the expense of time or money, it became as natural to many people to go to Walsingham or Canterbury for the sake of the pleasant society as it was to choose a church for the sake of gossip or flirtation.[154] This is already complained of about 1250 A.D. by Berthold of Regensburg, one of the greatest mission-preachers of the 13th century. “Men talk nowadays in church as if it were at market.... One tells what he has seen on his pilgrimage to Palestine or Rome or Compostella: thou mayst easily say so much in church of these same pilgrimages, that God or St. James will give thee no reward therefore.” Again, “Many a man journeys hence to St. James of Compostella, and never hears a single mass on the way out or back, and then they go with sport and laughter, and some seldom say even their Paternoster! This I say not to turn pilgrims aside from Compostella; I am not strong enough for that; but thou mightest earn more grace by a few masses than for all thy journey to Compostella and back. Now, what dost thou find at Compostella? St. James’s head. Well and good: that is a dead skull: the better part is in heaven. Now, what findest thou at home, at thy yard-gate? When thou goest to church in the morning, thou findest the true God and Man, body and soul, as truly as on that day wherein He was born of our Lady St. Mary, the ever-Virgin, whose holiness is greater than all saints.... Thou mayst earn more reward at one mass than another man in his six weeks out to St. Jacob and six weeks back again: that makes twelve weeks.” “Ye run to St. James, and sell so much at home that sometimes your wives and children must ever be the poorer for it, or thou thyself in need and debt all thy life long. Such a man crams himself so that he comes back far fatter than he went, and has much to say of what he has seen, and lets no man listen to the service or the sermon in church.” Two other great preachers, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry shortly before Berthold, and Etienne de Bourbon shortly after him, speak of the debaucheries which were not unusual on pilgrimages: the latter tells how pilgrims sometimes sang obscene songs in chorus, and joined in dissolute dances with the lewd village folk over the very graves in the churchyard; he seems to speak of the German pilgrims as exceptional in singing religious songs. All this was a century before Chaucer’s journey; and during those hundred years the institution had steadily lost in grace as it gained in popularity. The author of “Piers Plowman” not only notes how many rascals were to be found on pilgrimages, but would apparently have been glad to see them almost entirely superseded. His professional pilgrim comes hung round with tokens from a hundred shrines; he has been at Rome, Compostella, Jerusalem, Sinai, Bethlehem, Babylon, and even in Armenia; but of “Saint Truth” he has never heard, and can give no help to those who are in real distress about their souls. An ideal society would be one in which St. James was sought only by the sick-beds of the poor, and pilgrims resorted no longer to Rome but to “prisons and poor cottages” instead. Seventeen years before Chaucer’s journey, even a prelate of the Church dared to raise a similar protest. Archbishop Sudbury (then only Bishop of London) was met by a band of pilgrims on their way to Becket’s Jubilee. They asked for his blessing; he told them plainly that the promised Plenary Indulgence would be useless to them unless they went in a more reverent spirit; and many simple souls were rather pained than surprised when Wat Tyler’s mob, eleven years later, hacked off the head of so free-thinking an Archbishop on Tower Hill.[155] If this was what orthodox folk said already, then we need not wonder at Wycliffe’s outspoken condemnation, or that a citizen of Nottingham, as early as 1395, was compelled under pain of the stake to promise (among other articles) “I shall never more despise pilgrimage.”

Ten years after Chaucer, again, the Lollard Thorpe was tried before Archbishop Arundel, and painted pilgrimages exactly as Chaucer’s Poor Parson would have described them. “Such fond people waste blamefully God’s goods on their vain pilgrimages, spending their goods upon vicious hostelries, which are oft unclean women of their bodies.... Also, sir, I knowe well that when divers men and women will goe thus after their own willes, and finding out one pilgrimage, they will ordaine with them before, to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songes, and some other pilgrimes will have with them bagge pipes; so that everie towne that they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterburie bels, and with the barking out of dogges after them, that they make more noise, then if the king came there away, with all his clarions, and many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a moneth out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an halfe yeare after, great janglers, tale-tellers, and liers.”[156] A century later, we find Archbishop Warham and the Pope negotiating privately about Becket’s Jubilee in a frankly commercial spirit, while Erasmus publicly held up the Canterbury Pilgrimage to ridicule; and a few years later again St. Thomas was declared a traitor, his shrine was plundered, and the pilgrimages ceased. It may indeed be said that the Canterbury Pilgrimage would not have been so proper for our poet’s dramatic purpose but that most of its religious earnestness had long since evaporated.

But what a canvas it was in 1387, and how frankly Chaucer utilized all its possibilities! The opportunity of bringing in any tale which lay nearest to his heart—for what tale in the world was there that might not come naturally from one or other of this party?—was only a part of all that this subject offered, as the poet realized from the very first. Even more delightful than any of the tales told by Chaucer’s pilgrims, is the tale which he tells us about them all: the story of their journey to Canterbury. Nowhere within so brief a compass can we realize either the life of the 14th century on one hand, or on the other that dramatic power in which Chaucer stands second only to Shakespeare among English poets. Forget for a while the separate tales of the pilgrims—many of which were patched up by fits and starts during such broken leisure as this man of the world could afford for indulging his poetical fancies; while many others (like the Monk’s and the Parson’s) are tedious to modern readers in strict proportion to their dramatic propriety at the moment—forget for once all but the Prologue and the end-links, and read these through at one sitting, from the first stirrup-cup at Southwark Tabard to that final crest of Harbledown where the weary travellers look down at last upon the sacred city of their pilgrimage. There is no such story as this in all medieval literature; no such wonderful gallery of finished portraits, nor any drama so true both to common life and to perfect art. The dramatis personæ of the “Decameron” are mere puppets in comparison; their occasional talk seems to us insipid to the last degree of old-world fashion; Boccaccio’s preface and interludes are as much less dramatic than Chaucer’s as their natural background is more picturesque, with its Great Plague in Florence and its glimpses of the Val d’Arno from that sweet hill-garden of cypress and stone-pine and olive. Boccaccio wrote for a society that was in many ways over-refined already; it is fortunate for us that Chaucer’s public was not yet at that point of literary development at which art is too often tempted into artifice. He took the living men day by day, each in his simplest and most striking characteristics; and from all these motley figures, under the artist’s hand, grew a mosaic in which each stands out with all the glow of his own native colour, and with all the added glory of the jewelled hues around him. The sharp contrasts of medieval society gave the poet here a splendid opportunity. In days when the distinctions of rank were so marked and so unforgettable, even to the smallest details of costume, the Knight’s dignity risked nothing by unbending to familiar jest with the Host; and the variety of characters which Chaucer has brought together in this single cavalcade is as probable in nature as it is artistically effective. All moods, from the most exalted piety down to the coarsest buffoonery, were possible and natural on a journey religious indeed in essential conception, but which had by this time become so common and worldly a function that few pilgrims dreamed of putting off the old Adam until the white walls of Canterbury came in sight. The plot has in it all the charm of spring, of open-air travel, and of passing good-fellowship without afterthought; the rich fields of Kent, the trees budding into their first green, mine ease in mine inn at night, and over all the journey a far-off halo of sanctity.

On the evening of Tuesday, April 16, 1387, twenty-nine pilgrims found themselves together in the Tabard at Southwark.[157] This hostelry lay almost within a stone’s throw of Chaucer’s birthplace, and within sight of many most notable London landmarks. Behind lay the priory of St. Mary Overy, where Gower was now lodging among the friendly and not too ascetic monks, and where he still lies carved in stone, with his three great books for a pillow to his head. A few yards further in the background stood London Bridge, the eighth marvel of the world, with its twenty arches, its two chapels, its double row of houses, and its great tower bristling with rebel skulls. Wat Tyler’s head was among the newest there on that spring evening; and in five years the head of Chaucer’s Earl of Worcester was to attain the same bad eminence. Beyond the bridge rose the walls and guard-towers of the city, the open quays and nodding wooden houses, and a hundred and fifty church steeples, seldom indeed of any great architectural pretensions individually, but most picturesque in their variety, and dominated by the loftiest of all existing European structures—the wooden spire of old St. Paul’s.[158]

Short was his gown, with sleevës long and wide.
Well could he sit on horse, and fairë ride

THE SQUIRE OF THE “CANTERBURY TALES”
(From the Ellesmere MS. (15th century))

Nor were the pilgrims themselves less picturesque than the background of their journey. At the head of the first group the Knight, so fresh from the holy wars that the grease of his armour still stains his leather doublet, and that we guess his rank only from the excellence of his steed and his own high breeding—