John Ball himself could hardly go further.
Possibly Chaucer’s personal experience of the occasional difficulty of making both ends meet, quickened his sympathy with poor men. It is true that Florent’s wife, in the lines which follow those just quoted, goes on to defend poverty against riches on the ground that it is
A ful greet bringer out of bisinesse,
but though she calls cheerful poverty “an honest thing,” she is forced to own that at best it is “hateful good.” The Man of Law, in the prologue to his tale, speaks of it with undisguised bitterness:—
Herken what is the sentence of the wyse:—
“Bet is to dyen than have indigence;”
“Thy selve neighebour wol thee despyse;”
If thou be poore, farwel thy reverence!
······
If thou be povre, thy brother hateth thee,
And all thy freendes fleen fro thee, alas!
O riche marchaunts, ful of wele ben ye,
O noble, O prudent folk as in this cas!
And Chaucer’s lines to his empty purse show that he had no wish to share the pleasant security of those who are able, as Florent’s wife says, to sing and play in the presence of thieves.
In yet a third respect, Chaucer shows himself able to discriminate between the use and abuse of a thing. He can expose and denounce hypocrisy without losing his reverence for true religion; he can point out evils in social life, without siding wholly with nobles or people; he can laugh at the folly which allows itself to be deluded by charlatanism, without losing his respect for science. Two hundred years had yet to pass before Bacon should raise science, once and for all, above the level where it lay confused with magic and the black art. A generation to whom gunpowder was a novelty, and spectacles an almost miraculous aid to sight, found nothing strange in the sight of learned men seeking for the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s stone. In a world which was but just becoming dimly conscious of the mighty forces which lie at man’s command, limitations were unknown, and the boundary line between the possible and impossible was so uncertain as to be negligible. The populace which believed that every sage could summon legions of devils to his assistance, was not likely to criticise his pretensions too closely, and doubtless many a quack saw, and seized, the opportunity for imposing on the easy credulity of a greedy and wonder-loving people.
Chaucer shows a real interest in such rudimentary science as he was able to pick up in the midst of his other avocations. Clocks of any kind were rare in the fourteenth century, and the practice of telling the time by astronomical observations was a common one. There is nothing peculiar in noting the season or the hour by such statements as that
the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne.
or,