Chaucer’s little wind—“unethe it might be lesse”—which makes a soft noise in the green leaves, is too fresh ever to blow across the flowers of Acrasia’s garden, but the Bower of Bliss casts a spell over us of which Chaucer has not the secret. He is too frankly of this world to be at home in fairy-land, and the note of sincerity which sounds throughout his verse would accord ill with such intoxicating sweetness. Lady Pride and her followers, Dame Cælia and her fair daughters, Fidelia, Speranza, and Carita, find a natural home in Spenser’s world of wonders. But Chaucer’s allegorical personages must needs either come to life and turn into actual human beings, like the birds in the Parlement of Foules, or remain stiff abstractions, like Plesaunce, and Delyt, and Gentilnesse, and the other symbolic inhabitants of the garden of the Rose.
CHAPTER VII
SOME VIEWS OF CHAUCER’S ON MEN AND THINGS
The late fourteenth century was a time of social and political upheaval. The Church, over-rich and over-powerful for her own good, had become terribly corrupt. The fact that great offices of state were held by bishops meant, of necessity, that more and more of their purely ecclesiastical work was delegated to subordinates. In the ten years between 1376-86, out of twenty-five bishops no fewer than thirteen held secular offices of importance. William of Wykeham was appointed Chancellor of England and Bishop of the great diocese of Winchester in the same month. Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, led the English army in Flanders. No wonder that the power of the archdeacons, the oculi episcopi, increased tenfold. They frequently exercised authority in the bishop’s court, and in those days the powers of ecclesiastical courts were considerable and their jurisdiction was wide. The sketch which prefaces the Freres Tale was probably drawn from the life:—
Whilom ther was dwellinge in my contree
An erchedeken, a man of heigh degree
······
For smale tythes and for smal offringe
He made the peple pitously to singe.
For er the bisshop caughte hem with his hook,
They weren in the erchedekenes book.
Add to this the fact that one in three of the archdeacons holding office in England at this time were foreigners, and it is easy to see how much ill-feeling was likely to be stirred up between them and the laity. Nor were the parish priests much better. The black death, which ravaged Europe from time to time, had swept across England with peculiar fury in 1348. Hundreds of the noblest and best of the clergy, who stayed gallantly by their flocks, had been swept away. There were not enough priests to administer the sacraments of the Church, and between this urgent necessity for ministers to bury the dead, to baptise and marry, and the fact that many of the richer livings had fallen into the hands of foreigners, who cared nothing for the peasants committed to their charge, or of the great Abbeys, which were ready enough to appoint some illiterate boor, just able to stumble through his office, to act as their deputy at a nominal salary, it is small wonder that crying abuses came into existence. “They have parish churches,” writes Wycliff, “apropered to worldly rich bishops and abbots that have many thousand marks more than enow.... And yet they do not the office of curates, neither in teaching or preaching or giving of sacraments nor of receiving poor men in the parish: but setten an idiot for vicar or parish priest that cannot and may not do the office of a good curate, and yet the poor parish findeth him.” Chaucer finds it among the striking virtues of his poor Parson that:—
He sette nat his benefice to hyre,
And leet his sheep encombred in the myre,
And ran to London, un-to seynt Poules
To seken him a chaunterie for soules,[169]
Or with a bretherhed to been withholde;
But dwelte at hoom, and kepte wel his folde....
and that he does not attempt to wring their last penny from his unfortunate parishioners:—