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WILLIAM OF HATFIELD,
SON OF EDWARD III. AND PHILIPPA,
FROM HIS TOMB IN YORK MINSTER (1336)
SHOWING THE DRESS OF A NOBLE YOUTH
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 14TH CENTURY

If death comes at this moment, then “J’aurai passé par la terre, n’ayant rien aimé que l’amour.” But instead of death comes something not less sudden and overmastering. To the Black Knight, as to Dante, the Lady of his Life is revealed between two throbs of the heart—

It happed that I came on a day
Into a placë where I say[saw
Truly the fairest company
Of ladies, that ever man with eye
Had seen together in one place ...
Sooth to sayen, I saw one
That was like none of the rout ...
I saw her dance so comelily,
Carol and sing so sweetëly,
Laugh and play so womanly,
And look so debonairëly,
So goodly speak, and so friendly,
That certes, I trow that nevermore
Was seen so blissful a tresore.

Here at last the goddess of his hopes is revealed in the flesh; no longer the vague Not Impossible She, but henceforward She of the Golden Hair. The revelation commands the gratitude of a lifetime. Having crystallized upon herself his fluid and floating worship, she is henceforth conventionally divine; he demands no more than to be allowed to gaze on her, and in gazing he swoons.

As yet, then, she is his idol, his goddess, on an unapproachable pedestal. She may be pretty patently the work of his own hands—he has gone about dreaming of love until his dreams have taken sufficient consistency to be visible and tangible—but as yet his worship must be as far-off as Pygmalion’s, and he thirsts in vain for a word or a look. Then comes the second clause of Francesca’s creed—Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona: true love must needs beget love in return. The statue warms to life; the goddess steps down from her pedestal; the lover forgets now that he had meant to subsist for life on half a dozen kind looks and kind words; and at this point the matter would end nowadays—or at least would have ended a generation ago—in mere prosaic marriage. But here, in the Middle Ages, it is fifty to one that the fortunes of the pair are not exactly suitable; or he, or she, or both may be married already. Then comes the final clause: Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Seldom indeed could the course of true love run smooth in an age of business-marriages; and the poet found his grandest material in the wreckage of tender passions and high hopes upon that iron-bound shore.

The large majority of medieval romances, as has long ago been noted, celebrate illicit love. Therefore the first commandment of the code is secrecy, absolute secrecy; and in the songs of the Troubadors and Minnesingers, a personage almost as prominent as the two lovers themselves, is the “envious,” the “spier”—the person from whom it is impossible to escape for more than a minute at a time, amid the cheek-by-jowl of castle intercourse—a disappointed rival perhaps, or a mere malicious busybody, but, in any case, a perpetual skeleton at the feast. “Troilus and Criseyde,” for instance, is full of such allusions, and perhaps no poem exemplifies more clearly the common divorce between romantic love and marriage in medieval literature. It is a comparatively small thing that the first three books of the poem should contain no hint of matrimony, though Criseyde is a widow, and of noble blood. It would, after all, have been less of a mésalliance than John of Gaunt’s marriage; but of course it was perfectly natural for Chaucer to take the line of least poetical resistance, and make Troilus enjoy her love in secret, without thought of consecration by the rites of the Church. So far, the poem runs parallel with Goethe’s “Faust.” But when we come to the last two books, the behaviour of the pair is absolutely inexplicable to any one who has not realized the usual conventions of medieval romance. The Trojan prince Antenor is taken prisoner by the Greeks, who offer to exchange him against Criseyde—a fighting man against a mere woman. Hector does indeed protest in open Parliament—

But on my part ye may eft-soon them tell
We usen here no women for to sell.

But the political utility of the exchange is so obvious that Parliament determines to send the unwilling Criseyde away. What, it may be asked, is Troilus doing all this time? As Priam’s son, he would have had a voice in the council second only to Hector’s, and he “well-nigh died” to hear the proposition. Yet all through this critical discussion he kept silence, “lest men should his affection espy!” The separation, he knows, will kill him; but among all the measures he debates with Criseyde or Pandarus—even among the desperate acts which he threatens to commit—nothing so desperate as plain marriage seems to occur to any of the three. The first thought of Troilus is “how to save her honour,” but only in the technical sense of medieval chivalry, by feigning indifference to her. He sheds floods of tears; he tells Fortune that if only he may keep his lady, he is reckless of all else in the world; but, when for a moment he thinks of begging Criseyde’s freedom from the King his father, it is only to thrust the thought aside at once. The step would be not only useless, but necessarily involve “slander to her name.”[219] And all this was written for readers who knew very well that the parties had only to swear, first that they had plighted troth before witnesses, and secondly, that they had lived together as man and wife, in order to prove an indissoluble marriage contract. Nor can we ascribe this to any failure in Chaucer’s art. In the delineation of feelings, their natural development and their finer shades, he is second to no medieval poet, and these qualities come out especially in the “Troilus.” But, while he boldly changed so much in Boccaccio’s conception of the poem, he saw no reason to change this particular point, for it was thoroughly in accord with those conventions of his time for which he kept some respect even through his frequent irony.

To show clearly how the fault here is not in the poet but in the false point d’honneur of the chivalric love-code, let us compare it with a romance in real life from the “Paston Letters.” Sir John Paston’s steward, Richard Calle, fell in love with his master’s sister Margery. The Pastons, who not only were great gentlefolk in a small way, but were struggling hard also to become great gentlefolk in a big way, took up the natural position that “he should never have my good will for to make my sister sell candle and mustard in Framlingham.” But the pair had already plighted their mutual troth; and, therefore, though not yet absolutely married, they were so far engaged that neither could marry any one else without a Papal dispensation. Calle urged Margery to acknowledge this openly to her family: “I suppose, an ye tell them sadly the truth, they would not damn their souls for us.” She at last confessed, and the matter came up before the Bishop of Norwich for judgment. In spite of all the bullying of the family, and the flagrant partiality of the Bishop, the girl’s mother has to write and tell Sir John how “Your sister ... rehearsed what she had said [when she plighted her troth to Calle], and said, if those words made it not sure, she said boldly that she would make that surer ere that she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound, whatsoever the words weren. These lewd words grieved me and her grandam as much as all the remnant.” The Bishop still delayed judgment on the chance of finding “other things against [Calle] that might cause the letting thereof;” and meanwhile the mother turned Margery out into the street; so that the Bishop himself had to find her a decent lodging while he kept her waiting for his decision. But to annul this plain contract needed grosser methods of injustice than the Pastons had influence to compass, and Calle not only got his wife at last, but was taken back into the family service.[220] Troilus and Criseyde, having political forces arrayed against them, might indeed have failed tragically of their marriage in the end; but there was at least no reason why they should not fight for it as stoutly as the prosaic Norfolk bailiff did—if only the idea had ever entered into one or other of their heads!