Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

MERRY ENGLAND

“In the holidays all the summer the youths are exercised in leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone, and practising their shields; the maidens trip in their timbrels, and dance as long as they can well see. In winter, every holiday before dinner, the boars prepared for brawn are set to fight, or else bulls and bears are baited. When the great fen, or moor, which watereth the walls of the city on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels; and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the time of war.”—Fitzstephen’s “Description of London,” translated by John Stow.

Where in the meantime was Merry England? In the sense in which the phrase is often used, as a mere political or social catchword, it lay for Chaucer, as for us, in the haze of an imaginary past. Englishmen were even then more fortunate in their lot than many continental nations; but they had already serious responsibilities to bear. The glory of that age lies less in thoughtless merrymaking than in a brave and steady struggle—with the elements, with circumstances, and with fellow-man. Even in Chaucer’s time Englishmen took their pleasures sadly in comparison with Frenchmen and Italians. We cannot say that our forefathers enjoyed life less than we do, but we can certainly say that theirs was a life which we could enjoy only after a process of acclimatization; and they lacked almost altogether one of the most valued privileges of modern civilization—the undisturbed conduct of our own little house and our own small affairs, the established peace and order under cover of which even an artisan may now pursue his own hobbies with a sense of personal independence and a tranquil certitude of the morrow for which Roger Bacon would cheerfully have sacrificed a hand or an eye. Such tranquillity might conceivably be bought at the price of nobler virtues, but it is in itself one of the most justly prized conquests of civilization, and we may seek it vainly in our past.

However, as life was undoubtedly more picturesque in the 14th century, so the enjoyment also was more on the surface. Fitzstephen’s brief catalogue of the Londoners’ relaxations is charming; and, even when we have made all allowance for the poetical colours lavished by an antiquary who saw everything through a haze of distant memory and regret, Stow’s descriptions of city merrymakings are among the most delightful pages of history. Hours of labour were long,[257] and for village folk there was no great choice of amusements; yet there is a whole world of delight to be found in the most elementary field sports. Moreover, the most expansive enjoyment is often natural to those who have otherwise least freedom; witness the bank-holiday excitement of our own days and the negro passion for song and dance. The holy-days on which the Church forbade work amounted to something like one a week; and though there are frequent complaints that these were ill kept, equally widespread and emphatic is the testimony to noisy merriment on them; they bred more drunkenness and crime, we are assured by anxious Churchmen, than all the rest of the year.[258] Indeed, it is from judicial records that we may glean by far the fullest details about the games of our ancestors; and a brilliant archivist like Siméon Luce, when he undertakes to give a picture of popular games in the France of Chaucer’s day, draws almost exclusively on Royal proclamations and court rolls.[259]

From the Universities, sacred haunts of modern athleticism, down to the smallest country parish, we get the same picture of sports flourishing under considerable discouragement from the powers in being, but flourishing all the same, and taking a still more boisterous tinge from the injudicious attempts to suppress them altogether. “Alike in the Universities and out of them,” writes Dr. Rashdall on the subject of games, “the asceticism of the medieval ideal provoked and fostered the wildest indulgence in actual life.” Even chess was among the “noxious, inordinate, and unhonest games” expressly forbidden to the scholars of New College by William of Wykeham’s Statutes,[260] and indeed throughout the Middle Ages this was a pastime which led to more gambling and quarrels than most others. A very curious quarrel at cudgel-play outside the walls of Oxford is recorded in the “Munimenta Academica” (Rolls Series, p. 526). At Cambridge it was forbidden under penalty of forty pence to play tennis in the town. At Oxford we find four citizens compelled to abjure the same game solemnly before the vice-chancellor; and readers both of Froissart and of the preface to “Ivanhoe” will remember violent feuds arising from it.[261] In 1446 the Bishop of Exeter, while pleading that he has always kept open the doors of the cathedral cloisters at all reasonable times, adds, “at which times, and in especial in time of divine service, ungodly-ruled people (most customably young people of the said Commonalty) within the said cloister have exercised unlawful games, as the top, queke, penny-prick, and most at tennis, by the which all the walls of the said cloister have been defouled and the glass windows all to-burst.”[262]

As early as 1314, the laws of London forbade playing at football in the fields near the city; and this was among the games which, by Royal proclamation of 1363, were to give place to the all-important sport of archery. Others forbidden at the same time were quoits, throwing the hammer, hand-ball, club-ball, and golf. Indeed, from this ancient and royal game down to leap-frog and “conquerors,” nearly all our present sports were familiar, in more or less developed forms, to our ancestors. In 1332, Edward III. had to proclaim “let no boy or other person, under pain of imprisonment, play in any part of Westminster Palace, during the Parliament now summoned, at bars [i.e. prisoners’ base] or other games, or at snatch-hood”; and John Myrc instructs the parish clergy to forbid to their parishioners in general all “casting of ax-tree and eke of stone ... ball and bars and suchlike play” in the churchyard.[263] Wrestling, again, was among the most popular sports, and one of those which gave most trouble to coroners. The two great wrestling matches in 1222 between the citizens of London and the suburbans ended in a riot which assumed almost the dignity of a rebellion. Fatal wrestling-bouts, like fatal games of chess, are among the stock incidents of medieval romance; whether the enemy was to be got rid of through the hands of a professional champion (as in the quasi-Chaucerian “Tale of Gamelyn”) or by such foul play as is described in the Pardoner’s Tale—

Arise, as though thou wouldest with him play, And I shall rive him through the sidës way, While that thou strugglest with him as in game; And with thy dagger look thou do the same.

Moreover, the same tragedy might only too easily be played unintentionally, as in the ballad of the “Two Brothers”—

They warsled up, they warsled down Till John fell to the ground; A dirk fell out of Willie’s pouch, And gave him a deadly wound.

Or, as it is recorded in the business-like prose of an assize-roll: “Richard of Horsley was playing and wrestling with John the Miller of Tutlington; and by mishap his knife fell from its sheath and wounded the aforesaid John without the aforesaid Richard’s knowledge, so that he died. And the aforesaid Richard fled and is not suspected of the death; let him therefore return if he will, but let his chattels be confiscated for his flight. (N.B. He has no chattels).”[264] In this same assize-roll, out of forty-three accidental deaths, three were due to village games, and three more to sticks or stones aimed respectively at a cock, a dog, and a pig, but finding their fatal billet in a human life. Ecclesiastical disciplinarians endeavoured frequently, but with indifferent success, to put down the practice of wrestling in churchyards, with the scarcely less turbulent miracle-plays or dances, and the markets which so frequently stained the holy ground with blood. Even the State interfered in the matter of churchyard fairs and markets “for the honour of Holy Church”; but they went on gaily as before. Dances, as I have already had occasion to note, were condemned with a violence which is only partially explained even by Chaucer’s illuminating lines about the Parish Clerk—