Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. Sumer is icumen in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair and bright, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway.

One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English, beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33]

To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon idea of repartee seems—if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature—to have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your enemy’s son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness, passion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as Beowulf, the Husband’s Lament, Judith, but it is not until French wit flashes across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of Cokaygne, where

There are rivers great and fine
Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine.
Water serveth there for nothing
Save to look at, and for washing:

or listen to Hendyng’s shrewd comments on human nature:—

Many a man saith, were he rich,
There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34]
To be good and free;
But when he hath ought bygeten[35]
All the freedom is forgeten
And laid under knee.
“He is free of his horse, that never had one,”
Quoth Hendyng.

The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a telling phrase or an apt illustration, but such instances are few and obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the Cursor Mundi or Layamon’s Brut.

By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years’ War did much to foster the spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect—or combination of dialects—as standard English, and this creation of language from dialect, we owe—among other things—in large measure to Chaucer.

London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the circumstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the “cokeneye” dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern reader who turns over the pages of the Ayenbite of Inwit or the Ancren Riwle finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue; it is excusable if he finds even Piers Plowman baffling in places, and has difficulty in construing such passages as:—

He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed,
And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it nouȝte discreue;
In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde;
Of a freres frokke were þe forsleues,[36]