Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

Leland, with that sublime disregard for anything so prosaic as evidence which characterises sixteenth-century biographers, declares that “Geoffrey Chaucer, a youth of noble birth and highest promise, studied at Oxford University with all the earnestness of those who have applied themselves most diligently to learning.... He left the University an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician”; and to this list of accomplishments he afterwards adds, “and a devout theologian.” Fifty years later, Speght—to whom lovers of Chaucer are deeply indebted in other respects—equally authoritatively asserts that he was at Cambridge, but as he bases this assertion on a remark—

Philogenet I called am far and near
Of Cambridge clerk—

made by one of the characters in the Court of Love, a poem which scholars are now universally of opinion is not Chaucer’s work, it has little weight. As a matter of fact Chaucer’s name does not appear in the records of any college at either university, and, as Professor Lounsbury has conclusively shown, wide as are the poet’s interests, and great as his knowledge undoubtedly is, the scholarship shown by his works is not so remarkable as necessarily to imply close and protracted study. Classical legends were frequently embodied in the romances of an age in which, if we may believe Jean Bodel, himself a poet,

Ne sont que trois matières à nul homme entendant,
De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la grant,[4]

and the habit of treating Alexander the Great as if he were brother-in-arms to Roland and Oliver naturally opened the door to all sorts of embellishments and modifications. A veil of romance covers and colours the history of Greece and Rome. To Chaucer, Cleopatra is akin to the Lady of the Hideous Pass, or Morgan le Fay. The account of her death given in the Legend of Good Women (l. 671, etc.) is purely mediæval:—

(She) made her subtil workmen make a shryne
Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne
In all Egipte that she coude espye;
And putte ful the shryne of spycerye,
And leet the cors embaume;[5] and forth she fette
This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.[6]
And next the shryne a pit than doth she grave;
And alle the serpents that she mighte have
She putte hem in that grave....
······
And with that word, naked, with ful good herte,
Among the serpents in the pit she sterte.[7]

Nor is this devout theologian always accurate in his references to Bible history. His allusions to Old Testament stories are full of mistakes, as, for instance, when he speaks (in Book of Duchesse, l. 738) of Samson slaying himself with a pillar for love of Delila. It was not an age of nice scholarship, or care for detail. Men used stories as they found them, and repeated them as they happened to remember them, and no one was hyper-critical enough to refer to the original. More than half a century after Chaucer’s death Caxton translates the Æneid, not from the Latin of Virgil, but from “a little book in French,” and Gawain Douglas, the most scholarly of all the Scottish poets of the early sixteenth century, regards it as a moral allegory of the soul’s progress, cast in the form of an epic. But while Chaucer’s occasional mistranslations of Latin words and misrenderings of classical legends cannot be said to disprove his residence at one of the universities, they certainly cannot be said to support Leland’s statement, and the probability is that he early became attached to the court. The reign of Edward III witnessed a marked increase in the prosperity of the merchant class. The members of the great trade guilds were men of wealth and importance and there is nothing surprising in finding a vintner’s son one of the household of Elizabeth, wife of the king’s son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In fact the seals of John Chaucer and Agnes his wife show that both bore arms. In 1357 we find, from the royal accounts, that Geoffrey Chaucer was provided with a paltok (cloak) costing four shillings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of shoes, valued at three shillings, and in December of the same year he received a grant of 2s. 6d. “for necessaries against the feast of the Nativity” (Chaucer Soc., Life Records of Chaucer, p. xiv). The Canterbury Tales give abundant proof that their author had a keen eye for the niceties of dress, and at seventeen he had doubtless a proper appreciation of new shoes and red and black breeches.

Two years later (1359) he served in the French wars and was taken prisoner at “Retters,” a place which has been variously identified as Retiers, near Rennes, and Rethel, near Reims. He was liberated in March 1360, Edward III paying £16 (over £200 of our money) towards his ransom, which looks as if he were considered a person of some importance. Apparently he returned to court life in England, and to the duties of valettus camerae regis. A valet of the King’s Chamber had to “make beddis, to beare or hold torches, to sett boardis, to apparell all chambres, and such othir seruices as the Chamberlain, or Vshers of the Chambre, comaunde or assigne, to attend the Chambre, to watch the King by course, to go in messages, etc.” (Life Records, Pt. II, p. xi), and holders of the office must have had ample opportunity of acquiring the wisdom of Placebo:—

I have now been a court-man al my lyf.
And god it woot,[8] though I unworthy be,
I have stonden in ful greet degree
Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat;
Yet hadde I never with noon of hem debaat.
I never hem contraried,[9] trewely;
I woot wel that my lord can[10] more than I.
What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable;
I say the same, or elles thing semblable.[11]
A ful gret fool is any conseillour,
That serveth any lord of heigh honour,
That dar presume, or elles thenken it,
That his conseil sholde passe his lordes wit.
Nay, lordes been no foles,[12] by my fay.
(Marchantes Tale, l. 1492, etc.)

In 1366 a pension was granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of the Queen’s Chamber, and it is usually thought that this indicates Chaucer’s marriage about this time, since in 1381 the money was paid “to Geoffrey Chaucer, her husband.” Philippa seems to have been the sister—the Chaucer Society suggests, the sister-in-law—of Katherine Swynford, who became John of Gaunt’s third wife, and this connection possibly helps to explain the consistent kindness shown to Chaucer by the House of Lancaster. Various attempts have been made to show that the marriage was an unhappy one. Some of these will be noticed later in treating of Chaucer’s women, here it may suffice to say that although it is true that he paints a sufficiently gloomy picture of married life in the Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, that neither the host nor the merchant are happy in their choice, and that the Lenvoy which concludes the Clerkes Tale warns husbands that if they expect to find their wives patient Griseldas they will certainly be disappointed, we have to remember that the shrewish wife was as stock a comic convention of those days as the shrewish mother-in-law of later times, and when it comes to taking away the character of Philippa Chaucer on the ground that her husband complains in the Hous of Fame that he is unaccustomed to be awakened gently, it is impossible not to feel that she is receiving unnecessarily harsh treatment. Equally slight is the evidence for his suffering from an unhappy love affair. In the Parlement of Foules (ll. 89, 90) he speaks of himself as