Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL
(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)

Of Chaucer’s childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the serious risk of other people’s windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday, and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of football, or at “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the stone.” In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he would be sure to flock out with the rest to “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.”[20] In spring he would watch the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this. Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet’s Tower flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and between them, close by Chaucer’s own home, the “Tower Royal,” in which the Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler’s revolt. But the Thames itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, “where the merchants of Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels,” and finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the cooks’ shops; “for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that upon the river’s side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks’ row.” Here, then, Chaucer would loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native craft from “far by west,” but broad-sailed vessels from every country of Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone’s throw from his father’s house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21] Chief among the Easterlings at this time were the Cologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic, half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of “a Dutch bun and a keg of sturgeon,” or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would pick up easily enough among this colony of “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne”; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul’s lay nearest to Chaucer’s home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great merchant city. “When they put me to school,” writes Froissart, “there were little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring; and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace ... and then would I say to myself, ‘When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be able to love in earnest?’... When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod.... I could not be at rest; I was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go and tumble with them again.”[22] Is not childhood essentially the same in all countries and in all ages?

The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems by Chaucer’s contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer’s continental journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet. Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess’s movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her train had an equally varied experience. “We may catch glimpses of Chaucer in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost, at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of Queen Isabella at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358), at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower.”[23]

Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun even before his birth,[24] was the tallest and handsomest of all the King’s sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says—

“In all the world was then no prince hym like, Of his stature and of all semelynesse Above all men within his hole kyngrike By the shulders he might be seen doutlesse, [And] as a mayde in halle of gentilnesse.”

His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be Chaucer’s and Wycliffe’s best patron. For all John Chaucer’s favour with the King, the vintner’s son could never have found a place in this great society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like his own squire—singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May; already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under those conditions. Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more complacently to the page’s love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit Jean de Saintré and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the best possible commentary on Chaucer’s Court life.

Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that (as in Shakespeare’s case) differences of rank added to his despair. It may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no reason to suppose that Chaucer’s affections were less mercurial than those of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369, that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness—

I hold it to be a sickness That I have suffered this eight year, And yet my boote is never the nere; For there is physician but one That may me heal; but that is done.