Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

And though that he were worthy, he was wise, And of his port as meek as is a maid. He never yet no villainy ne said In all his life, unto no manner wight. He was a very perfect gentle knight.

Then his son, the Squire, a model of youthful beauty and strength, who had already struck many a good blow in France for his lady’s grace, but who shows here his gentler side, with yellow curls falling upon the shortest of fashionable jackets and the longest of sleeves—

Embroidered was he, as it were a mead All full of freshë flowrës, white and red. Singing he was, or fluting, all the day; He was as fresh as is the month of May.

And lastly their single attendant, the nut-headed yeoman forester, with his suit of Lincoln green, his peacock arrows, and his mighty bow.

After chivalry comes the Church; and first the fine black cloth and snowy linen of Madam Eglantine and her fellow nun, clean and dainty and demure, like a pair of aristocratic pussy-cats on a drawing-room hearthrug. Their male escort, the Nuns’ Priest, commands no great reverence from mine Host, who, however, will presently doff his cap before the Prioress, and address her with a studied deference even beyond the courtesy which he renders to the Knight. Her dignified reserve, her natural anxiety to set off a fine person with more elaboration of costume than the strict Rule permitted, her French of Stratford attë Bowe, her tenderness to lapdogs and even to marauding mice, her faultless refinement of behaviour under the ticklish conditions of a 14th-century dinner-table—all these pardonable luxuries of a fastidious nature are described with Chaucer’s most delicate irony, and stand in artistic contrast to the grosser indiscipline of the Monk. This “manly man, to be an abbot able,” contemptuously repudiated the traditional restraints of the cloister, and even the comparatively mild discipline of those smaller and therefore less rigorous “cells” which the fiery zeal of St. Bernard stigmatized as “Synagogues of Satan.”[159] He scoffed at the Benedictine prohibition of field sports and of extravagant dress, and at the old-fashioned theory of subduing the flesh by hard brainwork or field labour; yet at bottom he seems to have been a good fellow enough, with a certain real dignity of character; and the discipline which he so unceremoniously rejected had by this time (as we may see from the official records of his Order) grown very generally obsolete. But still more strange to the earlier ideals of his Order was the next cleric on Chaucer’s list, the Friar. Father Hubert is one of those jovial sinners for whom old Adam has always a lurking sympathy even when the new Adam feels most bound to condemn them. Essentially irreligious even in his most effective religious discourse; greedy, unabashed, as ubiquitous and intrusive as a bluebottle fly, he is yet always supple and ingratiating; a favourite boon-companion of the country squires, but still more popular with many women; equally free and easy with barmaids at a tavern or with wife and daughter in a citizen’s hall. The Summoner and the Pardoner, parasites that crawled on the skirts of the Church and plied under her broad mantle their dubious trade in sacred things, had not even the Friar’s redeeming features; yet we see at a glance their common humanity, and even recognize in our modern world many of the follies on which they were tempted to trade. Two figures alone among this company go far to redeem the Church—the Scholar and the Poor Parson. The former’s disinterested devotion to scholarship has passed into a proverb: “gladly would he learn, and gladly teach”—an ideal which then, as always, went too often hand in hand with leanness and poverty. The Parson, contentedly poor himself and full of compassion for his still poorer neighbours, equally ready at time of need to help the struggling sinner or to “snib” the impenitent rich man, has often tempted earlier commentators to read their own religious prepossessions into Chaucer’s verse. One party has assumed that so good a priest must have been a Lollard, or Wycliffe himself; while others have contended (with even less show of evidence, as we shall presently see) that he represents the typical orthodox rector or vicar of Chaucer’s time. The one thing of which we may be certain is that Chaucer knew and reverenced goodness when he saw it, and that he would willingly have subscribed to Thackeray’s humble words, “For myself, I am a heathen and a publican, but I can’t help thinking that those men are in the right.” In the Tales themselves, as on the pilgrimage, a multitude of sins are covered by this ploughman’s brother, of whom it is written that—

Christës lore, and His apostles’ twelve, He taught, and first he followed it him-selve.

A PARTY OF PILGRIMS
(FROM MS. ROY. 18. D. ii. f. 148)

To summarize even briefly the appearance and character of the remaining eighteen pilgrims would be too long a task; but it must be noticed how infallible an eye Chaucer had for just the touch which makes a portrait live. The Country Squire, looking like a daisy with his fiery face and white beard; the Sailor, embarrassed with his horse; the Wife of Bath, “somedeal deaf,” and therefore as loud in her voice as in her dress; the Summoner’s scurvy eczema under his thick black eyebrows; the Pardoner’s smooth yellow hair and eyes starting out of his head; the thick-set Miller, with a red-bristled wart on the end of his nose, and a bullet head with which he could burst in a door at one charge; and his rival the slender, choleric Reeve—

Full longë were his leggës and full lean, Y-like a staff; there was no calf y-seen!