Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

The olyve of pees, and eek the drunken vyne

or—

The victor palm.
(Parlement of Foules, l. 176, etc.
The whole passage is taken from Boccaccio’s Teseide.)

The commissionership of roads can have been no sinecure. In 1499—after nearly a century more of development and civilisation—“a glover from Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig clay called ‘Ramming clay’ for him on the highway, and was in no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had no malicious intent and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the highroad” (Mrs. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Vol. II, pp. 31-2). The modern traveller in the United States is sometimes surprised at dusk by finding the highway temporarily blocked by a house which is being moved from one side to the other and has been dumped down at the end of the day’s work, but this is nothing to finding that the road itself has been removed bodily. It is true that the corporation of Nottingham issued an order in 1507 forbidding people to dig holes in the market-place without leave, but this was long after Chaucer’s day, and if such ordinances were necessary to protect the actual market-place of a busy commercial city, it is not difficult to imagine the condition of country roads. The keeping of bridges in repair was looked upon, not as a matter of ordinary business, but as an act of piety, so that on the Continent special “Bridge Friars” existed, part of whose religious duties consisted in such work. In 1311-16 Richard of Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, offered forty days’ indulgence to all those “who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily labour” in repairing various roads and bridges (Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, p. 4). And in 1353 a patent of Edward III had ordered the paving of the highroad from Temple Bar to Westminster, since “it is so full of holes and bogs ... and the pavement is so damaged and broken” that traffic has become dangerous to man and beast. No wonder that robbers abounded, and that pilgrims found safety in numbers.

In 1390 highwaymen seem to have been particularly active, and the commissioner of roads himself was robbed more than once. Richard Brerelay was indicted for having “with others unknown” robbed Geoffrey Chaucer at Westminster of the sum of £10, on the Tuesday after the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (i. e. September 6); and in the same year “near the Fowle Ok” at Hatcham, in Surrey, Chaucer was robbed of a horse worth £10, goods worth 100 shillings, and £20 6s. 8d. in cash. Some, at least, of this seems to have been public money, for he was granted a royal pardon for the loss of £20 of the King’s money taken from him “by some notable robbers.”

In 1391 he lost his post as Clerk of the Works, but this does not seem to imply any serious loss of the royal favour, for three years later the king granted him a pension of £20 (about £300 of our money) a year for life. During the interval he seems to have got into money difficulties, for no sooner was this grant made than his creditors promptly sued him for debt.

In 1398 he received an additional grant of wine—a tun a year for life—and was also promoted to be sole, instead of sub-, forester of North Pemberton. In 1399 the son of his earliest and most powerful patron came to the throne, and Chaucer, who was still struggling with his creditors, addressed an impassioned appeal to him. Already, in 1398, the poet had been threatened with legal proceedings, and although the king had entrusted him with various commissions in the country, he had not dared to leave his house for fear of arrest (Ten Brink, History of English Literature, Vol. II, p. 198). No wonder he sang:—

To you, my purse, and to non other wight
Compleyne I, for ye be my lady dere!
I am so sory, now that ye be light;
For certes, but ye make me hevy chere.
(The Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse.
Professor Ten Brink believes this poem to have been
addressed to King Richard, but Professor Skeat has
no doubt that it was addressed to Henry.)

It is consoling to learn that Henry IV added forty marks a year to the pension granted by King Richard, thus bringing Chaucer’s income up to £600 or £700 of our money. This new outburst of good fortune promised well for the future, and Chaucer evidently looked forward to a prosperous and comfortable old age, for, on December 24, 1399, he took the lease of a house in the garden of St. Mary’s, Westminster, for fifty-four years. He was not, however, to make long use of his new possession, for on October 25, 1400, he died, and his grave was the first to mark the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. One of his later ballades, Truth may well serve as epitaph for the poet whom court life could never corrupt into a courtier, and whose clear sight and sharp wit never led him into bitterness or cynicism:—

That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,[25]
The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
Her nis non hoom,[26] her nis but wildernesse:
Forth pilgrim, forth! Forth beste out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the hye way, and lat thygost thee lede:[27].
And trouthe shal delivre, hit is no drede.[28]