Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

“Although the style [of Chaucer] for the antiquity may distaste you, yet as under a bitter and rough rind there lieth a delicate kernel of conceit and sweet invention.”—Henry Peacham, “The Compleat Gentleman,” 1622

Into this state of things suddenly came the “Black Death” of 1348-9, the most terrible plague that ever raged in Christendom. This was at once hailed by moralists as God’s long-delayed punishment upon a society rotten to the core. At first the world was startled into seriousness. Many of the clergy fought the plague with that self-sacrificing devotion which, in all denominations, a large fraction of the Christian clergy has always shown at similar moments. But there is no evidence to show that the priests died in sensibly larger proportions than their flocks; and many contemporary chroniclers expressly record that the sick were commonly deserted even by their spiritual pastors. After the first shock was over, the multitude relapsed into a licence proportionate to their first terror—a reaction described most vividly by Boccaccio, but with equal emphasis by other chroniclers. Many good men, in their bitter disappointment, complained that the world was grown more careless and irreligious than before the Plague; but this can hardly be the verdict of most modern students who look carefully into the mass of surviving evidence.

To begin with, the Black Death dealt a fatal blow to that old vicious system of boy-rectors. Half the population perished in the plague, half the livings went suddenly begging; and in the Church, as on the farm, labour was at a sudden premium. Such curates as survived dropped naturally into the vacant rectories; and, side by side with Acts of Parliament designed to keep the labourer down to his old wages, we find archi-episcopal decrees against the “unbridled cupidity” of the clergy, who by their pernicious example encouraged this demand of the lower classes for higher wages. The incumbent, who ought to be only too thankful that God has spared his life, takes advantage of the present stress to desert his parish and run after Mass-money.[287] Chaplains, again, are “not content with their competent and accustomed salaries,” which, as a matter of fact, were sometimes no higher than the wages of a common archer or a farm bailiff. But the economic movement was irresistible; and the Registers from this time forward show an extraordinary increase in the number of priests instituted to livings. In the same lists where the priests were formerly only thirty-seven per cent. of the whole, their proportion rises during and after the Pestilence to seventy-four per cent. The Black Death did in one year what the Ecumenical Council of Lyons had conspicuously failed to do, though summoned by a great reforming Pope and inspired by such zealous disciplinarians as St. Bonaventura and his fellow-Franciscan, Eudes Rigaud of Rouen.

Again, the shock of the Pestilence, the complete desertion of so many poor country benefices by the clergy, and the scandal generated by this quarrel over wages between chaplains and their employers, naturally threw the people back very much upon their own religious resources. The lay control over parish finances in 15th-century England, which, limited as it was, still excites the wonder of modern Catholicism, probably dated from this period. Men no longer gave much to monks, or even (in comparison with past times) to friars; but they now devoted their main religious energies to beautifying and endowing their own parish churches, which became far larger and more richly furnished in the 15th century than in the 13th. Moreover, Abbot Gasquet is probably right in attributing to the Black Death the rise of a new tone in orthodox religious feeling, which “was characterized by a [more] devotional and more self-reflective cast than previously.” There was every probability of such a religious change; all earnest men had seen in the plague the chastening hand of God; and in the end it yielded the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which were exercised thereby.

But this bracing process could not possibly, under the circumstances of the time, work entirely on the lines of orthodox conservatism. When we count up the forces that produced Wycliffism—the notorious corruption of the papal court, its unpopular French leanings, the vast sums drawn from England by foreign ecclesiastics, the unpopularity of the clergy at home, the growth of the English language and national spirit—among all these causes we must not forget to note that Wycliffe and his contemporaries, in their early manhood, had struggled through a year of horrors almost beyond modern conception. They had seen the multitude run wild, first with religious fanaticism and then with blasphemous despair; had watched all this volcanic matter cool rapidly down into dead lava; and were left to count one more abortive reform, and re-echo the old despairing “How long, O Lord!” “Sad to say, it seemeth to many that we are fallen into those unhappy times wherein the lights of heaven seem to be turned to darkness, and the stars of heaven are fallen upon the earth.... Our priests are now become blind, dark, and beclouded ... they are now darker than the laity.... Lo, in these days there is neither shaven crown on their head, nor religious decency in their garments, nor modesty in their words, nor temperance in their food, nor shamefastness in their gestures, nor even chastity in their deeds.”[288] Such is the cry of an orthodox contemporary of Wycliffe’s; and words like these explain why Wycliffe himself became unorthodox against his will. If he had died at the age of fifty or thereabouts, towards the beginning of Chaucer’s business career, posterity would have known him only as the most distinguished English philosopher of his time. The part which he played in later life was to a great extent forced upon him by the strong practical sense which underlay his speculative genius. Others saw the faults of religion as clearly, and exposed them as unmercifully, as he. But, while they were content to end with a pious “Well, God mend all!” Wycliffe was one of those in whom such thoughts lead to action: “Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him to mend it!” No doubt there were errors in his teaching, and much more that was premature; otherwise the authorities could never have managed so nearly to exterminate Lollardy. On the other hand, it is equally certain that Wycliffe gave a voice to feelings widespread and deeply rooted in the country. Orthodox chroniclers record their amazement at the rapid spread of his doctrines. “In those days,” says Knighton, with picturesque exaggeration, “that sect was held in the greatest honour, and multiplied so that you could scarce meet two men by the way whereof one was not a disciple of Wycliffe.” Walsingham speaks of the London citizens in general as “unbelieving towards God and the traditions of their fathers, supporters of the Lollards.”[289] In 1395 the Wycliffite opinions were openly pleaded before Parliament by two privy councillors, a powerful Northamptonshire landlord, and the brother of the Earl of Salisbury; the bishops had to recall Richard II. in hot haste from Ireland to deal with this open propaganda of heresy. Ten years after Chaucer’s death, again, a Bill was presented by the Commons for the wholesale disendowment of bishoprics and greater monasteries, “because of priests and clerks that now have full nigh destroyed all the houses of alms within the realm.” The petitioners pleaded that, apart from the enormous gain to the finances of the State, and to a proposed new system of almshouses, it would be a positive advantage to disendow idle and luxurious prelates and monks, “the which life and evil example of them hath been so long vicious that all the common people, both lords and simple commons, be now so vicious and infected through boldship of their sin, that scarce any man dreadeth God nor the Devil.” The King and the Prince of Wales, however, would not listen either to this proposal or to those upon which the petitioners afterwards fell back, that criminous clerks should be dealt with by the King’s courts, and that the recent Act for burning Lollards should be repealed.[290]

The Lollard movement in the Parliament of 1395 was led by Chaucer’s old fellow-ambassador, Sir Richard Stury, the “valiant ancient knight” of Froissart’s chronicles; and Chaucer himself has often been hailed, however falsely, as a Wycliffite. The mere fact that he speaks disparagingly of the clergy simply places him side by side with St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura, and St. Catherine of Siena, whose language on this subject is sometimes far stronger than his. As a fellow-protégé of John of Gaunt, Chaucer must often have met Wycliffe in that princely household; he sympathized, as so many educated Englishmen did, with many of the reformer’s opinions; but all the evidence is against his having belonged in any sense to the Lollard sect. The testimony of the poet’s own writings has been excellently summed up in Chap. VI. of Professor Lounsbury’s “Studies in Chaucer.” In early life our hero seems to have accepted as a matter of course the popular religion of his time. His hymn to the Virgin even outbids the fervour of its French original; and in the tales of miracles which he versified he has taken no pains to soften down touches which would now be received with scepticism alike by Protestants and by the papal commissioners for the revision of the Breviary. (Tales of the “Second Nun,” “Man of Law,” and “Prioress.”) Even then he was probably among the many who disbelieved in tales of Jewish ritual murder, though not sufficiently to deter the artist in him from welcoming the exquisite pathos of the little scholar’s death. But his mind was naturally critical; and it was further widened by an acquaintance with many cities and many men. The merchants and scholars of Italy were notorious for their free-thinking; and we may see in the unpriestly priest Froissart the sceptical habit of mind which was engendered in a 14th-century “intellectual” by a life spent in courts and among men of the world. It is quite natural, therefore, to find Chaucer scoffing openly at several small superstitions, which in many less sceptical minds lived on for centuries—the belief in Arthur and Lancelot, in fairies, in magic, in Virgilian miracles, in pagan oracles and gods, in alchemy, and even in judicial astrology. These last two points, indeed, supply a very close analogy to his religious views. It is difficult to avoid concluding, from his very intimate acquaintance with the details of the pursuit, that he had himself once been bitten with the craze for the philosopher’s stone. Again, if we only looked at his frequent poetical allusions to judicial astrology, we should be driven to conclude that he was a firm believer in the superstition; but in the prose “Astrolabe,” one of his latest and most serious writings, he expressly repudiates any such belief.

The analogy from this to his expressions on religious subjects is very close. At first sight we might judge him to have accepted to the last, though with growing reserve and waning enthusiasm, the whole contemporary system of doctrines and practices which Wycliffe in later life so unreservedly condemned. But one or two passages offer startling proof to the contrary. Take the Prologue to the “Legend of Good Women”—

A thousand timës have I heard men tell
That there is joy in heaven and pain in hell,
And I accordë well that it is so.
But natheless yet wot I well also
That there is none dwelling in this countree
That either hath in heaven or hell y-be,
He may of it none other wayës witen	[know
But as he hath heard said or found it written,
For by assay there may no man it prove.