Chaucer and His England Part 12

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRa.s.s OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK

(From Southacre Church, Norfolk (1384))

(For the lady's cote-hardie and b.u.t.tons, see p. 27, note 2. Her dress is here embroidered with her own arms and Sir John's.)]

But child-marriages were the real curse of medieval home-life in high society. The immaturity of the parents could not fail to tell often upon the children; and when Berthold of Regensburg pointed out how brief was the average of life among the 13th-century n.o.bility, and ascribed this to G.o.d's vengeance for their heartlessness towards the poor, he might more truly have traced the cause much further back. "In days of old," wrote a _trouvere_ of the 12th century, "n.o.bles married at a mature age; faith and loyalty then reigned everywhere. But nowadays avarice and luxury are rampant, and two infants of twelve years old are wedded together: take heed lest they breed children!"[198] The Church did, indeed, refuse to recognize the bond of marriage if contracted before both parties had turned seven; and she further forbade the making of such contracts until the age of twelve for the girl and fifteen for the boy, though without daring, in this case, to impugn the validity of the marriage once contracted. That the weaker should be allowed to marry three years earlier than the stronger s.e.x is justified by at least one great canon lawyer on the principle that "ill weeds grow apace"; a decision on which one would gladly have heard the comments of the Wife of Bath.[199] But "people let the Church protest, and married at any age they pleased"; for it was seldom indeed that the ecclesiastical prohibition was enforced against influence or wealth, and the Church herself, theory apart, was directly responsible for many of the worst abuses in this matter. Her determination to keep the whole marriage-law in her own hands, combined with her readiness to sell dispensations from her own regulations, resulted in a state of things almost incredible. On the one hand, a marriage was nullified by cousins.h.i.+p to the fourth degree, and even by the fact of the contracting parties having ever stood as sponsors to the same child, unless a papal dispensation had been bought; and this absurd severity not only nullified in theory half the peasants' marriages (since nearly everybody is more or less related in a small village), but gave rise to all sorts of tricks for obtaining fraudulent divorces. To quote again from Gautier, who tries all through to put the best possible face on the matter: "After a few years of marriage, a husband who had wearied of his wife could suddenly discover that they were related ... and here was a revival, under canonical and pious forms, of the ancient practice of divorce." It is the greatest mistake to suppose that divorce was a difficult matter in the Middle Ages; it was simply a question of money, as honest men frequently complained. The Church courts were ready to "make and unmake matrimony for money"; and "for a mantle of miniver" a man might get rid of his lawful wife.[200] An actual instance is worth many generalities. In the first quarter of the 14th century a Pope allowed the King and Queen of France to separate because they had _once_ been G.o.dparents to the same child; and at the same time sold a dispensation to a rich citizen who had _twice_ contracted the same relations.h.i.+p to the lady whom he now wished to marry. The collocation, in this case, was piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which was chalked up at street corners in Paris. John XXII. probably laughed with the rest, and went on as before.

On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theoretically of the utmost strictness, though only to the poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of the most incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve might, at any time and in any place, not only without leave of parents, but against all their wishes, contract an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal promise, without any priestly intervention whatever. In other words, the whole world in Chaucer's time was a vaster and more commodious Gretna Green.[201] Moreover, not only the civil power, but apparently even the Church, sometimes hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions as existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock case is quoted at length in the contemporary "Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln" (R.S., pp.

170-177), and fully corroborated by official doc.u.ments. A wretched child who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great n.o.ble took her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a second n.o.ble; and on his death, when she was apparently still only eleven, and certainly not much older, she was bought for 300 marks by a third knightly bridegroom. The bishop, though he excommunicated the first husband, and deprived the priest who had openly married him "in the face of the church," apparently made no attempt to declare the marriage null; and the third husband was still enjoying her estate twenty years after his wedding-day. In the face of instances like this (for another, scarcely less startling, may be found in Luce's "Du Guesclin," p. 139), we need no longer wonder that our poet's father was carried off in his earliest teens to be married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or that in Chaucer's own time, when the middle cla.s.ses were rapidly gaining more power in the state, Parliament legislated expressly against the frequent offences of this kind.

But the real root of the evil remained; so long as two children might, in a moment and without any religious ceremony whatever, pledge their persons and their properties for life, no legislation could be permanently effectual. From the moral side, we find Church councils fulminating desperately against the celebration of marriages in private houses or taverns, sometimes even after midnight, and with the natural concomitants of riot and excess. From the purely civil side, again, apart from runaway or irregular matches, there was also the scandalous frequency of formal child-marriages which were often the only security for the transmission of property; and here even the Church admitted the thin end of the wedge by permitting espousals "of children in their cradles," by way of exception, "for the sake of peace."[202] Let me quote here again from Smyth's "Lives of the Berkeleys." We there find, between 1288 and 1500, five marriages in which the ten contracting parties averaged less than eleven years. Maurice the Third, born in 1281, was only eight years old when he married a wife apparently of the same age; their eldest child was born before the father was fifteen; and the loyal Smyth comforts himself by reciting from Holy Scripture the still more precocious examples of Josiah and Solomon. It would be idle to multiply instances of so notorious a fact; but let us take one more case which touched all England, and must have come directly under Chaucer's notice. When the good Queen Anne of Bohemia was dead, for whose sake Richard II. would never afterwards live in his palace of Shene, it was yet necessary for his policy to take another wife. He chose the little daughter of the French King, then only seven years old, in spite of the remonstrances of his subjects. The pair were affianced by proxy in 1395; "and then (as I have been told) it was pretty to see her, young as she was; for she very well knew already how to play the queen." Next year, the two Kings met personally between Guines and Ardres, the later "Field of the Cloth of Gold," and sat down to meat together. "Then said the Duc de Bourbon many joyous and merry words to make the kings laugh.... And he spake aloud, addressing himself to the King of England, 'My Lord King of England, you should make good cheer; you have all that you desire and ask; you have your wife, or shall have; she shall be delivered to you!' Then said the King of France, 'Cousin of Bourbon, we would that our daughter were as old as our cousin the lady de St. Pol. She would bear the more love to our son the King of England, and it would have cost us a heavy dowry.' The King of England heard and understood this speech; wherefore he answered, inclining himself towards the King of France (though, indeed, the word had been addressed to the Duke, since the King had made the comparison of the daughter of the Comte de St. Pol), 'Fair father, we are well pleased with the present age of our wife, and we love not so much that she should be of great age as we take account of the love and alliance of our own selves and our kingdoms; for when we shall be at one accord and alliance together, there is no king in Christendom or elsewhere who could gainsay us.'"[203] The Royal pair proceeded at once to Calais, and the formal wedding took place three days later in the old church of St. Nicholas, which to Ruskin was a perpetual type of "the links unbroken between the past and present."

What kings were obliged to do at one time for political purposes, they would do at other times for money; and their subjects followed suit. As one of the authors of "Piers Plowman" puts it, the marriage choice should depend on personal qualities, and Christ will then bless it with sufficient prosperity.

"But few folk now follow this; for they give their children For covetise of chattels and cunning chapmen; Of kin nor of kindred account men but little ...

Let her be unlovely, unlovesome abed, A b.a.s.t.a.r.d, a bondmaid, a beggar's daughter, That no courtesy can; but let her be known For rich or well-rented, though she be wrinkled for elde, There is no squire nor knight in country about, But will bow to that bondmaid, to bid her an husband, And wedden her for her wealth; and wish on the morrow That his wife were wax, or a wallet-full of n.o.bles!"[204]

Moreover, this picture is abundantly borne out by plain facts and plain speech from other quarters. Richard II.'s first marriage, which turned out so happily when the boy of sixteen and the girl of fifteen had grown to know each other, was, in its essence, a bargain of pounds, s.h.i.+llings, and pence. A contemporary chronicler, recording how Richard offered an immense sum for her in order to outbid his Royal brother of France, heads his whole account of the transaction with the plain words, "The king buys himself a wife."[205] Gaston, Count of Foix, whom Froissart celebrates as a mirror of courtesy among contemporary princes, had a little ward of twelve whose hand was coveted by the great Duc de Berri, verging on his fiftieth year. But Gaston came most unwillingly to the point: "Yet was he not unwilling to suffer that the marriage should take place, but he intended to have a good sum of florins; not that he put forward that he meant to sell the lady, but he wished to be rewarded for his wards.h.i.+p, since he had had and nourished her for some nine years and a half, wherefore he required thirty thousand francs for her."[206] Dr. Gairdner has cited equally plain language used in the following century by a member of the n.o.ble family of Scrope, whose estate had become much impoverished.

"'For very need,' he writes, 'I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility'--a considerable point in his complaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got for his own child." Down to the very lowest rung of the social ladder, marriage was to a great extent a matter of money; and if we could look into the manor-rolls of Chaucer's perfect gentle Knight, we should find that one source of his income was a tax on each poor serf for leave to take a fellow-bondmaid to his bosom.[207] If, on the other hand, the pair dispensed with any marriage ceremony, then they must pay a heavy fine to the archdeacon. Yet, even so, marriage was not business-like enough for some satirists. Chaucer's fellow-poet, Eustache Deschamps, echoes the complaint, already voiced in the "Roman de la Rose," that one never buys a horse or other beast without full knowledge of all its points, whereas one takes a wife like a pig in a poke.[208] The complaint has, of course, been made before and since; but Bishop Stapledon's register may testify that it was seldom less justified than in Chaucer's time.

Such was one side of marriage in the days of chivalry. A woman could inherit property, but seldom defend it. The situation was too tempting to man's cupidity; and no less temptation was offered by the equally helpless cla.s.s of orphans. A wards.h.i.+p, which in our days is generally an honourable and thankless burden, was in Chaucer's time a lucrative and coveted windfall. In London the city customs granted a guardian, for his trouble, ten per cent. of the ward's property every year.[209] This was an open bargain which, in the hands of an honourable citizen, restored to the ward his patrimony with increase, but gave the guardian enough profit to make such wards.h.i.+ps a coveted privilege even among well-to-do citizens.

Elsewhere, where the customs were probably less precisely marked--and certainly the legal checks were fewer--wards.h.i.+ps were treated even more definitely as profitable windfalls. We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley paid 10,000 in modern money for a single ward; Chaucer, as we know from a contemporary doc.u.ment, made some 1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a proportionately greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not blush to buy and sell wards.h.i.+ps, from the King downwards. The above-quoted Stephen Scrope, who sold his own daughter as a matter of course, is indignant with his guardian, Sir John Fastolf, who had sold him to the virtuous Chief Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks, "through which sale I took a sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing; whereby I am disfigured in my person, and shall be whilst I live." Gascoigne had purchased Scrope for one of his own daughters. Fastolf bought him back again to avoid such a _mesalliance_; but the costs of each transfer, and something more, came out of the hapless ward's estate. "He bought and sold me as a beast, against all right and law, to mine own hurt more than a thousand marks."

Moreover, the means that were taken to avoid such disastrous wards.h.i.+ps became themselves one of the most active of the many forces which undermined the strict code of chivalry. A knight, in theory, was capable of looking after himself; therefore careful and influential parents like the Berkeleys sought to protect their heirs by knighthood from falling into wards.h.i.+ps as minors, in defiance of the rule which placed the earliest limit at twenty-one. Thus Maurice de Berkeley (IV.) was knighted in 1339 at the age of seven, and one of his descendants in 1476 at the age of five; and Eustache Deschamps complains of the practice as one of the open sores of contemporary chivalry--

"Et encore plus me confond, Ce que Chevaliers se font Plusieurs trop pet.i.tement, Qui dix ou qui sept ans n'ont."[210]

The practice shows equally clearly how hollow the dignity was becoming, and how little an unprotected child could count upon chivalric consideration, in the proper sense of the word.

Nor can these bargains in women and orphans be treated as a mere accident; they formed an integral part of medieval life, and influenced deeply all social relations. The men who bought their wives like chattels were only too likely to treat them accordingly. Take from the 14th and early 15th centuries two well-known instances, which would be utterly inconceivable in this unchivalrous age of ours. Edward I. hung up the Countess of Buchan in a wooden cage on the walls of Berwick "that pa.s.sers-by might gaze on her"; and when a woman accused a Franciscan friar of treasonable speeches, the King's justiciar decided that the two should proceed to wager of battle, the friar having one hand tied behind his back. At the best, the knight's oath provided no greater safeguard for women than the unsworn but inbred courtesy of a modern gentleman. When the peasant rebels of 1381 broke into the Tower, and some miscreants invited the Queen Mother to kiss them, "yet (strange to relate) the many knights and squires dared not rebuke one of the rioters for acts so indecent, or lay hold of them to stop them, or even murmur under their breath."[211]

But the strangest fact to modern minds is the prevalence of wife-beating, sister-beating, daughter-beating. The full evidence would fill a volume; but no picture of medieval life can be even approximately complete without more quotations than are commonly given on this subject. In the great epics, when the hero loses his temper, the ladies of his house too often suffer in face or limb. Gautier, in a chapter already referred to, quotes a large number of instances; but the words of contemporary law-givers and moralists are even more significant. The theory was based, of course, on Biblical texts; if G.o.d had meant woman for a position of superiority, he would have taken her from Adam's head rather than from his side.[212] Her inferiority is thus proclaimed almost on the first page of Holy Scripture; and inferiority, in an age of violence, necessarily involves subjection to corporal punishment. Gautier admits that it was already a real forward step when the 13th-century "Coutumes du Beauvoisis" enacted that a man must beat his wife "only in reason." A very interesting theological dictionary of early 14th century date, preserved in the British Museum (6 E. VI. 214A), expresses the ordinary views of cultured ecclesiastics.

"Moreover a man may chastise his wife and beat her by way of correction, for she forms part of his household; so that he, the master, may chastise that which is his, as it is written in the Gloss [to Canon Law]." Not long after Chaucer's death, St. Bernardino of Siena grants the same permission, even while rebuking the immoderate abuse of marital authority. "There are men who can bear more patiently with a hen that lays a fresh egg every day, than with their own wives; and sometimes when the hen breaks a pipkin or a cup he will spare it a beating, simply for love of the fresh egg which he is unwilling to lose. O raving madmen! who cannot bear a word from their own wives, though they bear them such fair fruit; but when the woman speaks a word more than they like, then they catch up a stick and begin to cudgel her; while the hen, that cackles all day and gives you no rest, you take patience with her for the sake of her miserable egg--and sometimes she will break more in your house than she herself is worth, yet you bear it in patience for the egg's sake! Many fidgetty fellows who sometimes see their wives turn out less neat and dainty than they would like, smite them forthwith; and meanwhile the hen may make a mess on the table, and you suffer her.... Don't you see the pig too, always squeaking and squealing and making your house filthy; yet you suffer him until the time for slaughtering, and your patience is only for the sake of his flesh to eat! Consider, rascal, consider the n.o.ble fruit of thy wife, and have patience; it is not right to beat her for every cause, no!" In another sermon, speaking of the extravagant and sometimes immodest fas.h.i.+ons of the day, he says to the over-dressed woman in his congregation, "Oh, if it were my business, if I were your husband, I would give you such a drubbing with feet and fists, that I would make you remember for a while!"[213]

Lastly, let us take the manual which Chaucer's contemporary, the Knight of La Tour Landry, wrote for the education of his daughters, and which became at once one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages.[214] The good knight relates quite naturally several cases of a.s.sault and battery, of which the first may suffice. A man had a scolding wife, who railed ungovernably upon him before strangers. "And he, that was angry of her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth; and then with his foot he struck her in the visage and brake her nose, and all her life after she had her nose crooked, the which shent and disfigured her visage after, that she might not for shame show her visage, it was so foul blemished: [for the nose is the fairest member that man or woman hath, and sitteth in the middle of the visage]. And this she had for her evil and great language that she was wont to say to her husband. And therefore the wife ought to suffer and let the husband have the words, and to be master...."

What was sauce for women was, of course, sauce for children also.

Uppingham is far from being the only English school which has for its seal a picture of the pedagogue dominating with his enormous birch over a group of tiny urchins. At the Universities, when a student took a degree in grammar, he "received as a symbol of his office, not a book like Masters of the other Faculties, but two to him far more important academical instruments--a 'palmer' and a birch, and thereupon entered upon the discharge of the most fundamental and characteristic part of his official duties by flogging a boy 'openlye in the Scolys.' Having paid a groat to the Bedel for the birch, and a similar sum to the boy 'for hys labour,'

the Inceptor became a fully accredited Master in Grammar."[215] At home, girls and boys were beaten indiscriminately. One of the earliest books of household conduct, "How the Good Wife taught her Daughter," puts the matter in a nutsh.e.l.l--

"And if thy children be rebel, and will not them low, If any of them misdoeth, neither ban them nor blow [curse nor cuff But take a smart rod, and beat them on a row Till they cry mercy, and be of their guilt aknow." [acknowledge

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH-CENTURY CLa.s.sROOM

(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6. f. 214)]

CHAPTER XVII

THE GAY SCIENCE

"Madame, whilom I was one That to my father had a king; But I was slow, and for nothing Me liste not to Love obey; And that I now full sore abey....

Among the gentle nation Love is an occupation Which, for to keep his l.u.s.tes save, Should every gentle hearte have."

GOWER, "Confessio Amantis," Bk. IV

The facts given in the foregoing chapter may explain a good deal in the Wife of Bath's Prologue that might otherwise be ascribed to wide poetical licence; but they may seem strangely at variance with the "Knight's Tale"

or the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess." The contradiction, however, lies only on the surface. Neither flesh nor spirit can suffer extreme starvation. When the facts of life are particularly sordid, then that "large and liberal discontent," which is more or less rooted in every human breast, builds itself an ideal world out of those very materials which are most conspicuously and most painfully lacking in the ungrateful reality. The conventional platonism and self-sacrifice of love, according to the knightly theory, was in strict proportion to its rarity in knightly practice. We must, of course, beware of the facile a.s.sumption that these medieval _mariages de convenance_ were so much less happy than ours; nothing in human nature is more marvellous than its adaptability; and Richard II., for instance, seems to have bought himself with hard cash as great a treasure as that which Tennyson's Lord of Burleigh won with more subtle discrimination. But at least the conditions of actual marriage were generally far less romantic then than now; and, at a time when the supposed formal judgment of a Court of Love, "that no married pair can really be in love with each other," was accepted even as _ben trovato_, it was natural that highly imaginative pictures of love _par amours_ should be extremely popular.

Let us consider again for a moment the conditions of life in a medieval castle. In spite of a good deal of ceremonial which has long gone out of fas.h.i.+on, the actual daily intercourse between man and woman was closer there than at present, in proportion as artificial distances were greater.

The lady might stand as high above the squire as the heaven is in comparison with the earth; but she had scarcely more privacy than on board a modern s.h.i.+p. They were constantly in each other's sight, yet could never by any possibility exchange a couple of confidential sentences except by a secret and dangerous rendezvous in some private room, or by such stray chances as some meeting on the stairs, some accident which dispersed the hunting-party and left them alone in the forest, or similar incidents consecrated to romance. The three great excitements of man's life--war, physical exercise, and carousing--touched the ladies far less nearly, and left them ordinarily to a life which their modern sisters would condemn as hopelessly dull. The daily-suppressed craving for excitement, the nervous irritability generated by artificial constraint, explain many contrasts which are conspicuous in medieval manners. Moreover, there were men always at hand, and always on the watch to seize the smallest chance. The Knight of La Tour Landry is not the only medieval writer who describes his own society in very much the same downright words as the Prophet Jeremiah (ch.

v., v. 8). The very _raison d'etre_ of his book was the recollection how, in younger days, "my fellows communed with ladies and gentlewomen, the which [fellows] prayed them of love; for there was none of them that they might find, lady or gentlewoman, but they would pray her; and if that one would not intend to that, other would anon pray. And whether they had good answer or evil, they recked never, for they had in them no shame nor dread by the cause that they were so used. And thereto they had fair language and words; for in every place they would have had their sports and their might. And so they did both deceive ladies and gentlewomen, and bear forth divers languages on them, some true and some false, of the which there came to divers great defames and slanders without cause and reason.... And I asked them why they foreswore them, saying that they loved every woman best that they spake to: for I said unto them, 'Sirs, ye should love nor be about to have but one.' But what I said unto them, it was never the better. And therefore because I saw at that time the governance of them, the which I doubted that time yet reigneth, and there be such fellows now or worse, and therefore I purposed to make a little book ... to the intent that my daughters should take ensample of fair continuance and good manners." The tenor of the whole book more than bears out the promise of this introduction: and the good knight significantly recommends his daughters to fast thrice a week as a sovereign specific against such dangers (pp. 2, 10, 14).

[Ill.u.s.tration: WISE AND UNWISE VIRGINS]

We have seen how often women were forbidden attendance at all sorts of public dances, and even weddings; and how demurely they were bidden to pace the streets. The accompanying ill.u.s.tration from a 15th-century miniature given by Thomas Wright ("Womankind in Western Europe," p. 157) shows on the one hand the formal way in which girls were expected to cross their hands on their laps as they sat, and on the other hand the licence which naturally followed by reaction from so much formality. Both sides come out fully in the Knight's book. We see a girl losing a husband through a freedom of speech with her prospective fiance which seems to us most natural and innocent; while the coa.r.s.est words and actions were permitted to patterns of chivalry in the presence of ladies. A stifling conventionality oppressed the model young lady, while the less wise virgin rushed into the other extreme of "rere-suppers" after bedtime with like-minded companions of both s.e.xes, and other liberties more startling still.[216] In every generation moralists noted with pain the gradual emanc.i.p.ation of ladies from a restraint which had always been excessive, and had often been merely theoretical, though those who regretted this most bitterly in their own time believed also most implicitly in the strict virtues of a golden past. Guibert of Nogent contrasts the charming picture of his own chaste mother with what he sees (or thinks he sees) around him in St. Bernard's days. "Lord, thou knowest how hardly--nay, almost how impossibly--that virtue [of chast.i.ty] is kept by women of our time: whereas of old there was such modesty that scarce any marriage was branded even by common gossip! Alas, how miserably, between those days and ours, maidenly modesty and honour have fallen off, and the mother's guardians.h.i.+p has decayed both in appearance and in fact; so that in all their behaviour nothing can be noted but unseemly mirth, wherein are no sounds but of jest, with winking eyes and babbling tongues, and wanton gait.... Each thinks that she has touched the lowest step of misery if she lack the regard of lovers; and she measures her glory of n.o.bility and courtliness by the ampler numbers of such suitors." Men were more modest of old than women are now: the present man can talk of nothing but his _bonnes fortunes_. "By these modern fas.h.i.+ons, and others like them, this age of ours is corrupted and spreads further corruption." In short, it is the familiar philippic of well-meaning orators in every age against the sins of society, and the familiar regret of the good old times. The Knight of La Tour Landry, again, would place the age of real modesty about the time of his own and Chaucer's father, a date by which, according to Guibert's calculations, the growing shamelessness of the world ought long ago to have worn G.o.d's patience threadbare.

Each was of course so far right that he lived (as we all do) in a time of transition, and that he saw, as we too see, much that might certainly be changed for the better. These things were even more glaring in the Middle Ages than now. We must not look for too much refinement of outward manners at this early date; but even in essential morality the girl-heroines of medieval romance must be placed, on the whole, even below those of the average French novel.[217] In both cases we must, of course, make the same allowance; it would be equally unfair to judge Chaucer's contemporaries and modern Parisian society strictly according to the novelist's or the poet's pictures. But in either case the popularity of the type points to a real underlying truth; and we should err less in taking the early romances literally than in accepting Ivanhoe, for instance, as a typical picture of medieval love. No one poet represents that love so fully as Chaucer, in both its aspects. I say in _both_, and not in _all_, for such love as lent itself to picturesque treatment had then practically only two aspects, the most ideal and the most material.

The maiden whose purity of heart and freedom of manners are equally natural was not only non-existent at that stage of society, but inconceivable. Emelye is, within her limits, as beautiful and touching a figure as any in poetry; but her limits are those of a figure in a stained-gla.s.s window compared with a portrait of t.i.tian's. Chaucer himself could not have made her a Die Vernon or an Ethel Newcome; with fuller modelling and more freedom of action in the story, she could at best have become a sort of Beatrix Esmond. But of heavenly love and earthly love, as they were understood in his time, our poet gives us ample choice. It has long ago been noted how large a proportion of his whole work turns on this one pa.s.sion.[218] As he said of himself, he had "told of lovers up and down more than Ovid maketh of mention": he was "Love's clerk." His earthly love we may here neglect, only remembering that it is never merely wicked, but always relieved by wit and humour--indeed, by wit and humour of his very best. But his heavenly love, the ideal service of chivalry, deserves looking into more closely; the more so as his notions are so exactly those of his time, except so far as they are chastened by his rare sense of humour.

_Amor, che al gentil cuor ratto s'apprende_--so sings Francesca in Dante's "Inferno." Love is to every "gentle" heart--to any one who has not a mere money-bag or clod of clay in his breast--not only an unavoidable fate but a paramount duty. As Chaucer's Arcite says, "A man must needes love, maugre his head; he may not flee it, though he should be dead." Troilus, again, who had come to years of discretion, and earned great distinction in war without ever having felt the tender pa.s.sion, is so far justly treated as a heathen and a publican even by the frivolous Pandarus, who welcomes his conversion as unctuously as Mr. Stiggins might have accepted Mr. Weller's--

Love, of his goodness, Hath thee converted out of wickedness.

But perhaps the best instance is that afforded by the famous medieval romance of "Pet.i.t Jean de Saintre" (chaps, i.-iv.). Jean, at the age of thirteen, became page to the chivalrous King John of France; as nearly as possible at the same time as Chaucer was serving the d.u.c.h.ess of Clarence in the same capacity. One of the ladies-in-waiting at the same Court was a young widow, who for her own amus.e.m.e.nt brought Pet.i.t Jean formally into her room. "Madame, seated at the foot of the little bed, made him stand between her and her women, and then laid it on his faith to tell her the truth of whatsoever she should ask. The poor boy, who little guessed her drift, gave the promise, thinking 'Alas, what have I done? what can this mean?' And while he thus wondered, Madame said, smiling upon her women, 'Tell me, master, upon the faith which you have pledged me; tell me first of all how long it is since you saw your lady _par amours_?' So when he heard speech of _lady par amours_, as one who had never thought thereon, the tears came to his eyes, and his heart beat and his face grew pale, for he knew not how to speak a single word.... And they pressed him so hard that he said, 'Madam, I have none.' 'What, you have none!' said the lady: 'ha! how happy would she be who had such a lover! It may well be that you have none, and well I believe it; but tell me, how long is it since you saw her whom you most love, and would fain have for your lady?'" The poor boy could say nothing, but knelt there twisting the end of his belt between his fingers until the waiting-women pitied him and advised him to answer the lady's question. "'Tell without more ado' (said they), 'whom you love best.' 'Whom I love best?' (said he), 'that is my lady mother, and then my sister Jacqueline.' Then said the lady, 'Sir boy, I intend not of your mother or sister, for the love of mother and sister and kinsfolk is utterly different from that of lady _par amours_; but I ask you of such ladies as are none of your kin.' 'Of them?' (said he), 'by my faith, lady, I love none.' Then said the lady, 'What! you love none? Ha! craven gentleman, you say that you love none? Thereby know I well that you will never be worth a straw.... Whence came the great valiance and exploits of Lancelot, Gawayne, Tristram, Biron the Courteous, and other Champions of the Round Table?...'" The sermon was unmercifully long, and it left the culprit in helpless tears; at the women's intercession, he was granted another day's respite. Boylike, he succeeded in s.h.i.+rking day after day until he hoped he was forgotten. But the inexorable lady caught him soon after, and tormented him until "as he thought within himself whom he should name, then (as nature desires and attracts like to like), he bethought himself of a little maiden of the court who was ten years of age. Then he said, 'Lady, it is Matheline de Coucy.' And when the lady heard this name, she thought well that this was but childish fondness and ignorance; yet she made more ado than before, and said, 'Now I see well that you are a most craven squire to have chosen Matheline for your service; not but that she is a most comely maiden, and of good house and better lineage than your own; but what good, what profit, what honour, what gain, what advantage, what comfort, what help, and what counsel can come therefrom to your own person, to make you a valiant man? What are the advantages which you can draw from Matheline, who is yet but a child? Sir, you should choose a Lady who....'" In short, the lady whom she finally commends to his notice is her own self. Little by little she teaches the stripling all that she knows of love; and later on, when she is cloyed with possession and weary of his absence at the wars, much that he had never guessed before of falsehood. The story is an admirable commentary on the well-known lines in Chaucer's "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess," where the Black Knight says of himself--

... since first I couth Have any manner wit from youth Or kindely understanding [natural To comprehend in any thing What love was in mine owne wit, Dreadeless I have ever yet [certainly Been tributary and given rent To love, wholly with good intent, And through pleasaunce become his thrall With good will--body, heart, and all.

All this I put in his servage As to my lord, and did homage, And full devoutly prayed him-to, He should beset mine hearte so That it plesaunce to him were, And wors.h.i.+p to my lady dear.

And this was long, and many a year Ere that mine heart was set aught-where, That I did thus, and knew not why; I trow, it came me kindely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM OF HATFIELD, SON OF EDWARD III AND PHILIPPA, FROM HIS TOMB IN YORK MINSTER (1336)

SHOWING THE DRESS OF A n.o.bLE YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 14TH CENTURY]

If death comes at this moment, then "J'aurai pa.s.se par la terre, n'ayant rien aime que l'amour." But instead of death comes something not less sudden and overmastering. To the Black Knight, as to Dante, the Lady of his Life is revealed between two throbs of the heart--

It happed that I came on a day Into a place where I say [saw Truly the fairest company Of ladies, that ever man with eye Had seen together in one place ...

Sooth to sayen, I saw one That was like none of the rout ...