Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

CHAPTER XX

THE POOR

“Misuse not thy bondman, the better mayst thou speed; Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven That he win a worthier seat, and with more bliss; For in charnel at the church churls be evil to know, Or a knight from a knave there; know this in thine heart.” “Piers Plowman,” B., vi., 46

It has sometimes been contended in recent years that the Middle Ages lacked only our smug middle-class comfort; and that, as the upper classes were nobler, so the poor were healthier and happier then. It is probable that the latter part of this theory is at least as mistaken as the first: but the question is in itself more complicated, and we have naturally less detailed evidence in the poor man’s case than in the rich man’s. Among the great, we find many virtues and many vices common to both ages; but a careful comparison reveals certain grave faults which put the earlier state of society, as we might expect, at a definite and serious disadvantage. No gentleman of the present day would dream of striking his wife and daughters, of talking to them like the Knight of La Tour Landry, or like the Merchant in the presence of the Nuns, or of selling marriages and wardships in the open market. All the redeeming virtues in the world, we should feel, could not put the man who saw no harm in these things in the front rank of real gentility. Such plain and decisive methods of differentiation, however, begin to disappear as we descend the social scale; until, at the very bottom, we find little or no difference in coarseness of moral fibre between our own contemporaries and Chaucer’s. For it stands to reason that the development of the poor cannot be so rapid as that of the upper classes. In all human affairs, to him that hath shall be given; the superior energy and abilities of one family will differentiate it more and more, as life becomes more complicated, from other families which still vegetate among the mass; and in proportion as the wealth of the world increases, the gap must necessarily widen between the man who has most and the man who has least; since there have always been a certain number who possess, and are capable of possessing or keeping, virtually nothing. In that sense, the terrible contrast between wealth and poverty is undoubtedly worse in our days; but this fact in itself is as insignificant as it is unavoidable. The tramp on the highroad is not appreciably unhappier for knowing that his nothingness is contrasted nowadays with Mr. Carnegie’s millions instead of de la Pole’s thousands; and again, until we can find some means of distributing the accumulations of the rich among the poor without doing far more harm than good, the community loses no more by allowing a selfish man to lock up his millions, than formerly when they were only hundreds or thousands. The securities afforded by modern society for possession and accumulation of wealth do indeed often permit the capitalist to sweat his workmen deplorably; but these are the same securities which allow the workman to sleep in certain possession of his own little savings. While the capitalist is accumulating money, the foresight and self-restraint of the workmen enables them to accumulate votes, which in the long run are worth even more. Much may no doubt be done in detail by keeping in eye the simpler methods of our ancestors; but no sound principle can be modelled on an age when nothing prevented capitalists from hoarding but lack of decent security, when strikes were rare only because of penal laws against all combinations of workmen, and when the peasant was partly kept from starving by his recognized market value as the domestic animal of his master. We could easily remedy many desperate social difficulties—for the moment at least—if we might reduce half the population of England again to the status of serfs.

“The social questions of the period cannot be understood, unless we remember that in 1381 more than half the people of England did not possess the privileges which Magna Charta secured to every ‘freeman.’”[240] The English serf was indeed some degrees better off than his French brother, to whose lord the legist Pierre de Fontaines could write in the 13th century “by our custom there is between thee and thy villein no judge but only God.”[241] The English serf could not be evicted, but neither could he leave his holding; he was transferred with the estate from master to master as a portion of the live stock. By custom, as the master had rights to definite services or money dues from him, so he had definite rights as against his master; but though in cases of manslaughter or maiming the serf could appeal to the king’s courts, all other cases must be heard in the manor court, where the lord was judge in his own cause. Let us hear Chaucer himself on this subject, in his Parson’s Tale: “Through this cursed sin of avarice and covetise come these hard lordships, through which men be distrained by tallages, customs, and carriages more than their duty or reason is: and eke take they of their bondmen amercements which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements. Of which amercements, or ransoming of bondmen, some lords’ stewards say that it is rightful, forasmuch as a churl hath no temporal thing that is not his lord’s, as they say. But certes these lordships do wrong that bereave their bondmen [of] things that they never gave them.” In theory, the Reeve was indeed a sort of foreman, elected by the workers to represent their interests before their master; but it will be noticed how Chaucer looks upon him as the lord’s servant; and in “Piers Plowman” he is even more definitely put among the enemies of the people, with beadles, sheriffs, and “sisours,” or jurors.[242] It must be remembered, too, that the general reliance everywhere on custom rather than on written law, the difference of customs on various manors, and the petty vexations constantly entailed even by those which were most certainly recognized, bred constant discontent and disputes. The heavy fine which the serf owed for sending his son to school fell, of course, only in very exceptional cases, and may be set off against the few who were enfranchized in order to enable them to take holy orders. But the merchet, or fine paid for marriage, must have been a bitter burden, while the heriot, or mortuary, is to modern ideas an exaction of unredeemed iniquity. In most manors, though apparently not in all, the lord claimed by this custom the best possession left by his dead tenant; and (so long as he had left not less than three head of live stock) the parish clergyman claimed the second best. The case of a widow and orphans in a struggling household is one in which no charity can ever be misplaced; yet here their natural protectors were precisely those who joined hands to plunder them; and every parish had its two licensed wreckers, who picked their perquisites from the deathbeds of the poor.[243] No doubt here, as elsewhere, the strict law was not always enforced, even though its enforcement was so definitely to the interest of the stronger party; self-interest, apart from a fellow-feeling which seldom dies out altogether, prevents a man from taxing even his horse beyond its powers; but there is definite evidence that merchets and heriots were no mere theoretical grievance. Moreover, these were only the worst of a hundred ways in which law and custom gave the lord a galling, and apparently unreasonable, hold upon the peasants; and they must needs have chafed against such a yoke as this even if their position as domestic animals had been more comfortable than it was. Let us suppose—though this needs better proof than has yet been advanced—that the serf was as well fed and housed as the modern English labourer;[244] suppose that he was far more of a real man than his legal status gave him a right to be; then he must only have smarted all the more, we may safely say, under his beastlike disabilities. “We are men formed in Christ’s likeness, and we are kept like beasts”; such are the words which Froissart puts into the serfs’ mouths. “To the sentiment” (comments a modern writer) “there is all the difference between economic compulsion, apparently the outcome of inevitable conditions, and a legal dependence upon personal caprice. Even comfortable circumstances, which he apparently enjoyed, created in the Malmesbury bondman no satisfaction with his lot. There is a pathetic ring in the words which, in his old age, he is recorded to have used, that ‘if he might bring that [his freedom] aboute, it wold be more joifull to him than any worlie goode.’” Nor was this the cry of a single voice only, but also of the whole peasantry of England at that moment of the Middle Ages when they most definitely formulated their aims. “The rising of 1381 sets it beyond doubt that the peasant had grasped the conception of complete personal liberty, that he held it degrading to perform forced labour, and that he considered freedom to be his right.”[245]

Moreover, the general voice of medieval moralists is here on the peasants’ side. It is true that (in spite of the frequent reminders of our common parentage in Adam and Eve) few men of Chaucer’s day would have agreed with Wycliffe in objecting on principle to hereditary bondage; but still fewer doubted that the landlords, as a class, did in fact use their power unmercifully. “How mad” (writes Cardinal Jacques de Vitry), “how mad are those men who rejoice when sons are born to their lords!” Many knights (he says) force their serfs to labour, and give them not even bread to eat. When the knight does call his men together, as if for war, it is too often only to prey on the peasant. “Many say nowadays, when they are rebuked for having taken a cow from a poor peasant: ‘Let it suffice the boor that I have left him the calf and his own life. I might do him far more harm if I would; I have taken his goose, but left him the feathers.’”

Here, again, is a still more living picture from “Piers Plowman”—

“Then Peace came to Parliament and put up a bill,
How that Wrong against his will his wife had y-taken
And how he ravished Rose, Reginald’s leman,
And Margaret of her maidenhood, maugre her cheeks.
‘Both my geese and my griskins his gadlings fetchen,
I dare not for dread of him fight nor chide.
He borrowed my bay steed, and brought him never again,
Nor no farthing him-for, for nought I can plead.
He maintaineth his men to murder mine own,
Forestalleth my fair, fighteth in my cheapings,	[markets
Breaketh up my barn-door and beareth away my wheat;
And taketh me but a tally for ten quarter oaten;
And yet he beat me thereto, and lieth by my maiden,
I am not so hardy for him up for to look.’
The King knew he said sooth, for Conscience him told.”

That this kind of thing was far less common in England than elsewhere, we have Froissart’s and other evidence; but that it was far too common even in Chaucer’s England there is no room whatever to doubt. As M. Jusserand has truly said, a dozen Parliamentary documents justify the poet’s complaints; and he quotes an extraordinarily interesting case from the actual petition of the victims.[246]