Such are the few prominent facts of Chaucer's public life. Where, during his abode in London, he took up his residence, we have no knowledge. During the troubles of the court, and during his own, he is said to have retreated to his favorite Woodstock. This house he had engaged originally, because the court was then much at Woodstock, and he was obliged to be in constant attendance on the king. It became his favorite abode. It was a square stone house, near the Park gate, and long retained the name of Chaucer's House. Many of the rural descriptions in his works have been traced to this favorite scene of his walks and studies. Every trace of it has been long swept away. The other residence which has acquired fame from connection with Chaucer, is Donnington Castle, in Berkshire. Tyrwhitt doubts whether it ever really belonged to him. If it did, he says, it could not have been till after the 16th of Richard II., for at that time it was in the possession of Sir Richard Abberbury. He observes, that we have no proof of such purchase, and he doubts whether the situation of his affairs admitted of such a purchase. It was five years, however, after this time when these affairs compelled him to seek the king's protection. There are traditions of his having settled all his lands on his son Thomas, for whom he had procured a rich wife. Again, it is true, it is denied that Thomas Chaucer was his son, or that it is known that he had any son but Lewis, said to be born twenty years after his marriage. So dubious is every step in this history. Yet tradition asserts Thomas Chaucer to have been his eldest son. It is known that Donnington Castle was for many years in the hands of this Thomas Chaucer; and may it not have been the fact, that the purchase of Donnington Park, and the settlement of it on his son, must, together with a diminished income from the change of some of his affairs, have been the source of his embarrassments? It is certain that at one time his emoluments were great; he speaks of himself as "once glorified in worldly wellfulnesse, and having suche goods in welthe as makin men riche." He was in a fair way to make a fortune, and plant a family of rank and substance. He was married to the sister of the favorite mistress and subsequent wife of the powerful and liberal John of Gaunt; had the favor of the king, Edward III., and his wife that of the noble Queen Philippa, one of whose maids of honor she had been. Every thing promised prosperity; the promise was confirmed on the accession of Richard II., but soon, as we have seen, the scene changed. He was involved in the troubles of the times, compelled to sacrifice his offices, and obliged to fly to foreign countries. He then complained, in his Testament of Love, "of being berafte out of dignitie of office, in which he made a gatheringe of worldly godes."
Notwithstanding all this cloud of uncertainty, the belief will always prevail that Donnington was the residence of Chaucer. Evelyn tells us that there was an oak in the Park which tradition asserted to have been planted by Chaucer, and which was still called Chaucer's Oak. As his house at Woodstock is gone, so his castle here is a mere ruin. It is generally supposed to be at Woodstock that he wrote his Canterbury Tales, where he, also, is said to have written his Treatise on the Astrolabe, for the use of his son Lewis; yet if, as asserted, he was upward of sixty when he commenced the Canterbury Tales, he may have been in possession also of Donnington during part of the time that he was writing his great poem. But every thing concerning these particulars is wrapped in the mists of five hundred years. The only branch of his family that he mentions by name is his son Lowis. The very name of his wife is a secret. "Historians," says Tyrwhitt, "though they own themselves totally ignorant of the Christian name of his wife, are all agreed that her surname was Rouet, the same with that of her father and eldest sister, Catharine Swynford." How Rouet and Swynford can be the same surname, Tyrwhitt does not tell us. Spite of this, the commentators have pored into the list of nine Dunicellæ of the Queen Philippa, to whom the king had granted annuities, and finding no Rouet there, have been resolved to fix, as the future wife of Chaucer, one Philippa Pykard, whom they did find. These are all rash peerings into the dark. As no damsel of the name of Rouet was found, the natural conclusion is that she was already married to Chaucer.
Of Donnington Castle in its present state a few more words may be acceptable, and this is the account we find given by Mr. Britton, in the Beauties of England and Wales. "Donnington Castle rears its lofty head above the remains of the venerable oaks that once surrounded it, on an eminence northeast of Donnington Grove, and nearly opposite to the village of Speen, now Newbury. It was formerly a place of much importance, and, by commanding the western road, gave to its possessors a considerable degree of authority. When it was originally built is uncertain, but, from a manuscript preserved in the Cottonian Library, it appears that it belonged to Walter Abberbury, who paid C. shillings for it to the king. Hither, about 1397, in the 70th year of his age, Geoffrey Chaucer, who had purchased it, retired. Alice, his granddaughter, conveyed it by marriage to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk." In this line, and, therefore, in the descendants of Chaucer, it continued till the reign of Henry VII., when, by the treasonable practices of the owner, it was escheated to the crown. In the civil wars it was a post of great consequence, being fortified as a garrison for the king. During these troubles it was twice besieged; the second time its siege being raised by the arrival of the king himself. In Camden's time this castle was entire. He describes it as "a small but very neat place, seated on the brow of a woody hill, having a fine prospect, lighted by windows on every side." The remains now consist of the east entrance, with its two round towers, and a small part of the east wall. The gateway is in good preservation, and the place for the portcullis may still be seen. A staircase winds up the south tower to the summit of the castle, which commands a beautiful view of the Hampshire Hills and the intermediate country.
It has been the fate of the places celebrated by Chaucer in his exquisite Canterbury Tales to retain something of their identity beyond all that might have been expected from the rapid changes, especially of late years, in England. The Tabard Inn, Southwark, from which his pilgrims set out, still exists, or at least partly so, under the name of the Talbot. This old inn is within view of London Bridge, on the left hand going thence down High-street in the borough. It is evidently the very inn which Dickens had in view when he described the one where Pickwick originally encountered Sam Weller. This once famous old hostel has indeed existed, but has fallen into decay, and sunk in rank. London has spread, and changed the importance of its localities. In the city, and at the west end, multitudes of splendid hotels have sprung up: the ancient Tabard is gone down to a very ordinary house of entertainment. Once it occupied, no doubt, the frontage on both sides of its gateway, now it is confined to the right hand; and although the ancient yard and ancient galleries present themselves to your view as you enter, you find the premises occupied by at least half a dozen different tenants and trades. Here is the inn, on the right hand; on the left are offices of wine-merchants and others. Under the old galleries is the warehouse of a London carman, and huge bales of goods lie before it, to go off by wagon or by rail-road. Wagons belonging to this establishment are going in and out, and gigs and chaises are drawn up on the further side of the inn. There are life and trade here still; but the antiquity and dignity of the ancient Tabard are broken up. The frontage, and about half the premises, were once destroyed by fire; the remainder, occupying the lower end of the court, exists in all its antiquity. The old wooden gallery, supported on stout wooden pillars, and with a heavy wooden balustrade, is roofed over; above are steep red-tiled roofs, with dormer-windows, bearing every mark of being very old. In front of this gallery hangs a large painting, long said to be a picture of the pilgrims entering Canterbury. A horseman is disappearing through the city gateway, and others are following; but the whole is so weather-beaten that it is difficult to make out. The painting seems to have possessed considerable merit, and it is a pity it is not restored.
Tyrwhitt says, "They who are disposed to believe the pilgrimage to have been real, and to have happened in 1383, may support their opinion by the following inscription, which is still to be read upon the inn, now called the Talbot, in Southwark: 'This is the inn where Sir Geoffrey Chaucer and the twenty-nine pilgrims lodged in their journey to Canterbury, anno 1383.'" Though the present inscription is evidently of a very recent date, we might suppose it to have been propagated to us by a succession of faithful transcripts from the very time; but, unluckily, there is too good reason to be assured that the first inscription of this sort was not earlier than the last century.
We learn from Speght, who appears to have been inquisitive about this inn in 1597, that "this was the hostelry where Chaucer and the other pilgrims met together, and with Henry Bailey, their host, accorded about the manner of their journey to Canterbury." Within the gallery was a large table, said to be the one where the pilgrims were entertained. It is now divided into four bed-rooms, where the guests of the inn still sleep, on the very floor occupied by the pilgrims upward of 500 years ago. And, indeed, how much longer? The building existed probably long before Chaucer's days, who has been dead 446 years. It is one of the greatest antiquities and curiosities of London, so few of the like kind being spared by the fire, and still fewer by modern changes and improvements.
In Canterbury, also, the pilgrim's inn is said to have continued to the present time, no longer, indeed, existing as an inn, but divided into a number of private tenements in High-street. The old inn mentioned by Chaucer was called the Checkers. It stands in High-street, at the corner of the lane leading to the Cathedral, just below the parade, on the left-hand side going into Canterbury. Its situation was just that which was most convenient for the pilgrims to Thomas à Becket's tomb. It was a very large inn, as was necessary for the enormous resort of votaries to the shrine of this pugnacious saint. It is now divided into several houses, and has been modernized externally, having no longer a trace of having been an inn. The way to the court-yard is through a narrow doorway passage, and round the court you see the only evidences of its antiquity, remains of carved wood-work, now whitewashed over.
The old age of Chaucer, like that of too many men of genius, is said to have been stormy, and not unvisited by necessity. We are informed that he went from Woodstock to Donnington Castle, and thence to London, to solicit a continuance of his annuities, in which he found such difficulties as probably hastened his death. It has been said, how could this be? How could a man with lands and a castle be in such necessity? and it has been attributed to the desire of his biographers to excite an undue sympathy for their subject, that they have represented him in his old age as avaricious. Probably, if we knew all the circumstances, the whole would be clear enough. We know so little of Chaucer's real, and especially of his domestic history, that we may pronounce, as falsely as presumptuously, in saying he could not be in need. Who shall say that because Chaucer casually mentions only one son, that he might not have half a dozen? Who shall say what misfortunes may have visited his old age? These were changeable and troublesome times. His biographers have settled his castle and estate on his son Thomas; and if he had other sons to provide for, and his annuities were not paid, these are causes enough for pecuniary difficulty.
The general opinion is, that he died October 25th, in the year 1400, being seventy-two years of age. According to Wood, he never repented of his reflections on the clergy of his times, but upbraided himself bitterly with the licentious portions of his writings, often crying out at the approach of death, "Woe, woe is me, that I can not recall and annul those things; but, alas! they are now continued from man to man, and I can not do what I would desire." He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the great south aisle, but no monument was raised to his memory till a century and a half after his decease, when Nicholas Bingham, a gentleman of Oxford, a poet and great admirer of Chaucer, erected the plain altar, now so well known, having three quatrefoils, and the same number of shields, at the north end of a magnificent recess, formed by four obtuse arched angles. The inscription and figures are now almost obliterated.
Like himself, his great work, the Canterbury Tales, lay buried for upward of seventy years in manuscript. Caxton, the first English printer, selected these tales as one of the earliest productions of his press, and thus gave to the world what it will never again consent to lose. Spite of the rude state of the language when he wrote, the splendor of his genius beams and burns gloriously through its inadequate vehicle. Time, which has destroyed his house at Woodstock, and beaten down his castle at Donnington, has not been able to effect the same ruin on his poems. The language has gone on perfecting and polishing; a host of glorious names and glorious works have succeeded Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, making England affluent in its literary fame as any nation on earth; but, from his distant position, the father of English poetry beams like a star of the first magnitude in the eternal hemisphere of genius. Like Shakspeare, he has, for the most part, seized on narratives already in existence to employ his art upon, but that art is so exquisite that it has stamped immortal value on the narrative. The life and the characters he has represented to us are a portion of the far past, rescued for us from the oblivion that has overwhelmed all that age besides. We gaze on the living and moving scenes with an interest which the progress of time can only deepen. To the latest ages men will read and say, "Thus, in the days of Wickliffe, of John of Gaunt, and Richard II., did men and women look, and act, and think, and feel; thus did a great poet live among them, and send them down to us, and to all posterity, ten thousand times more faithfully preserved than by all the arts of Egypt and the East." Quaint as they are, they are the very quintessence of human nature. They live yet, fresh and vivid, passionate and strong, as they did on their way to the tomb of St. Thomas, upward of five hundred years ago. They can never die; they can never grow old; and amid them the poet, Englishman every inch, lives, and laughs, and quaffs his cup of wine, and tells his story, and chuckles over his jokes, or listens to the narratives of all those around him, with a relish of life that he only could feel or could communicate. There is an elastic geniality in his spirit, a buoyant music in his numbers, a soul of enjoyment in his whole nature, that mark him at once as a man of a thousand; and we feel in the charm that bears us along a strength that will outlast a thousand years. It is like that of the stream that runs, of the wind that blows, of the sun that comes up, ruddy as with youth, from the bright east on an early summer's morning. It is the strength of nature living in its own joyful life, and mingling with the life of all around in gladdening companionship. For a hundred beautiful pictures of genuine English existence and English character; for a world of persons and things that have snatched us from the present to their society; for a host of wise and experience-fraught maxims; for a many a tear shed, and emotion revived, and laugh of merriment; for many a happy hour and bright remembrance, we thank thee, Dan Chaucer, and just thanks shalt thou receive a thousand years hence.