Chaucer And His Times Part 1

Chaucer and His Times.

by Grace E. Hadow.

CHAPTER I

CHAUCER'S LIFE AND TIMES

"The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities" according to one of the most famous of Chaucer scholars, and the more carefully we consider the evidence upon which this statement is based, the more fully do we find it endorsed. The name Chaucer itself has been variously derived from the Latin _calcearius_, a shoemaker, the French _chaussier_, a maker of long hose, and the French _chaufecire_, chafe-wax (_i. e._ a clerk of the court of Chancery whose duty consisted in affixing seals to royal doc.u.ments). The one point of agreement seems to be that the family was undoubtedly of French origin, though whether the founder of the English branch came over with the Conqueror or in Henry III's reign, cannot be decided. Most scholars are now agreed that Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1340, and that his father was John Chaucer, a vintner of Thames Street, London, though at one time his birth was dated as early as 1328, and Mr. Snell, in his _Age of Chaucer_, endeavours further to darken counsel--already sufficiently obscure--by suggesting that there may have been two contemporary Geoffreys, and that the facts which are usually accepted as throwing light on the history of the poet may really apply to his unknown namesake. This theory, however, has at present no evidence to support it, and it is reasonable to a.s.sume that Chaucer was a native of London. Possibly it was his early a.s.sociation with the wine-trade that gave him such insight into its mysteries, and called forth the Pardoner's warning:--

Now kepe yow fro the whyte and fro the rede, And namely fro the whyte wyn of Lepe, That is to selle in Fish-strete or in Chepe.

This wyn of Spayne crepeth subtilly In othere wynes, growing faste by, Of which there ryseth swich fumositee That when a man hath dronken draughtes three And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe, He is in Spayne, right at the toune of Lepe.

(_Pardoners Tale_, l. 562, etc.)

And it is noteworthy that more than once Chaucer goes out of his way to inveigh against drunkenness:--

A lecherous thing is wyn, and dronkenesse Is ful of stryving and of wrecchednesse

For dronkenesse is verray sepulture Of mannes wit and his discrecioun.

(_Pardoners Tale_, l. 549-559.)

Of his early years we know nothing. Probably he lived the life of other boys of that time: Lydgate's portrait of the mediaeval school-boy may well stand for a type:--

I had in custom to come to school late Not for to learn but for a countenance, With my fellows ready to debate, To jangle and j.a.pe was set all my pleasaunce.

Whereof rebuked was my Chevisaunce[1]

To forge a lesyng and thereupon to muse When I trespa.s.sed myselfe to excuse.

Loth to rise, lother to bed at eve; With unwashed handes ready aye to dinner; My Paternoster, my Creed, or my Believe Cast at the Cook; lo! this was my manner; Waved with each wind, as doth a reede-spear; Snibbed[2] of my friends such taches[3] for to amend Made deaf eare list nat to them attend.

(_Testament._)

Leland, with that sublime disregard for anything so prosaic as evidence which characterises sixteenth-century biographers, declares that "Geoffrey Chaucer, a youth of n.o.ble birth and highest promise, studied at Oxford University with all the earnestness of those who have applied themselves most diligently to learning.... He left the University an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician"; and to this list of accomplishments he afterwards adds, "and a devout theologian." Fifty years later, Speght--to whom lovers of Chaucer are deeply indebted in other respects--equally authoritatively a.s.serts that he was at Cambridge, but as he bases this a.s.sertion on a remark--

Philogenet I called am far and near Of Cambridge clerk--

made by one of the characters in the _Court of Love_, a poem which scholars are now universally of opinion is not Chaucer's work, it has little weight. As a matter of fact Chaucer's name does not appear in the records of any college at either university, and, as Professor Lounsbury has conclusively shown, wide as are the poet's interests, and great as his knowledge undoubtedly is, the scholars.h.i.+p shown by his works is not so remarkable as necessarily to imply close and protracted study. Cla.s.sical legends were frequently embodied in the romances of an age in which, if we may believe Jean Bodel, himself a poet,

Ne sont que trois matieres a nul homme entendant, De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la grant,[4]

and the habit of treating Alexander the Great as if he were brother-in-arms to Roland and Oliver naturally opened the door to all sorts of embellishments and modifications. A veil of romance covers and colours the history of Greece and Rome. To Chaucer, Cleopatra is akin to the Lady of the Hideous Pa.s.s, or Morgan le Fay. The account of her death given in the _Legend of Good Women_ (l. 671, etc.) is purely mediaeval:--

(She) made her subtil workmen make a shryne Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne In all Egipte that she coude espye; And putte ful the shryne of spycerye, And leet the cors embaume;[5] and forth she fette This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.[6]

And next the shryne a pit than doth she grave; And alle the serpents that she mighte have She putte hem in that grave....

And with that word, naked, with ful good herte, Among the serpents in the pit she sterte.[7]

Nor is this devout theologian always accurate in his references to Bible history. His allusions to Old Testament stories are full of mistakes, as, for instance, when he speaks (in _Book of d.u.c.h.esse_, l. 738) of Samson slaying himself with a pillar for love of Delila. It was not an age of nice scholars.h.i.+p, or care for detail. Men used stories as they found them, and repeated them as they happened to remember them, and no one was hyper-critical enough to refer to the original. More than half a century after Chaucer's death Caxton translates the _aeneid_, not from the Latin of Virgil, but from "a little book in French," and Gawain Douglas, the most scholarly of all the Scottish poets of the early sixteenth century, regards it as a moral allegory of the soul's progress, cast in the form of an epic. But while Chaucer's occasional mistranslations of Latin words and misrenderings of cla.s.sical legends cannot be said to disprove his residence at one of the universities, they certainly cannot be said to support Leland's statement, and the probability is that he early became attached to the court. The reign of Edward III witnessed a marked increase in the prosperity of the merchant cla.s.s. The members of the great trade guilds were men of wealth and importance and there is nothing surprising in finding a vintner's son one of the household of Elizabeth, wife of the king's son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In fact the seals of John Chaucer and Agnes his wife show that both bore arms. In 1357 we find, from the royal accounts, that Geoffrey Chaucer was provided with a paltok (cloak) costing four s.h.i.+llings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of shoes, valued at three s.h.i.+llings, and in December of the same year he received a grant of 2_s._ 6_d._ "for necessaries against the feast of the Nativity" (Chaucer Soc., _Life Records of Chaucer_, p. xiv). The _Canterbury Tales_ give abundant proof that their author had a keen eye for the niceties of dress, and at seventeen he had doubtless a proper appreciation of new shoes and red and black breeches.

Two years later (1359) he served in the French wars and was taken prisoner at "Retters," a place which has been variously identified as Retiers, near Rennes, and Rethel, near Reims. He was liberated in March 1360, Edward III paying 16 (over 200 of our money) towards his ransom, which looks as if he were considered a person of some importance. Apparently he returned to court life in England, and to the duties of _valettus camerae regis_. A valet of the King's Chamber had to "make beddis, to beare or hold torches, to sett boardis, to apparell all chambres, and such othir seruices as the Chamberlain, or Vshers of the Chambre, comaunde or a.s.signe, to attend the Chambre, to watch the King by course, to go in messages, etc." (_Life Records_, Pt. II, p. xi), and holders of the office must have had ample opportunity of acquiring the wisdom of Placebo:--

I have now been a court-man al my lyf.

And G.o.d it woot,[8] though I unworthy be, I have stonden in ful greet degree Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat; Yet hadde I never with noon of hem debaat.

I never hem contraried,[9] trewely; I woot wel that my lord can[10] more than I.

What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable; I say the same, or elles thing semblable.[11]

A ful gret fool is any conseillour, That serveth any lord of heigh honour, That dar presume, or elles thenken it, That his conseil sholde pa.s.se his lordes wit.

Nay, lordes been no foles,[12] by my fay.

(_Marchantes Tale_, l. 1492, etc.)

In 1366 a pension was granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of the Queen's Chamber, and it is usually thought that this indicates Chaucer's marriage about this time, since in 1381 the money was paid "to Geoffrey Chaucer, her husband." Philippa seems to have been the sister--the Chaucer Society suggests, the sister-in-law--of Katherine Swynford, who became John of Gaunt's third wife, and this connection possibly helps to explain the consistent kindness shown to Chaucer by the House of Lancaster. Various attempts have been made to show that the marriage was an unhappy one. Some of these will be noticed later in treating of Chaucer's women, here it may suffice to say that although it is true that he paints a sufficiently gloomy picture of married life in the _Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton_, that neither the host nor the merchant are happy in their choice, and that the _Lenvoy_ which concludes the _Clerkes Tale_ warns husbands that if they expect to find their wives patient Griseldas they will certainly be disappointed, we have to remember that the shrewish wife was as stock a comic convention of those days as the shrewish mother-in-law of later times, and when it comes to taking away the character of Philippa Chaucer on the ground that her husband complains in the _Hous of Fame_ that he is unaccustomed to be awakened gently, it is impossible not to feel that she is receiving unnecessarily harsh treatment. Equally slight is the evidence for his suffering from an unhappy love affair. In the _Parlement of Foules_ (ll. 89, 90) he speaks of himself as

Fulfild of thought and besy hevinesse; For bothe I hadde thing which that I nolde,[13]

And eek I ne hadde that thing that I wolde,

and commentators have leaped to the conclusion that he is here referring to his wife and a lady of high rank for whom he sighed in vain. In the same way when, in the _Book of the d.u.c.h.esse_, he speaks of having suffered for eight years from a sickness which one physician alone can cure, this is taken as an unmistakable reference to the same unrequited pa.s.sion. But we have nothing to show that in these pa.s.sages Chaucer is revealing his actual feelings. To be crossed in love is proper to every poet, and if his wife might have been justly annoyed when in 1382--at least sixteen years after his marriage--he wrote

... I knowe not love in dede Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre,[14]

(_Parlement of Foules_, ll. 8, 9.)

"Rosemounde"--if she had any real existence--can hardly have felt complimented by the affection of a poet who told her--and the world at large--

Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne As I in love am walwed and y-wounde.[15]

There is no proof one way or the other.

We know nothing of his children, except that in 1391 he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his little son Lewis, then ten years of age.

Gascoigne, a generation after Chaucer's death, speaks of Thomas Chaucer, a well-known man of wealth and position in the early fifteenth century, more than once Speaker of the House of Commons, as Geoffrey's son, but no mention is made of him by Chaucer himself or by any of his contemporaries or immediate successors. John of Gaunt paid a considerable sum of money to place a certain Elizabeth Chaucer in the nunnery of Barking in 1381, but she is usually considered to have been the poet's sister.

In 1367 Chaucer himself was granted a pension of twenty marks a year for life, in recognition of his services, and in 1368 (or, according to Mr. G.

C. Coulton, 1372) he was promoted to be an Esquire of the royal household.

The duties of an esquire seem better suited to a poet than those of a valet: "These Esquires of houshold of old be accustumed winter & summer in afternoons & in eunings to drawe to Lordes Chambres within Court, there to keep honest company after there Cunninge, in talking of Cronicles of Kinges & of others pollicies, & in pipeing or harpinge, songinges or other actes marcealls, to helpe to occupie the Court, & accompanie estraingers till the time require of departing."

In 1369 a Geoffrey Chaucer was again with the army in France, but no particular adventures seem to have befallen him.

At this time John of Gaunt's influence was paramount at the English court, which may partly account for Chaucer's steady and rapid promotion. In 1370 he was sent abroad on an important mission--the exact nature of which we do not know--and two years later he went to Genoa to arrange which English port should become the headquarters of the Genoese trade. From Genoa he went to Florence, and by November 1373 he was back in England again.

When Chaucer went to Italy, Dante had already been dead for over fifty years, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, the other members of that great trilogy of the earlier Renaissance, were both alive. Chaucer makes his clerk declare that he learned the tale of Griselda