Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with your age,
Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee,
And of your herte up-casteth the visage
To thilke god that after his image
Yow made, and thinketh al nis but a fayre
This world, that passeth sone as floures fayre.
And loveth him, the which that right for love
Upon a cros, our soules for to beye
First starf, and roos,[183] and sit in heven a-bove;
For he nil falsen no wight, dar I seye,
That wol his herte al hoolly[184] on him leye.
And sin he best to love is, and most meke,
What nedeth feyned loves for to seke?

In politics, as in religion, Chaucer shows himself keenly alive to the evils and abuses of the day, and yet no partisan. The author of Piers Plowman has left us a picture of the bitter poverty of the peasant class. The complaint of Peace against Wrong (Passus 4), shows how he has carried off his wife and stolen both geese and grys (pigs):—

He maynteneth his men to murthere myne hewen,[185]
Forstalleth my feires,[186] and fighteth in my chepyng,[187]
And breketh up my bernes dore[188] and bereth awey my whete
········
I am noght hardy for hym unethe to loke;[189]

and how completely the poor were at the mercy of the rich. When a peasant died, his lord had a right to his best possession, and if he owned not less than three cows, the parson of the parish took the next best, a condition of things against which we find Sir David Lyndsay protesting, as late as 1560, in his Satyre of the Three Estaats. John Ball, “the mad priest of Kent,” for twenty years combined the preaching of Lollardy with that of a kind of rough socialism, and the rude rhyme which contained the kernel of his teaching—

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?—

went the round of the Midlands and helped to fan the flame of discontent which finally broke into the wide-spread conflagration of the Peasants’ Revolt. It was a time when new ideals were slowly struggling to find expression, and the old order of feudalism was passing away for ever. But while the nobles were divided by factions among themselves, and the poor beat bleeding hands against the prison walls that hemmed them in, the middle class was steadily increasing in wealth and prosperity, and it is with this class that Chaucer chiefly concerns himself. The majority of the Canterbury pilgrims are prosperous, well-to-do tradesmen and artisans:—

Hir knyves were y-chaped[190] noght with bras
But al with silver, wroght ful clene and well,
Hir girdles and hir pouches every-deel.
Wel semed ech of hem a fair burgeys
To sitten in a yeldhall[191] on a deys.[192]
Everich, for the wisdom that he can,
Was shaply[193] for to been an alderman.
For catel hadde they y-nogh and rente,
And eek hir wyves wolde it wel assente;
And elles certain were they to blame.
It is ful fair to been y-clept “ma dame,”
And goon to vigilyes[194] al bifore,
And have a mantel royalliche y-bore.

This is something very different from Langland’s[195] picture of Dawe the dykere dying of hunger, or the poor farmer dining on bean-bread and bran. Even the Plowman seems fairly well off:—

His tythes payed he ful faire and wel,
Bothe of his propre swink[196] and his catel,

and the general impression is one of comfort, which even rises to a certain mild luxury. The pilgrims are well fed and well clothed, they have horses to ride, and can afford to call at the ale-house as they pass. They fill the air with the sound of laughter and song as they ride, and we can well understand the Lollard Thorpe’s complaint (made more than ten years after Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales) that, “What with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterburie bells, and with the barking out of dogges after them ... they (i. e. pilgrims) make more noise than if the king came there away with all his clarions and many other minstrels” (Wycliff’s Works, ed. Arnold, I. 83). Even in the tales themselves little hint is given of the darker side of the picture. We get a glimpse of the relation between lord and vassal, in the Clerkes Tale, but no comment is made on it. Griselda is carrying her water-pot back from the well, when she hears the marquis calling her:—