BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

“Jeunes amours, si vite épanouies,
Vous êtes l’aube et le matin du cœur.
Charmez l’enfant, extases inouïes
Et, quand le soir vient avec la douleur,
Charmez encor nos âmes éblouies,
Jeunes amours, si vite évanouies!”
Victor Hugo

The name Chaucer was in some cases a corruption of chauffecire, i.e. “chafewax,” or clerk in the Chancery, whose duty it was to help in the elaborate operation of sealing royal documents.[13] But Mr. V. B. Redstone seems to have shown conclusively that the poet’s ancestors were chaussiers, or makers of long hose, and that they combined this business with other more or less extensive mercantile operations, especially as vintners. The family, like others in the wine trade, may well have come originally from Gascony; but in the 13th and 14th centuries it seems to have thriven mainly in London and East Anglia, and recent research has definitely traced the poet’s immediate ancestry to Ipswich.[14] His grandfather, Robert Malyn, surnamed le Chaucer, came from the Suffolk village of Dennington, and set up a tavern in Ipswich. Robert left a child named John, who was forcibly abducted one night in 1324 by Geoffrey Stace, apparently his uncle. When Stace “stole and took away by force and arms—viz. swords, bows, and arrows—the said John,” his object was to settle possible difficulties of succession to a certain estate by forcing the boy to marry Joan de Westhale; and he pleaded in his justification the custom of Ipswich, by which “an heir became of full age at the end of his twelfth year, if he knew how to reckon and measure”;[15] but he was very heavily fined for his breach of the peace. We learn from the pleadings in this case that John Chaucer was still unmarried in 1328; that he lived in London with his stepfather, namesake, and fellow-vintner, Richard Chaucer, and that his patrimony was very small. Richard, dying twenty-one years later, left his house and his tavern to the Church; but he had very likely given his stepson substantial help during his lifetime. In any case, John must have thriven rapidly, for we find him, in 1338, at the age of twenty-six or thereabouts, among the distinguished company which followed Edward III. on his journey up the Rhine to negociate an alliance with the Emperor Louis IV. The Royal Wardrobe Books give many interesting details of this journey.[16] Queen Philippa accompanied the King half-way across Brabant, and then returned to Antwerp, where she gave birth to Lionel of Clarence, the poet’s first master. Among the party were also several of the household of the Earl of Derby, father-in-law to that John of Gaunt with whom Geoffrey Chaucer’s fortunes were to be closely bound. The travellers had started from Antwerp on Sunday, August 16; and on the following Sunday a long day’s journey brought them within sight of the colossal choir which, until sixty years ago, was almost all that existed of Cologne Cathedral. Here the King gave liberally to the building fund; and here John Chaucer probably stayed behind, since he and his fellow-citizens had come to promote closer commercial relations between the Rhine cities and London. The King was towed up the Rhine by sixty-two boatmen, sat in the Diet at Coblenz as Vicar Imperial, formed a seven years’ alliance with the Emperor, and sent on his five-year-old daughter Joan to Munich, where she waited many months vainly, but probably without impatience, for the young Duke of Austria, who was at present bespoken for her, but who finally turned elsewhere. Meanwhile Edward came back to Bonn, where he had to pay the equivalent of about £330 modern money for damage done in a quarrel between the citizens and those of his suite whom he had left behind—John Chaucer probably included. The Queen met the party again in Brabant, and they returned to Antwerp after a journey of exactly four weeks. We meet with several further allusions to John Chaucer among the London city records. It was very likely he who, in July, 1349, brought a valuable present from the Bishop of Salisbury to Queen Philippa at Devizes, at the time when the ravages of the Black Death in London supply a very probable reason for his absence from town, so that he might well have had his wife and son with him on this occasion. Certainly it was he who, with fourteen other principal vintners of the city, assented in 1342 to an ordinance providing that “no taverner should mix putrid and corrupt wine with wine that is good and pure, or should forbid that, when any company is drinking wine in his tavern, one of them, for himself and the rest of the company, shall enter the cellar where the tuns or pipes are then lying, and see that the measures or vessels into which the wine is poured are quite empty and clean within; and in like manner, from what tun or what pipe the wine is so drawn.” This salutary ordinance was set at nought afterwards, as it had been before; but this and other records bear witness to John Chaucer’s standing in his profession.

[Larger Image]

LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE’S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS’S MAP)

THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE RIGHT-HAND COW.
THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father’s London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as “a certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the King’s highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook northwards.”[17] The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields, divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands. Similar streams, or “fleets,” creeping between overhanging houses, are still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and there even in England.[18] Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving it still “a fair brook of sweet water” in its upper course; and he takes pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, “a Roman captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled.” In Chaucer’s time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret’s, Lothbury, and ran under the kitchen of Grocer’s Hall, and again under St. Mildred’s church; “from thence through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street.” In this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically “stopped up by divers filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city.” The “King’s highway of Thames Street,” though one of the chief arteries of the city, cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted the “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne,” many of whom were mayors of the city; and Stow’s survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First, the headquarters of the wine trade, “a large house built of stone and timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry. There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the town.” Here also “Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363, did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III., King of England, John, King of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England), Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect.” Picard, as Mr. Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer’s fellow-vintners on Edward III.’s Rhine journey in 1338.[19] Then there were the Vintner’s Hall and almshouses, which were built in Chaucer’s lifetime; the three Guild Halls of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that London was up in arms against him, “and unless he took great heed, that day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made his complaint.”