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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Chaucer and His England, by G. G. Coulton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Chaucer and His England
+
+Author: G. G. Coulton
+
+Release Date: August 31, 2011 [EBook #37277]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE.
+
+    "A more enlightening picture than any we have yet read."--_Times._
+
+    "It will, I hope, be read by every one who wants to know what the
+    Middle Ages were really like."--DR. RASHDALL in _Independent Review_.
+
+    "Extraordinarily vivacious, fresh, and vivid."--MR. C. F. G.
+    MASTERMAN, M.P., in _Speaker_.
+
+FRIAR'S LANTERN: A Medićval Fantasia.
+
+    "Written with undeniable ability."--_Times._
+
+    "Worthy of a place beside the 'Cloister and the Hearth' as a true work
+    of art."--_Commonwealth._
+
+FATHER RHINE; with 14 Illustrations.
+
+    "This is a very pleasant book of journeying."--_Spectator._
+
+PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND PUBLIC NEEDS.
+
+    "If the 'man in the street,' who and whoever he be, will take the
+    trouble to read it, his eyes will be opened."--_Times._
+
+MEDIĆVAL STUDIES: Seven Essays mostly reprinted from the monthly and
+quarterly reviews.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER
+
+PAINTED BY ORDER OF HIS PUPIL THOMAS HOCCLEVE, IN A COPY OF THE LATTER'S
+"REGEMENT OF PRINCES." THE HAIR AND BEARD ARE GREY, THE EYES HAZEL: HE HAS
+A ROSARY IN HIS LEFT HAND AND A BLACK PENCASE OR PENKNIFE HANGS FROM HIS
+NECK]
+
+
+
+
+  CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
+
+
+  BY G. G. COULTON, M.A.
+  AUTHOR OF "FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE," ETC.
+
+
+  WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  METHUEN & CO.
+  36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+  LONDON
+
+
+
+
+_First Published in 1908_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+No book of this size can pretend to treat exhaustively of all that
+concerns Chaucer and his England; but the Author's main aim has been to
+supply an informal historical commentary on the poet's works. He has not
+hesitated, in a book intended for the general public, to modernize
+Chaucer's spelling, or even on rare occasions to change a word.
+
+His best acknowledgments are due to those who have laboured so fruitfully
+during the last fifty years in publishing Chaucerian and other original
+documents of the later Middle Ages; more especially to Dr. F. J.
+Furnivall, the indefatigable founder of the Chaucer Society and the Early
+English Text Society; to Professor W. W. Skeat, whose ungrudging
+generosity in private help is necessarily known only to a small percentage
+of those who have been aided by his printed works; to Dr. R. R. Sharpe,
+archivist of the London Guildhall; to Prebendary F. C. Hingeston-Randolph
+and other editors of Episcopal Registers; to Messrs. W. Hudson and Walter
+Rye for their contributions to Norfolk history; and to Mr. V. B.
+Redstone's researches in Chaucerian genealogy. His proofs have enjoyed the
+great advantage of revision by Dr. Furnivall, who has made many valuable
+suggestions and corrections, but who is in no way responsible for other
+possible errors or omissions. The many debts to other writers are, it is
+hoped, duly acknowledged in their places; but the Author must here confess
+himself specially beholden to the writings of M. Jusserand, whose rare
+sympathy and insight are combined with an equal charm of exposition.
+
+He has also to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall, Messrs. E. Kelsey and H. R.
+Browne of Eastbourne, and the Librarian of Uppingham School, for kind
+permission to reproduce seven of the illustrations; also the Editor of the
+_Home and Counties Magazine_ for similar courtesy with regard to the plan
+of Chaucer's Aldgate included in a 16th-century survey published for the
+first time in that magazine (vol. i. p. 50).
+
+
+EASTBOURNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                    PAGE
+
+  PREFACE                                              v
+
+  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS                               xi
+
+  CHAPTER I
+    ENGLAND IN EMBRYO                                  1
+
+  CHAPTER II
+    BOYHOOD AND YOUTH                                 12
+
+  CHAPTER III
+    THE KING'S SQUIRE                                 25
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+    THE AMBASSADOR                                    36
+
+  CHAPTER V
+    THE MAN OF BUSINESS                               51
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+    LAST DAYS                                         64
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+    LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE                               76
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+    ALDGATE TOWER                                     93
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+    TOWN AND COUNTRY                                 104
+
+  CHAPTER X
+    THE LAWS OF LONDON                               119
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+    "CANTERBURY TALES"--THE _DRAMATIS PERSONĆ_       137
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+    "CANTERBURY TALES"--FIRST AND SECOND DAYS        151
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+    "CANTERBURY TALES"--THIRD AND FOURTH DAYS        160
+
+  CHAPTER XIV
+    KING AND QUEEN                                   173
+
+  CHAPTER XV
+    KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES                              188
+
+  CHAPTER XVI
+    HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR                      202
+
+  CHAPTER XVII
+    THE GAY SCIENCE                                  217
+
+  CHAPTER XVIII
+    THE GREAT WAR                                    232
+
+  CHAPTER XIX
+    THE BURDEN OF THE WAR                            245
+
+  CHAPTER XX
+    THE POOR                                         257
+
+  CHAPTER XXI
+    MERRY ENGLAND                                    272
+
+  CHAPTER XXII
+    THE KING'S PEACE                                 282
+
+  CHAPTER XXIII
+    PRIESTS AND PEOPLE                               294
+
+  CHAPTER XXIV
+    CONCLUSION                                       304
+
+  INDEX                                              317
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
+
+
+                                                        PAGE
+
+  MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL         18
+    _From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes"_
+
+  PLANS OF MEDIEVAL DWELLINGS                             97
+
+  MEDIEVAL MUMMERS                                       110
+    _From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes"_
+
+  PILGRIMS IN BED AT INN                                 139
+    _From T. Wright's "Homes of other Days"_
+
+  THE SQUIRE OF THE "CANTERBURY TALES"                   146
+    _From the Ellesmere MS. (15th century)_
+
+  THE MILLER                                             150
+    _From the Ellesmere MS._
+
+  THE WIFE OF BATH                                       162
+    _From the Ellesmere MS._
+
+  THE FRIAR                                              165
+    _From the Ellesmere MS._
+
+  PEACOCK FEAST OF LYNN                                  177
+    _From Stothard's Facsimile of the Original Brass_
+
+  A KNIGHT AND HIS LADY                                  203
+    _From Boutell's "Monumental Brasses"_
+
+  A BEVY OF LADIES                                       220
+    _From T. Wright's "Womankind in Western Europe"_
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF PLATES
+
+
+  THE HOCCLEVE PORTRAIT OF CHAUCER                    _Frontispiece_
+    _From the Painting in "The Regement of Princes"_
+
+                                                         FACING PAGE
+
+  LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY                        15
+    _From Vertue's Engraving of Aggas's Map_
+
+  WESTMINSTER HALL                                                32
+    _From a Photograph by J. Valentine & Sons_
+
+  A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE                                           35
+    _From the Louterell Psalter_
+
+  WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY                72
+    _From Vertue's Engraving of Aggas's Map_
+
+  WESTMINSTER ABBEY                                               73
+    _From a Photograph by S. B. Bolas & Co._
+
+  THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND                 82
+    _From MS. Roy. 16 F. ii. f. 73_
+
+  A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE 14TH CENTURY                              92
+    _From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6, f. 503 b_
+
+  ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS, AS RECONSTITUTED IN W.
+  NEWTON'S "LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME"                            101
+
+  A PARTY OF PILGRIMS                                            148
+    _From MS. Roy. 18 D. ii. f. 148_
+
+  CANTERBURY                                                     170
+    _From W. Smith's Drawing of 1588. (Sloane MS. 2596)_
+
+  EDWARD III.                                                    173
+    _From his Tomb in Westminster Abbey_
+
+  PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT                                           181
+    _From her Tomb in Westminster Abbey_
+
+  SIR GEOFFREY LOUTERELL, WITH HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER             194
+    _From the Louterell Psalter (Early 14th Century)_
+
+  SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL                                       216
+
+  CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH CENTURY CLASSROOM                216
+    _From MS. Roy. VI. E. 6, f. 214_
+
+  WILLIAM OF HATFIELD, SON OF EDWARD III. AND PHILIPPA           224
+    _From his Tomb in York Minster (1336)_
+
+  BODIAM CASTLE, KENT                                            245
+
+  THE PLOUGHMAN                                                  268
+    _From the Louterell Psalter (Early 14th Century)_
+
+  THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSSEX, BEFORE ITS RECENT
+  RESTORATION                                                    298
+
+  WESTMINSTER ABBEY--VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER'S TOMB               313
+    _From a Photograph by S. B. Bolas & Co._
+
+
+
+
+CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ENGLAND IN EMBRYO
+
+  "O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
+  And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames!"
+
+
+Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of
+birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain
+from pressing too literally the poet's fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer's
+times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them;
+but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a
+genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the
+20th century. There is indeed a glory over the distant past which is (in
+spite of the paradox) scarcely less real for being to a great extent
+imaginary; scarcely less true because it owes so much to the beholder's
+eye. It is like the subtle charm we feel every time we set foot afresh on
+a foreign shore. It is just because we should never dream of choosing
+France or Germany for our home that we love them so much for our holidays;
+it is just because we are so deeply rooted in our own age that we find so
+much pleasure and profit in the past, where we may build for ourselves a
+new heaven and a new earth out of the wreck of a vanished world. The very
+things which would oppress us out of all proportion as present-day
+realities dwindle to even less than their real significance in the long
+perspective of history. All the oppressions that were then done under the
+sun, and the tears of such as were oppressed, show very small in the
+sum-total of things; the ancient tale of wrong has little meaning to us
+who repose so far above it all; the real landmarks are the great men who
+for a moment moulded the world to their own will, or those still greater
+who kept themselves altogether unspotted from it. Human nature gives the
+lie direct to Mark Antony's bitter rhetoric: it is rather the good that
+lives after a man, and the evil that is oft interred with his bones. The
+balance may not be very heavy, but it is on the right side; man's
+insatiable curiosity about his fellow-men is as natural as his appetite
+for food, which may on the whole be trusted to refuse the evil and choose
+the good; and, in both cases, his taste is, within obvious limits, a true
+guide. It is a healthy instinct which prompts us to dwell on the beauties
+of an ancient timber-built house, or on the gorgeous pageantry of the
+Middle Ages, without a too curious scrutiny of what may lie under the
+surface; and at this distance the 14th century stands out to the modern
+eye with a clearness and brilliancy which few men can see in their own
+age, or even in that immediate past which must always be partially dimmed
+with the dust of present-day conflicts. Those who were separated by only a
+few generations from the Middle Ages could seldom judge them with
+sufficient sympathy. Even two hundred years ago, most Englishmen thought
+of that time as a great forest from which we had not long emerged; they
+looked back and saw it in imagination as Dante saw the dark wood of his
+own wanderings--bitter as death, cruel as the perilous sea from which a
+spent swimmer has just struggled out upon the shore. Then, with Goethe and
+Scott, came the Romantic Revival; and these men showed us the Middle Ages
+peopled with living creatures--beasts of prey, indeed, in very many cases,
+but always bright and swift and attractive, as wild beasts are in
+comparison with the commonplace stock of our fields and farmyards--bright
+in themselves, and heightened in colour by the artificial brilliancy which
+perspective gives to all that we see through the wrong end of a telescope.
+Since then men have turned the other end of the telescope on medieval
+society, and now, in due course, the microscope, with many curious
+results. But it is always good to balance our too detailed impressions
+with a general survey, and to take a brief holiday, of set purpose, from
+the world in which our own daily work has to be done, into a race of men
+so unlike our own even amid all their general resemblance.
+
+For the England of Edward III. was already, in its main national features,
+the England in which we live to-day. "In no country of Europe are the
+present-day institutions and manners and beliefs so directly derived from
+the social state of five centuries ago."[1] The year 1340, which saw the
+abolition of the law of Englishry, was very likely the exact year of
+Chaucer's birth; and from that time forward our legislation ceased to
+recognize any distinction of races: all natives of England were alike
+Englishmen. Sixteen years later it was first enacted that cases in the
+Sheriff's Courts of London should be pleaded in English; seven years
+later, again, this became in theory the language not only of the King's
+law courts, but also to some extent of Parliament; and Nicolas quotes an
+amusing instance of two ambassadors to France, a Knight and a Doctor of
+Laws, who confessed in 1404 "we are as ignorant of French as of Hebrew."
+The contemporary Trevisa apparently attributes this rapid breakdown to the
+Great Pestilence of 1349; but even before this the French language must
+have been in full decay among us, for at the Parliament which Edward III.
+called in 1337 to advise him about declaring war on France, the ambassador
+of Robert d'Artois took care to speak "in English, in order to be
+understanded of all folk, for a man ever knoweth better what he would say
+and propose in the language of his childhood than in any other." Later in
+the same year, in the famous statute which forbade all sports except the
+longbow, it was further ordained "that all lords, barons, knights, and
+honourable men of good towns should be careful and diligent to teach and
+instruct their children in the French tongue, whereby they might be the
+more skilful and practised in their wars."[2] But Acts of Parliament are
+not omnipotent even in the 20th century; and in the 14th they often
+represented rather pious aspirations than workaday facts. It was easier to
+foster a healthy pastime like archery than to enforce scholastic
+regulations which parents and masters were alike tempted to neglect; and
+certainly the French language lost ground very rapidly in the latter half
+of the century. In 1362 English superseded French as the spoken language
+of the law courts; next year the Chancellor opened Parliament in an
+English speech; and in 1385 Trevisa complained that boys at
+grammar-schools "know no more French than their left heel." The language
+lingered, of course. Chaucer's friend and contemporary, Gower, wrote as
+much in French as in English. French still kept the upper hand in
+Parliament till about fifty years after Chaucer's death, nor did the
+statutes cease altogether to be published in that language until the reign
+of Henry VIII. But though it was still the Court tongue in Chaucer's time,
+and though we do not know that Edward III. was capable of addressing his
+Commons in their native tongue, yet Henry IV. took care to claim the
+throne before Parliament in plain English;[3] and even before that time
+French had already become an exotic, an artificial dialect needing
+hothouse culture--no longer French of Paris, but that of "Stratford attë
+Bowë."[4] The tongue sat ill on a nation that was already proud of its
+insularity and unity. Even while labouring to write in French, Gower
+dedicates his work to his country: "O gentile Engletere, a toi j'escrits."
+It is not the least of Chaucer's claims on our gratitude that, from the
+very first, he wrote for the English people in English--that is, in the
+mixed dialect of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French which was habitually spoken
+in London by the upper middle classes of a mingled Norman and Teutonic
+population[5]--and that in so doing he laid the foundations of a national
+literary language. Much, of course, still remained to be done. Caxton, in
+1490, shows us how an Englishman might well be taken for a Frenchman
+outside his own country,[6] as in modern Germany a foreigner who speaks
+fluently, however incorrectly, passes easily for a German of some remote
+and barbarous province. Indeed, English unity in Chaucer's time was as
+recent as that of the modern German empire. Men would still go before
+bishops and magistrates to purge themselves by a solemn oath from the
+injurious suspicion of being Scots, and therefore enemies to the realm;
+and a couple of generations earlier the suspected Welshman had found
+himself under the same necessity. The articles of peace drawn up in 1274
+at Oxford between the northern and Irish scholars "read like a treaty of
+peace between hostile nations rather than an act of University
+legislation"; and even at the end of Chaucer's life we may find royal
+letters "licensing John Russell, born in Ireland, to reside in England,
+notwithstanding the proclamation that all Irish-born were to go and stay
+in their own country." But the Oxford _Concordia_ of 1274 was the last
+which recognized that division of students into "nations" which still
+remained so real at Paris and other continental universities; and though
+blood still reddened Oxford streets for a century longer in the ancient
+quarrel of north and south, yet the "great slaughter" of 1354 was entirely
+a town and gown affray.[7]
+
+The foundations of modern England were laid by Edward I., who did more
+than any other king to create a national parliament, a national system of
+justice, and a national army.[8] Edward III., with far less creative
+power, but with equal energy and ambition, inherited the ripe fruits of
+his grandfather's policy, and raised England to a place in European
+politics which she had never reached before and was seldom to reach again.
+"That which touches all," said Edward I., "should be approved by all";
+and, though continental sovereigns might use similar language as a subtle
+cloke for their arbitrary encroachments, in England the maxim had from the
+first a real meaning. The great barons--themselves steadily dwindling in
+feudal power--no longer sat alone in the King's councils; by their side
+sat country gentlemen and citizens elected to share in the
+responsibilities of government; and the clergy, but for their own
+persistent separatism, might have sent their chosen representatives to sit
+with the rest. Moreover, already in Chaucer's time we find precedents for
+the boldest demands of the Long Parliament. The Commons claimed, and for a
+time obtained, the control of taxation; and five of Richard II.'s
+ministers were condemned as traitors for counselling him to measures which
+Parliament branded as unconstitutional. Professor Maitland has well
+described the "omnicompetence" of Parliament at this time. Nothing human
+was alien to its sphere of activity, from the sale of herrings at Yarmouth
+fair and the fashion of citizens' girdles to those great constitutional
+questions which remained in dispute for three centuries longer, and were
+only settled at last by a civil war and a revolution.
+
+Nor was the judicial system less truly national than the Parliament.
+Maitland has pointed out that the years 1272-1290 were more fruitful in
+epoch-making legislation than any other period of English history, except
+perhaps that which succeeded the Reform Bill of 1832. Chaucer, like
+ourselves, lived in an age which was consolidating the great achievements
+of two generations past, and looking forward to far-reaching social
+changes in the future. Already in his time the Roman Law was outlandish in
+England; our land laws were fixed in many principles which for centuries
+remained unquestioned, and which are often found to underlie even the
+present system. Already under Edward III., as for many centuries
+afterwards, men looked upon the main principles of English jurisprudence
+as settled for ever, and strove only by a series of ingenious
+accommodations to fit them in with the requirements of a changing world.
+The framework of the law courts, again, was roughly that of modern
+England. The King's judges were no longer clerics, but laymen chosen from
+among the professional pleaders in the courts; and here again "one
+remarkable characteristic of our legal system is fixed."
+
+In many other ways, too, the kingdom had outgrown its clerical tutelage.
+Learning and art had long since ceased to be predominantly monastic; for
+at least two centuries before Chaucer's birth they had left the protection
+of the cloister, and flourished far more luxuriantly in the great world
+than they ever could have done under strictly monastic conditions. True
+monasticism was predominantly puritan, and therefore unfavourable to free
+development in any direction but that of mystic contemplation; if the
+spirit of St. Bernard had lived among the Cistercians, the glories of
+Tintern and Rievaulx would have been impossible; and even our cathedrals
+and parish churches owed more of their beauties to laymen than to clerics.
+So also with our universities, which rose on the ruins of monastic
+learning; and in which, despite the fresh impetus received from the
+Friars, the lay spirit still grew rapidly under the shelter of the Church.
+In the 14th century, when Oxford could show such a roll of philosophers
+that "not all the other Nations and Universities of Europe between them
+could muster such a list," a growing proportion of these were not
+cloistered, but secular clergy. At no earlier time could these latter have
+shown three such Oxford doctors as Bradwardine, Richard of Armagh, and
+Wycliffe. The General Chapter of the Benedictines strove repeatedly, but
+in vain, to compel a reasonable proportion of monks to study at Oxford or
+Cambridge.[9] Before the end of Edward III.'s reign, the English
+Universities had become far more truly national than at any previous time;
+their training and aims were less definitely ecclesiastical, and their
+culture overflowed to laymen like Chaucer and Gower.[10] Moreover, the
+Inns of Court had become practically lay universities of law: and, quite
+apart from Wycliffism, there was a rapid growth not only of the
+non-clerical but even of anti-clerical spirit. Blow after blow was struck
+at Papal privileges by successive Parliaments in which the representatives
+of the lower clergy no longer sat. The Pope's demand for arrears of John's
+tribute from England was rejected so emphatically that it was never
+pressed again; Parliament repudiated Papal claims of presentation to
+vacant benefices, and forbade, under the severest penalties, all
+unlicensed appeals to Rome from English courts. It is true that our kings
+constantly gave way on these two last points, but only because it was
+easier to share the spoils by connivance with the Popes; and these
+statutes mark none the less an epoch in English history. In 1371, again,
+Edward III. assented to a petition from Parliament which pleaded "inasmuch
+as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of the men of
+Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for their acts,
+whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may happen in times
+to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of his own realm be
+elected to replace them, and that none but laymen henceforth be
+chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of privy seal, or
+other great officers of the realm." Already the partial sequestration of
+the Alien Priories by the three Edwards, and the total suppression and
+spoliation of the Templars in 1312, had accustomed men's minds to schemes
+of wholesale disendowment which were advocated as earnestly by an
+anti-Lollard like Langland[11] as by Wycliffe himself; and indeed this
+writer, the most religious among the three principal poets of that age,
+was also the most anticlerical. In Edward III.'s reign the Reformation was
+already definitely in sight.
+
+In short, Chaucer's lot was cast in an epoch-making age. Then began our
+definite claim to the lordship of the sea; Sluys, our first great maritime
+victory, the Trafalgar of the Middle Ages, was won in the same year in
+which the poet was probably born; six years later we captured Calais, our
+first colony; and it was noted even in those days that the Englishman
+prospered still more abroad than at home. Never before or since have
+English armies been so frequently and so uniformly victorious as during
+the first thirty years of Chaucer's life; seldom have our commerce and our
+liberties developed more rapidly; and if the disasters which he saw were
+no less strange, these also helped to ripen his many-sided genius. The
+Great Pestilence of 1349, more terrible than any other recorded in
+history; the first pitched battle between Labour and Capital in 1381; the
+first formal deposition of an English King in 1327, to be repeated still
+more solemnly in 1399; all these must have affected the poet almost as
+deeply as they affected the State, notwithstanding the persistency with
+which he generally looks upon the brighter side. Professor Raleigh has
+wittily applied to him the confession of Dr. Johnson's friend, "I have
+tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness
+was always breaking in." It is difficult, however, not to surmise a great
+deal of more or less unwilling philosophy beneath Chaucer's delightful
+flow of good-humour. His subtle ironies may tell as plain a tale as other
+men's open complaints; and sometimes he hastens to laugh where we might
+suspect a rising lump in his throat. But the laugh is there, or at least
+the easy, good-natured smile. Where Gower sees an England more hopelessly
+given over to the Devil than even in Carlyle's most dyspeptic
+nightmares--where the robuster Langland sees an impending religious
+Armageddon, and the honest soul's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction
+towards a New Jerusalem rather hoped for than seen even by the eye of
+faith--there Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry
+England to which the horrors of the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death
+and Tyler's revolt are but a foil. Like many others in the Middle Ages, he
+seems convinced of the peculiar instability of the English character. He
+knew that he was living--as all generations are more or less conscious of
+living--in an uncomfortable borderland between that which once was, but
+can be no longer, and that which shall be, but cannot yet come to pass;
+yet all these changes supplied the artist with that variety of colour and
+form which he needed; and the man seems to have gone through life in the
+tranquil conviction that this was a pleasant world, and his own land a
+particularly privileged spot. The England of Chaucer is that of which one
+of his most noted predecessors wrote, "England is a strong land and a
+sturdy, and the plenteousest corner of the world, so rich a land that
+unneth it needeth help of any land, and every other land needeth help of
+England. England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft times able to
+mirth and game, free men of heart and with tongue, but the hand is more
+better and more free than the tongue."[12]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
+
+  "Jeunes amours, si vite épanouies,
+  Vous ętes l'aube et le matin du coeur.
+  Charmez l'enfant, extases inouďes
+  Et, quand le soir vient avec la douleur,
+  Charmez encor nos âmes éblouies,
+  Jeunes amours, si vite évanouies!"
+                                  VICTOR HUGO
+
+
+The name _Chaucer_ was in some cases a corruption of _chauffecire_, _i.e._
+"chafewax," or clerk in the Chancery, whose duty it was to help in the
+elaborate operation of sealing royal documents.[13] But Mr. V. B. Redstone
+seems to have shown conclusively that the poet's ancestors were
+_chaussiers_, or makers of long hose, and that they combined this business
+with other more or less extensive mercantile operations, especially as
+vintners. The family, like others in the wine trade, may well have come
+originally from Gascony; but in the 13th and 14th centuries it seems to
+have thriven mainly in London and East Anglia, and recent research has
+definitely traced the poet's immediate ancestry to Ipswich.[14] His
+grandfather, Robert Malyn, surnamed le Chaucer, came from the Suffolk
+village of Dennington, and set up a tavern in Ipswich. Robert left a
+child named John, who was forcibly abducted one night in 1324 by Geoffrey
+Stace, apparently his uncle. When Stace "stole and took away by force and
+arms--viz. swords, bows, and arrows--the said John," his object was to
+settle possible difficulties of succession to a certain estate by forcing
+the boy to marry Joan de Westhale; and he pleaded in his justification the
+custom of Ipswich, by which "an heir became of full age at the end of his
+twelfth year, if he knew how to reckon and measure";[15] but he was very
+heavily fined for his breach of the peace. We learn from the pleadings in
+this case that John Chaucer was still unmarried in 1328; that he lived in
+London with his stepfather, namesake, and fellow-vintner, Richard Chaucer,
+and that his patrimony was very small. Richard, dying twenty-one years
+later, left his house and his tavern to the Church; but he had very likely
+given his stepson substantial help during his lifetime. In any case, John
+must have thriven rapidly, for we find him, in 1338, at the age of
+twenty-six or thereabouts, among the distinguished company which followed
+Edward III. on his journey up the Rhine to negociate an alliance with the
+Emperor Louis IV. The Royal Wardrobe Books give many interesting details
+of this journey.[16] Queen Philippa accompanied the King half-way across
+Brabant, and then returned to Antwerp, where she gave birth to Lionel of
+Clarence, the poet's first master. Among the party were also several of
+the household of the Earl of Derby, father-in-law to that John of Gaunt
+with whom Geoffrey Chaucer's fortunes were to be closely bound. The
+travellers had started from Antwerp on Sunday, August 16; and on the
+following Sunday a long day's journey brought them within sight of the
+colossal choir which, until sixty years ago, was almost all that existed
+of Cologne Cathedral. Here the King gave liberally to the building fund;
+and here John Chaucer probably stayed behind, since he and his
+fellow-citizens had come to promote closer commercial relations between
+the Rhine cities and London. The King was towed up the Rhine by sixty-two
+boatmen, sat in the Diet at Coblenz as Vicar Imperial, formed a seven
+years' alliance with the Emperor, and sent on his five-year-old daughter
+Joan to Munich, where she waited many months vainly, but probably without
+impatience, for the young Duke of Austria, who was at present bespoken for
+her, but who finally turned elsewhere. Meanwhile Edward came back to Bonn,
+where he had to pay the equivalent of about Ł330 modern money for damage
+done in a quarrel between the citizens and those of his suite whom he had
+left behind--John Chaucer probably included. The Queen met the party again
+in Brabant, and they returned to Antwerp after a journey of exactly four
+weeks. We meet with several further allusions to John Chaucer among the
+London city records. It was very likely he who, in July, 1349, brought a
+valuable present from the Bishop of Salisbury to Queen Philippa at
+Devizes, at the time when the ravages of the Black Death in London supply
+a very probable reason for his absence from town, so that he might well
+have had his wife and son with him on this occasion. Certainly it was he
+who, with fourteen other principal vintners of the city, assented in 1342
+to an ordinance providing that "no taverner should mix putrid and corrupt
+wine with wine that is good and pure, or should forbid that, when any
+company is drinking wine in his tavern, one of them, for himself and the
+rest of the company, shall enter the cellar where the tuns or pipes are
+then lying, and see that the measures or vessels into which the wine is
+poured are quite empty and clean within; and in like manner, from what tun
+or what pipe the wine is so drawn." This salutary ordinance was set at
+nought afterwards, as it had been before; but this and other records bear
+witness to John Chaucer's standing in his profession.
+
+
+[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY
+
+(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
+
+THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE
+RIGHT-HAND COW. THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER]
+
+
+Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father's
+London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as "a
+certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between
+the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged
+to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the
+King's highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook
+northwards."[17] The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of
+Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields,
+divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish
+waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands.
+Similar streams, or "fleets," creeping between overhanging houses, are
+still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and
+there even in England.[18] Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign,
+describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving
+it still "a fair brook of sweet water" in its upper course; and he takes
+pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, "a Roman
+captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled."
+In Chaucer's time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and
+Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret's, Lothbury, and ran under the kitchen
+of Grocer's Hall, and again under St. Mildred's church; "from thence
+through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called
+the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far
+into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street." In
+this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly
+upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream
+for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous
+documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to
+reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the
+Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically "stopped up by divers
+filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said
+course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city." The "King's
+highway of Thames Street," though one of the chief arteries of the city,
+cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only
+just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when
+Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired
+houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and
+sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of
+tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside
+lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots
+of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst
+quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted
+the "Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne," many of whom were mayors of the city;
+and Stow's survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First,
+the headquarters of the wine trade, "a large house built of stone and
+timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry.
+There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the
+town." Here also "Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363,
+did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III., King of England, John, King
+of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England),
+Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall
+for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady
+Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect." Picard, as Mr.
+Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer's fellow-vintners on Edward III.'s
+Rhine journey in 1338.[19] Then there were the Vintner's Hall and
+almshouses, which were built in Chaucer's lifetime; the three Guild Halls
+of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of
+Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which
+John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that
+London was up in arms against him, "and unless he took great heed, that
+day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his
+oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but
+he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out
+at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they
+came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the
+princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made
+his complaint."
+
+
+[Illustration: MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL
+
+(From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")]
+
+
+Of Chaucer's childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with
+other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the
+serious risk of other people's windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his
+cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday,
+and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of
+football, or at "leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the
+stone." In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he
+would be sure to flock out with the rest to "play upon the ice; some,
+striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves
+seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to
+draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones
+to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little
+piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow
+out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one
+the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their
+arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort
+exerciseth itself against the time of war."[20] In spring he would watch
+the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk
+abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of
+Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this.
+Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as
+the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily
+to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty
+survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet's Tower
+flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and
+between them, close by Chaucer's own home, the "Tower Royal," in which the
+Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler's revolt. But the Thames
+itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among
+the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, "where the merchants of
+Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels," and
+finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the
+cooks' shops; "for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that
+upon the river's side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold
+in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks' row." Here, then, Chaucer would
+loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of
+strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native
+craft from "far by west," but broad-sailed vessels from every country of
+Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone's
+throw from his father's house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of
+the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard
+coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Lübeck,
+Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21] Chief among the Easterlings at this
+time were the Cologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially
+close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in
+with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty
+Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off
+Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic,
+half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their
+high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of "a Dutch bun and
+a keg of sturgeon," or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of
+Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very
+considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would
+pick up easily enough among this colony of "Merchant Vintners of
+Gascoyne"; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools
+attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul's lay nearest
+to Chaucer's home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks
+in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty
+income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a
+contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great
+merchant city. "When they put me to school," writes Froissart, "there were
+little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would
+serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring;
+and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace ... and then
+would I say to myself, 'When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be
+able to love in earnest?'... When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved
+me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in
+repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod.... I could not be at rest; I
+was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes
+I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but
+all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw
+my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go
+and tumble with them again."[22] Is not childhood essentially the same in
+all countries and in all ages?
+
+The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of
+seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems
+by Chaucer's contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and
+the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two
+sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously
+preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to
+contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince
+Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer's continental
+journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet.
+Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members
+of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey
+Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and
+black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the
+first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling
+payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the
+remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess's
+movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great
+Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her
+train had an equally varied experience. "We may catch glimpses of Chaucer
+in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great
+pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in
+London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost,
+at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again
+at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of
+Queen Isabella at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358),
+at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower."[23]
+
+Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun
+even before his birth,[24] was the tallest and handsomest of all the
+King's sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says--
+
+  "In all the world was then no prince hym like,
+  Of his stature and of all semelynesse
+  Above all men within his hole kyngrike
+  By the shulders he might be seen doutlesse,
+  [And] as a mayde in halle of gentilnesse."
+
+His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may
+be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no
+shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for
+a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among
+other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be
+Chaucer's and Wycliffe's best patron. For all John Chaucer's favour with
+the King, the vintner's son could never have found a place in this great
+society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like
+his own squire--singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May;
+already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while
+staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an
+unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under
+those conditions. Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily
+intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more
+indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could
+seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more
+complacently to the page's love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their
+messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is
+far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit
+Jean de Saintré and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the
+best possible commentary on Chaucer's Court life.
+
+Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early
+poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first
+year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that
+(as in Shakespeare's case) differences of rank added to his despair. It
+may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no
+reason to suppose that Chaucer's affections were less mercurial than those
+of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places
+at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369,
+that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness--
+
+  I hold it to be a sickness
+  That I have suffered this eight year,
+  And yet my boote is never the nere;
+  For there is physician but one
+  That may me heal; but that is done.
+
+Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty, Beauty, and Pleasance;
+but her surname is Fair-Ruthless. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity
+with his complaints of Love's tyranny; but, alas!
+
+  I found her dead, and buried in an heart....
+  And no wight wot that she is dead but I.
+
+The cruel fair stands high above him, a lady of royal excellence, humble
+indeed of heart, yet he scarce dares to call himself her servant--
+
+  Have mercy on me, thou serenest queen,
+  That you have sought so tenderly and yore,
+  Let some stream of your light on me be seen,
+  That love and dread you ever longer the more;
+  For, soothly for to say, I bear the sore,
+  And though I be not cunning for to plain,
+  For Goddës love, have mercy on my pain!
+
+But all is vain, for in the end "Ye recke not whether I float or sink."
+Like the contemporary poets of Piers Plowman, Chaucer discovered soon
+enough that the high road to wisdom lies through
+"Suffer-both-well-and-woe;" and that, before we can possess our souls, we
+must "see much and suffer more."[25] There is more than mere graceful
+irony in the beautiful lines with which, a few years later, he begins his
+"Troilus and Criseyde." He is (he says) the bondservant of Love, one whose
+own woes help him to comfort others' pain, or again, to enlist the
+sympathy of Fortune's favourite--
+
+  But ye lovéres, that bathen in gladness,
+  If any drop of pity in you be,
+  Remembreth you on passéd heaviness
+  That ye have felt, and on th' adversitie
+  Of other folk, and thinketh how that ye
+  Have felt that Lovë durstë you displease,
+  Or ye have won him with too great an ease.
+
+  And prayeth for them that be in the case
+  Of Troilus, as ye may after hear,
+  That Love them bring in heaven to solace;
+  And eke for me prayeth to God so dear....
+
+  And biddeth eke for them that be despaired
+  In love, that never will recovered be....
+
+  And biddeth eke for them that be at ease,
+  That God them grant aye good perséverance,
+  And send them might their ladies so to please
+  That it to Love be worship and pleasance.
+  For so hope I my soulë best t' advance,
+  To pray for them that Lovë's servants be,
+  And write their woe, and live in charitie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE KING'S SQUIRE
+
+  For I, that God of Lovë's servants serve,
+  Dare not to Love for mine unlikeliness
+  Prayen for speed, though I should therefore sterve,
+  So far am I from this help in darkness!
+                                  "Troilus and Criseyde," i., 15
+
+
+In Chaucer's life, as in the "Seven Ages of Man," the soldier follows hard
+upon the lover; he is scarcely out of his 'teens before we find him riding
+to the Great War, "in hope to stonden in his lady grace." He fought in
+that strange campaign of 1359-60, which began with such magnificent
+preparations, but ended so ineffectually. Edward marched across France
+from Calais to Reims with a splendid army and an unheard-of baggage train;
+but the towns closed their gates, the French armies hovered out of his
+reach, and the weather was such that horses and men died like flies. "The
+xiii. day of Aprill [1360] King Edward with his Oost lay before the Citee
+off Parys; the which was a ffoule Derke day of myste, and off haylle, and
+so bytter colde, that syttyng on horse bak men dyed. Wherefore, unto this
+day yt ys called blak Monday, and wolle be longe tyme here affter."[26]
+Edward felt that the stars fought against him, and was glad to make a less
+advantageous peace than he might have had before this wasteful raid.
+Chaucer's friend and brother-poet, Eustache Deschamps, recalls how the
+English took up their quarters in the villages and convents that crown the
+heights round Reims, and watched forty days for a favourable opportunity
+of attack. Froissart also tells us how Edward feared to assault so strong
+a city, and only blockaded it for seven weeks, until "it began to irk him,
+and his men found nought more to forage, and began to lose their horses,
+and were at great disease for lack of victuals." It was probably on one of
+these foraging parties that Chaucer was cut off with other stragglers by
+the French skirmishers; and the King paid Ł16 towards his ransom.[27] The
+items in the same account range from Ł50 paid towards the ransom of
+Richard Stury (a distinguished soldier who was afterwards a
+fellow-ambassador of Chaucer's), to Ł6 13_s._ 4_d._ "in compensation for
+the Lord Andrew Lutterell's dead horse," and Ł2 towards an archer's
+ransom.
+
+John Chaucer died in 1366, and his thrifty widow hastened to marry
+Bartholomew Attechapel; "the funeral bakemeats did coldly furnish forth
+the marriage tables."[28] Geoffrey appears to have inherited little
+property from either of them; but it must be remembered that economies
+were difficult in the Middle Ages, so that men lived far more nearly up to
+their incomes than in modern times; and, again, that a considerable
+proportion of a citizen's legacies often went to the Church. The healthy
+English and American practice of giving a boy a good start and then
+leaving him to shift for himself was therefore even more common in the
+14th century than now. This is essentially the state of things which we
+find described with amazement, and doubtless with a good deal of
+exaggeration, in the "Italian Relation of England" of a century later. The
+English tradesmen (says the author) show so little affection towards their
+children that "after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age
+of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and
+females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them
+generally for another seven or nine years." Thus the children look more to
+their masters than to their natural parents, and, "having no hope of their
+paternal inheritance," set up on their own account and marry away from
+home.[29] From this source (proceeds the Italian) springs that greed of
+gain and that omnipotence of money, even in the moral sphere, which are so
+characteristic of England. John Chaucer may have left little property to
+his son, but he had given him an excellent education, and put him in the
+way of making his own fortune; for in 1367 we find him a yeoman of the
+King's chamber, and endowed with a life-pension of twenty marks "of our
+special grace, and for the good services which our beloved yeoman Geoffrey
+Chaucer hath rendered us and shall render us for the future." The phrase
+makes it probable that he had already been some little time in the King's
+service--very likely as early as the unlucky campaign in which Edward had
+helped towards his ransom--and other indications make it almost certain
+that he was by this time a married man. Nine years before this, side by
+side with Chaucer in the Countess of Ulster's household accounts, we find
+among the ladies one Philippa _Pan'_, with a mark of abbreviation, which
+probably stands for _panetaria_, or mistress of the pantry. Just as the
+Countess bought Chaucer's red-and-black hosen, so she paid "for the making
+of Philippa's trimmings," "for the fashioning of one tunic for
+Philippa,"[30] "for the making of a corset for Philippa and for the
+fur-work," "for XLVIII great buttons of ... [unfortunate gap in the MS.]
+... bought in London by the aforesaid John Massingham for buttoning the
+aforesaid Philippa's trimmings"; and in each case her steward records the
+payment "for drink given to the aforesaid workmen according to the custom
+of London." Eight years after this (1366) the Queen granted a life-pension
+to her "damoiselle of the chamber," Philippa Chaucer. Six years later,
+again, Philippa Chaucer is in attendance upon John of Gaunt's wife; and in
+another two years we find her definitely spoken of as the wife of Geoffrey
+Chaucer, through whose hands her pension is paid on this occasion, and
+sometimes in later years. On the face of these documents the obvious
+conclusion would seem to be that the lady, who was certainly _Philippa
+Chaucer_ in 1366, and equally certainly _Philippa, wife of Geoffrey
+Chaucer_, in 1374, was already in 1366 our poet's wife. The only argument
+of apparent weight which has been urged against it is in fact of very
+little account when we consider actual medieval conditions. It has been
+pleaded that if Chaucer complained in 1366 of an unrequited love which had
+tortured him for eight years and still overshadowed his life, he could not
+already be a married man. To urge this is to neglect one of the most
+characteristic features of good society in the Middle Ages. Even Léon
+Gautier, the enthusiastic apologist of chivalry, admits sadly that the
+feudal marriage was too often a loveless compact, except so far as the
+pair might shake down together afterwards;[31] and conjugal love plays a
+very secondary part in the great romances of chivalry. However apocryphal
+may be the alleged solemn verdict of a Court of Love that husband and wife
+had no right to be in love with each other, the sentence was at least
+recognized as _ben trovato_; and nobody who has closely studied medieval
+society, either in romance or in chronicle, would suppose that Chaucer
+blushed to feel a hopeless passion for another, or to write openly of it
+while he had a wife of his own. Dante's Beatrice, and probably Petrarch's
+Laura, were married women; and, however strongly we may be inclined to
+urge the exceptional and ethereal nature of these two cases, nothing of
+the kind can be pleaded for Boccaccio's Fiammetta and Froissart's
+anonymous lady-love. Chaucer, therefore, might well have followed the
+examples of the four greatest writers of his century. Moreover, in this
+case we have evidence that he and Philippa not only began, but continued
+and ended with at least a homoeopathic dose of that "little aversion"
+which Mrs. Malaprop so strongly recommended in matrimony. His allusions to
+wedded life are predominantly disrespectful, or at best mockingly
+ironical; and though his own marriage may well have steadied him in some
+ways--Prof. Skeat points out that his least moral tales were all written
+after Philippa's death in 1387--yet the evidence is against his having
+found in it such companionship as might have chained his too errant fancy.
+The lives of Burne-Jones and Morris throw unexpected sidelights on that of
+the master whom they loved so well; and neither of them seems fully to
+have realized how much his own development owed to modern things for which
+seventeen generations of men have struggled and suffered since Chaucer's
+time. No artist of the Middle Ages--or, indeed, of any but quite recent
+times--could have earned by his genius a passport into society for wife
+and family as well as himself; nor could anything but a miracle have
+unbarred for Chaucer that paradise of splendid work, pure domestic
+felicity, and social success which attracts us so much in the life of
+Burne-Jones.[32] His wife was probably rather his social superior, and
+both would have had in any case a certain status as attendants at Court;
+but that was in itself an unhealthy life, and so far as Chaucer's poetry
+raised him above his fellow yeomen or fellow squires, so far that special
+favour would tend to separate him from his wife. A courtly poet's married
+life could scarcely be happy in an age compounded of such social licence
+and such galling restrictions: an age when a man might recite the Miller's
+and Reve's tales in mixed company, yet a girl was expected not to speak
+till she was addressed, to fold her hands when she sat down, to keep her
+eyes fixed on the ground as she walked, to assume that all talk of love
+meant illicit love, and to avoid even the most natural familiarities on
+pain of scandal.[33] We may very easily exaggerate the want of harmony in
+the Chaucer household; but everything tends to assure us that his was not
+altogether an ideal marriage. When, therefore, he tells us he has long
+been the servant of Love, and that he is the very clerk of Love, we need
+not suppose any reference here to the lady who had been his wife certainly
+for some years, and perhaps for nearly twenty. Prof. Hales, however, seems
+to go a good deal too far in assuming that Philippa was in attendance on
+Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, while her husband lived snugly in
+bachelor apartments over Aldgate.[34]
+
+But who, it may be asked, was this Philippa of the Pantry before she
+became Philippa Chaucer? Here again the indications, though tantalizingly
+slight, all point towards some connection with John of Gaunt, Chaucer's
+great patron. She was probably either a Swynford or a Roet, _i.e._
+sister-in-law or own sister to Katherine Roet, who married Sir Thomas
+Swynford, and who became in after life first mistress and finally wife to
+John of Gaunt. From this marriage were descended the great Beaufort
+family, of which the most powerful member, the Cardinal Minister of Henry
+VI., speaks in one of his letters of his _cousin_, Thomas Chaucer.[35]
+This again is complicated by the doubt which has been thrown on a Thomas
+Chaucer's sonship to Geoffrey, in spite of the definite assertion by the
+former's contemporary, Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University.
+
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER HALL
+
+(THE GREAT HALL OF THE KING'S PALACE AT WESTMINSTER)]
+
+
+Meanwhile, however, we are certain that Chaucer was in 1367 a Yeoman of
+Edward III.'s Chamber, and that he was promoted five years later to be a
+squire in the Royal household. The still existing Household Ordinances of
+Edward II. on one side, and Edward IV. on the other, agree so closely in
+their description of the duties of these two offices, that we may infer
+pretty exactly what they were in Chaucer's time. The earlier ordinances
+prescribe that the yeomen "shall serve in the chamber, making beds,
+holding and carrying torches, and divers other things which [the King] and
+the chamberlain shall command them. These [yeomen] shall eat in the
+chamber before the King. And each of them, be he well or ill, shall have
+for livery one darre[36] of bread, one gallon of beer, a _messe de
+gros_[37] from the kitchen, and yearly a robe in cloth or a mark in money;
+and for shoes 4_s._ 8_d._, at two seasons in the year.[38] And if any of
+them be sent out of the Court in the King's business, by his commandment,
+he shall have 4_d._ a day for his expenses." The later ordinances add to
+these duties "to attend the Chamber, to watch the King by course, to go
+messages, etc." The yeomen were bedded two by two, apparently on the floor
+of the great hall, so that visitors to Westminster Hall may well happen
+to tread on the spot where Chaucer nightly lay down to sleep. When he
+became a squire, he might either have found himself still on duty in the
+King's chamber, or else an "Esquire for the King's mouth," to taste the
+food for fear of poison, to carve for the King, and to serve his wine on
+bended knee. He still shared a bed with some fellow squire; but they now
+shared a servant also and a private room, to which each might bring at
+night his gallon or half gallon of ale; "and for winter season, each of
+them two Paris candles, one faggot, or else a half of tallwood." Besides
+his mess of great meat, he might now take a mess of roast also;[39] his
+wages were raised to 7-1/2_d._ per day, and he received yearly "two robes
+of cloth, or 40_s._ in money." Moreover, as the Household Book of Edward
+IV. adds, "these esquires of household of old be accustomed, winter and
+summer, in afternoons and in evenings to draw to Lords Chambers within
+Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of
+Chronicles of Kings, and of other policies, or in piping or harping,
+singing, or other acts martial, to help to occupy the Court, and accompany
+strangers till the time require of departing." The same compiler looks
+back to Edward III.'s time as the crown and glory of English Court life;
+and indeed that King lived on a higher scale (as things went in those
+days) than any other medieval English King except his inglorious grandson,
+Richard II. King John of France might indeed marvel to find himself among
+a nation of shopkeepers, and laugh at the thrift and order which
+underlay even his Royal cousin's extravagances.[40] But John's son,
+Charles the Wise, was destined to earn that surname by nothing more than
+by his imitation of English business methods in peace and war; and
+meanwhile the longest laugh was with Edward, whose Court swarmed with
+French prisoners and hostages. Among the enforced guests were King John
+himself, four royal dukes, the flower of the nobility, and thirty-six
+substantial citizens sent over by the great towns as pledges for the
+enormous war indemnity, which was in fact never fully paid. All these were
+probably still at Court when Chaucer first joined it, and few poets have
+ever feasted their youthful eyes on more splendid sights than this.
+Palaces and castles were filled to overflowing with the spoils of France;
+and the prisoners themselves vied with their captors in knightly sports
+and knightly magnificence. One of the royal princes had sixteen servants
+with him in his captivity; all moved freely about the country on parole,
+hawking and hunting, dancing and flouting, rather like guests than
+prisoners. Indeed, as Mme. Darmesteter truly remarks, there was a natural
+freemasonry between the French nobility and the French-speaking courtiers
+of England; and Froissart draws a vivid contrast between our manners and
+those of the Germans in this respect. "For English and Gascons are of such
+condition that they put a knight or a squire courteously to ransom; but
+the custom of the Germans, and their courtesy [to their prisoners] is of
+no such sort hitherto--I know not how they will do henceforth--for
+hitherto they have had neither pity nor mercy on Christian gentlemen who
+fall into their hands as prisoners, but lay on them ransoms to the full
+of their estate and even beyond, and put them in chains, in irons, and in
+close prison like thieves and murderers; and all to extort the greater
+ransom."[41] The French lords added rather to the gaiety of a Court which
+was already perhaps the gayest in Europe; a society all the merrier
+because it was spending money that had been so quickly won; and because,
+in those days of shifting fortune, the shadow of change might already be
+foreboded on the horizon. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may be
+captives in our turn. Few of the great leaders on either side escaped
+without paying ransom at least once in their lives; and the devil-may-care
+of the camp had its direct influence on Court manners. The extravagant and
+comparatively inartistic fashions which, at the end of the 14th century,
+displaced one of the simplest and most beautiful models of dress which
+have ever reigned, were invented, as a contemporary assures us, by "the
+unthrifty women that be evil of their body, and chamberers to Englishmen
+and other men of war that dwellen with them as their lemans; for they were
+the first that brought up this estate that ye use of great purfles and
+slit coats.... And as to my wife, she shall not; but the princesses and
+ladies of England have taken up the said state and guise, and they may
+well hold it if them list."[42] Towards the end of Chaucer's life, when
+Richard II. had increased his personal expenses in direct proportion to
+his ill-success in war and politics, the English Court reached its highest
+pitch of extravagance. The chronicler Hardyng writes--
+
+  "Truly I herd _Robert Ireliffe_ say,
+  _Clerke of the grene cloth_, that to the household
+  Came every daye, for moost partie alwaye,
+  Ten thousand folke, by his messes tould,
+  That followed the hous, aye, as thei would;
+  And in the kechin three hundred servitours,
+  And in eche office many occupiours.
+
+  "And ladies faire with their gentilwomen,
+  Chamberers also and lavenders,
+  Three hundred of them were occupied then:
+  Ther was greate pride among the officers,
+  And of al menne far passyng their compeers,
+  Of riche araye, and muche more costious
+  Than was before or sith, and more precious."
+
+And he adds a description of Court morals which may well suggest further
+reflections on Chaucer's married life.[43]
+
+
+[Illustration: A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE
+
+(FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER)]
+
+
+But the Court was all that the poet could desire as a school of worldly
+manners, of human passion and character, and of gorgeous pageantry. The
+King travelled much with his household; a grievous burden indeed to the
+poor country folk on whom his purveyors preyed, but to the world in
+general a glorious sight. He took with him a multitude of officers already
+suppressed as superfluous in the days of Edward IV., "as well Sergeants of
+Arms and Messagers many, with the twenty-four Archers before the King,
+shooting when he rode by the country, called _Gard Corpes le Roy_. And
+therefore the King journied not passing ten or twelve miles a day." Ruskin
+traces much of his store of observation to the leisurely journeys round
+England with his father in Mr. Telford's chaise; and the young Chaucer
+must have gathered from these Royal progresses a rich harvest of
+impressions for future use.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE AMBASSADOR
+
+  "Adieu, mol lit, adieu, piteux regards;
+  Adieu, pain frais que l'on soulait trouver;
+  Il me convient porter honneur aux lards;
+  Il convient ail et biscuit avaler,
+  Et chevaucher un périlleux cheval."
+                                  EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS
+
+
+Although we have nothing important dating from before his thirtieth year,
+we know from Chaucer's own words that he wrote many "Balades, Roundels,
+and Virelays" which are now lost; or, as he puts it in his last rueful
+Retractation, "many a song and many a lecherous lay." These were no doubt
+fugitive pieces, often written for different friends or patrons, and put
+abroad in their names. Besides these, we know that he translated certain
+religious works, including the famous "Misery of Human Life" of Pope
+Innocent the Third. Piety and Profanity, prayers and curses, jostle each
+other in Chaucer's early life as in the society round him: we may think of
+his own Shipman, thoroughly orthodox after his simple fashion, but
+silencing the too Puritanical parson with a rattling oath at close range,
+and proceeding to "clynken so mery a belle" that we feel a sort of
+treachery in pausing to wonder how such a festive tale could be brought
+forth for a company of pilgrims as a pill to purge heterodoxy!
+
+The first of his early poems which we can date with any certainty is also
+the best worth dating. This is the "Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse," in
+memory of John of Gaunt's first wife, who died in September, 1369. The
+poem is obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages,
+fresh to us even where the critics trace them to some obvious French
+source. Such, for instance, is the beginning of his dream, where he
+describes the inevitable May morning--inevitable in medieval verse, but
+here and there, when he or his fellow-poets are in their happiest mood, as
+fresh again as Nature herself, who is never tired of harping on the same
+old themes of sunshine and blue sky and fresh air. He wakes at dawn to
+hear the birds singing their matins at his eaves; his bedroom walls are
+painted with scenes from the "Romance of the Rose," and broad sunlight
+streams through the storied glass upon his bed. He throws open the
+casement: "blue, bright, clear was the air, nor in all the welkin was one
+cloud." A bugle rings out; he hears the trampling of horse and hounds; the
+Emperor Octavian's hunt is afoot--or, in plainer prose, King Edward the
+Third's. The poet joins them; a puppy comes up fawning, starting away,
+fawning again, until it has led him apart from the rest.
+
+  It came and crept to me as low
+  Right as it haddë me y-knowe,
+  Held down his head and joined his ears,
+  And laid all smoothë down his hairs.
+  I would have caught it, and anon
+  It fled, and was from me gone;
+  And I him followed, and it forth went
+  Down by a flowery greenë went                     [glade
+  Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet
+  With flowerës fele, fair under feet.              [many
+
+Here he finds a young knight all in black, mourning by himself. A little
+unobtrusive sympathy unlocks the young man's heart. She was "my hap, my
+heal, and all my bliss;" "and goodë fairë White she hight." The first
+meeting had been as sudden as that of Dante and Beatrice: a medieval
+garden-party--"the fairest companye of ladies, that ever man with eye had
+seen together in one place," and one among them who "was like none of all
+the rout," but who outshone the rest as the sun outshines moon and stars--
+
+  For every hair upon her head,
+  Sooth to say, it was not red;
+  Nor neither yellow nor brown it was,
+  Me thoughte most like gold it was.
+
+Her eyes shone with such simple enjoyment of life that "fools" were apt to
+read a special welcome in her glance, to their bitter disappointment in
+course of time. She disdained the "knakkes smale," the little coquettish
+tricks of certain other ladies, who send their lovers half round the
+world, and give them but cold cheer on their return. The rest of the
+personal description is more commonplace, and (however faithful to
+medieval precedent) a little too like some modern sportsman's enumeration
+of his horse's points. The course of true love did not run too smoothly
+here. On the knight's first proposal, "she saidë 'nay!' all utterly." But
+"another year," when she had learned to know him better, she took him to
+her mercy, and they lived full many a year in bliss, only broken now by
+her death. The poem, which had rather dragged at the beginning, here ends
+abruptly, as though Chaucer had tired of it. He has no effectual comfort
+to offer in such a sorrow; the hunt breaks in upon their dialogue; King
+and courtiers ride off to a long white-walled castle on a hill, where a
+bell rings the hour of noon and wakes the poet from his dream.
+
+When we have reckoned up all Chaucer's debts to his predecessors in this
+poem--and they are many--there is ample proof left of his own originality.
+Moreover, we cannot too often remind ourselves that the idea of copyright,
+either legal or moral, is modern. In the scarcity of books which reigned
+before the days of printing, the poet who "conveyed" most might well be
+the greatest benefactor to mankind. The educated public, so far as such a
+body then existed, rather encouraged than reprobated the practice of
+borrowing; and the poet, like the modern schoolboy versifier, was
+applauded for his skill in weaving classical tags into his own work.
+Chaucer differed from his predecessors, and most of his successors, less
+in the amount which he borrowed than in the extraordinary vitality and
+originality which he infused into the older work. If we had only these
+fragments of his early works, we should still understand how Deschamps
+praises him as "King of worldly love in Albion"; we should still feel
+something of that charm of language which earned the poet his popularity
+at Court and his promotion to important offices.
+
+It is well known that medieval society had not developed the minute
+sub-divisions of labour which have often been pushed to excess in modern
+times. The architect was simply a master-mason; the barber was equally
+ready to try his hand on your beard or on a malignant tumour; the King
+might choose for his minister a frankly incapable personal favourite, or
+send out his most gorgeously accoutred knights on a reconnaissance which
+would have been infinitely better carried out by a trained scout.
+Similarly, the poets of the 14th century were very frequently sent abroad
+as ambassadors; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio had already set Chaucer this
+example, which his friend Eustache Deschamps was soon to follow. The
+choice implied, no doubt, a subtle tribute to the power of rhetoric, under
+which category poetry was often classed. The rarity of book-learning did
+not indeed give the scholar a higher value in general society than he
+commands nowadays, or bring more grist to his mill; he and his horse were
+commonly lean enough, and his only worldly treasures were his score of
+books at his bed's head. But the medieval mind, which persistently
+invested lunatics with the highest prophetic qualities, seems to have had
+an equally touching faith in poetic clairvoyance at times when common
+sense was at fault, and to have called upon a Dante or a Chaucer just as,
+in similar emergencies, it called upon particular saints whose
+intercession was least invoked in everyday life. Much, of course, is to be
+explained by the fact that formal and elaborate public speeches were as
+necessary as spectacular display on these embassies; but, even so, we may
+wonder that the Ravennati ever entrusted an embassy to Dante, who is
+recorded to have been so violent a political partisan that he was capable
+of throwing stones even at women in the excitement of discussion. Chaucer,
+however, had neither the qualities nor the defects of such headlong
+fanaticism; and from the frequency with which he was employed we may infer
+that he showed real talents for diplomacy.
+
+His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had
+taken part in a second French campaign, he was "abroad in the King's
+service" during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the
+Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and
+1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still
+extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the
+latter year, when he "was joined in a commission with James Pronam and
+John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and
+merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where
+the Genoese might form a commercial establishment."[44] This journey
+lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or
+about Ł1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions
+that Chaucer's business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and
+here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest
+of business documents opens out a vista of things in themselves most
+romantic.
+
+Of all that makes the traveller's joy in modern Italy, the greater part
+was already there for Chaucer to see, with much more that he saw and that
+we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the
+same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange
+trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of
+these things, and less inclined to find God's hand in the mountains or the
+sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the
+sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of
+mountain scenery which comes out in the "Pearl" and in early Scottish
+poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance's sea-voyages, he expedites
+them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business
+journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years
+later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel passage
+in the rough little boats of those days, "a perilous horse to ride,"
+indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant
+elbow room--
+
+  "Bestow the boat, boatswain, anon,
+  That our pilgrims may play thereon;
+  For some are like to cough and groan ...
+  This meanëwhile the pilgrims lie
+  And have their bowlës fast them by
+  And cry after hot Malvoisie ...
+  Some laid their bookës on their knee,
+  And read so long they might not see:--
+  'Alas! mine head will cleave in three!'"[45]
+
+Worse passages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us
+how Hervé de Léon "took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive
+at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days,
+and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Hervé of Léon
+was so sore troubled that he had never health after." King John of France,
+a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel,[46] and Edward
+III. had one passage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the
+arts of "necromancers and wizards." Moreover, nearly all Chaucer's
+embassies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372,
+when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with
+French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or
+less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder
+mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to
+be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, "the most desolate, the most
+solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia."[47] But, after all
+these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches
+had been inhospitable:
+
+  "Il fait bien bon demeurer
+  Au doux château de Pavie."[48]
+
+We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely
+among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life
+the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least
+delightful passages of Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ are those which
+describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish
+brought out of the sea.
+
+For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer
+found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then
+world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches
+round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their
+decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar
+wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would
+find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The
+pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their
+first freshness, with thousands more which have long since disappeared.
+Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built,
+the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer
+must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new Ćneas among the
+rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with
+each other in every department of human skill--
+
+  "Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura
+  Exercet sub sole labor--"
+
+Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on
+the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting
+flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet's
+business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy.
+To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a
+circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio,
+we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of
+the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante's literary personality
+was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he
+summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on
+the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense
+individualism and the frankness with which he asserted his own personal
+convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which
+Dante wielded the keys of heaven and hell is the fundamental independence
+of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous
+Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to hell, he was
+only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent.
+But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a
+pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady
+whom he had loved on earth--in this choice, and in his corresponding
+independence of expression, he gave an impetus to free thought far beyond
+what he himself can have intended. Virgil's parting speech at the end of
+the "Purgatorio," "Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I
+make thee King and High Priest over thyself," conveyed a licence of which
+others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered
+it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he
+does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St.
+Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after
+him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial
+attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and
+Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to
+the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even
+semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the
+Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded
+a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always
+provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the
+first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement
+when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no
+stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian
+free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked
+effectually upon a mind which "was going through an intense religious
+crisis."[49] Dante's mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet
+for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much
+that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the
+earliest extant from his pen. "Chaucer's A. B. C.," a rapturous hymn to
+the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far
+beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach
+more perilously near to Mariolatry than this--"Almighty and all-merciable
+Queen"! Another poem of the same period is the "Life of St. Cecilia,"
+with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante,
+and its fervent prayer for help against temptation--
+
+  Now help, thou meek and blissful fairë maid
+  Me flemëd wretch in this desert of gall;          [banished
+  Think on the woman Canaanee, that said
+  That whelpës eaten some of the crumbës all
+  That from their lordës table been y-fall;
+  And though that I, unworthy son of Eve
+  Be sinful, yet accept now my believe....
+  And of thy light my soul in prison light,
+  That troubled is by the contagion
+  Of my body, and also by the weight
+  Of earthly lust, and false affection:
+  O haven of refuge, O salvation
+  Of them that be in sorrow and in distress
+  Now help, for to my work I will me dress.[50]
+
+But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and
+mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the
+great Florentine's style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In
+matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he
+also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as
+Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in
+Chaucer's later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which
+he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of
+comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and
+Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no
+doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have
+developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist
+in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him,
+and of none after him until the 16th century brought English men of
+letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.
+
+Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey,
+of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living
+men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of
+the "Clerk's Tale" would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the
+former; and most biographers have assumed that it is not only the
+fictitious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the
+story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his
+own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he
+had just translated into Latin from the "Decameron" during the very year
+of Chaucer's visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English
+poet's fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready
+passport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such
+close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly
+doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from
+Petrarch "at Padua," the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer's Italian
+journey at Arquŕ, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It
+has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven
+Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he
+lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this
+year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily
+assumed as a proof of Chaucer's ignorance, does in fact show that he
+possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch's
+whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal
+intercourse.[51] This is admirably illustrated by the story of Chaucer's
+relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly
+went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days,
+before Boccaccio's first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies
+or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been
+naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious
+difficulty. Great as are Chaucer's literary obligations to the author of
+the "Decameron," he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those
+occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his
+authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio's.[52] It
+is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and
+that Chaucer, while claiming the right of "conveying" from Boccaccio as
+much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his
+due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked
+out with Boccaccio's true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely
+be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer's
+character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any
+grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the
+amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the
+assumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see
+that in Dante's and Petrarch's cases he proclaims his debt with the most
+commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most
+probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as
+he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval manuscripts
+were quite commonly written without anything like the modern title-page;
+and, even when the author's name was recorded on the first page, the
+frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the
+mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a title after his own
+fancy.[53] Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the
+streets of Boccaccio's Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of
+Fiesole under which the lovers of the "Decameron" had sat, and missed by a
+few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated
+whole books of his without ever realizing their true authorship. In those
+days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the
+King's Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in
+fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed,
+assure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and
+Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of
+the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a
+more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore,
+that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other
+during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers
+to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer
+knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.
+
+It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already
+met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of
+1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for
+the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an
+honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a
+report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This,
+however, was taken as disproved by the more recent assertion of Nicholas
+that Chaucer drew his pension in England "with his own hands" during all
+this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby's researches have reopened the
+possibility of the old tradition.[54] He ascertained, by a fresh
+examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid
+to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to
+Milan, but the words _into his own hands_ are omitted from this particular
+entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it
+destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght's
+assertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer's own silence on the subject may
+have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the
+Knight's mouth in protest against the Monk's fondness for tragedies--
+
+              ... for little heaviness
+  Is right enough to many folk, I guess.
+  I say for me it is a great dis-ease,
+  Where as men have been in great wealth and ease,
+  To hearen of their sudden fall, alas!
+
+Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer's old master. The
+Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a
+splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There
+were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan
+on the bridegroom's arrival. But three months after the wedding "my lord
+Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for
+that the fashion of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward
+Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan,
+and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my
+lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one
+accord." This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even
+from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with
+its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55] Why
+should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he
+was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched
+him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters
+in his life--the Black Death, and Wat Tyler's revolt. It is still
+possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at
+Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of
+Milan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MAN OF BUSINESS
+
+    "Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts
+    and balance a ledger."--_Times_
+
+
+The Italian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer's last embassy.
+In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February
+of next year he was associated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas
+Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur's partner at the battle
+of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer,
+would have seen his old fellow-envoy's head grinning down from the spikes
+of London Bridge side by side with "a quarter of Sir Harry Percy."[56] In
+April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d'Angle
+and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with
+France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little
+princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years
+older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no
+authority to treat. So the embassy ended only in a very brief extension of
+the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and
+Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later,
+when Richard took to second wife Marie's niece Isabella, then only in her
+eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again associated with Sir
+Guichard d'Angle and two others on a mission to negotiate for Richard's
+marriage with one of poor little Marie's sisters. Here also the
+discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir
+Edward Berkeley on a fresh embassy to Italy. This time it was to treat "of
+certain matters touching the King's war" with the great English
+_condottiere_ Sir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was
+suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate
+afforded matter for one of the Monk's "tragedies" in the "Canterbury
+Tales"--
+
+  Of Milan greatë Barnabo Viscount,
+  God of delight and scourge of Lombardye.
+
+During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet
+John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear
+once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this,
+so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.
+
+It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant
+circumstances of these later embassies, important as they are for showing
+the high estimate put on Chaucer's business talents, and much as they must
+have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully
+matured at last in the poet of the "Canterbury Tales." But they show us
+that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most
+remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched
+others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded
+Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was
+a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate
+sister of Clarence's Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins.
+These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to
+those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned
+supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he
+became no longer the mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a
+genius) of French and Italian classics, but a classic himself, master of a
+style that could express all the accumulated observations of half a
+century--Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English
+men and women, and no other man. The analysis and criticism of the works
+which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs
+to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary
+critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet
+found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and
+how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and
+fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough,
+strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle
+Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only
+by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante
+himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare
+has been to us ever since.
+
+It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and
+observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch
+him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his
+return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at
+court. On St. George's day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of
+wine daily for life, "to be received in the port of London from the hands
+of the King's butler." Such grants were common enough; but they take us
+back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition
+had come down. St. George's was a day of solemn feasting in the Round
+Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily
+services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head
+from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services
+rendered during the past year. But the grant was already in those days
+more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a
+periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was
+commuted for a life-pension of about Ł200 modern value.
+
+Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune.
+Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the
+obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and
+of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however,
+are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a
+life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also
+had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household
+amounted to some Ł1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added
+considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wardships and a large
+share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and
+officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond
+his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer's
+financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another
+comptrollership which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was
+permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollership also; and in
+this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the
+Shire for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a
+justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon
+Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues.
+Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years.
+In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among
+others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet
+"_de raptu meo_." _Raptus_ often means simply _abduction_, and it may well
+be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia
+as had been made upon his own father, who, as it will be remembered, had
+narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the
+gratification of other people's private interests. This is rendered all
+the more probable by two other documents connected with the same matter
+which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57] It is, however, possible
+that the _raptus_ was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has
+pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer's "little son Lowis" was just ten
+years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation,
+have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on
+Cecilia's part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide
+divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders
+this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is
+certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity
+were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils
+of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pass a law exacting
+that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be
+deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pass on to the next of
+kin.[58] But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather
+pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find
+our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into
+a case of _raptus_, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]
+
+During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer occupied those lodgings
+over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his
+name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with
+one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary
+point of view. Here he studied with an assiduity which would have been
+impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in
+his later years of want and sordid shifts. Here he translated Boethius, of
+whose philosophical "Consolations" he was so soon to stand in bitter need.
+Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that "Troilus and
+Cressida" which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In
+1382 he composed his "Parliament of Fowls" in honour of Richard II.'s
+marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the "House of Fame" and the
+"Legend of Good Women." These two poems, like most of Chaucer's work, are
+unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind
+ourselves that he was no professional _litterateur_, but a courtier,
+diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant
+study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be
+considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were
+sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was
+then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their
+gratitude for what he told them, few in those days would have been
+inclined to complain of all that Chaucer "left half-told." So the poet
+freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and
+returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking
+such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up,
+and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness
+after all these centuries.
+
+This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his
+election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. His
+contemporary, Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn
+parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, "at the palace of
+Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, nobles, and
+counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men
+were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease.
+And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a
+crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower
+sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six
+hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports,
+and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when
+all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was
+proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil
+law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin,
+French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir
+Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days
+before in all that he should say." Chaucer's Parliament sat more probably
+in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly passed off with
+less order and unanimity than Froissart's of 1337, though the main theme
+was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so
+lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crécy and Poitiers and a
+dozen other victories in pitched battles, our ships had been destroyed off
+La Rochelle in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since
+which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns
+suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the
+capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60]
+and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous
+forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did
+indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and his
+fellow-members assembled on October 1, "it had still seemed possible that
+any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of
+the Thames."[61] The militia of the southern counties was still assembled
+to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round
+London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for
+Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The
+Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his
+unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament
+refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the
+members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward
+II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out
+any longer. As a contemporary puts it, "The King would not come to
+Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had
+been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to
+attend."[62] The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the
+two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a
+Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his
+Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to
+repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed
+preparations.
+
+Meanwhile, however, other _protégés_ of his had suffered besides the great
+men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted
+from Richard a commission for a month "to receive and dispose of all crown
+revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and
+set up others in their stead."[63] Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls
+of this Parliament that the commission was issued "for inquiring, among
+other alleged abuses, into the state of the Subsidies and Customs; and as
+the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the
+officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of
+those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed
+to that investigation." It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had
+been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so,
+and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the
+poet's character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual
+order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed
+object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show
+that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then,
+when Richard's patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer's
+other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a
+wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile--at such a moment it was almost
+inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in
+December both his comptrollerships were in other men's hands. Even in his
+best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse
+would very naturally drive him to desperate shifts. It is not surprising,
+therefore, that we soon find him assigning his two pensions to one John
+Scalby (May 1, 1388).
+
+But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with
+her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was
+admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the
+future Henry IV.[64] At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter's
+pension as usual, but not at Michaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears
+from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet's
+already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every
+indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of
+enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he
+probably wrote the greater part of the "Canterbury Tales."
+
+Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain
+attempt to reassert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to
+sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the "Merciless Parliament"
+of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer's old
+colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage
+in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had
+reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their
+essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world,
+he struck his blow. In May, 1389, "he suddenly entered the privy council,
+took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, 'What age am I?' They
+answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. 'Then,' said he, 'I am of
+full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir
+of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of
+his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.'" He at once
+dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of
+Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John's factious younger brother, the
+Duke of Gloucester.
+
+With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was
+natural that Chaucer's luck should turn. Two months after this scene in
+Council he was appointed by Richard II. "Clerk of our Works at our Palace
+of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our
+Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern
+Langley, and Feckenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and
+in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of
+our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said
+Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or
+deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other
+workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can
+be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and
+to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages." Our poet had
+also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the
+King's prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their
+oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back
+runaways, and "to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or
+rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they
+shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the
+injunctions given in our name." That these time-honoured clauses were no
+dead letter, is shown by the still surviving documents in which Chaucer
+deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen
+and impounding materials, by the constant petitions of medieval
+Parliaments against this system of "Purveyance" for the King's
+necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the
+City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive
+workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one
+John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short
+while by "pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take
+carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of
+Windsor."[65]
+
+We have a curious inventory of the "dead stock" which Chaucer took over
+from his predecessors in the Clerkship, and for which he made himself
+responsible; the list ranges from "one bronze image, two stone images
+unpainted, seven images in the likeness of Kings" for Westminster Palace,
+with considerable fittings for the lists and galleries of a tournament,
+and 100 stone cannon balls for the Tower, down to "one broken cable ...
+one dilapidated pitchfork ... three sieves, whereof two are crazy."[66]
+For all this, which he was allowed to do by deputy, Chaucer received two
+shillings a day, or something like Ł450 a year of modern money.[67]
+Further commissions of the same kind were granted to him: the supervision
+of the works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, which was "threatened with
+ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground;" and again of a great
+scaffold in Smithfield for the Royal party on the occasion of the
+tournament in May, 1390. Two months earlier in this same year he had been
+associated with his old colleague Sir Richard Stury and others on a
+commission to repair the dykes and drains of Thames from Greenwich to
+Woolwich, which were "so broken and ruined that manifold and inestimable
+damages have happened in times past, and more are feared for the future."
+A marginal note on a MS. of his "Envoy to Scogan," written some three
+years later, states that the poet was then living at Greenwich; and a
+casual remark in the "Canterbury Tales" very probably points in the same
+direction.[68] Either in 1390 or 1391 a Geoffrey Chaucer, who was probably
+the poet, was appointed Forester of North Petherton Park in Somerset.
+
+But here again we find one single mischance breaking the even tenour of
+Chaucer's new-born prosperity. In September, 1390, while on his journeys
+as Clerk of the Works, he was the victim of at least two, and just
+possibly three, highway robberies (of which two were on one day) at
+Westminster, and near "The Foul Oak" at Hatcham. Two of the robbers were
+in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was
+nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the
+moment by turning King's evidence. He was, however, accused of another
+robbery in Hertfordshire, and attempted to save his life by charging
+Thomas Talbot's servant with complicity in the crime. This time the
+accused offered "wager of battle." Brerelay was vanquished in the duel,
+and strung up out of hand.
+
+It is difficult to resist the conviction that Chaucer was by this time
+recognized as an unbusiness-like person; for the King deprived him of his
+Clerkship in the following June (1391), at a time when we can find nothing
+in the political situation to account for the dismissal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+LAST DAYS
+
+  "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
+    Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art.
+  I warmed both hands before the fire of life:
+    It sinks; and I am ready to depart."
+                                  W. S. LANDOR
+
+
+From this time forward Chaucer seems to have lived from hand to mouth. He
+had, as will presently be seen, a son, stepson, or foster-son of
+considerable wealth and position; and no doubt he had other good friends
+too. We have reason to believe that he was still working at the
+"Canterbury Tales," and receiving such stray crumbs from great men's
+tables as remained the main reward of literature until modern times. In
+1391 (if we may judge from the fact that problems in the book are
+calculated for that year) he wrote the "Treatise on the Astrolabe" for the
+instruction of his ten-year-old son Lewis.[69] It was most likely in 1393
+that he wrote from Greenwich the "Envoy" to his friend Henry Scogan, who
+was then with the Court at Windsor, "at the stream's head of grace." The
+poet urges him there to make profitable mention of his friend, "forgot in
+solitary wilderness" at the lower end of the same river; and it is natural
+to connect this with the fact that, in 1394, Richard granted Chaucer a
+fresh pension of Ł20 a year for life. But the King's exchequer was
+constantly empty, and we have seen that the poet's was seldom full; so we
+need not be surprised to find him constantly applying for his pension at
+irregular times during the rest of the reign. Twice he dunned his royal
+patron for the paltry sum of 6_s._ 8_d._ More significant still is a
+record of the Court of Common Pleas showing that he was sued by Isabella
+Buckholt for the sum of Ł14. 1_s._ 11_d._ some time between April 24 and
+May 20, 1398; the Sheriff of Middlesex reported that Chaucer had no
+possessions in his bailiwick. On May 4 the poet obtained letters of
+protection, in which the King alludes formally to the "very many arduous
+and urgent affairs" with which "our beloved esquire" is entrusted, and
+therefore takes him with "his men, lands, goods, rents, and all his
+possessions" under the Royal protection, and forbids all pleas or arrests
+against him for the next two years. The recital of these arduous and
+urgent affairs is no doubt (like that of Chaucer's lands and rents) a mere
+legal form; but the protection was real. Isabella Buckholt pressed her
+suit, but the Sheriff returned in October, 1398, and June, 1399, that the
+defendant "could not be found." Yet all this time Chaucer was visible
+enough, for he was petitioning the King for formal letters patent to
+confirm a grant already made by word of mouth in the preceding December,
+of a yearly butt of wine from the Royal cellars "for God's sake, and as a
+work of charity." This grant, valued at about Ł75 of modern money, was
+confirmed on October 13, 1398, and was the last gift from Richard to
+Chaucer. Before twelve months were gone, the captive King had ravelled out
+his weaved-up follies before his pitiless accusers in the Tower of London;
+and on the very 13th of October, year for year, on which Chaucer had
+received his butt of wine from Richard II., a fresh poetical supplication
+brought him a still greater favour from the next King. Henry IV. granted
+on his own account a pension of forty marks in addition to Richard's; and
+five days afterwards we find Chaucer pleading that he had "accidentally
+lost" the late King's letters patent for the pension and the wine, and
+begging for their renewal under Henry's hand. The favour was granted, and
+Chaucer was thus freed from any uncertainty which might have attached to
+his former grants from a deposed King, even though one of them was already
+recognized and renewed in Henry's letters of October 13.[70]
+
+"King Richard," writes Froissart, "had a greyhound called Math, who always
+waited upon the king and would know no man else; for whensoever the king
+did ride, he that kept the greyhound did let him loose, and he would
+straight run to the king and fawn upon him and leap with his fore feet
+upon the king's shoulders. And as the king and the earl of Derby talked
+together in the court, the greyhound, who was wont to leap upon the king,
+left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lancaster, and made
+to him the same friendly countenance and cheer as he was wont to do to the
+king. The duke, who knew not the greyhound, demanded of the king what the
+greyhound would do. 'Cousin,' quoth the king, 'it is a great good token to
+you and an evil sign to me.' 'Sir, how know you that?' quoth the duke. 'I
+know it well,' quoth the king, 'the greyhound maketh you cheer this day as
+king of England, as ye shall be, and I shall be deposed. The greyhound
+hath this knowledge naturally; therefore take him to you; he will follow
+you and forsake me.' The duke understood well those words and cherished
+the greyhound, who would never after follow king Richard, but followed the
+duke of Lancaster: [and more than thirty thousand men saw and knew
+this."[71]] The fickle hound did but foreshadow the bearing of Richard's
+dependents in general. The poem in which Chaucer hastened to salute the
+new King of a few days breathed no word of pity for his fallen
+predecessor, but hailed Henry as the saviour of England, "conqueror of
+Albion," "very king by lineage and free election."[72] In the months that
+followed, while Chaucer enjoyed his wine and his pension, the King who
+first gave them was starving himself, or being starved by his gaolers, at
+Pontefract. It must of course be remembered that, while Richard was felt
+on all hands to have thrown his splendid chances wantonly away, Henry was
+the son of Chaucer's best patron; and indeed the poet had recently been in
+close relations with the future King, if not actually in his service.[73]
+Still, we know that few were willing to suffer in those days for untimely
+faith to a fallen sovereign, and we ourselves have less reason to blame
+the many, than to thank the luckier stars under which such trials of
+loyalty are spared to our generation. Chaucer's contemporary and
+fellow-courtier, Froissart, might indeed write bitterly in his old age
+about a people which could change its ruler like an old glove; but
+Froissart was at ease in his fat canonry of Chimay; while Chaucer, with a
+hundred poets before and since, had chirped like a cricket all through the
+summer, and was now face to face with cold and starvation in the winter of
+his life.
+
+His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old
+age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in
+the tone of Wamba the Witless: "Wait till you come to forty year!" There
+is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be
+content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so--
+
+  Was never pike wallowed in galantine
+  As I in love am wallowed and y-bound.
+
+Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in
+the outspoken triumph-note of its close--
+
+  Since I from Love escapčd am so fat,
+  I never think to be in his prison lean;
+  Since I am free, I count him not a bean.
+  He may answčr, and sayë this or that;
+  I do no force, I speak right as I mean            [I care no whit
+  _Since I from Love escapčd am so fat,
+  I never think to be in his prison lean_.
+  Love hath my name y-struck out of his slate,
+  And he is struck out my bookës clean
+  For evermore; there is none other mean.
+      _Since I from Love escapčd am so fat,
+      I never think to be in his prison lean;
+      Since I am free, I count him not a bean!_
+
+Then we have "The Former Age"--a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for
+the ungrateful Present--
+
+  Alas, alas! now may men weep and cry!
+  For in our days is nought but covetise
+  And doubleness, and treason, and envý,
+    Prison, manslaughter, and murder in sundry wise.[74]
+
+Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning "This wretched
+worldës transmutacioun"; a "Complaint of Venus"; the two begging epistles
+to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend
+Bukton; a piteous complaint entitled "Lack of Steadfastness," and two
+moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these
+is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and
+most resigned--
+
+  Flee from the press, and dwell with Soothfastness ...
+  That thee is sent, receive in buxomness                [obedience
+  The wrestling for this world asketh a fall             [requires, implies
+  Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
+  Forth, Pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
+  Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all;
+  Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead,
+  And Truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.
+
+The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later
+poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are
+Chaucer's own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had
+indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn
+again into closer kinship, just as early childhood is much the same in all
+countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer's later
+writings that reminds us of Renan's "pauvre âme déveloutée de soixante
+ans." All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed
+remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh
+has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to
+even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however
+much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are,
+in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But,
+for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions,
+there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems:
+and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old
+man's disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer's old age; we
+see in him what Ruskin calls "a Tory of the old school--Walter Scott's
+school, that is to say, and Homer's"; loyal to monarchy and deeply
+distrustful of democracy, yet never doubting the King's ultimate
+responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory
+nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for
+its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their
+own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a
+wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes
+burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He
+anticipates in effect Heine's tragi-comic appeal, "Hate me, Ladies, laugh
+at me, jilt me, but let me live!" For all that we have lost or missed, the
+world is no mere vale of tears--
+
+  But, lord Christ! when that it remembreth me
+  Upon my youth, and on my jollity,
+  It tickleth me about mine heartë-root.
+  Unto this day it doth mine heartë boot
+  That I have had my world as in my time!
+  But Age, alas!----
+
+well, even Age has its consolations--
+
+  The flour is gone, there is no more to tell,
+  The bran, as I best can, now must I sell!
+
+There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer's later
+years--to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had
+cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes
+for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th
+century drew to its close; Edward III.'s sun had gone down in disgrace;
+his grandson's brilliant infancy had passed into a childish manhood, whose
+wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of
+Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles
+VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to
+his own supporters.[75] The Great Pestilence and the Papal Schism, the
+Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants' Revolt in England, had shaken
+society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with
+scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John
+Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan's sense; a place
+of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches
+with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid
+glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified
+into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was
+rather Thackeray's Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of
+life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as
+insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human
+beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and
+weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that,
+when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than "come,
+children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played
+out." But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose
+last cry is recorded at the end of the "Canterbury Tales." Everything
+points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his
+death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and,
+though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must
+beware of exaggerations on this point.[76] Moreover, even if his
+unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it
+needed a temper very different from Chaucer's to withstand, under medieval
+conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the
+clergy. Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology
+for a document which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the
+dying man's instinctive call for his mother. "I beseech you meekly of God"
+(so runs the epilogue to the "Parson's Tale") "that ye pray for me that
+Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts--and namely [especially]
+of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song
+and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the
+sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction
+to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King
+of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious
+blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that
+shall be saved."
+
+But we are anticipating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had
+brought Chaucer once again into easy circumstances, and within a few weeks
+we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey "a tenement, with its
+appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel," _i.e._
+somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.'s chapel, sheltered by the
+south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and "nigh to the White Rose
+Tavern"; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of
+the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of
+sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to
+be planted "in the herbary between the King's Chamber and the Church."[77]
+"He that plants pears, plants for his heirs," says the old proverb; and it
+is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this
+ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four
+marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last;
+but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he
+drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was
+paid through the hands of one William Somere; and then the Royal
+accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the
+inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the
+Abbey which has since received the name of Poet's Corner.[78] It is
+probable that we owe this fortunate circumstance still more to the fact
+that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or
+poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as
+naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his
+last years.
+
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY
+
+(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
+
+(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE
+CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)]
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOWS OF CHAUCER'S
+HOUSE
+
+(ON EXTREME RIGHT, PART OF HENRY VII'S CHAPEL, BUILT ON THE SITE OF ST.
+MARY'S CHAPEL)]
+
+
+The industry of Mr. Edward Scott has discovered that this same house in
+St. Mary's Chapel garden was let, from at least 1423 until his death in
+1434, to Thomas Chaucer, who was probably the poet's son. This Thomas was
+a man of considerable wealth and position. He began as a _protégé_ of John
+of Gaunt, and became Chief Butler to Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V.
+in succession; Constable of Wallingford Castle, and M.P. for Oxfordshire
+in nine parliaments between 1402 and 1429. He was many times Speaker, a
+commissioner for the marriage of Henry V., and an Ambassador to treat for
+peace with France; fought at Agincourt with a retinue of twelve
+men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; became a member of the King's
+Council, and died a very rich man. His only daughter made two very
+distinguished marriages; and her grandson was that Earl of Lincoln whom
+Richard III. declared his heir-apparent. For a while it seemed likely that
+Geoffrey Chaucer's descendants would sit on the throne of England, but the
+Earl died in fight against Henry VII. at Stoke. Of the poet's "little son
+Lewis" we hear no more after that brief glimpse of his boyhood; and
+Elizabeth Chaucy, the only other person whom we can with any probability
+claim as Chaucer's child, was entered as a nun at Barking in 1381, John of
+Gaunt paying Ł51 8_s._ 2_d._ for her expenses. It is just possible,
+however, that this may be the same Elizabeth Chausier who was received as
+a nun in St. Helen's priory four years earlier, at the King's nomination;
+in this case the date would point more probably to the poet's sister.
+
+This is not the place for any literary dissertation on Chaucer's poetry,
+which has already been admirably discussed by many modern critics, from
+Lowell onwards. He did more than any other man to fix the literary English
+tongue: he was the first real master of style in our language, and
+retained an undisputed supremacy until the Elizabethan age. This he owes
+(as has often been pointed out) not only to his natural genius, but also
+to the happy chances which gave him so wide an experience of society.
+Living in one of the most brilliant epochs of English history, he was by
+turns lover, courtier, soldier, man of business, student, ambassador,
+Justice of the Peace, Member of Parliament, Thames Conservator, and
+perhaps even something of an architect, if he took his Clerkship of the
+Works seriously. All these experiences were mirrored in eyes as observant,
+and treasured in as faithful a memory, as those of any other English poet
+but one; and to these natural gifts of the born portrait-painter he added
+the crowning quality of a perfect style. If his writings have been hailed
+as a "well of English undefiled," it was because he spoke habitually, and
+therefore wrote naturally, the best English of his day, the English of the
+court and of the higher clergy. In this he was even more fortunate than
+Dante, as he surpassed Dante in variety (though not in intenseness) of
+experience, and as he knew one more language than he. When we note with
+astonishment the freshness of Chaucer's characters across these five
+centuries, we must always remember that his exceptional experience and
+powers of observation were combined with an equally extraordinary mastery
+of expression. It is because Chaucer's speech ranges with absolute ease
+from the best talk of the best society, down to the Miller's broad
+buffoonery or the north-country jargon of the Cambridge students, that his
+characters seem to us so modern in spite of the social and political
+revolutions which separate their world from ours. It will be my aim to
+portray, in the remaining chapters, the England of that day in those
+features which throw most light on the peculiarities of Chaucer's men and
+women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE
+
+  "Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
+  Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
+  Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
+  Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
+  And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
+  The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green;
+  Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves
+  Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves,
+  Cut from the yew wood on the burnt-up hill,
+  And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill,
+  And treasured scanty spice from some far sea,
+  Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery,
+  And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne;
+  While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen
+  Moves over bills of lading----"
+                                  W. MORRIS
+
+
+There are two episodes of Chaucer's life which belong even more properly
+to Chaucer's England; in which it may not only be said that our interest
+is concentrated less on the man than on his surroundings, but even that we
+can scarcely get a glimpse of the man except through his surroundings.
+These two episodes are his life in London, and his Canterbury Pilgrimage;
+and with these we may most fitly begin our survey of the world in which he
+lived.
+
+The most tranquilly prosperous period of the poet's life was that space of
+twelve years, from 1374 to 1386, during which he lived over the tower of
+Aldgate and worked at the Customs House, with occasional interruptions of
+foreign travel on the King's business. The Tower of London, according to
+popular belief, had its foundations cemented with blood; and this was only
+too true of Chaucer's Aldgate. It was a massive structure, double-gated
+and double-portcullised, and built in part with the stones of Jews' houses
+plundered and torn down by the Barons who took London in 1215. But, in
+spite of similar incidents here and there, England was generally so free
+from civil war that the townsfolk were very commonly tempted to avoid
+unnecessary outlay upon fortifications. The traveller in Germany or
+Switzerland is often surprised to see even villages strongly walled
+against robber barons; while we may find great and wealthy English towns
+like Lynn and Cambridge which had little other defence than a ditch and
+palisade.[79] Even in fortified cities like London, the tendency was to
+neglect the walls--at one period we find men even pulling them gradually
+to pieces[80]--and to let the towers or gates for private lodgings. As
+early as the last year of Edward I., we find Cripplegate thus let out; and
+such notices are frequent in the "Memorials of London Life," collected by
+Mr. Riley from the City archives.[81]
+
+Here Chaucer had only half a mile to go to his daily work, by streets
+which we may follow still. If he took the stricter view, which held that
+gentlefolk ought to begin their day with a Mass, and to hear it fasting,
+then he had at least St. Michael's, Aldgate, and All Hallows Stonechurch
+on his direct way, and two others within a few yards of his road. If,
+however, he was of those who preferred to begin the day with a sop of wine
+or "a draught of moist and corny ale," then the noted hostelry of the
+Saracen's Head probably stood even then, and had stood since the time of
+the Crusades, within a few yards of Aldgate Tower. Close by the fork of
+Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets he would pass a "fair and large-built
+house," the town inn of the Prior of Hornchurch. Then, in Fenchurch
+Street, the mansion and garden of the Earls of Northumberland, and again,
+at the corner of Mart Lane, the manor and garden of Blanch Apleton.
+Turning down Mart Lane (now corrupted into _Mark_), the poet would pass
+the great chain, ready to be stretched at any moment across the narrow
+street, which marked the limits of Aldgate and Tower Street wards. He
+would cross Tower Street a few yards to the eastward of "the quadrant
+called Galley Row, because galley men dwelt there." These galley men were
+"divers strangers, born in Genoa and those parts," whose settlement in
+London had probably been the object of Chaucer's first Italian mission,
+and who presently prospered sufficiently to fill not only this quadrant,
+but also part of Minchin Lane, and to possess a quay of their own. But,
+like their cousins the Lombards, these Genoese soon showed themselves
+smarter business men even than their hosts. They introduced unauthorized
+halfpence of Genoa, called "Galley halfpence"; and these, with similar
+"suskings" from France, and "dodkins" from the Low Countries, survived the
+strict penalties threatened by two Acts of Parliament, and lasted on at
+least till Elizabeth's reign. "In my youth," writes Stow, "I have seen
+them pass current, but with some difficulty, for the English halfpence
+were then, though not so broad, somewhat thicker and stronger."[82] Stow
+found a building on the quay which he identified with their hall. "It
+seemeth that the builders of the hall of this house were shipwrights, and
+not carpenters;" for it was clinker-built like a boat, "and seemeth as it
+were a galley, the keel turned upwards." But this building was probably
+later than Chaucer's time. The galley quay almost touched that of the
+Custom-House; and here our poet had abundant opportunities of keeping up
+his Italian while sampling the "wines of Crete and other sweet wines in
+one of the cellars, and red and white wines in the other cellar."[83] His
+poems show an appreciation of good vintages, which was no doubt partly
+hereditary and partly acquired on the London quays, where he could talk
+with these Mediterranean mariners and drink the juice of their native
+grapes, remembering all the while how he had once watched them ripening on
+those southern slopes--
+
+  How richly, down the rocky dell,
+  The torrent vineyard streaming fell
+    To meet the sun and sunny waters
+  That only heaved with a summer swell![84]
+
+When Chaucer began his work in 1374 there was no regular building for the
+Customs; the King hired a house for the purpose at Ł3 a year, and a single
+boatman watched in the port to prevent smuggling. In 1383, however, one
+John Churchman built a house, which Richard II. undertook to hire for the
+rest of the builder's life; this became the first Custom-House, and lasted
+until Elizabeth's reign. The lease gives its modest proportions exactly: a
+ground floor, in which the King kept his weigh-beams for wool and other
+merchandise; a "solar," or upper chamber, for a counting-house; and above
+this yet another solar, 38 by 21-1/2 feet, partitioned into "two chambers
+and one _garret_, as men call it." For this new house the King paid the
+somewhat higher rent of Ł4. Chaucer was bound by the terms of his
+appointment to do the work personally, without substitute, and to write
+his "rolls touching the said office with his own hand"; but it is probable
+that he accepted these terms with the usual medieval licence. He went
+abroad at least five times on the King's service during his term of
+office; and the two original rolls which survive are apparently not
+written by his hand. His own words in the "House of Fame" show that he
+took his book-keeping work at the office seriously; but it is not likely
+that the press of business was such as to keep him always at the
+counting-house; and he may well have helped his boatman to patrol the
+port, which extended down-river to Gravesend and Tilbury. It is at least
+certain that, in 1376, he caught John Kent smuggling a cargo of wool away
+from London, and so earned prize-money to the value of Ł1000 in modern
+currency. It is certain also that his daily work for twelve years must
+have kept him in close daily contact with sea-faring folk, who, from
+Homer's days at least, have always provided the richest food for poetry
+and romance. The commonest seaman had stirring tales to tell in those
+days, when every sailor was a potential pirate, and foreign crews dealt
+with each other by methods still more summary than plank-walking.[85]
+Moreover, there was even more truth than now in the proverb that "far
+fowls have fair feathers"; and the Genoese on Galley Quay had sailed many
+seas unknown even to the tempest-tossed shipman of Dartmouth, whose
+southern limit was Cape Finisterre. They had passed the Pillars of
+Hercules, and seen the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, and shuddered from
+afar at the Great Whirlpool of the Bay of Biscay, which sucked in its
+floods thrice daily, and thrice belched them forth again; and into which
+about this time "four vessels of the town of Lynn, steering too
+incautiously, suddenly fell, and were swallowed up under their comrades'
+eyes."[86]
+
+Moreover, the very streets and markets of London then presented a pageant
+unquestionably far more inspiring to a man of Chaucer's temperament than
+anything that can be seen there to-day. It is easy to exaggerate the
+contrast between modern and medieval London, if only by leaving out of
+account those subtle attractions which kept even William Morris from
+tearing himself away from the much-abused town. It is also undeniable
+that, however small and white, Chaucer's London was not clean, even to the
+outward eye; and that the exclusive passion for Gothic buildings is to
+some extent a mere modern fashion, as it was the fashion two hundred years
+ago to consider them a positive eyesore. To some great poet of the future,
+modern London may well supply a grander canvas still; but to a writer like
+Chaucer, content to avoid psychological problems and take men and things
+as they appear on the surface, there was every possible inspiration in
+this busy capital of some 40,000 souls, where everybody could see
+everything that went on, and it was almost possible to know all one's
+fellow-citizens by sight. Some streets, no doubt, were as crowded as any
+oriental bazaar; but most of the buying and selling went on in open
+market, with lavish expenditure of words and gestures; while the shops
+were open booths in which the passer-by could see master and men at their
+work, and stop to chat with them on his way. In the absence of catalogues
+and advertisements, every man spread out his gayest wares in the sun, and
+commended them to the public with every resource of mother-wit or
+professional rhetoric. Cornhill and Cheapside were like the Mercato
+Vecchio at Florence or St. Mark's Square at Venice. Extremes meet in
+modern London, and there is theme enough for poetry in the deeper
+contrasts that underlie our uniformity of architecture and dress. But in
+Chaucer's London the crowd was almost as motley to man's eye as to God's--
+
+  Barons and burgesses and bondmen also ...
+  Baxters and brewsters and butchers many,
+  Woolwebsters and weavers of linen,
+  Tailors and tinkers and tollers in markets,
+  Masons and miners and many other crafts ...
+  Of all-kind living labourers leapt forth some,
+  As dykers and delvers that do their deeds ill,
+  And drive forth the long day with _Dieu vous sauve, Dame Emme_
+  Cooks and their knaves cried "Hot pies, hot!
+  Good griskin and geese! go dine, go!"
+  Taverners unto them told the same [tale]
+  "White wine of Alsace and red wine of Gascoyne,
+  Of the Rhine and of Rochelle, the roast to defye!"        [digest.[87]
+
+The very sticks and stones had an individuality no less marked. The
+churches, parish and monastic, stood out as conspicuously as they still
+stand in Norwich, and were often used for secular purposes, despite the
+prohibitions of synods and councils. For even London had in Chaucer's time
+scarcely any secular public buildings, while at Norwich, one of the four
+greatest towns in the kingdom, public meetings were sometimes held in the
+Tolhouse, sometimes in the Chapel of St. Mary's College, in default of a
+regular Guildhall. The city houses of noblemen and great churchmen were
+numerous and often splendid, and Besant rightly emphasizes this feudal
+aspect of the city; but he seems in his enumeration of the lords'
+retainers to allow too little for medieval licence in dealing with
+figures; and certainly he has exaggerated their architectural magnificence
+beyond all reason.[88] But at least the ordinary citizens' and artisans'
+dwellings presented the most picturesque variety. Here and there a stone
+house, rare enough to earn special mention in official documents; but most
+of the dwellings were of timber and plaster, in front and behind, with
+only side-gables of masonry for some sort of security against the
+spreading of fires.[89] The ground floor was generally open to the
+street, and formed the shop; then, some eight or ten feet above the
+pavement, came the "solar" or "soller" on its projecting brackets, and
+sometimes (as in the Custom House) a third storey also. Outside stairs
+seem to have been common, and sometimes penthouses on pillars or cellar
+steps further broke the monotony of the street, though frequent enactments
+strove to regulate these in the public interest. Of comfort or privacy in
+the modern sense these houses had little to offer. The living rooms were
+frequently limited to hall and bower (_i.e._ bedroom); only the better
+sort had two chambers; glass was rare; in Paris, which was at least as
+well-built as London, a well-to-do citizen might well have windows of
+oiled linen for his bedroom, and even in 1575 a good-sized house at
+Sheffield contained only sixteen feet of glass altogether.[90] Meanwhile
+the wooden shutters which did duty for casements were naturally full of
+chinks; and the inhabitants were exposed during dark nights not only to
+the nuisance and danger of "common listeners at the eaves," against whom
+medieval town legislation is deservedly severe, but also to the far
+greater chances of burglary afforded by the frailty of their habitations.
+It is not infrequently recorded in medieval inquests that the housebreaker
+found his line of least resistance not through a window or a door, but
+through the wall itself.[91] Moreover, in those unlighted streets, much
+that was most picturesque by day was most dangerous at night, from the
+projecting staircases and penthouses down to doorways unlawfully opened
+after curfew, wherein "aspyers" might lurk, "waiting men for to beaten or
+to slayen." These and many similar considerations will serve to explain
+why night-walking was treated in medieval towns as an offence
+presumptively no less criminal than, in our days, the illegal possession
+of dynamite. The 15th-century statutes of Oxford condemn the nocturnal
+wanderer to a fine double that which he would have incurred by shooting at
+a proctor and his attendants with intent to injure.[92]
+
+
+[Illustration: THE TOWER, WITH LONDON BRIDGE IN THE BACKGROUND
+
+(FROM MS. ROY. 16 F. ii, f. 73: A LATE 15TH CENTURY MS. OF THE POEMS OF
+CHARLES D'ORLÉANS)]
+
+
+But to return to the inside of the houses. The contract for a well-to-do
+citizen's dwelling of 1308 has been preserved, by a fortunate chance, in
+one of the city Letter-books. "Simon de Canterbury, carpenter, came before
+the Mayor and Aldermen ... and acknowledged that he would make at his own
+proper charges, down to the locks, for William de Hanigtone, skinner,
+before the Feast of Easter then next ensuing, a hall and a room with a
+chimney, and one larder between the said hall and room; and one solar over
+the room and larder; also, one oriel at the end of the hall, beyond the
+high bench, and one step with a porch from the ground to the door of the
+hall aforesaid, outside of that hall; and two enclosures as cellars,
+opposite to each other, beneath the hall; and one enclosure for a sewer,
+with two pipes leading to the said sewer; and one stable, [_blank_] in
+length, between the said hall and the old kitchen, and twelve feet in
+width, with a solar above such stable, and a garret above the solar
+aforesaid; and at one end of such solar, there is to be a kitchen with a
+chimney; and there is to be an oriel between the said hall and the old
+chamber, eight feet in width.... And the said William de Hanigtone
+acknowledged that he was bound to pay to Simon before-mentioned, for the
+work aforesaid, the sum of Ł9 5_s._ 4_d._ sterling, half a hundred of
+Eastern martenskins, fur for a woman's head, value five shillings, and fur
+for a robe of him, the said Simon, etc."[93] Read side by side with this
+the list of another fairly well-to-do citizen's furniture in 1337. Hugh le
+Benere, a Vintner who owned several tenements, was accused of having
+murdered Alice his wife.[94] He refused to plead, was condemned to prison
+for life, and his goods were inventoried. Omitting the stock-in-trade of
+six casks of wine (valued at six marks), the wearing apparel, and the
+helmet and quilted doublet in which Hugh had to turn out for the general
+muster, the whole furniture was as follows: "One mattress, value 4_s._; 6
+blankets and one serge, 13_s._ 6_d._; one green carpet, 2_s._; one torn
+coverlet, with shields of sendal, 4_s._; ... 7 linen sheets, 5_s._; one
+table-cloth, 2_s._; 3 table-cloths, 18_d._; ... one canvas, 8_d._; 3
+feather beds, 8_s._; 5 cushions, 6_d._; ... 3 brass pots, 12_s._; one
+brass pot, 6_s._; 2 pairs of brass pots, 2_s._ 6_d._; one brass pot,
+broken, 2_s._ 6_d._; one candlestick of latten, and one plate, with one
+small brass plate, 2_s._; 2 pieces of lead, 6_d._; one grate, 3_d._; 2
+andirons, 18_d._; 2 basins, with one washing vessel, 5_s._; one iron
+grating, 12_d._; one tripod, 2_d._; ... one iron spit, 3_d._; one
+frying-pan, 1_d._; ... one funnel, 1_d._; one small canvas bag, 1_d._; ...
+one old linen sheet, 1_d._; 2 pillows, 3_d._; ... one counter, 4_s._; 2
+coffers, 8_d._; 2 curtains, 8_d._; 2 remnants of cloth, 1_d._; 6 chests,
+10_s._ 10_d._; one folding table, 12_d._; 2 chairs, 8_d._; one portable
+cupboard, 6_d._; 2 tubs, 2_s._; also firewood, sold for 3_s._; one mazer
+cup, 6_s._; ... one cup called "note" (_i.e._ cocoanut) with a foot and
+cover of silver, value 30_s._; 6 silver spoons, 6_s._"[95]
+
+This implies no very high standard of domestic comfort. The hall, it must
+be remembered, had no chimney in the modern sense, but a hole in the roof
+to which the smoke went up from an open hearth in the centre of the room,
+more or less assisted in most cases by a funnel-shaped erection of lath
+and plaster.[96] It is not generally realized what draughts our ancestors
+were obliged to accept as unavoidable, even when they sat partially
+screened by their high-backed seats, as in old inn kitchens. A man needed
+his warmest furs still more for sitting indoors than for walking abroad;
+and to Montaigne, even in 1580, one of the most remarkable things in
+Switzerland was the draughtless comfort of the stove-warmed rooms. "One
+neither burns one's face nor one's boots, and one escapes the smoke of
+French houses. Moreover, whereas we [in France] take our warm and furred
+_robes de chambre_ when we enter the house, they on the contrary dress in
+their doublets, with their heads uncovered to the very hair, and put on
+their warm clothes to walk in the open air."[97] The important part played
+by furs of all kinds, and the matter-of-course mention of dirt and vermin,
+are among the first things that strike us in medieval literature.
+
+But the worst discomfort of the house, to the modern mind, was the want of
+privacy. There was generally but one bedroom; for most of the household
+the house meant simply the hall; and some of those with whom the rest were
+brought into such close contact might indeed be "gey ill to live wi'."[98]
+We have seen that, even as a King's squire, Chaucer had not a bed to
+himself; and sometimes one bed had to accommodate three occupants. This
+was so ordered, for instance, by the 15th-century statutes of the
+choir-school at Wells, which provided minutely for the packing: "two
+smaller boys with their heads to the head of the bed, and an older one
+with his head to the foot of the bed and his feet between the others'
+heads." A distinguished theologian of the same century, narrating a
+ghost-story of his own, begins quite naturally: "When I was a youth, and
+lay in a square chamber, which had only a single door well shut from
+within, together with three more companions in the same bed...." One of
+these, we presently find, "was of greater age, and a man of some
+experience."[99] The upper classes of Chaucer's later days had indeed
+begun to introduce revolutionary changes into the old-fashioned common
+life of the hall; a generation of unparalleled success in war and commerce
+was already making possible, and therefore inevitable, a new cleavage
+between class and class. The author of the B. text of "Piers Plowman,"
+writing about 1377, complains of these new and unsociable ways (x., 94).
+
+  "Ailing is the Hall each day in the week,
+  Where the lord nor the lady liketh not to sit.
+  Now hath each rich man a rule to eaten by himself
+  In a privy parlour, for poor men's sake,
+  Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief Hall,
+  That was made for meals, and men to eaten in."
+
+Few men, however, could afford even these rudiments of privacy; people
+like Chaucer, of fair income and good social position, still found in
+their homes many of the discomforts of shipboard; and their daily
+intercourse with their fellow-men bred the same blunt familiarity, even
+beneath the most ceremonious outward fashions. It was not only starveling
+dependents like Lippo Lippi, whose daily life compelled them to study
+night and day the faces and outward ways of their fellow-men.
+
+But let us get back again into the street, where all the work and play of
+London was as visible to the passer-by as that of any colony of working
+ants under the glass cases in a modern exhibition. Often, of course, there
+were set pageants for edification or distraction--Miracle Plays and solemn
+church processions twice or thrice in the year,--the Mayor's annual ride
+to the palace of Westminster and back,--the King's return with a new Queen
+or after a successful campaign, as in 1357, when Edward III. "came over
+the Bridge and through the City of London, with the King of France and
+other prisoners of rich ransom in his train. He entered the city about
+tierce [9 a.m.] and made for Westminster; but at the news of his coming so
+great a crowd of folk ran together to see this marvellous sight, that for
+the press of the people he could scarce reach his palace after noonday."
+Frequent again were the royal tournaments at Smithfield, Cheapside, and
+Westminster, or "trials by battle" in those same lists, when one gentleman
+had accused another of treachery, and London citizens might see the
+quarrel decided by God's judgment.[100] Here were welcome contrasts to the
+monotony of household life; for there was in all these shows a piquant
+element of personal risk, or at least of possible broken heads for others.
+Even if the King threw down his truncheon before the bitter end of the
+duel, even if no bones were broken at the tournament, something at least
+would happen amongst the crowd. Fountains ran wine in the morning, and
+blood was pretty sure to be shed somewhere before night. In 1396, when the
+little French Princess of eight years was brought to her Royal bridegroom
+at Westminster, nine persons were crushed to death on London Bridge, and
+the Prior of Tiptree was among the dead. Even the church processions, as
+episcopal registers show, ended not infrequently in scuffling, blows, and
+bloodshed; and the frequent holy days enjoyed then, as since, a sad
+notoriety for crime. Moreover, these things were not, as with us, mere
+matters of newspaper knowledge; they stared the passer-by in the face.
+Chaucer must have heard from his father how the unpopular Bishop Stapledon
+was torn from his horse at the north door of St. Paul's and beheaded with
+two of his esquires in Cheapside; how the clergy of the cathedral and of
+St. Clement's feared to harbour the corpses, which lay naked by the
+roadside at Temple Bar until "women and wretched poor folk took the
+Bishop's naked corpse, and a woman gave him an old rag to cover his belly,
+and they buried him in a waste plot called the Lawless Church, with his
+squires by his side, all naked and without office of priest or
+clerk."[101] Chaucer himself must have seen some of the many similar
+tragedies in 1381, for they are among the few events of contemporary
+history which we can definitely trace in his poems--
+
+  Have ye not seen some time a palë face
+  Among a press, of him that hath been led
+  Toward his death, where as him gat no grace,
+  And such a colour in his face hath had,
+  Men mightë know his face that was bestead
+  Amongës all the faces in that rout?[102]
+
+What modern Londoner has witnessed this, or anything like it? Yet to all
+his living readers Chaucer appealed confidently, "Have ye not seen?"
+Scores of wretched lawyers and jurors were hunted down in that riot, and
+hurried through the streets to have their heads hacked off at Tower Hill
+or Cheapside, "and many Flemings lost their head at that time, and namely
+[specially] they that could not say 'Bread and Cheese,' but 'Case and
+Brode.'"[103] It may well have been Simon of Sudbury's white face that
+haunted Chaucer, when the mob forgot his archbishopric in the unpopularity
+of his ministry, forgot the sanctity of the chapel at whose altar he had
+taken refuge, "paid no reverence even to the Lord's Body which the priest
+held up before him, but worse than demons (who fear and flee Christ's
+sacrament) dragged him by the arms, by his hood, by different parts of the
+body towards their fellow-rioters on Tower Hill without the gates. When
+they had come thither, a most horrible shout arose, not like men's shouts,
+but worse beyond all comparison than all human cries, and most like to the
+yelling of devils in hell. Moreover, they cried thus whensoever they
+beheaded men or tore down their houses, so long as God permitted them to
+work their iniquity unpunished."[104] De Quincey has noted how such cries
+may make a deeper mark on the soul than any visible scene. And here again
+Chaucer has brought his own experience, though half in jest, as a parallel
+to the sack of Ilion and Carthage or the burning of Rome--
+
+  So hideous was the noise, _benedicite!_
+  Certës, he Jacke Straw, and his meinie
+  Ne madë never shoutës half so shrill,
+  When that they woulden any Fleming kill ...[105]
+
+Last tragedy of all--but this time, though he may well have seen, the poet
+could no longer write--Richard II.'s corpse "was brought to St. Paul's in
+London, and his face shown to the people," that they might know he was
+really dead.[106]
+
+Nor was there less comedy than tragedy in the London streets; the heads
+grinned down from the spikes of London Bridge on such daily buffooneries
+as scarcely survive nowadays except in the amenities of cabdrivers and
+busmen. The hue and cry after a thief in one of these narrow streets,
+encumbered with show-benches and goods of every description, must at any
+time have been a Rabelaisian farce; and still more so when it was the
+thief who had raised the hue and cry after a true man, and had slipped off
+himself in the confusion. The crowds who gather in modern towns to see a
+man in handcuffs led from a dingy van up the dingy court steps would have
+found a far keener relish in the public punishments which Chaucer saw on
+his way to and from work; fraudulent tradesmen in the pillory, with their
+putrid wares burning under their noses, or drinking wry-mouthed the
+corrupt wine which they had palmed off on the public; scolding wives in
+the somewhat milder "thewe"; sometimes a penitential procession all round
+the city, as in the case of the quack doctor and astrologer whose story is
+so vividly told by the good Monk of St. Alban's. The impostor "was set on
+a horse [barebacked] with the beast's tail in his hand for a bridle, and
+two pots which in the vulgar tongue we call _Jordans_ bound round his
+neck, with a whetstone in sign that he earned all this by his lies; and
+thus he was led round the whole city."[107] A lay chronicler might have
+given us the reverse of the medal; some priest barelegged in his shirt,
+with a lighted taper in his hand, doing penance for his sins before the
+congregation of his own church. The author of "Piers Plowman" knew this
+well enough; in introducing us to his tavern company, it is a priest and a
+parish clerk whom he shows us cheek-by-jowl with the two least reputable
+ladies of the party. The whole passage deserves quoting in full as a
+picture of low life indeed, but one familiar enough to Chaucer and his
+friends in their day; for it is a matter of common remark that even the
+distance which separated different classes in earlier days made it easier
+for them to mix familiarly in public. The very catalogue of this tavern
+company is a comedy in itself, and may well conclude our survey of common
+London sights. Glutton, on his way to morning mass, has passed Bett the
+brewster's open door; and her persuasive "I have good ale, gossip" has
+broken down all his good resolutions--
+
+  Then goeth Glutton in, and great oaths after.
+  Ciss the seamstress sat on the bench,
+  Wat the warrener, and his wife drunk,
+  Tim the tinker, and twain of his knaves,
+  Hick the hackneyman and Hugh the needler;
+  Clarice of Cock's Lane, the clerk of the church,
+  Sir Piers of Prydie and Pernel of Flanders;
+  An hayward and an hermit, the hangman of Tyburn,
+  Daw the dyker, with a dozen harlots                    [rascals
+  Of porters and pickpurses and pilled tooth-drawers;    [bald
+  A ribiber and a ratter, a raker and his knave          [lute-player, scavenger
+  A roper and a ridingking, and Rose the disher,         [mercenary trooper
+  Godfrey the garlicmonger and Griffin the Welshman,
+  And upholders an heap, early by the morrow             [furniture-brokers
+  Give Glutton with glad cheer good ale to hansel.[108]  [try
+
+
+[Illustration: A TOOTH-DRAWER OF THE 14TH CENTURY, WITH A WREATH OF PAST
+TROPHIES OVER HIS SHOULDER
+
+(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6 f. 503 b)]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ALDGATE TOWER
+
+    "For though the love of books, in a cleric, be honourable in the very
+    nature of the case, yet it hath sorely exposed us to the adverse
+    judgment of many folk, to whom we became an object of wonder, and were
+    blamed at one time for greediness in that matter, or again for seeming
+    vanity, or again, for intemperate delight in letters; yet we cared no
+    more for their revilings than for the barking of curs, contented with
+    His testimony alone to Whom it pertaineth to try the hearts and
+    reins.... Yet perchance they would have praised and been kindly
+    affected towards us if we had spent our time in hunting wild beasts,
+    in playing at dice, or in courting ladies' favours."--The
+    "Philobiblon" of Bp. R. de Bury (1287-1345).
+
+
+Even in the 14th century a man's house was more truly his castle in
+England than in any country of equal population; and Chaucer was
+particularly fortunate in having secured a city castle for his house. The
+records show that such leases were commonly granted by the authorities to
+men of influence and good position in the City; in 1367 the Black Prince
+specially begged the Mayor that Thomas de Kent might have Cripplegate; and
+we have curious evidence of the keen competition for Aldgate. The Mayor
+and Aldermen granted to Chaucer in 1374 "the whole dwelling-house above
+Aldgate Gate, with the chambers thereon built and a certain cellar beneath
+the said gate, on the eastern side thereof, together with all its
+appurtenances, for the lifetime of the said Geoffrey." There was no rent,
+though of course Chaucer had to keep it in repair; in an earlier lease of
+1354, the tenant had paid 13_s._ 4_d._ a year besides repairs. The City
+promised to keep no prisoners in the tower during Chaucer's tenancy,[109]
+but naturally stipulated that they might take possession of their gate
+when necessary for the defence of the City. In 1386, as we have already
+seen and shall see more fully hereafter, there was a scare of invasion so
+serious that the authorities can scarcely have failed to take the gates
+into their own hands for a while. Though this need not necessarily have
+ended Chaucer's tenancy altogether, yet he must in fact have given it up
+then, if not earlier; and a Common Council meeting held on October 4
+resolved to grant no such leases in future "by reason of divers damages
+that have befallen the said city, through grants made to many persons, as
+well of the Gates and the dwelling-houses above them, as of the gardens
+and vacant places adjoining the walls, gates, and fosses of the said city,
+whereby great and divers mischiefs may readily hereafter ensue." Yet _on
+the very next day_ (and this is our first notice of the end of Chaucer's
+tenancy) a fresh lease of Aldgate tower and house was granted to Chaucer's
+friend Richard Forster by another friend of the poet's, Nicholas Brembre,
+who was then Mayor. This may very likely have been a pre-arranged job
+among the three friends; but the flagrant violation of the law may well
+seem startling even to those who have realized the frequent contrasts
+between medieval theory and medieval practice; and after this we are quite
+prepared for Riley's footnote, "Within a very short period after this
+enactment was made, it came to be utterly disregarded."[110] The whole
+transaction, however, shows clearly that the Aldgate lodging was
+considered a prize in its way.
+
+That Chaucer loved it, we know from one of the too rare autobiographical
+passages in his poems, describing his shy seclusion even more plainly
+than the Host hints at it in the "Canterbury Tales." The "House of Fame"
+is a serio-comic poem modelled vaguely on Dante's "Comedia," in which a
+golden eagle carries Chaucer up to heaven, and, like Beatrice, plays the
+part of Mentor all the while. The poet, who was at first somewhat startled
+by the sudden rush through the air, and feared lest he might have been
+chosen as an unworthy successor to Enoch and Elias, is presently quieted
+by the Eagle's assurance that this temporary apotheosis is his reward as
+the Clerk of Love--
+
+  Love holdeth it great humbleness,
+  And virtue eke, that thou wilt make
+  A-night full oft thy head to ache,
+  In thy study so thou writest
+  And ever more of Love enditest.
+
+The Ruler of the Gods, therefore, has taken pity on the poet's lonely
+life--
+
+  That is, that thou hast no tidings
+  Of Lovë's folk, if they be glad,
+  Nor of nothing ellës that God made:
+  And not only from far countree,
+  Whence no tiding cometh to thee,
+  But of thy very neighëbores
+  That dwellen almost at thy doors,
+  Thou hearest neither that nor this;
+  For, when thy labour done all is,
+  And hast y-made thy reckonings,
+  Instead of rest and newë things
+  Thou go'st home to thy house anon,
+  And, all so dumb as any stone,
+  Thou sittest at another book
+  Till fully dazed is thy look,
+  And livest thus as an heremite,
+  Although thy abstinence is lite.[111]         [little
+
+Here we have the central figure of the Aldgate Chamber, but what was the
+background? Was his room, as some will have it, such as that to which his
+eyes opened in the "Book of the Duchess"?
+
+  And sooth to say my chamber was
+  Full well depainted, and with glass
+  Were all the windows well y-glazed
+  Full clear, and not one hole y-crazed,      [cracked
+  That to behold it was great joy;
+  For wholly all the story of Troy
+  Was in the glazing y-wrought thus ...
+  And all the walls with colours fine
+  Were painted, bothë text and glose,         [commentary
+  And all the Romance of the Rose.
+  My windows weren shut each one
+  And through the glass the sunnë shone
+  Upon my bed with brightë beams....
+
+Those lines were written before the Aldgate days; and the hints which can
+be gathered from surviving inventories and similar sources make it very
+improbable that the poet was lodged with anything like such outward
+magnificence. The storied glass and the frescoed wall were far more
+probably a reminiscence from Windsor, or from Chaucer's life with one of
+the royal dukes; and the furniture of the Aldgate dwelling-house is likely
+to have resembled in quantity that which we have seen recorded of Hugh le
+Benere, and in quality the similar but more valuable stock of Richard de
+Blountesham. (Riley, p. 123.) Richard possessed bedding for three beds to
+the total value of fifty shillings and eightpence; his brass pot weighed
+sixty-seven pounds; and, over and above his pewter plates, dishes, and
+salt-cellars, he possessed "three silver cups, ten shillings in weight."
+Three better cups than these, at least, stood in the Chaucer cupboard; for
+on New Year's Day, 1380, 1381, and 1382, the accounts of the Duchy of
+Lancaster record presents from John of Gaunt to Philippa Chaucer of
+silver-gilt cups with covers. The first of these weighed thirty-one
+shillings, and cost nearly three pounds; the second and third were
+apparently rather more valuable. We must suppose, therefore, that the
+Aldgate rooms were handsomely furnished, as a London citizen's rooms went;
+but we must beware here of such exaggerations as the genius of William
+Morris has popularized. The assumption that the poet knew familiarly
+every book from which he quotes has long been exploded; and it is quite as
+unsafe to suppose that the artistic glories which he so often describes
+formed part of his home life. There were tapestries and stained glass in
+churches for every man to see, and in palaces and castles for the
+enjoyment of the few; but they become fairly frequent in citizens' houses
+only in the century after Chaucer's death; and it was very easy to spend
+an income such as his without the aid of artistic extravagance. Froissart,
+whose circumstances were so nearly the same, and who, though a priest, was
+just as little given to abstinence, confesses to having spent 2000 livres
+(or some Ł8000 modern English money) in twenty-five years, over and above
+his fat living of Lestinnes. "And yet I hoard no grain in my barns, I
+build no churches, or clocks, or ships, or galleys, or manor-houses. I
+spend not my money on furnishing fine rooms.... My chronicles indeed have
+cost me a good seven hundred livres, at the least, and the taverners of
+Lestinnes have had a good five hundred more."[112] Froissart's confession
+introduces a witty poetical plea for fresh contributions; and if Chaucer
+had added a couple of similar stanzas to the "Complaint to his Empty
+Purse," it is probable that their tenor would have been much the same:
+"Books, and the Taverner; and I've had my money's worth from both!"
+
+
+[Illustration: 1. GROUND PLAN AND SECTION OF THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT
+ALFRISTON--A TYPICAL TIMBER HOUSE OF THE 14TH CENTURY. (For the Hall, see
+Chaucer's "Miller's Tale")
+
+2. PLAN OF ALDGATE TOWER AS IT WAS IN CHAUCER'S TIME]
+
+
+Professor Lounsbury ("Studies in Chaucer," chap. v.) has discoursed
+exhaustively, and very judicially, on Chaucer's learning; he shows clearly
+what books the poet knew only as nodding acquaintances, and how many
+others he must at one time have possessed, or at least have had at hand
+for serious study; and it would be impertinent to go back here over the
+same ground. But Professor Lounsbury is less clear on the subject which
+most concerns us here--the average price of books; for the three volumes
+which he instances from the King's library were no doubt illuminated, and
+he follows Devon in the obvious slip of describing the French Bible as
+"written in the _Gaelic_ language." (II., 196; the reference to Devon
+should be p. 213, not 218.) But, at the lowest possible estimate, books
+were certainly an item which would have swelled any budget seriously in
+the 14th century. This was indeed grossly overstated by Robertson and
+other writers of a century ago; but Maitland's "Dark Ages," while
+correcting their exaggerations, is itself calculated to mislead in the
+other direction. A small Bible was cheap at forty shillings, _i.e._ the
+equivalent of Ł30 in modern money; so that the twenty volumes of Aristotle
+which Chaucer's Clerk of Oxford had at his bed's head could scarcely have
+failed to cost him the value of three average citizens' houses in a great
+town.[113] Among all the church dignitaries whose wills are recorded in
+Bishop Stafford's Register at Exeter (1395-1419) the largest library
+mentioned is only of fourteen volumes. The sixty testators include a Dean,
+two Archdeacons, twenty Canons or Prebendaries, thirteen Rectors, six
+Vicars, and eighteen layfolk, mostly rich people. The whole sixty
+apparently possessed only two Bibles between them, and only one hundred
+and thirty-eight books altogether; or, omitting church service-books, only
+sixty; _i.e._ exactly one each on an average. Thirteen of the beneficed
+clergy were altogether bookless, though several of them possessed the
+_baselard_ or dagger which church councils had forbidden in vain for
+centuries past; four more had only their Breviary. Of the laity fifteen
+were bookless, while three had service-books, one of these being a knight,
+who simply bequeathed them as part of the furniture of his private chapel.
+Any similar collection of wills and inventories would (I believe) give the
+same results, which fully agree with the independent evidence of
+contemporary writers. Bishop Richard de Bury (or possibly the
+distinguished theologian, Holcot, writing in his name) speaks bitterly of
+the neglect of books in the 14th century. Not only (he says) is the ardent
+collector ridiculed, but even education is despised, and money rules the
+world. Laymen, who do not even care whether books lie straight or upside
+down, are utterly unworthy of all communion with them; the secular clergy
+neglect them; the monastic clergy (with honourable exceptions among the
+friars) pamper their bodies and leave their books amid the dust and
+rubbish, till they become "corrupt and abominable, breeding-grounds for
+mice, riddled with worm-holes." Even when in use, they have a score of
+deadly enemies--dirty and careless readers (whose various peculiarities
+the good Bishop describes in language of Biblical directness)--children
+who cry for and slobber over the illuminated capitals--and careless or
+slovenly servants. But the deadliest of all such enemies is the priest's
+concubine, who finds the neglected volume half-hidden under cobwebs, and
+barters it for female finery. There is an obvious element of exaggeration
+in the good Bishop's satire; but the Oxford Chancellor, Gascoigne, a
+century later, speaks equally strongly of the neglect of writing and the
+destruction of literature in the monasteries of his time; and there is
+abundant official evidence to prove that our ancestors did not atone for
+natural disadvantages by any excessive zeal in the multiplication, use, or
+preservation of books.[114]
+
+Chaucer was scarcely born when the "Philobiblon" was written; and already
+in his day there was a growing number of leisured laymen who did know the
+top end of a book from the bottom, and who cared to read and write
+something beyond money accounts. Gower, who probably made money as a
+London merchant before he became a country squire, was also a well-read
+man; but systematic readers were still very rare outside the Universities,
+and Mrs. Green writes, even of a later generation of English citizens, "So
+far as we know, no trader or burgher possessed a library."[115]
+Twenty-nine years after Chaucer's death, the celebrated Whittington did
+indeed found a library; yet this was placed not at the Guildhall, to
+which he was a considerable benefactor, but in the Greyfriars' convent.
+The poet's bookishness would therefore inevitably have made him something
+of a recluse, and we have no reason to tax his own description with
+exaggeration.
+
+
+[Illustration: ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS AS RECONSTITUTED IN W.
+NEWTON'S "LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME"
+
+12. ST. MICHAEL'S, ALDGATE; 25. BLANCH APPLETON; 26. ST. CATHERINE,
+COLEMAN STREET; 27. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE; 28. PRIOR OF HORNCHURCH'S
+LODGING; 29. SARACEN'S HEAD]
+
+
+London has never been a silent city, but Chaucer enjoyed at least one of
+the quietest spots in it. If (as we have every reason to suppose) the
+Ordinance of 1345 was far from putting an end to the nuisances which it
+indicates, then Chaucer must have heaved a sigh of relief when he had seen
+the Custom-House locked up, and turned his back on Spurrier Lane. The
+Spurriers were addicted to working after dark for nefarious ends of their
+own; "and further, many of the said trade are wandering about all day,
+without working at all at their trade; and then, when they have become
+drunk and frantic, they take to their work, to the annoyance of the sick
+and of all their neighbourhood, as well as by reason of the broils that
+arise between them and the strange folks who are dwelling among them. And
+then they blow up their fires so vigorously, that their forges begin all
+at once to blaze, to the great peril of themselves and of all the
+neighbourhood around. And then too, all the neighbours are much in dread
+of the sparks, which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the
+mouths of the chimneys in their forges."[116] We may trust that no such
+offensive handiwork was carried on round Aldgate, whither the poet would
+arrive about five o'clock in the evening, and sit down forthwith to
+supper, as the sun began to slant over the open fields. We may hope, at
+least, that he was wont to sup at home rather than at those alluring
+cook-shops which alternated with wine-taverns along the river bank; and
+that, as he "defyed the roast" with his Gascon wine, Philippa sat and
+sipped with him from one of time-honoured Lancaster's silver-gilt cups.
+Even if we accept the most pessimistic theories of Chaucer's married
+life, we need scarcely doubt that the pair sat often together at their
+open window in the twilight--
+
+  Both of one mind, as married people use,
+  Quietly, quietly the evening through.
+
+The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and
+the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their
+very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men
+and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such
+haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out
+from Bow steeple.[117] Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in
+"Troilus and Criseyde," written during this very Aldgate time. The hero
+watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of
+Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at
+latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover
+fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the
+evening shadows leave most to the imagination--
+
+  The day go'th fast, and after that com'th eve
+  And yet came not to Troilus Criseyde.
+  He looketh forth by hedge, by tree, by greve,           [grove
+  And far his head over the wall he laid ...
+  "Have here my truth, I see her! Yond she is!
+  Have up thine eyen, man! May'st thou not see?"
+  Pandarus answered, "Nay, so mote I the!
+  All wrong, by God! What say'st thou, man? Where art?
+  That I see yond is but a farë-cart."
+  The warden of the gatës gan to call
+  The folk which that without the gatës were,
+  And bade them driven in their beastës all,
+  Or all the night they musten bleven there;              [remain
+  And far within the night, with many a tear,
+  This Troilus gan homeward for to ride,
+  For well he seeth it helpeth nought t' abide.
+
+And far within the night, while the "uncunning porters" sing over their
+liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of
+Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the "Romance of the Rose." Does he not also,
+to poor Philippa's disgust, "laugh full fast" to himself sometimes over
+that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains "of wicked wives
+... more legendës and lives than be of goodë wives in the Bible"? It is
+difficult to escape from this conviction. His "Wife of Bath" cites the
+treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that
+Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the
+practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read
+aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall
+then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals.
+Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the
+belly, like that of the Apocalypse. "Late to bed" suits ill with "early to
+rise," and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat
+unsympathetic "Awake, Geoffrey!" was often the first word he heard in the
+morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven--
+
+  At the last to me he spake
+  In mannës voice, and said "Awake!
+  And be not so aghast, for shame!"
+  And called me then by my name
+  And, for I should the better abraid           [rouse
+  Me dreamed, "Awake!" to me he said
+  Right in the samë voice and steven            [tone
+  That useth one I couldë neven;                [name
+  And with that voice, sooth for to say'n
+  My mindë came to me again;
+  For it was goodly said to me,
+  So it was never wont to be.
+                                  "House of Fame," ii., 47.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TOWN AND COUNTRY
+
+  "For never to my mind was evening yet
+  But was far beautifuller than its day."
+                                  BROWNING
+
+  "Wherefore is the sun red at even? For he goeth toward hell."
+                         ("The Master of Oxford's Catechism" (XV. cent.);
+                                  "Reliquić Antiquć," i., 232.)
+
+
+That which in Chaucer's day passed for rank "sluggardy a-night" might yet
+be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he
+needed Philippa's shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character
+given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, "that he had seen the sun
+rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together." It is indeed
+startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five
+hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a
+lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever
+seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night's
+dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner's mood: "the
+sun, my dear, that's God!" In the days when a tallow candle cost four
+times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and
+His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning
+your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict
+dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to
+have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset
+as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his
+"Playground of Europe," has brought a wealth of illustration and
+penetrating comment to show how strictly men's ideas of the picturesque
+are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even
+more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular
+religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was
+a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had
+special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and
+the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest
+monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by
+love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sülte, for instance,
+in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery
+beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, "who oft-times
+affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the
+air." The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so
+that "many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the
+Bürgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred
+measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity
+to a herring-barrel." What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or
+Tintern was not the beauty of "these steep woods and lofty cliffs," but
+their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks' own labours and those of their
+servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to
+listen how "the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of
+birds," then they felt their forefathers to have been right in "noting
+fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds."[118] After
+all, the earth was cursed for Adam's sake, and even its apparent beauty
+was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang
+in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists--
+
+  "The world is fair to gaze on, white and green and red,
+  But inly foul and black of hue, and dismal as the dead."
+
+Ruskin's famous passage on this subject ("M. P.," iii., 14, 15) is, on the
+whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two
+remarkable exceptions. The poet of "Pearl," who probably knew Wales well,
+describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas anticipated
+Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also
+with apparent sympathy.[119] Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its
+different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident
+delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of
+daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our
+eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or
+think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil's tomb.[120] The scenic
+splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul
+turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the
+broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even
+Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and
+variety of the sunrises in the "Decameron" is equalled only by the bald
+brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects
+mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be
+equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer;
+Criseyde's "Ywis, it will be night as fast," is quite a characteristic
+epitaph for the dying day.
+
+On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its
+sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant
+conventional repetition; and here Chaucer is at his best. He may well
+have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard
+de Bury calls "a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever
+taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk," yet no poet was ever
+farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature--
+
+  On bookës for to read I me delight,
+  And to them give I faith and full credence,
+  And in mine heart have them in reverence
+  So heartily, that there is gamë none
+  That from my bookës maketh me to go'n
+  But it be seldom on the holyday;
+  Save, certainly, when that the month of May
+  Is comen, and that I hear the fowlës sing,
+  And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring,
+  Farewell my book and my devotion![121]
+
+Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop's wood within a mile's walk of
+Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the "Great Shaft of
+Cornhill," the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared
+at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and
+which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple
+it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring
+row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the
+reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122] These May-day festivities,
+which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in
+popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When
+we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of
+winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we
+consider that even in castles and manor-houses men's lives differed from
+this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the
+monotony of woman's life under these conditions, doubly bound as she was
+to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame,
+with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Mass and gossip with a few
+neighbours--only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day
+meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the
+brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three
+or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long
+failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of
+last year's fruit--in that position, men watched the first green buds with
+the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was
+proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have
+recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports
+under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism
+itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval
+ideal. Fénelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he
+protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called
+interests of religion.[123] It would be difficult to find a single great
+preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say
+in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the
+parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods
+and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar
+attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with
+women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the
+roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but
+even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the
+disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted
+to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions snow, sawdust,
+and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old
+shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly
+forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124] These and other
+similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain
+the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in
+the streets. "If any man speak to thee," writes the Good Wife for her
+Daughter, "swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way"; and again--
+
+  "Go not to the wrestling, nor to shooting at the cock
+  As it were a strumpet, or a giggëlot,
+  Stay at home, daughter."
+
+"When thou goest into town or to church," says the author of the "Ménagier
+de Paris" to his young wife, "walk with thine head high, thine eyelids
+lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front
+of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to
+the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards." Even Chaucer tells us of
+his Virginia--
+
+  She hath full oftentimës sick her feigned,
+  For that she wouldë flee the companye
+  Where likely was to treaten of follye--
+  As is at feastës, revels, and at dances,
+  That be occasions of dalliances.[125]
+
+These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond
+all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an
+objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a
+series of Christmastide proclamations "that no one shall go in the streets
+of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of
+imprisonment." Similarly severe measures were threatened against football
+in the streets, against the game of "taking off the hoods of people, or
+laying hands on them," and against "hocking" or extorting violent
+contributions from passers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter.
+But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their
+inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly
+"charging on the King's behalf and his City, that no man or person ...
+during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by
+night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings
+with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in
+any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after
+the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen."[126] Much of this mumming was
+not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely
+anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined
+in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the
+Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for
+Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a
+very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern
+times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to
+suppress all natural enjoyment of life--even Madame Eglantyne's lapdogs
+were definitely contraband--but the girls were trammelled at every turn
+with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental
+harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches
+provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often
+obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of
+medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and
+unreal "other-worldliness" of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best
+explain certain of Chaucer's least edifying tales by referring, on the
+other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his "A. B. C."
+
+
+[Illustration: MEDIEVAL MUMMERS. (From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")]
+
+
+But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the
+elvish and retiring poet of the "Canterbury Tales" mentions the sports of
+the townsfolk only with gentle irony. "Merry Absolon," the parish clerk,
+who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well
+"after the school of Oxenford ... and with his leggës casten to and fro,"
+and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the 'prentice class to
+which he essentially belonged--all these small perfections are enumerated
+only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought
+by woman's guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the
+Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to
+and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggëlots,
+around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the
+country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields--young men and
+maidens, old men and children--but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by
+himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun--
+
+  Upon the smallë softë sweetë grass,
+  That was with flowrës sweet embroidered all.
+
+At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone
+with the birds--
+
+  A wind, so small it scarcely might be less,
+  Made in the leavës green a noisë soft,
+  Accordant to the fowlës' song aloft.
+
+Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun--
+
+  Right as the freshë, reddë rosë new
+  Against the Summer sunnë coloured is!
+
+But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is
+difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh
+and blood--
+
+  ... of all the flowers in the mead
+  Then love I most these flowers white and red
+  Such as men callen daisies in our town.
+  To them I have so great affectioun,
+  As I said erst, when comen is the May,
+  That in my bed there dawneth me no day
+  But I am up and walking in the mead,
+  To see this flower against the sunnë spread; ...
+  As she that is of allë flowers flower,
+  Fulfillčd of all virtue and honour,
+  And ever y-like fair and fresh of hue.
+  And I love it, and ever y-like new,
+  And ever shall, till that mine heartë die....
+    I fell asleep; within an hour or two
+  Me dreamčd how I lay in the meadow tho                  [then
+  To see this flower that I love so and dread;
+  And from afar came walking in the mead
+  The God of Love, and in his hand a Queen,
+  And she was clad in royal habit green;
+  A fret of gold she haddë next her hair,
+  And upon that a whitë crown she bare
+  With fleurons smallë, and I shall not lie,
+  For all the world right as a da˙sye
+  Y-crowned is with whitë leavës lite,
+  So were the fleurons of her coroune white;
+  For of one pearlë, fine, oriental
+  Her whitë coroune was y-maked all.
+
+Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving
+nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only
+essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities
+almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that
+Chaucer's sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises,
+than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even
+so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is
+their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, "Canterbury Tales," A.,
+1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and "Book of Duchess," 291,
+where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens
+the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens,
+though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration
+of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common
+things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly
+remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly
+studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed
+inferiority. Chaucer's triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun's
+Priest's tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny
+garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens
+himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with
+Chanticleer--all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy
+with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how
+glorious a part of God's creation is even a barn-door cock?
+
+  His voice was merrier than the merry orgon
+  On massë-days that in the churchë go'n ...
+  His comb was redder than the fine coral,
+  Embattled as it were a castle wall;
+  His bill was black, and like the jet it shone,
+  Like azure were his leggës and his toen;
+  His nailës whiter than the lily flower,
+  And like the burnished gold was his colour!
+
+Nothing but Chaucer's directness of observation and truth of colouring
+could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van
+Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of
+youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and
+freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.
+
+In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was
+already becoming in a manner cockneyfied; although she already imported
+sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food,
+and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her
+bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the
+ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life.
+Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of
+agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a
+conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long
+Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and
+corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison
+with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town
+and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great
+as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded
+quarters, the mass of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the
+natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river
+and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul's was plainly set on a
+hill, and nobody could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn
+down the present Gray's Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued)
+Boadicea's chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames,
+though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only "in parts,"
+still ran at low tide over native shingle and mud; the Southwark shore was
+green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their
+gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of
+course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred
+yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural
+landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted
+with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a
+distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and
+the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later
+social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country.
+Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as
+two miles from the walls, "but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On
+all sides," he continues, "without the houses of the suburb, are the
+citizens' gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly,
+and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows,
+with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise.
+Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for
+harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a
+hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful
+increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the
+north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear.
+Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement's Well are most
+famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer
+evenings, when they walk forth to take the air." No doubt in Chaucer's
+time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether
+the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward
+from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering
+the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop's Wood in Stepney parish and the
+fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the "Great
+Forest" of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a
+corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and
+which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and
+beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley's "Memorials" contain
+frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, "a
+little herber[129] that I have," in which Chaucer laid the scene of his
+"Legend of Good Women." These gardens seem to have made a fairly
+continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and
+made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer
+home, however, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street,
+Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln's twenty carefully-tilled
+acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate
+paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and
+rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that
+pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was
+then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages
+which clustered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to
+himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence
+in which Becket's chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the
+city. "Many citizens," writes Fitzstephen, "do delight themselves in hawks
+and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire,
+all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray." The city huntsman was, in
+those days, a salaried official of some dignity.
+
+So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the
+other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a
+company of nature-poets unsurpassed in any language. May we not hope that
+his companions in the "little herber," or on his wider excursions, were
+sometimes "the moral Gower" or "the philosophical Strode?" And may we not
+picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his
+contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer's friend was probably the Ralph
+Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite
+controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a
+lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as
+public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the
+house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into
+Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer
+from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability
+as the author of "Pearl" and other 14th-century poems second only to
+Chaucer's. However that may be, "the philosophical Strode" must
+unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his
+"Troilus," and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer's own
+reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter--
+
+  O youngë freshë folkës, he or she,
+  In which that love upgroweth with your age,
+  Repair ye home from worldly vanitie,
+  And of your heart upcast ye the visage
+  To that same God that after His image
+  You made; and think that all is but a fair,
+  This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair.
+
+But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere
+suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the
+long day wanes at last; and now--
+
+  When that the sun out of the south 'gan west
+  And that this flower 'gan close, and go to rest,
+  For darkness of the night, the which she dread,
+  Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped
+  To go to rest, and early for to rise.
+
+The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows
+thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the
+laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious
+revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or
+so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors
+round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the
+pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he
+must surely have read: "The only pests of London are the immoderate
+drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE LAWS OF LONDON
+
+    "Del un Marchant au jour present
+  L'en parle molt communement,
+  Il ad noun Triche plein de guile,
+  Qe pour sercher del orient
+  Jusques au fin del occident,
+  N'y ad cité ne bonne vile
+  U Triche son avoir ne pile.
+  Triche en Bourdeaux, Triche en Civile,
+  Triche en Paris achat et vent;
+  Triche ad ses niefs et sa famile,
+  Et du richesce plus nobile
+  Triche ad disz foitz plus q'autre gent.
+    Triche a Florence et a Venise
+  Ad son recet et sa franchise,
+  Si ad a Brugges et a Gant;
+  A son agard auci s'est mise
+  La noble Cité sur Tamise,
+  La quelle Brutus fuist fondant;
+  Mais Triche la vait confondant."
+                                  GOWER, "Mirour," 25273 ff.
+
+
+But the picturesque side of things was only the smaller half of Chaucer's
+life, as it is of ours. We must not be more royalist than the King, or
+claim more for Chaucer and his England than he himself would ever have
+dreamed of claiming. That which seems most beautiful and romantic to us
+was not necessarily so five hundred years ago. The literature of Chivalry,
+for instance, seems to have touched Chaucer comparatively little: he
+scarcely mentions it but in more or less open derision. Again, while
+Ruskin and William Morris seem at times almost tempted to wish themselves
+back to the 14th century for the sake of its Gothic architecture, Chaucer
+in his retrospective mood is not ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet
+uncorrupted by architects of any description whatever--
+
+  No trumpës for the warrës folk ne knew,
+  Nor towers high and wallës round or square ...
+  Yet were no palace chambers, nor no halls;
+  In cavës and in woodës soft and sweet
+  Slepten this blessed folk withouten walls.[131]
+
+No doubt he would as little have chosen seriously to go back to hips and
+haws as Morris would seriously have wished to live in the Middle Ages. But
+his words may warn us against over-estimating the picturesque side of his
+age. The most important is commonly what goes on under the surface; and
+this was eminently true of Chaucer's native London. When we look closely
+into the social and political ideals of those motley figures which
+thronged the streets, we may see there our own modern liberties in the
+making, and note once more how slowly, yet how surely, the mills of God
+grind. It was once as hard for a community of a few thousand souls to
+govern itself as it is now for a nation; and parts of what seem to us the
+very foundations of civilized society were formerly as uncertain and
+tentative as Imperial Federation or the International Peace Congress.
+
+The ordinary English town after the Conquest was originally simply part of
+a feudal estate: a rather denser aggregation than the ordinary village,
+and therefore rather more conscious of solidarity and power. The
+householders, by dint of holding more and more together, became
+increasingly capable of driving collective bargains, and of concentrating
+their numerical force upon any point at issue. They thus throve better
+than the isolated peasant; and their growing prosperity made them able to
+pay heavier dues to their feudal lords, who thus saw a prospect of
+immediate pecuniary gain in selling fresh liberties to the citizens. This
+process, which was still in its earlier stages in many towns during
+Chaucer's lifetime, was, however, already far advanced in London, which
+claimed over other cities a superiority symbolized by the legend of its
+origin: Brut, the son of Ćneas, had founded it, and named it Troynovant,
+or New Troy. But the city had far more tangible claims to supremacy than
+this: it had obtained from Henry I.--earlier by nearly a century than any
+other--the right of electing its own sheriff and justiciar; and from a
+still earlier time than this it had been almost as important politically
+as it is now. Mr. Loftie, whose "London" in the "Historic Towns" series
+gives so clear a view of its political development, shows us the city
+holding out against Canute long after the rest of the kingdom had been
+conquered; and making, even after Hastings, such terms with the Conqueror
+as secured to the citizens their traditional liberties. Even thus early,
+the city fully exemplified the dignity and enduring power of commerce and
+industry in an age of undisguised physical force. Its foreign trade was
+considerable, and foreign settlers numerous. "Already there was trade with
+the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee; and Norman ships, so far back as the days of
+Ćthelred and even of his father, had brought the wines of the south to
+London. The [German] emperor's men had already established their
+stafelhof, or steelyard, and traded under jealous rules and almost
+monastic discipline, but with such money that to this day 'sterling'
+stands beside 'real' as an adjective, for the Royal credit was not better
+than that of the Easterling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong to
+the 'Gildhalda Theutonicorum,' as it was called in the 13th century,
+settled in the city beside the Normans of the Conquest, the Frenchmen
+mentioned in the charter, and the old English stock of law-worthy
+citizens."[132]
+
+The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely
+by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by
+suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to
+the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity
+of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to
+buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D.,
+Fitzstephen boasted that London traded "with every nation under heaven";
+and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing
+picture of English commerce; "Could the ships of Tharshish" (he exclaims),
+"so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?" Our fortunate
+insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and
+sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled
+commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great
+political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic
+exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between
+English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer's birth.
+French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and
+measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the
+coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs,
+placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time
+even formally forbade "all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and
+Provence." All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; "robbed
+like a merchant" became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I.,
+though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate
+sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage
+foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says,
+almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent
+Chaucer's father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet
+himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed
+freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of
+the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of
+close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English
+Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer's
+grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King
+commanded on account of "certain outrages and despites" done to the Gascon
+merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which
+Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and
+absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the
+tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have
+seen, were massacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse
+merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of
+their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers,
+and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included
+most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the
+Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury--a hateful term, which, in
+the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other
+financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the
+community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was
+fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible
+all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of
+human nature. "He who taketh usury goeth to hell, and he who taketh none,
+liveth on the verge of beggary"; so wrote an Italian contemporary of
+Chaucer's. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly
+accepted his chance of damnation, and who would point to his big belly and
+fat cheeks with a scoffing "See how the priest's curses shrivel me up!"
+Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been
+opened, he would have seen how "God had in fact fattened him for
+everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter"; but there remained
+many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who
+quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. "Usurers'
+bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred
+in front of the High Altar in churches"; so writes a great Franciscan
+preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady
+Meed in "Piers Plowman"--the incarnation of Illicit Gain--has scarcely
+come up to London when--
+
+  "Then came there a confessor, coped as a Friar ...
+  Then he absolved her soon, and sithen he said
+  'We have a window a-working, will cost us full high;
+  Wouldst thou glaze that gable, and grave therein thy name,
+  Sure should thy soul be heaven to have.'"[135]
+
+In other words, the Canon Law practically compelled the taker of interest
+to become a villain, as the old penal laws encouraged the thief to commit
+murder. Gower, if we make a little obvious allowance for a satirist's
+rhetoric, will show us how ordinary citizens regarded the usurious
+Lombards.[136] "They claim to dwell in our land as freely, and with as
+warm a welcome, as if they had been born and bred amongst us.... But they
+meditate in their heart how to rob our silver and gold." They change (he
+says) their chaff for our corn; they sweep in our good sterling coin so
+that there is little left in the country. "To-day I see such Lombards come
+[to London] as menials in mean attire; and before a year is past, by dint
+of deceit and intrigue, they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our
+city.... It is great shame that our Lords, who ought to keep our laws,
+should treat our merchants as serfs, and quietly free the hands of strange
+folk to rob us. But Covetise hath dominion over all things: for bribery
+makes friends and brings success: that is the custom in my country." Nor
+"in my country" only, but in other lands too; for the best-known firm of
+merchants now-a-days is Trick and Co. "Seek from East to the going out of
+the West, there is no city or good town where Trick does not rob to enrich
+himself. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and
+sells; Trick has his ships and servants, and of the noblest riches Trick
+has ten times more than other folk. At Florence and Venice, Trick has his
+fortress and freedom of trade; so he has at Bruges and Ghent; under his
+care too has the noble City on the Thames put herself, which Brutus
+founded, but which Trick is on the way to confound...." Why not, indeed,
+in an age in which all the bonds of society are loosed? "One [merchant]
+told me the other day how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly
+who, being able to get the delights of this life, should pass them by: for
+after this life is over, no man knoweth for truth which way or by what
+path we go. Thus do the merchants of our present days dispute and say and
+answer for the most part."
+
+Much of Gower's complaint about Trick might be equally truly applied to
+any age or community; but much was due also to the growth of large and
+complicated money transactions, involving considerable speculation on
+credit. Gower complains that merchants talked of "many thousands" where
+their fathers had talked of "scores" or "hundreds"; and he, like Chaucer,
+describes the dignified trader as affecting considerable outward show to
+disguise the insecurity of his financial position.[137] Edward III. set
+here a Royal example by failing for a million florins, or more than
+Ł4,000,000 of modern money, and thus ruining two of the greatest European
+banking firms, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence. Undeterred by similar
+risks, the de la Poles of Hull undertook to finance the King, and became
+the first family of great merchant-princes in England. Operations such as
+these opened a new world of possibilities for commerce--vast stakes on the
+table, and vast prizes to the winners. Moreover, city politics grew
+complicated in proportion with city finance. The mass of existing
+documents shows a continual extension of the Londoner's civic authorities,
+until the townsfolk were trammeled by a network of byelaws not indeed so
+elaborate as those of a modern city, but incomparably more hampering and
+vexatious. On this subject, which is of capital importance for the
+comprehension of life in Chaucer's time, it would be difficult on the
+whole to put the facts more clearly than they have already been put by
+Riley on pp. cix. ff. of his introduction to the "Liber Albus." "Such is a
+sketch of some few of the leading features of social life within the walls
+of London in the 13th and 14th centuries. The good old times, whenever
+else they may have existed, assuredly are not to be looked for in days
+like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in
+part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated
+the lawmakers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently
+set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these
+were times, the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws both
+national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately
+they created or protected comparatively few real valuable rights, gave
+birth to many and grievous wrongs. That the favoured and so-called _free_
+citizen of London even--despite the extensive privileges in reference to
+trade which he enjoyed--was in possession of more than the faintest shadow
+of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance
+of the pages just submitted to the reader's notice, filled as they are
+with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive:
+laws, for example, which compelled each citizen,[138] whether he would or
+no, to be bail and surety for a neighbour's good behaviour, over whom
+perhaps it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws
+which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for
+the King and the great lords of the land had stripped the stalls of all
+that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pass the city walls
+for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound
+him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the
+precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe
+penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and
+artisans; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they
+permitted 'genteel dogs' to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws
+which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the city officials on
+various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under
+heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his
+loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules, at what
+hours he was to walk in the streets, and incidentally, what he was to eat
+and what to drink. Viewed individually, laws and ordinances such as these
+may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but 'trifles make life,' the
+poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like
+these, must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man,
+and a burden hard to be borne. Every dark picture, however, has its
+reverse, and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or
+two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as
+disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too
+often treated little better than a slave; but, on the other hand, the
+price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour
+appear--at times, at least--to have been regulated on a very fair and
+liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic
+authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to
+sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be
+protected, in their dealings, against the artifices of adulteration,
+deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our
+approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was
+evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters
+of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic
+authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution
+to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The
+fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and
+public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity, to some
+extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present
+day."
+
+The words about the purity of the Thames need some modification in the
+light of such incidents as those recorded (for instance) in Mr. Sharpe's
+calendar of "Letter Book" G, pp. xxvii. ff.;[139] but the most serious
+gap in Riley's picture is the absence of any clear allusion to the almost
+incredible gulfs which are frequently to be found between 14th-century
+theory and practice. We have already seen how openly the city officials
+broke their own brand-new resolution about lodgings over the city gates;
+and the surviving records of all medieval cities tell the same tale, for
+which we might indeed be prepared by the wearisome iteration with which we
+find the same enactments re-enacted again and again, as if they had never
+been thought of before. As Dean Colet said, when the world of the Middle
+Ages was at its last gasp, it was not new laws that England needed, but a
+new spirit of justice in enforcing the old laws. Seldom, indeed, had these
+become an absolute dead letter--we find them invoked at times where we
+should least have expected it--but at the very best they were enforced
+with a barefaced partiality which cannot be paralleled in modern civilized
+countries even under the most unfavourable circumstances. From Norwich,
+one of the greatest towns in the kingdom, and certainly not one of the
+worst governed, we have fortunately surviving a series of Leet Court
+Rolls, which have been admirably edited by Mr. Hudson for the Selden
+Society, and commented on more briefly in his "Records of the City of
+Norwich."[140] He shows that, whereas the breach of certain civic
+regulations should nominally have been punished by a fine for the first
+offence, pillory for the second, and expulsion for the third, yet in fact
+there was no pretence, in an ordinary way, of taking the law literally.
+"The price of ale was fixed according to the price of wheat. Almost every
+housewife of the leading families brewed ale and sold it to her
+neighbours, and invariably charged more than the fixed price. The
+authorities evidently expected and wished this course to be taken, for
+these ladies were regularly presented and amerced every year for the same
+offence, paid their amercements and went away to go through the same
+process in the future as in the past. Much the same course was pursued by
+other trades and occupations. Fishmongers, tanners, poulterers, cooks,
+etc., are fined wholesale year after year for breaking every by-law that
+concerned their business. In short, instead of a trader (as now) taking
+out a license to do his business on certain conditions which he is
+expected to keep, he was bound by conditions which he was expected to
+break and afterwards fined for the breach. The same financial result was
+attained or aimed at by a different method." Moreover, the fines
+themselves were collected with the strangest irregularity. "Some are
+excused by the Bailiffs without reason assigned; some 'at the instance' of
+certain great people wishing to do a good turn for a friend. Again, others
+make a bargain with the collector, thus expressed, as for instance, 'John
+de Swaffham is not in tithing. Amercement 2_s._ He paid 6_d._, the rest is
+excused. He is quit.' Sometimes an entry is marked 'vad,' i.e. _vadiat_,
+or _vadiatur_, 'he gives a pledge,' or, 'it is pledged.' The Collector had
+seized a jug, or basin, or chair. But by far the larger number of entries
+are marked 'd,' i.e. _debet_, 'he owes it.' The Collector had got nothing.
+At the end of each (great) Leet is a collector's account of moneys
+received and paid in to the Bailiffs or the City Chamberlain in three or
+four or more payments. By drawing out a balance sheet for the whole city
+in this year it appears that the total amount of all the amercements
+entered is Ł72 18_s._ 10_d._ This is equivalent to more than Ł1000 at the
+present value of money. But all that the Collectors can account for, even
+after Easter, is Ł17 0_s._ 2_d._ It is clear that however efficient the
+system was in preventing offences from passing undetected, it did not do
+much to deter offenders from repeating them."
+
+The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book;
+and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman,
+they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In
+general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized
+but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends.
+Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences;
+yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe
+was "out at cockcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Mass, so
+that by six o'clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good
+folk of the town."[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid
+victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory
+inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people
+of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an
+appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer's sarcasm as to the unwholesome
+fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others.
+Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a
+reduction in price "because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for
+these last seven years." "What!" replied the Cook, "for so long a time,
+and you are yet alive!" The author of "Piers Plowman" exhorts mayors to
+apply the pillory more strictly to--
+
+  "Brewsters and bakers, butchers and cooks;
+  For these are men on this mould that most harm worken
+  To the poor people that piece-meal buyen:
+  For they poison the people privily and oft ..."
+
+A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the
+twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. "All the men of Sprowston sell
+sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in
+Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human
+bodies."[143]
+
+This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch
+glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and
+partial as city justice still was in Chaucer's days, overstrained in
+theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real
+self-government and of real apprenticeship to higher things in politics,
+not only civic but national. The constitution of the city was frankly
+oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a
+constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against
+encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or
+even at the risk of bloodshed--this in itself was the thin end of the
+democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed,
+domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of
+money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms
+than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was
+these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country
+squires,[144] successfully asserted in Parliament the power of the purse,
+and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation's
+money, before they voted it for his use.
+
+Moreover, it was due enormously to London and the great cities that our
+national liberties were safeguarded from the foreign invader. The
+considerable advance in national wealth between 1330 and 1430 was partly
+due to our success in war. While English cities multiplied, French cities
+had even in many cases to surrender into their King's hands those
+liberties for which they were now too poor to render the correspondent
+services. Yet, even before the first blow had been struck, those wars were
+already half-won by English commerce. "The secret of the battles of Crécy
+and Poitiers lies in the merchants' counting-houses of London, Bordeaux,
+and Bruges."[145] Apart from those habits and qualities which successful
+commerce implies, the amount of direct supplies in men and money
+contributed by the English towns during Edward's wars can only be fully
+realized by reading Dr. Sharpe's admirable prefaces to his "Calendars of
+Letter-Books." But a single instance is brief and striking enough to be
+quoted here.
+
+Our crushing defeat by the combined French and Spanish navies off La
+Rochelle in 1372 lost us the command of the sea until our victory at
+Cadzand in 1387; and Chaucer's Merchant rightly voiced the crying need of
+English commerce during that time--
+
+  He would the sea were kept, for any thing,
+  Betwixtë Middelburgh and Orëwell.
+
+During those fifteen years the ports of the south coast were constantly
+harried by privateers. The Isle of Wight was taken and plundered. The
+Prior of Lewes, heading a hastily raised force against the invaders, was
+taken prisoner at Rottingdean; and such efforts to clear the seas as were
+made on our part were not public, but merely civic, or even private. The
+men of Winchelsea and Rye burned a couple of Norman ports, after
+plundering the very churches; and the sailors of Portsmouth and Dartmouth
+collected a fleet which for a short while swept the Channel. This may be
+the reason why Chaucer, writing two years later, makes his bold Shipman
+hail from Dartmouth. But, seven years before this raid, a single London
+merchant had done still more. A Scottish pirate named Mercer, reinforced
+by French and Spanish ships, infested the North Sea until "God raised up
+against him one of the citizens of Troynovant." "John Philpot, citizen of
+London, a man of great wit, wealth and power, narrowly considering the
+default or treachery of the Duke of Lancaster and the other Lords who
+ought to have defended the realm, and pitying his oppressed countrymen,
+hired with his own money a thousand armed men.... And it came to pass that
+the Almighty, who ever helpeth pious vows, gave success to him and his, so
+that his men presently took the said Mercer, with all that he had taken by
+force from Scarborough, and fifteen more Spanish ships laden with much
+riches. Whereat the whole people exulted ... and now John Philpot alone
+was praised in all men's mouths and held in admiration, while they spake
+opprobriously and with bitter blame of our princes and the host which had
+long ago been raised, as is the wont of the common herd in their changing
+moods."[146]
+
+Walsingham's final moral here is, after all, that of Chaucer: "O stormy
+people, unsad and ever untrue, Aye indiscreet, and changing as a
+vane!"[147] English writers seem, indeed, to speak of their countrymen as
+especially fickle and inconstant; and there was no doubt more reason for
+the charge in those days, when men in general were far more swayed by
+impulse and less by reflexion--when indeed the fundamental insecurity of
+the social and political fabric was such as to thwart even the ripest
+reflexion at every turn. It is striking how short-lived were the London
+trading families until after Chaucer's time: no such succession as the
+Rothschilds and Barings was as yet possible. Moreover, in civic as in
+national politics, it was still possible to lose one's head for the crime
+of having shown too much zeal in a losing cause, as the career of
+Chaucer's colleague Brembre may testify.[148] Walsingham loses no
+opportunity of jeering at the inconstancy of the London citizens; he
+portrays their panic during the invasion scare of 1386, and during the
+King's suppression of their liberties in 1389-92, with all the superiority
+of a monk whose own skin was safe enough in the cloister of St. Alban's.
+On this latter occasion the citizens had to pay Richard the enormous fine
+of Ł20,000--or, according to a Malmesbury monk, Ł40,000--for the
+restoration of their privileges; and even then they were glad to welcome
+him on his first gracious visit "as an angel of God."[149] But they bided
+their time, and Richard was to learn, like other sovereigns before and
+since, how heavy a sword the Londoners could throw into the political
+scale. Froissart noted that "they ever have been, are, and will be so long
+as the City stands, the most powerful of all England"; that what London
+thought was also what England thought; and that even a king might find he
+had gained but a Pyrrhic victory over them. "For where the men of London
+are at accord and fully agreed, no man dare gainsay them. They are of more
+weight than all the rest of England, nor dare any man drive them to bay,
+for they are most mighty in wealth and in men."[150]
+
+However little Chaucer may have interested himself in his neighbours, here
+were things which no poet could help seeing. The real history of Medieval
+London is yet to be written; it will be a story of strange contrasts,
+gold and brass and iron and clay. But there was a greatness in the very
+disquiet and inconstancy of the city; some ideals were already fermenting
+there which, realized only after centuries of conflict, have made modern
+England what we are proud to see her; and other ideals of which we, like
+our forefathers, can only say that we trust in their future realization.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"CANTERBURY TALES"--THE _DRAMATIS PERSONĆ_
+
+  "Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together
+  To seek St. James, and saints in Rome.
+  They went forth in their way with many wise tales,
+  And had leave to lie all their life after ...
+  Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves,
+  Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after;
+  Great lubbers and long, that loth were to labour,
+  Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other,
+  And shaped themselves as hermits, their ease to have."
+                                  "Piers Plowman," B., Prol. 46
+
+
+During those twelve years in Aldgate Tower, Chaucer's genius fought its
+way through the literary conventions of his time to the full assertion of
+its native originality. He had begun with allegory and moralization, after
+the model of the "Roman de la Rose"; shreds of these conventions clung to
+him even to the end of the Aldgate period; but they were already outworn.
+In "Troilus and Cressida" we have real men and women under all the
+classical machinery: they think and act as men thought and acted in
+Chaucer's time; and Pandarus especially is so lifelike and individual that
+Shakespeare will transfer him almost bodily to his own canvas. In the
+"House of Fame" and the "Legend of Good Women" the form indeed is again
+allegorical, but the poet's individuality breaks through this narrow mask;
+his self-revelations are franker and more direct than at any previous
+time; and in each case he wearied of the poem and broke off long before
+the end. With the humility of a true artist, he had practised his hand for
+years to draw carefully after the old acknowledged models; but these now
+satisfied him less and less. His mind was stored with images which could
+not be forced into the narrow framework of a dream; he must find a canvas
+broad enough for all the life of his time; for the cream of all that he
+had seen and heard in Flanders and France and Italy, in the streets of
+London and on the open highways of a dozen English counties. Boccaccio,
+for a similar scheme, had brought together a company of young Florentines
+of the upper class, and of both sexes, in a villa-garden. Chaucer's plan
+of a pilgrim cavalcade gave him a variety of character as much greater as
+the company in a third-class carriage is more various than that in a
+West-end club.
+
+
+[Illustration: A HOSTELRY AT NIGHT
+
+(From a 15th-century MS. of "Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles" in the
+Hunterian Library at Glasgow)]
+
+
+In earlier ages, a pilgrimage had of course been a very solemn matter,
+involving the certainty of great labour and heavy privations, and with
+very considerable risk to life or limb. The crusades themselves were
+pilgrimages _en masse_, as contemporary chroniclers often remind us. At
+the commencement of an undertaking so serious, the pilgrims naturally
+sought the blessing of the Church; and there was a special service for
+their use. It is probable, however, that Chaucer's pilgrims troubled
+themselves as little about this service as about the special pilgrim's
+dress, the absence of which appears very plainly from his descriptions of
+their costume. For a century at least before he wrote, pilgrimages had
+been gradually becoming journeys rather of pleasure than of duty, for
+those who could afford the necessary expense which they entailed.
+Travelling indeed was not always safe; but when the pilgrim went alone and
+on foot he could always protect himself from most evil-doers by taking the
+traditional scrip and staff and gown which marked him as sacred; and
+often, as in Chaucer's case, a caravan was formed which might well defy
+all the ordinary perils of the road. The "mire" and "slough," which
+Chaucer more than once mentions, had always been as much a matter of
+common routine to everybody, even on his journey from farm to farm or
+village to village, as a puncture is to the modern cyclist, or occasional
+external traction to the motorist.[151] Moreover, though the inns might
+not be what we should call luxurious, they offered abundant good cheer and
+good fellowship to all who could pay the price. A certain Count of Poitou
+went about in disguise to find what class of his subjects led the
+happiest life; he judged at last "that the merchants at fair-time, who go
+to taverns and find all the delicacies they can desire ready prepared,
+would lead the most delightful life of all, but for this one drawback,
+that they must at last settle the score for all that they have
+consumed."[152] If, at these inns, the pilgrims often found themselves
+packed into great dormitories fitted with berths like a ship's cabin, this
+was far less of a change from their ordinary habits than are those
+hardships to which modern mountain tourists cheerfully submit on
+occasion.[153] Any great change from the ordinary routine marks a bright
+spot in most men's minds, even in these days of many amusements and much
+locomotion; so that, in proportion as the King's peace grew more effectual
+in England, and places of pilgrimage multiplied, and the middle classes
+could better afford the expense of time or money, it became as natural to
+many people to go to Walsingham or Canterbury for the sake of the pleasant
+society as it was to choose a church for the sake of gossip or
+flirtation.[154] This is already complained of about 1250 A.D. by Berthold
+of Regensburg, one of the greatest mission-preachers of the 13th century.
+"Men talk nowadays in church as if it were at market.... One tells what he
+has seen on his pilgrimage to Palestine or Rome or Compostella: thou mayst
+easily say so much in church of these same pilgrimages, that God or St.
+James will give thee no reward therefore." Again, "Many a man journeys
+hence to St. James of Compostella, and never hears a single mass on the
+way out or back, and then they go with sport and laughter, and some seldom
+say even their Paternoster! This I say not to turn pilgrims aside from
+Compostella; I am not strong enough for that; but thou mightest earn more
+grace by a few masses than for all thy journey to Compostella and back.
+Now, what dost thou find at Compostella? St. James's head. Well and good:
+that is a dead skull: the better part is in heaven. Now, what findest thou
+at home, at thy yard-gate? When thou goest to church in the morning, thou
+findest the true God and Man, body and soul, as truly as on that day
+wherein He was born of our Lady St. Mary, the ever-Virgin, whose holiness
+is greater than all saints.... Thou mayst earn more reward at one mass
+than another man in his six weeks out to St. Jacob and six weeks back
+again: that makes twelve weeks." "Ye run to St. James, and sell so much at
+home that sometimes your wives and children must ever be the poorer for
+it, or thou thyself in need and debt all thy life long. Such a man crams
+himself so that he comes back far fatter than he went, and has much to say
+of what he has seen, and lets no man listen to the service or the sermon
+in church." Two other great preachers, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry shortly
+before Berthold, and Etienne de Bourbon shortly after him, speak of the
+debaucheries which were not unusual on pilgrimages: the latter tells how
+pilgrims sometimes sang obscene songs in chorus, and joined in dissolute
+dances with the lewd village folk over the very graves in the churchyard;
+he seems to speak of the German pilgrims as exceptional in singing
+religious songs. All this was a century before Chaucer's journey; and
+during those hundred years the institution had steadily lost in grace as
+it gained in popularity. The author of "Piers Plowman" not only notes how
+many rascals were to be found on pilgrimages, but would apparently have
+been glad to see them almost entirely superseded. His professional
+pilgrim comes hung round with tokens from a hundred shrines; he has been
+at Rome, Compostella, Jerusalem, Sinai, Bethlehem, Babylon, and even in
+Armenia; but of "Saint Truth" he has never heard, and can give no help to
+those who are in real distress about their souls. An ideal society would
+be one in which St. James was sought only by the sick-beds of the poor,
+and pilgrims resorted no longer to Rome but to "prisons and poor cottages"
+instead. Seventeen years before Chaucer's journey, even a prelate of the
+Church dared to raise a similar protest. Archbishop Sudbury (then only
+Bishop of London) was met by a band of pilgrims on their way to Becket's
+Jubilee. They asked for his blessing; he told them plainly that the
+promised Plenary Indulgence would be useless to them unless they went in a
+more reverent spirit; and many simple souls were rather pained than
+surprised when Wat Tyler's mob, eleven years later, hacked off the head of
+so free-thinking an Archbishop on Tower Hill.[155] If this was what
+orthodox folk said already, then we need not wonder at Wycliffe's
+outspoken condemnation, or that a citizen of Nottingham, as early as 1395,
+was compelled under pain of the stake to promise (among other articles) "I
+shall never more despise pilgrimage."
+
+Ten years after Chaucer, again, the Lollard Thorpe was tried before
+Archbishop Arundel, and painted pilgrimages exactly as Chaucer's Poor
+Parson would have described them. "Such fond people waste blamefully God's
+goods on their vain pilgrimages, spending their goods upon vicious
+hostelries, which are oft unclean women of their bodies.... Also, sir, I
+knowe well that when divers men and women will goe thus after their own
+willes, and finding out one pilgrimage, they will ordaine with them
+before, to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton
+songes, and some other pilgrimes will have with them bagge pipes; so that
+everie towne that they come through, what with the noise of their singing,
+and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their
+Canterburie bels, and with the barking out of dogges after them, that they
+make more noise, then if the king came there away, with all his clarions,
+and many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a moneth out in
+their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an halfe yeare after, great
+janglers, tale-tellers, and liers."[156] A century later, we find
+Archbishop Warham and the Pope negotiating privately about Becket's
+Jubilee in a frankly commercial spirit, while Erasmus publicly held up the
+Canterbury Pilgrimage to ridicule; and a few years later again St. Thomas
+was declared a traitor, his shrine was plundered, and the pilgrimages
+ceased. It may indeed be said that the Canterbury Pilgrimage would not
+have been so proper for our poet's dramatic purpose but that most of its
+religious earnestness had long since evaporated.
+
+But what a canvas it was in 1387, and how frankly Chaucer utilized all its
+possibilities! The opportunity of bringing in any tale which lay nearest
+to his heart--for what tale in the world was there that might not come
+naturally from one or other of this party?--was only a part of all that
+this subject offered, as the poet realized from the very first. Even more
+delightful than any of the tales told by Chaucer's pilgrims, is the tale
+which he tells us about them all: the story of their journey to
+Canterbury. Nowhere within so brief a compass can we realize either the
+life of the 14th century on one hand, or on the other that dramatic power
+in which Chaucer stands second only to Shakespeare among English poets.
+Forget for a while the separate tales of the pilgrims--many of which were
+patched up by fits and starts during such broken leisure as this man of
+the world could afford for indulging his poetical fancies; while many
+others (like the Monk's and the Parson's) are tedious to modern readers in
+strict proportion to their dramatic propriety at the moment--forget for
+once all but the Prologue and the end-links, and read these through at one
+sitting, from the first stirrup-cup at Southwark Tabard to that final
+crest of Harbledown where the weary travellers look down at last upon the
+sacred city of their pilgrimage. There is no such story as this in all
+medieval literature; no such wonderful gallery of finished portraits, nor
+any drama so true both to common life and to perfect art. The _dramatis
+personć_ of the "Decameron" are mere puppets in comparison; their
+occasional talk seems to us insipid to the last degree of old-world
+fashion; Boccaccio's preface and interludes are as much less dramatic than
+Chaucer's as their natural background is more picturesque, with its Great
+Plague in Florence and its glimpses of the Val d'Arno from that sweet
+hill-garden of cypress and stone-pine and olive. Boccaccio wrote for a
+society that was in many ways over-refined already; it is fortunate for us
+that Chaucer's public was not yet at that point of literary development at
+which art is too often tempted into artifice. He took the living men day
+by day, each in his simplest and most striking characteristics; and from
+all these motley figures, under the artist's hand, grew a mosaic in which
+each stands out with all the glow of his own native colour, and with all
+the added glory of the jewelled hues around him. The sharp contrasts of
+medieval society gave the poet here a splendid opportunity. In days when
+the distinctions of rank were so marked and so unforgettable, even to the
+smallest details of costume, the Knight's dignity risked nothing by
+unbending to familiar jest with the Host; and the variety of characters
+which Chaucer has brought together in this single cavalcade is as probable
+in nature as it is artistically effective. All moods, from the most
+exalted piety down to the coarsest buffoonery, were possible and natural
+on a journey religious indeed in essential conception, but which had by
+this time become so common and worldly a function that few pilgrims
+dreamed of putting off the old Adam until the white walls of Canterbury
+came in sight. The plot has in it all the charm of spring, of open-air
+travel, and of passing good-fellowship without afterthought; the rich
+fields of Kent, the trees budding into their first green, mine ease in
+mine inn at night, and over all the journey a far-off halo of sanctity.
+
+On the evening of Tuesday, April 16, 1387, twenty-nine pilgrims found
+themselves together in the Tabard at Southwark.[157] This hostelry lay
+almost within a stone's throw of Chaucer's birthplace, and within sight of
+many most notable London landmarks. Behind lay the priory of St. Mary
+Overy, where Gower was now lodging among the friendly and not too ascetic
+monks, and where he still lies carved in stone, with his three great books
+for a pillow to his head. A few yards further in the background stood
+London Bridge, the eighth marvel of the world, with its twenty arches, its
+two chapels, its double row of houses, and its great tower bristling with
+rebel skulls. Wat Tyler's head was among the newest there on that spring
+evening; and in five years the head of Chaucer's Earl of Worcester was to
+attain the same bad eminence. Beyond the bridge rose the walls and
+guard-towers of the city, the open quays and nodding wooden houses, and a
+hundred and fifty church steeples, seldom indeed of any great
+architectural pretensions individually, but most picturesque in their
+variety, and dominated by the loftiest of all existing European
+structures--the wooden spire of old St. Paul's.[158]
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Short was his gown, with sleevës long and wide.
+  Well could he sit on horse, and fairë ride
+
+THE SQUIRE OF THE "CANTERBURY TALES"
+
+(From the Ellesmere MS. (15th century))]
+
+
+Nor were the pilgrims themselves less picturesque than the background of
+their journey. At the head of the first group the Knight, so fresh from
+the holy wars that the grease of his armour still stains his leather
+doublet, and that we guess his rank only from the excellence of his steed
+and his own high breeding--
+
+  And though that he were worthy, he was wise,
+  And of his port as meek as is a maid.
+  He never yet no villainy ne said
+  In all his life, unto no manner wight.
+  He was a very perfect gentle knight.
+
+Then his son, the Squire, a model of youthful beauty and strength, who had
+already struck many a good blow in France for his lady's grace, but who
+shows here his gentler side, with yellow curls falling upon the shortest
+of fashionable jackets and the longest of sleeves--
+
+  Embroidered was he, as it were a mead
+  All full of freshë flowrës, white and red.
+  Singing he was, or fluting, all the day;
+  He was as fresh as is the month of May.
+
+And lastly their single attendant, the nut-headed yeoman forester, with
+his suit of Lincoln green, his peacock arrows, and his mighty bow.
+
+After chivalry comes the Church; and first the fine black cloth and snowy
+linen of Madam Eglantine and her fellow nun, clean and dainty and demure,
+like a pair of aristocratic pussy-cats on a drawing-room hearthrug. Their
+male escort, the Nuns' Priest, commands no great reverence from mine Host,
+who, however, will presently doff his cap before the Prioress, and address
+her with a studied deference even beyond the courtesy which he renders to
+the Knight. Her dignified reserve, her natural anxiety to set off a fine
+person with more elaboration of costume than the strict Rule permitted,
+her French of Stratford attë Bowe, her tenderness to lapdogs and even to
+marauding mice, her faultless refinement of behaviour under the ticklish
+conditions of a 14th-century dinner-table--all these pardonable luxuries
+of a fastidious nature are described with Chaucer's most delicate irony,
+and stand in artistic contrast to the grosser indiscipline of the Monk.
+This "manly man, to be an abbot able," contemptuously repudiated the
+traditional restraints of the cloister, and even the comparatively mild
+discipline of those smaller and therefore less rigorous "cells" which the
+fiery zeal of St. Bernard stigmatized as "Synagogues of Satan."[159] He
+scoffed at the Benedictine prohibition of field sports and of extravagant
+dress, and at the old-fashioned theory of subduing the flesh by hard
+brainwork or field labour; yet at bottom he seems to have been a good
+fellow enough, with a certain real dignity of character; and the
+discipline which he so unceremoniously rejected had by this time (as we
+may see from the official records of his Order) grown very generally
+obsolete. But still more strange to the earlier ideals of his Order was
+the next cleric on Chaucer's list, the Friar. Father Hubert is one of
+those jovial sinners for whom old Adam has always a lurking sympathy even
+when the new Adam feels most bound to condemn them. Essentially
+irreligious even in his most effective religious discourse; greedy,
+unabashed, as ubiquitous and intrusive as a bluebottle fly, he is yet
+always supple and ingratiating; a favourite boon-companion of the country
+squires, but still more popular with many women; equally free and easy
+with barmaids at a tavern or with wife and daughter in a citizen's hall.
+The Summoner and the Pardoner, parasites that crawled on the skirts of the
+Church and plied under her broad mantle their dubious trade in sacred
+things, had not even the Friar's redeeming features; yet we see at a
+glance their common humanity, and even recognize in our modern world many
+of the follies on which they were tempted to trade. Two figures alone
+among this company go far to redeem the Church--the Scholar and the Poor
+Parson. The former's disinterested devotion to scholarship has passed into
+a proverb: "gladly would he learn, and gladly teach"--an ideal which then,
+as always, went too often hand in hand with leanness and poverty. The
+Parson, contentedly poor himself and full of compassion for his still
+poorer neighbours, equally ready at time of need to help the struggling
+sinner or to "snib" the impenitent rich man, has often tempted earlier
+commentators to read their own religious prepossessions into Chaucer's
+verse. One party has assumed that so good a priest must have been a
+Lollard, or Wycliffe himself; while others have contended (with even less
+show of evidence, as we shall presently see) that he represents the
+typical orthodox rector or vicar of Chaucer's time. The one thing of which
+we may be certain is that Chaucer knew and reverenced goodness when he saw
+it, and that he would willingly have subscribed to Thackeray's humble
+words, "For myself, I am a heathen and a publican, but I can't help
+thinking that those men are in the right." In the Tales themselves, as on
+the pilgrimage, a multitude of sins are covered by this ploughman's
+brother, of whom it is written that--
+
+  Christës lore, and His apostles' twelve,
+  He taught, and first he followed it him-selve.
+
+
+[Illustration: A PARTY OF PILGRIMS
+
+(FROM MS. ROY. 18. D. ii. f. 148)]
+
+
+To summarize even briefly the appearance and character of the remaining
+eighteen pilgrims would be too long a task; but it must be noticed how
+infallible an eye Chaucer had for just the touch which makes a portrait
+live. The Country Squire, looking like a daisy with his fiery face and
+white beard; the Sailor, embarrassed with his horse; the Wife of Bath,
+"somedeal deaf," and therefore as loud in her voice as in her dress; the
+Summoner's scurvy eczema under his thick black eyebrows; the Pardoner's
+smooth yellow hair and eyes starting out of his head; the thick-set
+Miller, with a red-bristled wart on the end of his nose, and a bullet head
+with which he could burst in a door at one charge; and his rival the
+slender, choleric Reeve--
+
+  Full longë were his leggës and full lean,
+  Y-like a staff; there was no calf y-seen!
+
+A goodly company, indeed, and much to the taste of Harry Bailey, mine host
+of the Tabard, whom we may pretty safely identify with an actual
+contemporary and fellow M.P. of Chaucer's.[160] He proposes, therefore,
+to be their guide and master of the ceremonies on the road to Canterbury
+and back. The pilgrims themselves shall tell tales to shorten the journey,
+"drawing cut" for their order; and the teller of the best tale shall, on
+their return, enjoy a supper at the expense of the rest--
+
+                          By one assent
+  We be accorded to his judgëment;
+  And thereupon the wine was set anon;
+  We drunken, and to restë went each one
+  Withouten any longer tarrying.
+
+      A-morrow, when the day began to spring,
+  Up rose the host, and was our aller cock,         [for all of us
+  And gathered us together in a flock....
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  A white coat and a blue hood wearëd he,
+  A bagpipe well couldë he blow and sound,
+  And therewithal he brought us out of town.
+
+THE MILLER
+
+(From the Ellesmere MS.)]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+"CANTERBURY TALES"--FIRST AND SECOND DAYS
+
+    "For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers
+    appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
+    voice of the turtle is heard in our land."--SOLOMON'S SONG
+
+
+Here, then, they are assembled on a perfect morning of English spring,
+with London streets awakening to life behind them, and the open road in
+front. Think of the dayspring from on high, the good brown earth and
+tender foliage, smoke curling up from cottage chimneys, pawing steeds,
+barking dogs, the cheerful stirrup-cup; every rider's face set to the
+journey after his individual mood, when at last the Host had successfully
+gathered his flock--
+
+  And forth we ride, a little more than pace,
+  Unto the watering of Saint Thomas.
+
+That is, to the little brook which now runs underground near the second
+milestone on the Old Kent Road, remembered only in the name of St. Thomas'
+Road and the Thomas ŕ Becket Tavern. Up to this point the party had been
+enlivened by the Miller's bagpipe, and Professor Raleigh has justly
+pointed out how many musicians there are in Chaucer's company: the Squire;
+the Prioress with her psalms, "entuned in her nose full seemëly"; the
+Friar, who could sing so well to his own harp; the Pardoner, with his
+"Come hither, love, to me," and the Summoner, who accompanied him in so
+"stiff" a bass. By St. Thomas' watering, however, either the Miller is out
+of breath or the party are out of patience, for here the Host reins up,
+and reminds them of their promise to tell tales on the way. They draw
+cuts, and the longest straw (whether by chance or by Boniface's sleight of
+hand) falls to the one man with whom none other would have disputed for
+precedence. The Knight, with ready courtesy, welcomed the choice "in God's
+name," and rode on, bidding the company "hearken what I say." Let us not
+inquire too closely how far every word was audible to the whole thirty, as
+they clattered and splashed along. We may always be sure that enough was
+heard to keep the general interest alive, and it may be charitably hoped
+that the two nuns were among those who caught least.
+
+The Knight's tale was worthy of his reputation--chivalrous, dignified,
+with some delicate irony and many flights of lofty poetry. The Host
+laughed aloud for joy of this excellent beginning, and called upon the
+Monk for the next turn; but here suddenly broke in--
+
+  The Miller, that for-dronken was all pale
+  So that unnethe upon his horse he sat ...             [scarcely
+  And swore by armës and by blood and bones
+  'I can a noble talë for the nonce
+  With which I will now quit the Knightës tale.'
+    Our Hostë saw that he was drunk of ale
+  And said, 'abide, Robin, my lievë brother,
+  Some better man shall tell us first another;
+  Abide, and let us worken thriftily.'
+    'By Goddës soul,' quoth he, 'that will not I;
+  For I will speak, or ellës go my way.'
+    Our Host answered: 'Tell on, a devil way!
+  Thou art a fool; thy wit is overcome.'
+  'Now hearken,' quoth the Miller, 'all and some!
+  But first I make a protestatioun
+  That I am drunk, I know it by my soun;                [sound
+  And therefore, if that I misspeak or say,
+  Wite it the ale of Southwark, I you pray;             [blame
+  For I will tell a legend and a life
+  Both of a carpenter and of his wife....'
+
+The Reeve (who is himself a carpenter also) protests in vain against such
+slander of honest folk and their wives. Robin Miller has the bit between
+his teeth, and plunges now headlong into his tale as he had run in old
+times against the door--a "churlës tale," but told with consummate
+dramatic effect, and recorded by Chaucer with a half-ironical apology--
+
+  And therefore every gentle wight I pray
+  For Goddës love, deem ye not that I say
+  Of evil intent, but that I must rehearse
+  Their talës allë, be they better or worse,
+  Or ellës falsen some of my matčre.
+  And therefore, whoso list it not to hear,
+  Turn over the leaf and choose another tale.
+
+The Miller's story proved an apple of discord in its small way, but
+poetically effective in the variety which it and its fellows lent to the
+journey--
+
+  Diversë folk diversëly they said,
+  But for the mostë part they laughed and played;
+  Nor at this tale I saw no man him grieve,
+  But it were only Osëwold the Reeve,
+
+who, though chiefly sensible to the slur upon his own profession, lays
+special stress on the indecorum of the Miller's proceeding. Some men (he
+says) are like medlars, never ripe till they be rotten, and with all the
+follies of youth under their grizzling hairs--
+
+  When that our host had heard this sermoning,
+  He gan to speak as lordly as a King:
+  He saidë 'What amounteth all this wit?
+  What shall we speak all day of holy writ?         [why
+  The devil made a Reevë for to preach,
+  And of a cobbler a shipman or a leech!
+  Say forth thy tale, and tarry not the time,
+  Lo, Depëford, and it is halfway prime.
+  Lo Greenëwich, there many a shrew is in;
+  It were all time thy talë to begin.'
+
+The story records, by way of natural revenge, the domestic misfortunes of
+a Miller; and, for all the Reeve's moral indignation, it is as essentially
+"churlish" as its predecessor, and as popular with at least one section of
+the party--
+
+  The Cook of London, while the Reeve spake,
+  For joy, him thought, he clawed him on the back,
+  'Ha, ha!' quoth he, 'for Christës passioun,
+  This Miller had a sharp conclusion ...
+  But God forbiddë that we stinten here;
+  And therefore, if that ye vouchsafe to hear
+  A tale of me, that am a poorë man,
+  I will you tell as well as ever I can
+  A little jape that fell in our citie.'                [jest
+
+The Host gives leave on the one condition that the tale shall be fresher
+and wholesomer than the Cook's victuals sometimes are--
+
+  'For many a pasty hast thou letten blood,
+  And many a Jack of Dover hast thou sold               [meat pie
+  That hath been twyës hot and twyës cold!
+  Of many a pilgrim hast thou Christës curse,
+  For of thy parsley yet they fare the worse
+  That they have eaten with thy stubble-goose;
+  For in thy shop is many a flyë loose!'
+
+The Cook's "little jape," however, to judge by its commencement, was even
+more fly-blown than his stubble-goose. The Miller seemed to have let loose
+every riotous element, and to have started the company upon a downward
+slope of accelerating impropriety. But this to Chaucer would have been
+more than a sin, it would have been an obvious artistic blunder; and when
+the ribaldry begins in earnest, the best manuscripts break off with "of
+this Cook's tale maked Chaucer no more." In other MSS. the Cook himself
+breaks off in disgust at his own story, and tells the heroic tale of
+Gamelyn, which Chaucer may possibly have meant to rewrite for the series.
+Here end the tales of the first day; incomplete enough, as indeed the
+whole book is only a fragment of Chaucer's mighty plan. The pilgrims
+probably slept at Dartford, fifteen miles from London.
+
+Next morning the Host seems to have found it hard to keep his team
+together; it is ten o'clock when he begins to bewail the time already
+wasted, and prays the Man of Law to tell a tale. The lawyer assents in a
+speech interlarded with legal French and legal metaphors, and referring at
+some length to Chaucer's other poems. He then launches into a formal
+prologue, and finally tells the pious Custance's strange adventures by
+land and sea. This, if not so generally popular with the company as other
+less decorous tales before and after it, enjoyed at least a genuine
+_succčs d'estime_. Thereupon followed one of the liveliest of all
+Chaucer's dialogues. The Host called upon the Parish Priest for a tale,
+adjuring him "for Goddës bones" and "by Goddës dignitie." "_Benedicite!_"
+replied the Parson; "what aileth the man, so sinfully to swear?" upon
+which the Host promptly scents "a Lollard in the wind," and ironically
+bids his companions prepare for a sermon.[161] The Shipman, professionally
+indifferent to oaths of whatever description, and bold in conscious
+innocence of all puritanical taint, here interposes an emphatic veto--
+
+  'Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,'
+  Saidë the Shipman; 'here he shall not preach.
+  He shall no gospel glosen here nor teach.             [expound
+  We believe all in the great God,' quoth he,
+  'He wouldë sowen some difficultee,
+  Or springen cockle in our cleanë corn;
+  And therefore, Host, I warnë thee beforn,
+  My jolly body shal a talë tell,
+  And I shall clinken you so merry a bell
+  That I shall waken all this companye;
+  But it shall not be of philosophye,
+  Nor _physices_, nor termës quaint of law,
+  There is but little Latin in my maw.'
+
+The bluff skipper is as good as his word; his tale is frankly
+unprofessional, and its infectious jollity must almost have appealed to
+the Parson himself, even though it reeked with the most orthodox
+profanity, and showed no point of contact with puritanism except a low
+estimate of average monastic morals.
+
+  'Well said, by _Corpus Dominus_,' quoth our Host,
+  'Now longë mayest thou sailë by the coast,
+  Sir gentle master, gentle mariner! ...
+  Draw ye no monkës more unto your inn!
+    But now pass on, and let us seek about
+  Who shall now tellë first, of all this rout,
+  Another tale;' and with that word he said,
+  As courteously as it had been a maid,
+  'My lady Prioressë, by your leave,
+  So that I wist I shouldë you not grieve,
+  I wouldë deemen that ye tellen should
+  A talë next, if so were that ye would.
+  Now will ye vouchësafe, my lady dear?'
+    'Gladly,' quoth she, and said as ye shall hear.
+
+The gentle lady tells that charming tale which Burne-Jones so loved and
+adorned, of the little scholar murdered by Jews for his devotion to the
+Blessed Virgin, and sustained miraculously by her power. Chaucer loved the
+Prioress; and he makes us feel the reverent hush which followed upon her
+tale--
+
+  When said was all this miracle, every man
+  So sober was, that wonder was to see,
+  Till that our Hostë japen then began,
+  And then at erst he lookëd upon me,
+  And saidë thus: 'What man art thou?' quoth he;
+  'Thou lookest as thou wouldest find an hare,
+  For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
+
+  Approachë near, and look up merrily.
+  Now ware you, sirs, and let this man have place!
+  He in the waist is shape as well as I;
+  This were a puppet in an arm to embrace
+  For any woman, small and fair of face!
+  He seemeth elvish by his countenance,
+  For unto no wight doth he dalliance.
+
+  Say now somewhat, since other folk have said;
+  Tell us a tale of mirth, and that anon....'
+
+Chaucer executes himself as willingly as the rest, and enters upon a
+long-winded tale of knight-errantry, parodied from the romances in vogue;
+but the Age of Chivalry is already half past. Before the poet has even
+finished the preliminary catalogue of his hero's accomplishments--
+
+  'No more of this, for Goddës dignitee,'
+  Quoth our Hostë, 'for thou makest me
+  So weary of thy very lewedness                    [folly
+  That (all so wisely God my soulë bless)
+  Mine earës achen of thy drasty speech             [trashy
+  Now, such a rhyme the devil I biteche!            [commit to
+  This may well be rhyme doggerel,' quoth he.
+
+Chaucer suffers the interruption with only the mildest of protests, and
+proceeds to tell instead "a lytel thing in prose," a translation of a
+French translation of a long-winded moral allegory by an Italian
+friar-preacher. The monumental dulness of this "Tale of Melibee and of his
+wife Prudence" is no doubt a further stroke of satire, and Chaucer must
+have felt himself amply avenged in recounting this story to the bitter
+end. Yet there was a moral in it which appealed to the Host, who burst
+out--
+
+  ... as I am a faithful man
+  And by that precious _corpus Madrian_             [St. Mathurin
+  I haddë liever than a barrel ale
+  That goodë lief my wife had heard this tale.
+  For she is nothing of such patience
+  As was this Melibeus' wife Prudence.
+  By Goddës bonës, when I beat my knaves,
+  She bringeth me forth the greatë clubbëd staves,
+  And crieth 'Slay the doggës every one.
+  And break them, bothë back and every bone!'
+  And if that any neighëbour of mine,
+  Will not in churchë to my wife incline,
+  Or be so hardy to her to trespass,
+  When she com'th home she rampeth in my face
+  And crieth 'Falsë coward, wreak thy wife!
+  By corpus bones! I will have thy knife,
+  And thou shalt have my distaff and go spin!'
+
+The Host has plenty more to say on this theme; but presently he remembers
+his duties, and calls upon the Monk for a tale, though not without another
+long digression on monastic comforts and monastic morals, from the point
+of view of the man in the street. The Monk takes all his broad jesting
+with the good humour of a man who is used to it, and offers to tell some
+tragedies, "of which I have an hundred in my cell." After a few harmless
+pedantries by way of prologue, he proceeds to reel off instalments of his
+hundred tragedies with the steady, self-satisfied, merciless drone of a
+man whose office and cloth generally assure him of a patient hearing.
+Here, however, we are no longer in the minster, but in God's own sunlight
+and fresh air; the Pilgrim's Way is Liberty Hall; and while Dan Piers is
+yet moralizing with damnable iteration over the ninth of his fallen
+heroes, the Knight suddenly interrupts him--the Knight himself, who never
+yet no villainy ne said, in all his life, unto no manner wight!
+
+    'Ho!' quoth the Knight, 'good sir, no more of this!
+  What ye have said is right enough, ywis                   [certainly
+  And muckle more; for little heaviness
+  Is right enough to many folk, I guess.
+  I say for me it is a great dis-ease,
+  Where as men have been in great wealth and ease
+  To hearen of their sudden fall, alas!
+  And the contrary is joy and great solace ...
+  And of such thing were goodly for to tell.'
+    'Yea,' quoth our Host, 'by Saintë Paulës Bell! ...
+  Sir Monk, no more of this, so God you bless,
+  Your tale annoyeth all this companye;
+  Such talking is not worth a butterflye,
+  For therein is there no desport nor game.
+  Wherefore, sire Monk, or Dan Piers by your name,
+  I pray you heartily, tell us somewhat else;
+  For surely, but for clinking of your bells
+  That on your bridle hang on every side,
+  By Heaven's King, that for us allë died,
+  I should ere this have fallen down for sleep,
+  Although the slough had never been so deep ...
+  Sir, say somewhat of hunting, I you pray.'
+    'Nay,' quoth this Monk, 'I have no lust to play;
+  Now let another tell, as I have told.'
+    Then spake our Host with rudë speech and bold,
+  And said unto the Nunnës Priest anon,
+  'Come near, thou Priest, come hither, thou Sir John!
+  Tell us such thing as may our heartës glad;
+  Be blithë, though thou ride upon a jade.
+  What though thine horse be bothë foul and lean?
+  If it will serve thee, reck thou not a bean;
+  Look that thine heart be merry evermo!'
+
+The domestic confessor of stately Madame Eglantine is possibly accustomed
+to sudden and peremptory commands; in any case, he obeys readily enough
+here. "'Yes, sir,' quoth he, 'yes, Host'" ... and proceeds to recount that
+tragi-comedy of Reynard and Chanticleer which, well-worn as the plot is,
+shows off to perfection many of Chaucer's rarest artistic qualities.
+
+The tale is told, and the Host shows his appreciation by saluting the
+Nuns' Priest with the same broad gibes and innuendoes with which he had
+already greeted the Monk. Here probably ends the second day; the Pilgrims
+would sleep at Rochester, which was in sight when the Monk began his
+Tale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+"CANTERBURY TALES"--THIRD AND FOURTH DAYS
+
+  "... quasi peregrin, che si ricrea
+  Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
+  E spera gia ridir com' ello stea."
+                                  "Paradiso," xxxi., 43
+
+
+On the morning of the third day we find the Physician speaking; he tells
+the tragedy of Virginia, not straight from Livy, whom Chaucer had probably
+never had a chance of reading, but from its feebler echo in the "Roman de
+la Rose." Even so, however, the pity of it comes home to his hearers.
+
+  Our Hostë gan to swear as he were wood;               [mad
+  'Harrow!' quoth he, 'by nailës and by blood!
+  This was a false churl and a false justice! ...
+  By _Corpus_ bonës! but I have triacle                 [medicinal syrup
+  Or else a draught of moist and corny ale,
+  Or but I hear anon a merry tale,
+  Mine heart is lost, for pity of this maid.
+  Thou _bel ami_, thou Pardoner,' he said
+  'Tell us some mirth, or japës, right anon!'
+    'It shall be done,' quoth he, 'by saint Ronyon!
+  But first' (quoth he) 'here at this alë stake
+  I will both drink and eaten of a cake.'
+  And right anon the gentles gan to cry
+  'Nay! let him tell us of no ribaldry....'
+  'I grant, ywis,' quoth he; 'but I must think
+  Upon some honest thing, the while I drink.'
+
+The suspicion of the "gentles" might seem premature; but they evidently
+suspected this pardon-monger of too copious morning-draughts already, and
+the tenor of his whole prologue must have confirmed their fears. With the
+cake in his mouth, and the froth of the pot on his lips, he takes as his
+text, _Radix malorum est cupiditas_, "Covetousness is the root of all
+evil," and exposes with cynical frankness the tricks of his trade. By a
+judicious use of "my longë crystal stones, y-crammëd full of cloutës and
+of bones," I make (says he) my round 100 marks a year;[162] and, when the
+people have offered, then I mount the pulpit, nod east and west upon the
+congregation like a dove on a barn-gable, and preach such tales as
+this.... Hereupon follows his tale of the three thieves who all murdered
+each other for the same treasure. It is told with admirable spirit; and
+now the Pardoner, carried away by sheer force of habit, calls upon the
+company to kiss his relics, make their offerings, and earn his indulgences
+piping-hot from Rome. Might not a horse stumble here, at this very moment,
+and break the neck of some unlucky pilgrim, who would then bitterly regret
+his lost opportunities in hell or purgatory? Strike, then, while the iron
+is hot--
+
+  I counsel that our Host here shall begin,
+  For he is most enveloped in sin!
+  ... Come forth, sir Host, and offer first anon,
+  And thou shalt kiss my relics every one ...
+  Yea, for a groat! unbuckle anon thy purse.
+    'Nay, nay,' quoth he, 'then have I Christë's curse ...
+
+The Host, as his opening words may suggest, answers to the purpose, easy
+words to understand, but not so easy to print here in the broad nakedness
+of their scorn for the Pardoner and all his works--
+
+  This Pardoner answerëd not a word;
+  So wroth he was, no wordë would he say.
+    'Now,' quoth our Host, 'I will no longer play
+  With thee, nor with none other angry man.'
+    But right anon the worthy Knight began
+  (When that he saw that all the people lough)        [laughed
+  'No more of this, for it is right enough!           [quite
+  Sir Pardoner, be glad and merry of cheer;
+  And ye, sir Host, that be to me so dear,
+  I pray now that ye kiss the Pardoner;
+  And, Pardoner, I pray thee draw thee near,
+  And, as we diden, let us laugh and play.'
+    Anon they kist, and riden forth their way.
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Upon an ambler easily she sat,
+  Y-wimpled well, and on her head an hat
+  As broad as is a buckler or a targe;
+  A foot-mantle about her hippës large,
+  And on her feet a pair of spurrës sharp.
+
+THE WIFE OF BATH
+
+(From the Ellesmere MS.)]
+
+
+The thread of the tales here breaks off; and then suddenly we find the
+Wife of Bath talking, talking, talking, almost without end as she was
+without beginning. Her prologue is half a dozen tales in itself, longer
+almost, and certainly wittier, than all the other prologues put together.
+The theme is marriage, and her mouth speaks from the abundance of her
+heart. Here, indeed, we have God's plenty: fish, flesh, and fowl are set
+before us in one dish, not to speak of creeping things: it is in truth a
+strong mess, savoury to those that have the stomach for it, but reeking of
+garlic, crammed with oaths like the Shipman's talk; a sample of the
+Eternal Feminine undisguised and unrefined, in its most glaring contrast
+with the only other two women of the party, the Prioress and her
+fellow-nun--
+
+  Men may divine, and glosen up and down,
+  But well I wot, express, withouten lie,
+  God bade us for to wax and multiply;
+  That gentle text can I well understand.
+  Eke, well I wot, he said that mine husband
+  Should leavë father and mother, and takë me;
+  But of no number mention madë he
+  Of bigamy or of octogamy,
+  Why shouldë men speak of it villainy?
+
+The good wife tells how she has outlived five husbands, and proclaims her
+readiness for a sixth. The five martyrs are sketched with a master-touch,
+and are divided into categories according to their obedience or
+disobedience. But, with all their variety of disposition, time and
+matrimony had tamed even the most stubborn of them; even that clerk of
+Oxford whose earlier wont had been to read aloud nightly by the fire from
+a Book of Bad Women--
+
+  ... And when I saw he wouldë never fine           [finish
+  To readen on this cursed book all night,
+  All suddenly three leavës have I plight           [plucked
+  Out of his book, right as he read; and eke
+  I with my fist so took him on the cheek
+  That in our fire he fell backward adown;
+  And up he start as doth a wood lioun              [mad
+  And with his fist he smote me on the head,
+  That in the floor I lay as I were dead ...
+
+But the quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love; and when the husband
+had been brought, half by violence and half by cajolery, to give his wife
+her own way in everything, then--
+
+  After that day we never had debate.
+  God help me so, I was to him as kind
+  As any wife from Denmark unto Ind.
+
+For all social purposes, as we have said, this was the only woman of the
+company; and where there is one woman there are always two men as ready to
+quarrel over her as if she were Helen of Troy. Moreover, in this case,
+professional jealousies were also at work. Already in the middle of her
+prologue the Summoner had fallen into familiar dialogue with this merry
+wife; and now, at the end--
+
+  The Friar laughed when he had heard all this;
+  'Now, dame,' quoth he, 'so have I joy or bliss,
+  This is a long preamble of a tale!'
+    And when the Summoner heard the Friar gale              [cry out
+  'Lo,' quoth the Summoner, 'Goddës armes two!
+  A friar will intermit him ever-mo.                        [interfere
+  Lo, goodë men, a fly, and eke a frere
+  Will fall in every dishë and matčre.
+  What speak'st thou of a "preambulation"?
+  What? amble, or trot, or peace, or go sit down!
+  Thou lettest our disport in this mančre.'
+    'Yea, wilt thou so, sir Summoner?' quoth the Frere;
+  'Now, by my faith, I shall, ere that I go,
+  Tell of a Summoner such a tale or two
+  That all the folk shall laughen in this place.'
+    'Now ellës, Friar, I beshrew thy face,'                 [curse
+  Quoth this Summoner, 'and I beshrewë me,
+  But if I tellë tales, two or three,
+  Of friars, ere I come to Sittingbourne,
+  That I shall make thine heartë for to mourn,
+  For well I wot thy patience is gone.'
+    Our Hostë cričd 'Peace! and that anon;'
+  And saidë: 'Let the woman tell her tale;
+  Ye fare as folk that drunken be of ale.
+  Do, dame, tell forth your tale, and that is best.'
+    'All ready, sir,' quoth she, 'right as you list,
+  If I have licence of this worthy Frere.'
+    'Yes, dame,' quoth he, 'tell forth, and I will hear.'
+
+The lady, having thus definitely notified her choice between the rivals
+(on quite other grounds, as the next few lines show, than those of
+religion or morality), proceeds to tell her tale on the theme that nothing
+is so dear to the female heart as "sovereignty" or "mastery." Then the
+quarrel blazes up afresh, and the Friar (after an insulting prologue for
+which the Host calls him to order) tells a story which is, from first to
+last, a bitter satire on the whole tribe of Summoners. Then the Summoner,
+"quaking like an aspen leaf for ire," stands up in his stirrups and claims
+to be heard in turn. His prologue, which by itself might suffice to turn
+the tables on his enemy, is a broad parody of those revelations to devout
+Religious which announced how the blessed souls of their particular Order
+(for the Friars were not alone in this egotism) enjoyed for their
+exclusive use some choice and peculiar mansion in heaven--under the skirts
+of the Virgin's mantle, for instance, or even within the wound of their
+Saviour's side. Then begins the tale itself of a Franciscan Stiggins on
+his daily rounds, and of the "oldë churl, with lockës hoar," who at one
+stroke blasphemed the whole convent, and took ample change out of Friar
+John for many a good penny or fat meal given in the past, and for much
+friction in his conjugal relations. The whole is told with inimitable
+humour, and it is to be regretted that we hear nothing of the comments
+with which it was received. At this point comes another gap in Chaucer's
+plan.
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  His eyen twinkled in his head aright
+  As do the starrës in a frosty night.
+
+THE FRIAR
+
+(From the Ellesmere MS.)]
+
+
+Then suddenly our Host calls upon the Clerk of Oxford--
+
+  Ye ride as still and coy as doth a maid,
+  Were newly spousëd, sitting at the board;
+  This day ne heard I of your tongue a word ...
+  For Goddës sake, as be of better cheer!
+  It is no timë for to study here.
+
+The Clerk, thus rudely shaken from his meditations, tells the story of
+Patient Griselda, which he had "learned at Padua, of a worthy clerk ...
+Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet." The good Clerk softens down much of
+that which most shocks the modern mind in this truly medieval conception
+of wifely obedience; and, as a confirmed bachelor, he adds an ironical
+postscript which is as clever as anything Chaucer ever wrote.[163] We must
+revere the heroine, but despair of finding her peer--
+
+  Griseld' is dead, and eke her patience,
+  And both at once buričd in Itayle.
+
+So begins this satirical ballad, and goes on to bid the wife of the
+present day to enjoy herself at her husband's expense--
+
+  Be aye of cheer as light as leaf on lind,             [lime-tree
+  And let him care and weep, and wring and wail!
+
+The last line rouses a sad echo in one heart at least, for the Merchant
+had been wedded but two months--
+
+  'Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow,
+  I know enough, on even and a-morrow'
+  Quoth the Merchant, 'and so do other more
+  That wedded be ...'
+
+His tale turns accordingly on the misadventures of an old knight who had
+been foolish enough to marry a girl in her teens. Upon this the Host
+congratulates himself that _his_ wife, with all her shrewishness and
+other vices more, is "as true as any steel." Here ends the third day; the
+travellers probably slept at the Pilgrim's House at Ospringe, parts of
+which stand still as Chaucer saw it.
+
+Next morning the Squire is first called upon to
+
+  ... say somewhat of love; for certes ye
+  Do ken thereon as much as any man.
+
+He modestly disclaims the compliment, and tells (or rather leaves half
+told) the story of Cambuscan, with the magic ring and mirror and horse of
+brass. Chaucer had evidently intended to finish the story; for the
+Franklin is loud in praise of the young man's eloquence, and sighs to mark
+the contrast with his own son, who, in spite of constant paternal
+"snybbings," haunts dice and low company, and shows no ambition to learn
+of "gentillesse." "Straw for your 'gentillessë,' quoth our Host," and
+forthwith demands a tale from the Franklin, who, with many apologies for
+his want of rhetoric, tells admirably a Breton legend of chivalry and
+magic.
+
+Another gap brings us to the Second Nun, who tells the tale of St. Cecilia
+from the Golden Legend, with a prefatory invocation to the Virgin
+translated from Dante. By the time this is ended the pilgrims are five
+miles further on, at Boughton-under-Blee. Here, at the foot of the hilly
+forest of Blean, with only eight more miles before them to Canterbury,
+they are startled by the clattering of horse-hoofs behind them. It was a
+Canon Regular with a Yeoman at his heels.[164] The man had seen the
+pilgrims at daybreak, and warned his master; and the two had ridden hard
+to overtake so merry a company. While the Canon greeted the pilgrims, our
+Host questioned his Yeoman, who first obscurely hinted, and then began
+openly to relate, such things as made the Canon set spurs to his horse
+and "flee away for very sorrow and shame." The Yeoman is now only too glad
+to make a clean breast of it. He has been seven years with this monastic
+alchemist, who has fallen meanwhile from one degree of poverty to another;
+half-cheat, half-dupe, with a thousand tricks for cozening folk of their
+money, but always wasting his own on the search for the philosopher's
+stone. Meanwhile, after ruinous expenses and painful care, every
+experiment ends in the same way: "the pot to-breaketh, and farewell, all
+is go!" The experimenters pick themselves up, look round on the mass of
+splinters and the dinted walls, and begin to quarrel over the cause--
+
+  Some said it was along on the fire making,
+  Some saidë Nay, it was on the blowing,
+  (Then was I feared, for that was mine office,)
+  'Straw!' quoth the third, 'ye be lewëd and nice     [ignorant and foolish
+  It was not tempered as it ought to be.'
+  'Nay,' quoth the fourthë, 'stint and hearken me;
+  Because our fire ne was not made of beech,
+  That is the cause, and other none, so I theech!'    [so may I thrive!
+
+At last the mess is swept up, the few recognizable fragments of metal are
+put aside for further use, another furnace is built, and the indefatigable
+Canon concocts a fresh hell-broth, sweeping away all past failures with
+the incurable optimism of a monomaniac, "There was defect in somewhat,
+well I wot." Many of the fraternity, however, are arrant knaves, without
+the least redeeming leaven of folly; and the Yeoman goes on to tell the
+tricks by which such an one beguiled a "sotted priest" who had set his
+heart on this unlawful gain.
+
+By this time the company was come to "Bob Up and Down," which was probably
+the pilgrims' nickname for Upper Harbledown. Here our Host found the Cook
+straggling behind, asleep on his nag in broad daylight--
+
+  'Awake, thou Cook,' quoth he, 'God give thee sorrow!
+  What aileth thee to sleepë by the morrow?
+  Hast thou had fleas all night, or art thou drunk?'
+
+The Cook opens his mouth, and at once compels his neighbours to adopt the
+latter and less charitable theory. He is evidently in no state for
+story-telling; so the Manciple offers himself instead, not without a few
+broad jests at his fellow's infirmity--
+
+  And with this speech the Cook was wroth and wraw,       [indignant
+  And on the manciple he 'gan noddë fast
+  For lack of speech; and down the horse him cast,
+  Where as he lay till that men up him took!
+
+The Manciple, fearing lest the Cook's resentment should prompt some future
+revenge in the way of business, pulled out a gourd of wine, coaxed another
+draught into the drunken man, and earned his half-articulate gratitude.
+Then he told the fable of the crow from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
+
+The tale was ended, and the sun began to sink, for it was four
+o'clock.[165] The cavalcade began to "enter at a thorpë's end"--no doubt
+the village of Harbledown, the last before Canterbury, famous for the
+Black Prince's Well and for the relics of St. Thomas at its leper
+hospital. Here at last the pilgrims remember the real object of their
+journey. The Host lays aside his oaths (all but one, "Cokkës bones!" which
+slips out unawares) and looks round now for the hitherto neglected Parson,
+upon whom he calls for a "fable."
+
+    This Parson answered all at once
+  'Thou gettest fable none y-told for me,
+  For Paul, that writeth unto Timothee,
+  Reproveth them that weyven soothfastness                     [depart from
+  And tellen fables and such wretchedness ...
+  I cannot gestë "_rum, ram, ruf_" by letter,[166]
+  Nor, God wot, rhyme hold I but little better;
+  And therefore if you list--I will not glose--
+  I will you tell a merry tale in prose
+  To knit up all this feast, and make an end;
+  And Jesu, for His gracë, wit me send
+  To shewë you the way, in this voyage,
+  Of thilkë perfect, glorious pilgrimage
+  That hight Jerusalem celestial ...'
+  Upon this word we have assented soon,
+  For as us seemed, it was for to doon                         [right to do
+  To enden in some virtuous sentence,
+  And for to give him space and audience.
+
+The Host voices the common consent, reinforcing his speech for once with a
+prayer instead of an oath. The Parson then launches out into a treatise on
+the Seven Deadly Sins and their remedies, translated from the French of a
+13th-century friar. The treatise (like Chaucer's other prose writings)
+lacks the style of his verse; but it contains one lively and amusing
+chapter of his own insertion, satirizing the extravagance of costume in
+his day (lines 407 ff.).
+
+
+[Illustration:CANTERBVRY FROM W. SMITH'S DRAWING OF 1588. (SLOANE MS.
+2596). THE PILGRIMS ENTERED BY THE WEST GATE (NO. 6)]
+
+
+Long before the Parson had ended, the city must have been in full view
+below--white-walled, red-roofed amid its orchards and green meadows, but
+lacking that perfect bell-tower which, from far and near, is now the
+fairest sight of all. At this point an anonymous and far inferior poet has
+continued Chaucer's narrative in the "Tale of Beryn." The prologue to that
+tale shows us the pilgrims putting up at the Chequers Inn, "that many a
+man doth know," fragments of which may still be seen close to the
+Cathedral at the corner of Mercery Lane.[167] Travelling as they did in
+force--and especially with such redoubtable champions among their
+party--they would no doubt have been able to choose this desirable hostel
+without too great molestation; but in favour of less able-bodied pilgrims
+the city authorities were obliged to pass a law that no hosteler should
+"disturb no manner of strange man coming to the city for to take his inn;
+but it shall be lawful to take his inn at his own lust without disturbance
+of any hosteler."[168] In the Cathedral itself--
+
+  The Pardoner and the Miller, and other lewd sots,
+  Sought themselves in the church right as lewd goats,
+  Peerëd fast and porëd high upon the glass,
+  Counterfeiting gentlemen, the armës for to blase,         [blazon
+
+till the Host bade them show better manners, and go offer at the shrine.
+"Then passed they forth boisterously, goggling with their heads," kissed
+the relics dutifully, saw the different holy places, and presently sat
+down to dinner. How the Miller (being accustomed to such sleight of hand)
+stole afterwards a bosom-full of "Canterbury brooches"; how uproarious was
+the merriment after supper, and how the Pardoner became the hero of a
+scandalous adventure--this and much more may be read at length in the
+prologue to the "Tale of Beryn." It will already have been noted, however,
+that the anonymous poet entirely agrees with Chaucer in laying stress on
+what may be called the bank-holiday side of the pilgrimage. That side does
+indeed come out with rather more than its due prominence when we thus skip
+the separate tales and run straight through the plot of the pilgrims'
+journey; but, when all allowances have been made, Chaucer enables us to
+understand why orthodox preachers spoke on this subject almost as strongly
+as the heresiarch Wycliffe; and, on the other hand, how great a gap was
+made in the life of the common folk by the abolition of pilgrimages.
+
+The very fidelity with which the poet paints his own time shows us the
+Reformation in embryo. We have in fact here, within the six hundred pages
+of the "Canterbury Tales," one of the most vivid and significant of all
+scenes in the great Legend of the Ages; and his pilgrims, so intent upon
+the present, so exactly mirrored by Chaucer as they moved and spoke in
+their own time, tell us nevertheless both of another age that was almost
+past and of a future time which was not yet ripe for reality. The Knight
+is still of course the most respected figure in such a company; and he
+brings into the book a pale afterglow of the real crusades; but the Host
+now treads close upon his heels, big with the importance of a prosperous
+citizen who has twice sat in Parliament side by side with knights of the
+shire. The good Prioress recalls faintly the heroic age of monasticism;
+yet St. Benedict and St. Francis would have recognized their truest son in
+the poor Parson, upon whom the pilgrims called only in the last resort.
+The Monk and the Friar, the Summoner and the Pardoner, do indeed remind us
+how large a share the Church claimed in every department of daily life;
+but they make us ask at the same time "how long can it last?" Extremes
+meet; and the "lewd sots" who went "goggling with their heads," gaping and
+disputing at the painted windows on their way to the shrine, were lineal
+ancestors to the notorious "Blue Dick" of 250 years later, who made a
+merit of having mounted on a lofty ladder, pike in hand, to "rattle down
+proud Becket's glassie bones."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: EDWARD III. FROM HIS TOMB IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY]
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+KING AND QUEEN
+
+  "Then came there a King; knighthood him led;
+  Might of the Commons made him to reign."
+                                  "Piers Plowman," B., Prol. 112
+
+
+We have traced the main course of the poet's life, followed him at work
+and at play, and considered his immediate environment. Let us now try to
+roam more at large through the England of his day, and note the more
+salient features of that society, high and low, from which he drew his
+characters.
+
+In this age, Chaucer could scarcely have had a better introduction to
+Court life than that which fell to his lot. The King whom he served, when
+we have made all possible deductions, was still the most imposing
+sovereign of the time. Adam Murimuth, a contemporary chronicler not often
+given to rhetoric, has drawn Edward III.'s portrait with no more
+exaggeration than we must take for granted in a contemporary, and with
+such brilliancy that his more picturesque successor, Walsingham, has
+transferred the paragraph almost bodily into his own pages. "This King
+Edward," writes Adam, "was of infinite goodness, and glorious among all
+the great ones of the world, being entitled The Glorious par excellence,
+for that by virtue of grace from heaven he outshone in excellence all his
+predecessors, renowned and noble as they were. He was so great-hearted
+that he never blenched or changed the fashion of his countenance at any
+ill-hap or trouble soever that came upon him; a renowned and fortunate
+warrior, who triumphed gloriously in battles by sea and land; clement and
+benign, familiar and gentle even to all men, both strangers and his own
+subjects or dependents; devoted to God, for he held God's Church and His
+ministers in the greatest reverence. In temporal matters he was not too
+unyielding, prudent and discreet in counsel, affable and gentle in
+courtesy of speech, composed and measured in gesture and manners, pitiful
+to the afflicted, and profuse in largesse. In times of wealth he was not
+immoderate; his love of building was great and discriminating; he bore
+losses with moderation; devoted to hawking, he spent much pains on that
+art. His body was comely, and his face like the face of a god, wherefrom
+so marvellous grace shone forth that whosoever openly considered his
+countenance, or dreamed thereof by night, conceived a sure and certain
+hope of pleasant solace and good-fortune that day. He ruled his realm
+strictly even to his old age; he was liberal in giving and lavish in
+spending; for he was excellent in all honour of manners, so that to live
+under him was to reign; since his fame was so spread abroad among
+barbarous nations that, extolling his honour, they averred that no land
+under the sun had ever produced a King so noble, so generous, or so
+fortunate; and that, after his death, none such would perchance ever be
+raised up for future times. Yet he controlled not, even in old age, the
+dissolute lusts of the flesh; and, as is believed, this intemperance
+shortened his life." Hereupon follows a painfully involved sentence in
+which the chronicler draws a moral from Edward's brilliant youth, the full
+midday of his manhood, and the degradation of his declining years.[169]
+
+If the praise of Edward's clemency seems overdrawn to those who remember
+the story of the citizens of Calais, we must bear in mind that the
+chronicler compares him here with other sovereigns of the time--with his
+rival Philippe de Valois, who was scarcely dissuaded from executing Sir
+Walter de Mauny in cold blood, despite his safe conduct from the Dauphin;
+with Gaston de Foix, who with a penknife in his hand struck at his only
+son and killed him; with Richard II., who smote the Earl of Arundel in the
+face during the Queen's funeral, and "polluted Westminster Abbey with his
+blood"; with Charles the Bad of Navarre, and Pedro the Cruel of Spain.
+What even the cleric Murimuth saw, and what Chaucer and his friend
+Hoccleve saw still more intimately, was the Haroun al-Raschid who went
+about "in simple array alone" to hear what his people said of him; the
+"mighty victor, mighty lord" of Sluys, Crécy and Calais; the King who in
+war would freely hazard his own person, "raging like a wild boar, and
+crying 'Ha Saint Edward! Ha Saint George!'"[170] and who in peace would
+lead the revels at Windsor, clad in white and silver, and embroidered with
+his motto--
+
+  Hay, hay, the whitë swan!
+  By Goddës soul I am thy man!
+
+If Edward and his sons were renowned for their uniform success in battle,
+it was not because they had feared to look defeat in the face. Every one
+knows how much was risked and all but lost at Crécy and Poitiers; the
+great sea-fight of "Les Espagnols sur Mer" is less known. Froissart excels
+himself in this story.[171] We see Edward sailing out gaily, in spite of
+the superior numbers of the Spaniards, and bidding his minstrels pipe the
+brand-new air which Sir John Chandos had brought back from Germany, while
+Chandos himself sang the words. Then, when the enemy came sailing down
+upon him with their great embattled ships, the King bade his steersman
+tilt straight at the first Spanish vessel, in spite of the disparity of
+weight. The English boat cracked under the shock; her seams opened; and,
+by the time that Edward had captured the next ship, his own was beginning
+to sink. The Black Prince had even a narrower escape; it became evident
+that his ship would go down before he could board the enemy; only the
+timely arrival of the Earl of Derby saved him; the deck sank almost under
+his feet as he climbed the sides of the Spaniard; "and all the enemy were
+put overboard without taking any to mercy." The Queen prayed all day at
+some abbey--probably Battle--in anguish of heart for the news which came
+from time to time through watchers on the far-off Downs. Although Edward
+and his sons took horse at once upon their landing, not until two o'clock
+in the morning did they find her, apparently in her own castle at
+Pevensey: "so the lords and ladies passed that night in great revel,
+speaking of war and of love."
+
+Arms and love were equally commemorated in a foundation which was one of
+the glories of Edward's reign--the Round Tower of Windsor. Dying chivalry,
+like other moribund institutions, broke out now and then into fantastic
+revivals of the past. Edward resolved to hold a Round Table at his palace,
+and to build a great tower for the purpose. Warrants were sent out to
+impress the unhappy labourers throughout six counties; for a short time as
+many as 722 men were employed on the work, and the whole Round Tower was
+built in ten months of the year 1344.[172] Froissart connects this,
+probably too closely, with the Order of the Garter, which seems not to
+have been actually founded until 1349, when every household in the country
+was saddened by the Great Pestilence. We have here one of the typical
+contrasts of those times; both sides of the shield are seen in those
+memories of love and war which cling round the Round Tower of Windsor.
+Lavish profusion side by side with dirt and squalor; the minstrels clad in
+rich cloths taken from the Spaniards; bright eyes and careless merriment
+at the Royal board, while the hawks scream down from their perches, and
+noble hounds fight for bones among the rushes; silken trains, stiff with
+gold, trailing over the nameless defilements of the floor; a King and his
+sons, more stately and warlike than any other Royal family; but their
+crowns are in pawn with foreign merchants, and they themselves have been
+obliged to leave four earls behind as hostages to their Flemish
+creditors.[173] Royalty has always its _memento mori_, no doubt, but not
+always under the same forms.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE PEACOCK FEAST
+
+(From the sepulchral brass of Robert Braunche, twice Mayor of Lynn, who
+died in 1364. Braunche had the honour of entertaining Edward III., here
+distinguished by his crown on the extreme left of the guests. Observe the
+attitude of the attendant squire on the extreme right.)]
+
+
+If Chaucer the poet was fortunate in his Royal master, still more
+fortunate was Philippa Chaucer in her namesake, "the good Queen." The
+wooing of Edward and Philippa of Hainault is painted lovingly by
+Froissart, who was the lady's compatriot and a clerk in her service. In
+1326 Queen Isabella of England, who had broken more or less definitely
+with her husband, was staying with her eldest boy at her brother's Court
+in Paris. But the King of France had no wish to encourage open rebellion;
+and Isabella avoided extradition only by fleeing to her cousin, the Count
+of Hainault, at Valenciennes. "In those days had Count William four
+daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Joan, and Isabel; among whom young Edward
+devoted himself most, and inclined with eyes of love to Philippa rather
+than to the rest; and the maiden knew him better and kept closer company
+with him than any of her sisters. So have I since heard from the mouth of
+the good Lady herself, who was Queen of England, and in whose court and
+service I dwelt." It was agreed, in reward for the count's hospitality,
+that Edward should marry one of the girls; and when Isabella went home to
+conquer England in her son's name, the main body of her army consisted of
+Hainaulters, and most of the prepaid dowry of the future bride was
+consumed by the expenses of the expedition. Then, in 1327, when the
+wretched Edward II. had bitterly expiated his follies and crimes in the
+dungeon of Berkeley, and the "she-wolf of France" already ruled England in
+her son's name, she went through the form of asking whether he would marry
+one of the young countesses. "And when they asked him, he began to laugh,
+and said, 'Yes, I am better pleased to marry there than elsewhere; and
+rather to Philippa, for she and I accorded excellently well together; and
+she wept, I know well, when I took leave of her at my departure.'" All
+that was needed now was a papal dispensation; for the parties were second
+cousins. This was, of course, a mere matter of form--or, rather, of money.
+Towards the end of the year Philippa was married by proxy at Valenciennes;
+and on December 23 she arrived in London, where there were "great
+rejoicings and noble show of lords, earls, barons, knights, highborn
+ladies and noble damsels, with rich display of dress and jewels, with
+jousts too and tourneys for the ladies' love, with dancing and carolling,
+and with great and rich feasts day by day; and these rejoicings endured
+for the space of 3 weeks." Edward was at York, resting after his first
+Scottish campaign; so "the young queen and her meinie journeyed northwards
+until they came to York, where she was received with great solemnity. And
+all the lords of England who were in the city came forth in fair array to
+meet her, and with them the young king, mounted on an excellently-paced
+hackney, magnificently clad and arrayed; and he took her by the hand, and
+then embraced and kissed her; and so riding side by side, with great
+plenty of minstrels and honours, they entered the city and came to the
+Queen's lodgings.... So there the young King Edward wedded Philippa of
+Hainault in the cathedral church of St. William [_sic_].... And the king
+was seventeen years of age, and the young queen was on the point of
+fourteen years.... Thus came the said queen Philippa to England at so
+happy a time that the whole kingdom might well rejoice thereat, and did
+indeed rejoice; for since the days of queen Guinevere, who was wife to
+King Arthur and queen of England (which men called Great Britain in those
+days), so good a queen never came to that land, nor any who had so much
+honour, or such fair offspring; for in her time, by King Edward her
+spouse, she had seven sons and five daughters. And, so long as she lived,
+the realm of England enjoyed grace, prosperity, honour, and all good
+fortune; nor was there ever enduring famine or dearth in the land while
+she reigned there.... Tall and straight she was; wise, gladsome, humble,
+devout, free-handed, and courteous; and in her time she was richly adorned
+with all noble virtues, and well beloved of God and men."[174]
+
+
+[Illustration: PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT, FROM HER TOMB IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
+
+(THE FIRST OF THE ROYAL TOMBS WHICH IS AN ACTUAL PORTRAIT)]
+
+
+So far Froissart, recording events which happened some ten years before
+his birth, from the mouths of the actors themselves; writing lovingly, in
+his extreme old age, of his first and noblest patroness, and proudly as a
+Dane might write thirty years hence of the princess who had come from his
+own home to win all hearts in England.[175] From other chroniclers, and
+from dry official documents, we may throw interesting sidelights on these
+more living memorials. One such document, however, is as living as a page
+from Froissart himself, in spite of--or shall we say, because of?--its
+essentially business character and the legal caution of phrase in which
+the writer has wrapped up his direct personal impressions. The official
+register of the ill-fated Bishop Stapledon, of Exeter, so soon to expiate
+at the hands of a London mob his loyal ministerial service to Edward
+II., is in the main like other episcopal registers--a record of
+ordinations, institutions, dispensations, lawsuits, and more or less
+unsuccessful attempts to reduce his clergy to canonical discipline.[176]
+But it contains, under the date of 1319 (p. 169), an entry which has, so
+far as I know, been strangely overlooked hitherto by historians. The Latin
+title runs, "Inspection and Description of the Daughter of the Count of
+Hainault, Philippa by name." To this a later hand, probably that of the
+succeeding bishop, has added: "She was Queen of England, Wife to Edward
+III." The document itself, which is in Norman-French, runs as follows:
+"The lady whom we saw has not uncomely hair, betwixt blue-black and brown.
+Her head is clean-shaped; her forehead high and broad, and standing
+somewhat forward. Her face narrows between the eyes, and the lower part of
+her face still more narrow and slender than the forehead. Her eyes are
+blackish-brown and deep. Her nose is fairly smooth and even, save that it
+is somewhat broad at the tip and also flattened, yet it is no snub-nose.
+Her nostrils are also broad, her mouth fairly wide. Her lips somewhat
+full, and especially the lower lip. Her teeth which have fallen and grown
+again are white enough, but the rest are not so white. The lower teeth
+project a little beyond the upper; yet this is but little seen. Her ears
+and chin are comely enough. Her neck, shoulders, and all her body and
+lower limbs are reasonably well shapen; all her limbs are well set and
+unmaimed; and nought is amiss so far as a man may see. Moreover, she is
+brown of skin all over, and much like her father; and in all things she is
+pleasant enough, as it seems to us. And the damsel will be of the age of
+nine years on St. John's day next to come, as her mother saith. She is
+neither too tall nor too short for such an age; she is of fair carriage,
+and well taught in all that becometh her rank, and highly esteemed and
+well beloved of her father and mother and of all her meinie, in so far as
+we could inquire and learn the truth." Cannot we here see, through the
+bishop's dry and measured phrases, a figure scarcely less living and
+attractive than Froissart shows us?
+
+But the register corrects the historian just where we should expect to
+find him at fault. "The noble and worthy lady my mistress" would scarcely
+have told Froissart how much State policy there had been in the marriage,
+true love-match as it had been in spite of all. The old bishop, before
+whose face she had trembled, and laughed again behind his back with her
+sisters; his invidious comparisons between her first and second teeth; his
+business-like collection of backstairs gossip, which some more
+confidential maid-of-honour must surely have whispered to her mistress--of
+all this the noble lady naturally breathed no syllable to her devoted
+clerk. But, apart from the official record in the secret archives of
+Exeter diocese, a vague memory of it all was kept alive in men's minds by
+that most efficacious of historical preservatives--a broad jest. The
+rhyming chronicler Hardyng, whose life overlapped Froissart's and
+Chaucer's by several years, records a good deal of Court gossip,
+especially about Edward III.'s family. He writes[177]--
+
+  "He sent forth then to Hainault for a wife
+    A bishop and other lordës temporal,
+  Where, in chamber privy and secret
+    At discovered, dishevelled also in all,
+    As seeming was to estate virginal.
+  Among themselves our lords, for his prudence
+  Of the bishop asked counsel and sentence.
+
+  "Which daughter of the five should be the queen.
+    Who counselled thus, with sad avisëment
+  'We will have her with good hippës, I mean,
+    For she will bear good sons, to mine intent.'
+    To which they all accorded by assent,
+  And chose Philippa that was full feminine,
+  As the bishop most wise did determine.
+
+  "But then among themselves they laughed fast ay;
+    The lords then said [that] the bishop couth
+  Full mickle skill of a woman alway,                     [was a good judge
+    That so could choose a lady that was uncouth;         [unknown
+    And, for the merry words that came of his mouth,
+  They trowed he had right great experience
+  Of woman's rule and their convenience."
+
+Later on again, after enumerating the titles and virtues of the sons that
+were born of this union, Hardyng continues--
+
+  "So high and large they were of all stature,
+    The least of them was of [his] person able
+  To have foughten with any creature
+    Single battaile in actës merciable;
+    The bishop's wit me thinketh commendable,
+  So well could choose the princess that them bore,
+  For by practice he knew it, or by lore."
+
+We need find no difficulty in reconciling Froissart with these other
+documents; Edward's was a love-match, but, like all Royal love-matches,
+subject to possible considerations of State. The first negotiations for a
+papal dispensation carefully avoid exact specification; the request is
+simply for leave to marry "one of the daughters" of Hainault; only two
+months before the actual marriage does the final document bear Philippa's
+name.
+
+The Queen's public life--the scene before Calais, and her (somewhat
+doubtful) presence at the battle of Nevile's Cross--belongs rather to the
+general history of England; of her private life, as of Chaucer's, a great
+deal only flashes out here and there, meteor-wise, from account-books and
+similar business documents. We find, for instance, what gifts were given
+to the messengers who announced the births of her successive children to
+the King; and Beltz, in his "Memorials of the Garter," has unearthed the
+name of the lady who nursed the Black Prince.[178] We find Edward building
+for his young consort the castle since called Queenborough, the
+master-mason on this occasion being John Gibbon, ancestor to the great
+historian. At another moment we see the Earl of Oxford, as Chamberlain,
+claiming for his perquisites after the coronation Philippa's bed, shoes,
+and three silver basins; but Edward redeemed the bed for Ł1000.[179] This
+redemption is explained by divers entries in the Royal accounts; in 1335-6
+the King owed John of Cologne Ł3000 for a bed made "against the
+confinement of the Lady Philippa ... of green velvet, embroidered in gold,
+with red sirens, bearing a shield with the arms of England and Hainault."
+The infant on this occasion was the short-lived William of Hatfield, whose
+child-tomb may be seen in York Cathedral. Her carpets for a later
+confinement cost Ł900, but her bed only Ł1250. And so on to the latest
+entries of all--the carving of her tomb at Westminster; the wrought-iron
+hearse which the canons of St. Paul's obligingly took from the tomb of
+Bishop Northbrooke and sold for that of the Queen at the price of
+Ł600;[180] lastly, the rich "mortuary" accruing to the Chapter of York
+Minster, who got for their perquisite the bed on which Philippa had
+breathed her last, and had its rich hangings cut up into "thirteen copes,
+six tunics and one chasuble."[181]
+
+But here let us turn back to Froissart, who, under the year 1369, turns
+suddenly aside from his chronicle of battles and sieges, to pay a
+heartfelt tribute to his first benefactress. "Now let us speak of the
+death of the gentlest queen, the most liberal and courteous of all who
+reigned in her time, my Lady Philippa of Hainault, queen of England and
+Ireland: God pardon her and all others! In these days ... there came to
+pass in England a thing common enough, but exceedingly pitiful this time
+for the king and her children and the whole land; for the good lady the
+Queen of England, who had done so much good in her lifetime and succoured
+so many knights, ladies, and damsels, and given and distributed so freely
+among all people, and who had ever loved so naturally those of her own
+native land of Hainault, lay grievously sick in the castle of Windsor; and
+her sickness lay so hard upon her that it waxed more and more grievous,
+and her last end drew near. When therefore this good lady and queen knew
+that she must die, she sent for the king her husband; and, when he was
+come into her presence, she drew her right hand from under the coverlet
+and put it into the right hand of the king, who was sore grieved in his
+heart; and thus spake the good lady: 'My Lord, heaven be thanked that we
+have spent our days in peace and joy and prosperity; wherefore I pray that
+you will grant me three boons at this my departure.' The King, weeping and
+sobbing, answered and said, 'Ask, Lady, for they are granted.' 'My Lord, I
+pray for all sorts of good folk with whom in time past I have dealt for
+their merchandize, both on this and on that side of the sea, that ye will
+easily trust their word for that wherein I am bound to them, and pay full
+quittance for me. Next, that ye will keep and accomplish all ordinances
+which I have made, and all legacies which I have bequeathed, both to
+churches on either side of the sea where I have paid my devotions, and to
+the squires and damsels who have served me. Thirdly, my Lord, I pray that
+ye will choose no other sepulture than to lie by my side in the Abbey of
+Westminster, when God's will shall be done on you.' The King answered
+weeping, 'Lady, I grant it you.' Then made the Queen the sign of the true
+cross on him, and commended the King to God, and likewise the lord Thomas
+her youngest son, who was by her side; and then within a brief space she
+yielded up her ghost, which (as I firmly believe) the holy angels of
+paradise seized and carried with great joy to the glory of heaven; for
+never in her life did she nor thought she any thing whereby she might lose
+it."
+
+As the good Queen's beloved bed-hangings were dispersed in fragments among
+the Canons of York, so her dying benedictions would seem to have been
+scattered no less widely to the winds. One of the servants so tenderly
+commended to the King's care was Chaucer's wife; but another was Alice
+Perrers, whom Edward had already noted with favour, and who now took more
+or less openly the dead Queen's place. Men aged rapidly in those days;
+and, as Edward trod the descending slope of life, his manly will weakened
+and left little but the animal behind. Philippa was scarcely cold in her
+grave when Alice Perrers, decked in her mistress's jewels, was
+masquerading at royal tournaments as the Lady of the Sun. Presently she
+was sitting openly at the judge's side in the law courts; the King's shame
+was the common talk of his subjects; and even the formal protests of
+Parliament failed to separate her from the doting old King, from whom on
+his death-bed she kept the clergy away until his speech was gone. Then,
+having stolen the very rings from his fingers, she left him to a priest
+who could only infer repentance from his groans and tears. Thomas of
+Woodstock, the Queen's Benjamin, fared not much better. He became the
+selfish and overbearing leader of the opposition to Richard II., and was
+at last secretly murdered by order of the royal nephew whom he had bullied
+more or less successfully for twenty years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES
+
+  "'But teach me,' quoth the Knight; 'and, by Christ, I will assay!'
+  'By St. Paul,' quoth Perkin, 'ye proffer you so fair
+  That I shall work and sweat, and sow for us both,
+  And other labours do for thy love, all my lifetime,
+  In covenant that thou keep Holy Church and myself
+  From wasters and from wicked men, that this world destroy;
+  And go hunt hardily to hares and foxes,
+  To boars and to badgers that break down my hedges;
+  And go train thy falcons wild-fowl to kill,
+  For such come to my croft and crop my wheat.'"
+                                  "Piers Plowman," B., vi., 24
+
+
+The theory of chivalry, which itself owes much to pre-Christian morality,
+lies at the roots of the modern conception of gentility. The essence of
+perfect knighthood was fearless strength, softened by charity and
+consecrated by faith. A certain small and select class had (it was held) a
+hereditary right to all the best things of this world, and the concomitant
+duty of using with moderation for themselves and giving freely to others.
+Essentially exclusive and jealous of its privileges, the chivalric ideal
+was yet the highest possible in a society whose very foundations rested on
+caste distinctions, and where bondmen were more numerous than freemen. The
+world will always be the richer for it; but we must not forget that, like
+the finest flower of Greek and Roman culture, it postulated a servile
+class; the many must needs toil and groan and bleed in order that the few
+might have grace and freedom to grow to their individual perfection. In
+its finest products it may extort unwilling admiration even from the most
+convinced democrat--
+
+  "Often I find myself saying, old faith and doctrine abjuring, ...
+  Were it not well that the stem should be naked of leaf and of tendril,
+  Poverty-stricken, the barest, the dismallest stick of the garden;
+  Flowerless, leafless, unlovely, for ninety-and-nine long summers,
+  So in the hundredth, at last, were bloom for one day at the summit,
+  So but that fleeting flower were lovely as Lady Maria?"[182]
+
+When, however, we look closer into the system, and turn from theory to
+practice, then we find again those glaring inconsistencies which meet us
+nearly everywhere in medieval society. A close study even of such a
+panegyrist as Froissart compels us to look to some other age than his for
+the spirit of perfect chivalry; and many writers would place the palmy
+days of knighthood in the age of St. Louis. Here again, however, we find
+the same difficulty; for in Joinville himself there are many jarring
+notes, and other records of the period are still less flattering to
+knightly society. The most learned of modern apologists for the Middle
+Ages, Léon Gautier, is driven to put back the Golden Age one century
+further, thus implying that Francis and Dominic, Aquinas and Dante, the
+glories of Westminster and Amiens, the saintly King who dealt justice
+under the oak of Vincennes, and twice led his armies oversea against the
+heathen, all belonged to an age of decadence in chivalry. Yet, even at
+this sacrifice, the Golden Age escapes us. When we go back to the middle
+of the 12th century we find St. Bernard's contemporaries branding the
+chivalry of their times as shamelessly untrue to its traditional code.
+"The Order of Knighthood" (writes Peter of Blois in his 94th Epistle) "is
+nowadays mere disorder.... Knights of old bound themselves by an oath to
+stand by the state, not to flee from battle, and to prefer the public
+welfare to their own lives. Nay, even in these present days candidates for
+knighthood take their swords from the altar as a confession that they are
+sons of the Church, and that the blade is given to them for the honour of
+the priesthood, the defence of the poor, the chastisement of evil-doers,
+and the deliverance of their country. But all goes by contraries; for
+nowadays, from the moment when they are honoured with the knightly belt,
+they rise up against the Lord's anointed and rage against the patrimony of
+the Crucified. They rob and despoil Christ's poor, afflicting the wretched
+miserably and without mercy, that from other men's pain they may gratify
+their unlawful appetites and their wanton pleasures.... They who should
+have used their strength against Christ's enemies fight now in their cups
+and drunkenness, waste their time in sloth, moulder in debauchery, and
+dishonour the name and office of Knighthood by their degenerate lives."
+This was about 1170. A couple of generations earlier we get an equally
+unfavourable impression from the learned and virtuous abbot, Guibert of
+Nogent. Further back, again, the evidence is still more damning; and
+nobody would seriously seek the golden age of chivalry in the 11th
+century. It is indeed a mirage; and Peter of Blois in 1170, Cardinal
+Jacques de Vitry in 1220, who so disadvantageously contrasted the
+knighthood of their own time with that of the past, were simply victims of
+a common delusion. They despaired too lightly of the actual world, and
+sought refuge too credulously in an imaginary past. Even if, in medieval
+fashion, we trace this institution back to Romulus, to David, to Joshua,
+or to Adam himself, we shall, after all, find it nowhere more flourishing
+than in the first half of the 13th century, imperfectly as its code was
+kept even then.
+
+By the end of that century, however, two great causes were at work which
+made for the decay of chivalry. Before Dante had begun to write, the real
+Crusades were over--or, indeed, even before Dante was born--for the two
+expeditions led by St. Louis were small compared with others in the past.
+In 1229 the Emperor Frederick II. had recovered from the infidel by
+treaty those holy places which Coeur-de-Lion had in vain attempted to
+storm; and this had dealt a severe blow to the old traditions. Again,
+during the years that followed, the Pope did not hesitate to attack his
+enemy the Emperor, even in the Holy Land; so that, while Christian fought
+against Christian over Christ's grave, the Turk stepped in and reconquered
+Jerusalem (1244). Lastly, his successors, while they regularly raised
+enormous taxes and contributions for the reconquest of Palestine,
+systematically spent them on their own private ambitions or personal
+pleasures. Before the 13th century was out the last Christian fortress had
+been taken, and there was nothing now to show for two centuries of
+bloodshed. Under these repeated shocks men began to lose faith in the
+crusading principle. A couple of generations before Chaucer's birth,
+Etienne de Bourbon complained that the upper classes "not only did not
+take the cross, but scoffed at the lower orders when they did so" (p.
+174). In France, after the disastrous failure of St. Louis's first
+expedition, the rabble said that Mahomet was now stronger than
+Christ.[183] Edward III. and his rival, Philippe de Valois, did for a
+moment propose to go and free the Holy Land in concert, but hardly
+seriously. Chaucer's Knight had indeed fought in Asia Minor, but mainly
+against European pagans in Spain and on the shores of the Baltic; and,
+irreproachable as his motives were in this particular instance, Gower
+shows scant sympathy for those which commonly prompted crusades of this
+kind.[184]
+
+A still more fatal cause of the decay of chivalry, perhaps, lay in the
+growing prosperity of the merchant class. Even distinguished historians
+have written misleadingly concerning the ideal of material prosperity and
+middle-class comfort, as though it had been born only with the
+Reformation. It seems in fact an inseparable bye-product of civilization:
+whether healthy or unhealthy need not be discussed here. As the Dark Ages
+brightened into the Middle Ages, as mere club-law grew weaker and weaker,
+so the longing for material comforts grew stronger and stronger. The great
+monasteries were among the leaders in this as in so many other respects.
+In 12th-century England, the nearest approach to the comfort of a modern
+household would probably have been found either in rich Jews' houses or in
+the more favoured parts of abbeys like Bury and St. Albans. Already in the
+13th century the merchant class begins to come definitely to the fore. As
+the early 14th-century _Renart le Contrefait_ complains--
+
+  "Bourgeois du roi est pair et comte;
+  De tous états portent l'honneur.
+  Riches bourgeois sont bien seigneurs!"[185]
+
+Italy and the south of France were particularly advanced in this respect;
+and Dante's paternal house was probably richer in material comforts than
+any castle or palace in England, as his surroundings were in many other
+ways more civilized. Even the feudal aristocracy, as will presently be
+seen, learned much in these ways from the citizen-class: and, meanwhile, a
+slow but sure intermingling process began between the two classes
+themselves. First only by way of abuse, but presently by open procedure of
+law, the rich plebeian began to buy for himself the sacred rank of
+Knighthood. Long before the end of the 13th century, there were districts
+of France in which rich citizens claimed knighthood as their inalienable
+right. In England, the order was cheapened by Edward I.'s statute of
+_Distraint of Knighthood_ (1278), in which some have seen a deliberate
+purpose to undermine the feudal nobility. By this law, all freeholders
+possessing an estate of Ł20 a year were not only permitted, but compelled
+to become knights; and the superficiality of the strict chivalric ideal is
+shown clearly by the facts that such a law could ever be passed, and that
+men tried so persistently to evade it. If knighthood had been in reality,
+even at the end of the 12th century, anything like what its formal codes
+represent, then no such attempt as this could have been made in 1235 by a
+King humbly devoted to the Church--for, as early as that year, Henry III.
+had anticipated his son's enactments.
+
+Where Royal statutes and popular tendencies work together against an
+ancient institution, it soon begins to crumble away; and the knighthood
+which Chaucer knew was far removed from that of a few generations before.
+We read in "Piers Plowman" that, while "poor gentle blood" is refused,
+"soapsellers and their sons for silver have been knights." An Italian
+contemporary, Sacchetti, complains that he has seen knighthood conferred
+on "mechanics, artisans, even bakers; nay, worse still, on woolcarders,
+usurers, and cozening ribalds"; and Eustache Deschamps speaks scarcely
+less strongly.[186] Several 14th-century mayors of London were knighted,
+including John Chaucer's fellow-vintner Picard, and Geoffrey's colleagues
+at the Customs, Walworth, Brembre, and Philipot.
+
+But Brembre and Philipot, Sir Walter Besant has reminded us, were probably
+members of old country families, who had come to seek their fortunes in
+London.[187] True; but this only shows us the decay of chivalry on another
+side. Nothing could be more honourable, or better in the long run for the
+country, than that there should be such a double current of circulation,
+fresh healthy blood flowing from the country manor to the London
+counting-house, and hard cash trickling back again from the city to the
+somewhat impoverished manor. It was magnificent, but it was not chivalry,
+at any rate in the medieval sense. Gower reminded his readers that even
+civil law forbade the knight to become merchant or trader; but the
+movement was far too strong to be checked by law. The old families had
+lost heavily by the crusades, by the natural subdivision of estates, and
+by their own extravagance. Moreover, the growing luxury of the times made
+them feel still more acutely the limitation of their incomes; and the
+moneylenders of Chaucer's day found their best customers among country
+magnates. "The city usurer," writes Gower, "keeps on hire his brokers and
+procurers, who search for knights, vavasours and squires. When these have
+mortgaged their lands, and are driven by need to borrow, then these
+rascals lead them to the usurers; and presently that trick will be played
+which in modern jargon is called the _chevisance_ of money.... Ah! what a
+bargain, which thus enriches the creditor and will ruin the debtor!"[188]
+In an age which knew knight-errantry no longer, nothing but the most
+careful husbandry could secure the old families in their former
+pre-eminence; and well it was for England that these were early forced by
+bitter experience to recognise the essential dignity of honest commerce.
+Edward I., under the financial pressure of his great wars, insisted that
+he was "free to buy and sell like any other." All the Kings were obliged
+to travel from one Royal manor to another, as M. Jusserand has pointed
+out, from sheer motives of economy.[189] We have already seen how Edward
+III., even in his pleasures, kept business accounts with a regularity
+which earned him a sneer from King John of France. The Cistercians, who
+were probably the richest religious body in England, owed their wealth
+mainly to their success in the wool trade. But perhaps the most curious
+evidence of this kind may be found in the invaluable collections from the
+Berkeley papers made in the 17th century by John Smyth of Nibley, and
+published by the Bristol and Gloucester Archćological Society. We there
+find a series of great barons, often holding distinguished offices in
+peace or war, but always exploiting their estates with a dogged unity of
+purpose which a Lombard might have envied. Thomas I., who held the barony
+from 1220 to 1243, showed his business foresight by letting a great deal
+of land on copyhold. His son (1243-1281) was "a careful husband, and
+strict in all his bargains." This Thomas II., who served with distinction
+in twenty-eight campaigns, kept in his own hands from thirteen to twenty
+manors, farming them with the most meticulous care. His accounts show that
+"when this lord was free from foreign employment, he went often in
+progress from one of his manors and farmhouses to another, scarce two
+miles asunder, making his stay at each of them for one or two nights,
+overseeing and directing the above-mentioned husbandries." Lady Berkeley
+went on similar rounds from manor to manor in order to inspect the
+dairies. Smyth gives amusing instances of the baron's frugalities, side by
+side with his generosity. He followed a policy of sub-letting land in tail
+to tenants, calculating "that the heirs of such donees being within age
+should be in ward to him, ... and so the profit of the land to become his
+own again, and the value of the marriage also to boot": a calculation
+which the reader will presently be in a better position to understand. He
+"would not permit any freeman's widow to marry again unless she first made
+fine with him" (one poor creature who protested against this rule was
+fined Ł20 in modern money); and he fixed a custom, which survived for
+centuries on his manors, of seizing into his own hands the estates of all
+copyholders' widows who re-married, or were guilty of incontinence. He
+vowed a crusade, but never performed it; his grandson paid a knight Ł100
+to go instead of the dead baron. Lady Berkeley's "elder years were weak
+and sickly, part of whose physic was sawing of billets and sticks, for
+which cause she had before her death yearly bought certain fine hand-saws,
+which she used in her chamber, and which commonly cost twopence a piece."
+
+
+[Illustration: SIR GEOFFREY LOUTERELL WITH HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER
+
+(LOUTERELL PSALTER. EARLY 14TH CENTURY.)]
+
+
+Maurice III. (1321-1326) continued, or rather improved upon, his father's
+exact methods. Thomas III. (1326-1361) was almost as great a warrior as
+his grandfather, though less fortunate. Froissart tells in his own
+picturesque style how he pressed so far forward at Poitiers as to get
+himself badly wounded and taken prisoner, and how the squire who took him
+bought himself a knighthood out of the ransom. (Globe ed., p. 127). Even
+more significant, perhaps, are the Royal commissions by which this lord
+was deputed to raise men for the great war, and to which I shall have
+occasion to refer later on. But, amidst all this public business, Thomas
+found time to farm himself about eighty manors! Like his grandfather, he
+was blessed with an equally business-like helpmeet, for when he was abroad
+on business or war, "his good and frugal lady withdrew herself for the
+most part to her houses of least resort and receipt, whether for her
+retirement or frugality, I determine not." The doubt here expressed must
+be merely rhetorical, for Smyth later on records how she had a new gown
+made for herself "of cloth furred throughout with coney-skins out of the
+kitchen." Indeed, most of the cloth and fur for the robes of this great
+household came from the estate itself. "In each manor, and almost upon
+each farmhouse, he had a pigeon-house, and in divers manors two, and in
+Hame and a few others three; from each house he drew yearly great numbers,
+as 1300, 1200, 1000, 850, 700, 650 from an house; and from Hame in one
+year 2151 young pigeons." These figures serve to explain how the baronial
+pigeons, preying on the crops, and so sacred that no man might touch them
+on pain of life or limb, became one of the chief causes which precipitated
+the French Revolution. Like his grandfather--and indeed like all feudal
+lords, from the King downwards--he found justice a profitable business. He
+"often held in one year four leets or views of frankpledge in Berkeley
+borough, wherefrom, imposing fourpence and sixpence upon a brewing of ale,
+and renting out the toll or profit of the wharfage and market there to the
+lord of the town, he drew yearly from that art more than the rent of the
+borough."[190] Again, he dealt in wardships, buying of Edward III. "for
+1000 marks ... the marriage of the heir of John de la Ware, with the
+profits of his lands, until the full age of the heir." He carried his
+business habits into every department of life. In founding a chantry at
+Newport he provided expressly by deed that the priest "should live
+chastely and honestly, and not come to markets, ale-houses, or taverns,
+neither should frequent plays or unlawful games; in a word, he made this
+his priest by these ordinances to be one of those honest men whom we
+mistakenly call _puritans_ in these our days." The accounts of his
+tournaments are most interesting, and throw a still clearer light on King
+John's sneer. Smyth notes that this lord was a most enthusiastic jouster,
+and gives two years as examples from the accounts (1st and 2nd Ed. III.).
+Yet, in all the six tournaments which Lord Thomas attended in those two
+years, he spent only Ł90 18_s._, or Ł15 3_s._ per tournament; and this at
+a time when he was saving money at the rate of Ł450 a year, an economy
+which he nearly trebled later on.[191] He evidently knew, however, that a
+heavy outlay upon occasion will repay itself with interest, for we find
+him paying Ł108 for a tower in his castle; and, whereas the park fence had
+hitherto been of thorn, new-made every three years, Lord Thomas went to
+the expense of an oaken paling.
+
+Maurice IV. (1361-1368), "in husbandry his father's true apprentice," not
+only made considerable quantities of wine, cider, and perry from his
+gardens at Berkeley, but turned an honest penny by selling the apples
+which had grown under the castle windows. Warned by failing health, he
+tried to secure the fortune of his eldest son, aged fourteen, by marrying
+him to the heiress of Lord Lisle. The girl was then only seven, so it was
+provided that she should live on in her father's house for four years
+after the wedding. Maurice soon died, and Lord Lisle bought from the King
+the wardship of his youthful son-in-law for Ł400 a year--that is, for
+about a sixth of the whole revenue of the estates. This young Thomas IV.,
+having at last become his own master (1368-1417), "fell into the old
+course of his father's and grandfather's husbandries." Among other thrifty
+bargains, he "bought of Henry Talbot twenty-four Scottish prisoners, taken
+by him upon the land by the seaside, in way of war, as the King's
+enemies."[192] He left an only heiress, the broad lands were divided, and
+the long series of exact stewards' accounts breaks suddenly off. The heir
+to the peerage, Lord James Berkeley, being involved in perpetual lawsuits,
+became "a continual borrower, and often of small sums; yea, of church
+vestments and altar-goods." Not until 1481 did the good husbandry begin
+again.
+
+It is probable that these Berkeleys were an exceptionally business-like
+family; but there is similar evidence for other great households, and the
+intimate history of our noble families is far from justifying that
+particular view of chivalry which has lately found its most brilliant
+exponent in William Morris. The custom of modern Florence, where you may
+ring at a marble palace and buy from the porter a bottle of the marquis's
+own wine, is simply a legacy of the Middle Ages.[193] The English nobles
+of Chaucer's day were of course far behind their Florentine brethren in
+this particular direction; but that current was already flowing strongly
+which, a century later, was to create a new nobility of commerce and
+wealth in England.
+
+The direct effect of the great French war on chivalry must be reserved for
+discussion in another chapter; but it is pertinent to point out here one
+indirect, though very potent, influence. Apart from the business-like way
+in which towns were pillaged, the custom of ransoming prisoners imported a
+very definite commercial element into knightly life. In the wars of the
+12th and early 13th centuries, when the knights and their mounted
+retainers formed the backbone of the army on both sides, and were
+sometimes almost the only combatants, it is astounding to note how few
+were killed even in decisive battles. At Tinchebrai (1106), which gave
+Henry I. the whole duchy of Normandy, "the Knights were mostly admitted to
+quarter; only a few escaped; the rest, 400 in all, were taken
+prisoners.... Not a single knight on Henry's side had been slain." At the
+"crushing defeat" of Brenville, three years later, "140 knights were
+captured, but only three slain in the battle." At Bouvines, one of the
+greatest and most decisive battles of the Middle Ages (1214), even the
+vanquished lost only 170 knights out of 1500. At Lincoln, in 1217, the
+victors lost but one knight, and the vanquished apparently only two,
+though 400 were captured; and even at Lewes (1264) the captives were far
+more numerous than the slain.[194] It was, in fact, difficult to kill a
+fully-armed man except by cutting his throat as he lay on the ground, and
+from this the victors were generally deterred not only by the freemasonry
+which reigned among knights and squires of all nations, but still more by
+the wicked waste of money involved in such a proceeding. "Many a good
+prisoner" is a common phrase from Froissart's pen; and, in recounting the
+battle of Poitiers, he laments that the archers "slew in that affray many
+men who could not come to ransom or mercy." Though both this and the
+parallel phrase which he uses at Crécy leave us in doubt which thought was
+uppermost in his mind, yet he speaks with unequivocal frankness about the
+slaughter of Aljubarrota: "Lo! behold the great evil adventure that befel
+that Saturday; for they slew as many prisoners as would well have been
+worth, one with another, four hundred thousand franks!"[195] In the days
+when the great chronicler of chivalry wrote thus, why should not Lord
+Berkeley deal in Scottish prisoners as his modern descendant might deal in
+Canadian Pacifics?
+
+It is, indeed, a fatal misapprehension to assume that a society in which
+coin was necessarily scarce was therefore more indifferent to money than
+our own age of millionaires and multi-millionaires. The underlying fallacy
+is scarcely less patent than that which prompted a disappointed mistress
+to say of her cook, "I _did_ think she was honest, for she couldn't even
+read or write!" Chaucer's contemporaries blamed the prevalent
+mammon-worship even more loudly and frequently than men do now, with as
+much sincerity perhaps, and certainly with even more cause. Bribery was
+rampant in every part of 14th-century society, especially among the
+highest officials and in the Church. Chaucer's satire on the Archdeacon's
+itching palm is more than borne out by official documents; and his
+contemporaries speak even more bitterly of the venality of justice in
+general. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, in an age when the right of
+holding courts was notoriously sought mainly for its pecuniary advantages?
+In "Piers Plowman," Lady Meed (or, in modern slang, the Almighty Dollar)
+rules everywhere, and not least in the law courts. Gower speaks no less
+plainly. The Judges (he says) are commonly swayed by gifts and personal
+considerations: "men say, and I believe it, that justice nowadays is in
+the balance of gold, which hath so great virtue; for, if I give more than
+thou, thy right is not worth a straw. Right without gifts is of no avail
+with Judges."[196] What Gower recorded in the most pointed Latin and
+French he could muster, the people whose voice he claimed to echo wrote
+after their own rough fashion in blood. The peasants who rose in 1381
+fastened first of all upon what seemed their worst enemies. "Then began
+they to show forth in deeds part of their inmost purpose, and to behead in
+revenge all and every lawyer in the land, from the half-fledged pleader to
+the aged justice, together with all the jurors of the country whom they
+could catch. For they said that all such must first be slain before the
+land could enjoy true freedom."[197]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR
+
+    "Io ho uno grandissimo dubbio di voi, ch'io mi credo che se ne salvino
+    tanti pochi di quegli che sono in istato di matrimonio, che de' mille,
+    novecento novantanove credo che sia matrimonio del diavolo."--ST.
+    BERNARDINO OF SIENA, Sermon xix
+
+
+But we have as yet considered only one side of chivalry. While blushing,
+like Gibbon, to unite such discordant names, let us yet remember that the
+knight was "the champion of God _and the ladies_," and may therefore
+fairly claim to be judged in this latter capacity also.
+
+Even here, however, we find him in practice just as far below either his
+avowed ideal or the too favourable pictures of later romance. The feudal
+system, with which knighthood was in fact bound up, precluded chivalry to
+women in its full modern sense. Land was necessarily held by personal
+service; therefore the woman, useless in war, must necessarily be given
+with her land to some man able to defend it and her. As even Gautier
+admits, the woman was too often a mere appendage of the fief; and he
+quotes from a _chanson de geste_, in which the emperor says to a favoured
+knight--
+
+  "Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs;
+  Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner,
+  Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez."           [femme
+
+Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time went on, the
+compulsion was rather less barefaced than this, he is still compelled
+sadly to acknowledge of the average medieval match in high life that
+"after all, whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of a
+truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly Christian one." From
+this initial defect two others followed almost as a matter of course: the
+extreme haste with which marriages were concluded, and the indecently
+early age at which children were bound for life to partners whom they had
+very likely never seen. Gautier quotes from another _chanson de geste_,
+where a heroine, within a month of her first husband's death, remarries
+again on the very day on which her second bridegroom is proposed and
+introduced to her for the first time; and the poet adds, "Great was the
+joy and laughter that day!" The extreme promptitude with which the Wife of
+Bath provided herself with a new husband--or, for the matter of that,
+Chaucer's own mother--is characteristically medieval.
+
+
+[Illustration: BRASS OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK
+
+(From Southacre Church, Norfolk (1384))
+
+(For the lady's cote-hardie and buttons, 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 nobility, and ascribed this to
+God'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
+_trouvčre_ of the 12th century, "nobles 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 sex 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 cousinship 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
+godparents to the same child; and at the same time sold a dispensation to
+a rich citizen who had _twice_ contracted the same relationship 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 documents. A wretched child
+who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great noble took
+her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a
+second noble; 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 classes 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 bastard, 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 nobles!"[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, shillings, 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 wardship,
+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 noble 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
+class of orphans. A wardship, 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 wardships 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--wardships were treated even more
+definitely as profitable windfalls. We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley
+paid Ł10,000 in modern money for a single ward; Chaucer, as we know from a
+contemporary document, made some Ł1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a
+proportionately greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not blush to
+buy and sell wardships, 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 _mésalliance_; 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 wardships
+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 wardships 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 petitement,
+  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 passers-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 God 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 noble 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 fashions 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 assault 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 nutshell--
+
+  "And if thy children be rebčl, 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
+
+
+[Illustration: SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL]
+
+
+[Illustration: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH-CENTURY CLASSROOM
+
+(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6. f. 214)]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE GAY SCIENCE
+
+    "Madamë, whilom I was one
+  That to my father had a king;
+  But I was slow, and for nothing
+  Me listë not to Love obey;
+  And that I now full sore abey....
+  Among the gentle nation
+  Love is an occupation
+  Which, for to keep his lustës save,
+  Should every gentle heartë 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 Duchess." 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 assumption 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
+fashion, 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 ship. 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'ętre_ 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).
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 illustration 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 fiancé which seems to us
+most natural and innocent; while the coarsest 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 sexes, and other liberties more startling
+still.[216] In every generation moralists noted with pain the gradual
+emancipation 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 chastity] 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
+guardianship 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 nobility 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 fashions, 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 God'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-glass window compared with a portrait of Titian'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 passion.[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 needës 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 passion, 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 "Petit Jean de Saintré" (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 Duchess of Clarence
+in the same capacity. One of the ladies-in-waiting at the same Court was a
+young widow, who for her own amusement brought Petit 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 shirking 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 Duchess," where the Black
+Knight says of himself--
+
+    ... since first I couth
+  Have any manner wit from youth
+  Or kindëly understanding                        [natural
+  To comprehend in any thing
+  What love was in mine ownë wit,
+  Dreadëless 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 heartë so
+  That it plesaunce to him were,
+  And worship 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 kindëly.
+
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM OF HATFIELD, SON OF EDWARD III AND PHILIPPA, FROM
+HIS TOMB IN YORK MINSTER (1336)
+
+SHOWING THE DRESS OF A NOBLE YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 14TH CENTURY]
+
+
+If death comes at this moment, then "J'aurai passé par la terre, n'ayant
+rien aimé 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 placë 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 ...
+  I saw her dance so comelily,
+  Carol and sing so sweetëly,
+  Laugh and play so womanly,
+  And look so debonairëly,
+  So goodly speak, and so friendly,
+  That certes, I trow that nevermore
+  Was seen so blissful a tresore.
+
+Here at last the goddess of his hopes is revealed in the flesh; no longer
+the vague _Not Impossible She_, but henceforward _She of the Golden Hair_.
+The revelation commands the gratitude of a lifetime. Having crystallized
+upon herself his fluid and floating worship, she is henceforth
+conventionally divine; he demands no more than to be allowed to gaze on
+her, and in gazing he swoons.
+
+As yet, then, she is his idol, his goddess, on an unapproachable pedestal.
+She may be pretty patently the work of his own hands--he has gone about
+dreaming of love until his dreams have taken sufficient consistency to be
+visible and tangible--but as yet his worship must be as far-off as
+Pygmalion's, and he thirsts in vain for a word or a look. Then comes the
+second clause of Francesca's creed--_Amor, che a nullo amato amar
+perdona_: true love must needs beget love in return. The statue warms to
+life; the goddess steps down from her pedestal; the lover forgets now that
+he had meant to subsist for life on half a dozen kind looks and kind
+words; and at this point the matter would end nowadays--or at least would
+have ended a generation ago--in mere prosaic marriage. But here, in the
+Middle Ages, it is fifty to one that the fortunes of the pair are not
+exactly suitable; or he, or she, or both may be married already. Then
+comes the final clause: _Amor condusse noi ad una morte_. Seldom indeed
+could the course of true love run smooth in an age of business-marriages;
+and the poet found his grandest material in the wreckage of tender
+passions and high hopes upon that iron-bound shore.
+
+The large majority of medieval romances, as has long ago been noted,
+celebrate illicit love. Therefore the first commandment of the code is
+secrecy, absolute secrecy; and in the songs of the Troubadors and
+Minnesingers, a personage almost as prominent as the two lovers
+themselves, is the "envious," the "spier"--the person from whom it is
+impossible to escape for more than a minute at a time, amid the
+cheek-by-jowl of castle intercourse--a disappointed rival perhaps, or a
+mere malicious busybody, but, in any case, a perpetual skeleton at the
+feast. "Troilus and Criseyde," for instance, is full of such allusions,
+and perhaps no poem exemplifies more clearly the common divorce between
+romantic love and marriage in medieval literature. It is a comparatively
+small thing that the first three books of the poem should contain no hint
+of matrimony, though Criseyde is a widow, and of noble blood. It would,
+after all, have been less of a _mésalliance_ than John of Gaunt's
+marriage; but of course it was perfectly natural for Chaucer to take the
+line of least poetical resistance, and make Troilus enjoy her love in
+secret, without thought of consecration by the rites of the Church. So
+far, the poem runs parallel with Goethe's "Faust." But when we come to the
+last two books, the behaviour of the pair is absolutely inexplicable to
+any one who has not realized the usual conventions of medieval romance.
+The Trojan prince Antenor is taken prisoner by the Greeks, who offer to
+exchange him against Criseyde--a fighting man against a mere woman.
+Hector does indeed protest in open Parliament--
+
+  But on my part ye may eft-soon them tell
+  We usen here no women for to sell.
+
+But the political utility of the exchange is so obvious that Parliament
+determines to send the unwilling Criseyde away. What, it may be asked, is
+Troilus doing all this time? As Priam's son, he would have had a voice in
+the council second only to Hector's, and he "well-nigh died" to hear the
+proposition. Yet all through this critical discussion he kept silence,
+"lest men should his affection espy!" The separation, he knows, will kill
+him; but among all the measures he debates with Criseyde or Pandarus--even
+among the desperate acts which he threatens to commit--nothing so
+desperate as plain marriage seems to occur to any of the three. The first
+thought of Troilus is "how to save her honour," but only in the technical
+sense of medieval chivalry, by feigning indifference to her. He sheds
+floods of tears; he tells Fortune that if only he may keep his lady, he is
+reckless of all else in the world; but, when for a moment he thinks of
+begging Criseyde's freedom from the King his father, it is only to thrust
+the thought aside at once. The step would be not only useless, but
+necessarily involve "slander to her name."[219] And all this was written
+for readers who knew very well that the parties had only to swear, first
+that they had plighted troth before witnesses, and secondly, that they had
+lived together as man and wife, in order to prove an indissoluble marriage
+contract. Nor can we ascribe this to any failure in Chaucer's art. In the
+delineation of feelings, their natural development and their finer shades,
+he is second to no medieval poet, and these qualities come out especially
+in the "Troilus." But, while he boldly changed so much in Boccaccio's
+conception of the poem, he saw no reason to change this particular point,
+for it was thoroughly in accord with those conventions of his time for
+which he kept some respect even through his frequent irony.
+
+To show clearly how the fault here is not in the poet but in the false
+_point d'honneur_ of the chivalric love-code, let us compare it with a
+romance in real life from the "Paston Letters." Sir John Paston's steward,
+Richard Calle, fell in love with his master's sister Margery. The Pastons,
+who not only were great gentlefolk in a small way, but were struggling
+hard also to become great gentlefolk in a big way, took up the natural
+position that "he should never have my good will for to make my sister
+sell candle and mustard in Framlingham." But the pair had already plighted
+their mutual troth; and, therefore, though not yet absolutely married,
+they were so far engaged that neither could marry any one else without a
+Papal dispensation. Calle urged Margery to acknowledge this openly to her
+family: "I suppose, an ye tell them sadly the truth, they would not damn
+their souls for us." She at last confessed, and the matter came up before
+the Bishop of Norwich for judgment. In spite of all the bullying of the
+family, and the flagrant partiality of the Bishop, the girl's mother has
+to write and tell Sir John how "Your sister ... rehearsed what she had
+said [when she plighted her troth to Calle], and said, if those words made
+it not sure, she said boldly that she would make that surer ere that she
+went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound,
+whatsoever the words weren. These lewd words grieved me and her grandam as
+much as all the remnant." The Bishop still delayed judgment on the chance
+of finding "other things against [Calle] that might cause the letting
+thereof;" and meanwhile the mother turned Margery out into the street; so
+that the Bishop himself had to find her a decent lodging while he kept her
+waiting for his decision. But to annul this plain contract needed grosser
+methods of injustice than the Pastons had influence to compass, and Calle
+not only got his wife at last, but was taken back into the family
+service.[220] Troilus and Criseyde, having political forces arrayed
+against them, might indeed have failed tragically of their marriage in the
+end; but there was at least no reason why they should not fight for it as
+stoutly as the prosaic Norfolk bailiff did--if only the idea had ever
+entered into one or other of their heads!
+
+Another tacit assumption of the chivalric love-code comes out clearly in
+the Knight's Tale, and even goes some way to explain the Franklin's;
+though this latter evidently recounts an old Breton lay in which the
+perspective is as frankly fantastic as the landscape of a miniature. The
+honest commentator Benvenuto da Imola is at great pains to assure us that
+Dante's _amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona_ was not an exhaustive
+statement of actual fact; and that even the kindest ladies sometimes
+remained obdurate to the prayers of the most meritorious suitors. What is
+to happen, then? The hero may, of course, sometimes die; but not always;
+that would be too monotonous. The solution here, as in so many other
+cases, lies in a poetic paraphrase of too prosaic facts. The Duc de Berri,
+who was a great connoisseur and a man of the most refined tastes, bought
+at an immense sacrifice of money the most delicate little countess in the
+market: she, of course, had no choice at all in the matter. At an equal
+sacrifice of blood, first Arcite and then Palamon won the equally passive
+Emelye, who, when Theseus had set her up as a prize to the better fighter,
+could only pray that she might either avoid them both, or at least fall to
+him who loved her best in his inmost heart. At a cost of equal suffering,
+though in a different way, Aurelius won the unwilling Dorigen--for his
+subsequent generosity is beside the present purpose. The reader's
+sympathy, in medieval romance, is nearly always enlisted for the pursuing
+man. If only he can show sufficient valour, or suffer long enough, he must
+have the prize, and the lady is sure to shake down comfortably enough
+sooner or later.[221] The idea is not, of course, peculiar to medieval
+poetry, but the frequency with which it there occurs supplies another
+answer to the main question of this chapter. Why, if medieval marriages
+were really so business-like, is medieval love-poetry so transcendental?
+It is not, in fact, by any means so transcendental as it seems on the
+surface; neither Palamon nor Arcite, at the bottom of all his extravagant
+protestations of humble worship, feels the least scruple in making Emelye
+the prize of a series of swashing blows at best, and possibly of a single
+lucky prod. The chance of Shakespeare's caskets does at least give Portia
+to the man whom her heart had already chosen; but the similar chances and
+counter-chances of the Knight's Tale simply play shuttlecock with a
+helpless and unwilling girl. Under the spell of Chaucer's art, we know
+quite well that Palamon and Emelye lived very happily ever afterwards; but
+the Knight's Tale gives us no reason to doubt the overwhelming evidence
+that, while heroes in poetry conquered their wives with their right arm,
+plain men in prose openly bargained for them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE GREAT WAR
+
+  "Ce voyons bien, qu'au temps présent
+  La guerre si commune éprend,
+  Qu'a peine y a nul labourer
+  Lequel a son métier se prend:
+  Le prętre laist le sacrement,               [laisse
+  Et le vilain le charruer,
+  Tous vont aux armes travailler.
+  Si Dieu ne pense ŕ l'amender,
+  L'on peut douter prochainement
+  Que tout le mond doit reverser."
+                                  GOWER, "Mirour," 24097
+
+
+Of all the causes that tended in Chaucer's time to modify the old ideals
+of knighthood, none perhaps was more potent than the Hundred Years' War.
+Unjust as it was on both sides--for the cause of Philippe de Valois cannot
+be separated from certain inexcusable manoeuvres of his predecessors on
+the French throne--it was the first thoroughly national war on so large a
+scale since the institution of chivalry. No longer merely feudal levies,
+but a whole people on either side is gradually involved in this struggle;
+and its military lessons anticipate, to a certain extent, those of the
+French Revolutionary Wars. Even in Froissart's narrative, the greatest
+heroes of Crécy are the English archers; and the Welsh knifemen by their
+side play a part undreamed of in earlier feudal warfare. "When the Genoese
+were assembled together and began to approach, they made a great cry to
+abash the Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that;
+then the Genoese again the second time made another fell cry, and stept
+forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot; thirdly, again
+they cried, and went forth till they came within shot; then they shot
+fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the English archers stept forth one
+pace and let fly their arrows so wholly together and so thick, that it
+seemed snow.... And ever still the Englishmen shot whereas they saw
+thickest press; the sharp arrows ran into the men of arms and into their
+horses, and many fell, horse and men.... And also among the Englishmen
+there were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives, and they
+went in among the men of arms, and slew and murdered many as they lay on
+the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires, whereof the king of
+England was after displeased, for he had rather they had been taken
+prisoners."
+
+Those "certain rascals" did not only kill certain knights, they killed
+also the old idea of Knighthood. From that time forward the art of war,
+which had so long been practised under the frequent restraint of certain
+aristocratic conventions, took a great leap in the direction of modern
+business methods. The people were concerned now; and they had grown, as
+they are apt to grow, inconveniently in earnest. There is a peculiarly
+living interest for modern England in the story of that army which at
+Crécy won the first of a series of victories astounding to all
+Christendom. Only a few months after Chaucer's unlucky campaign in France,
+Petrarch had travelled across to Paris, and recorded his impressions in a
+letter. "The English ... have overthrown the ancient glories of France by
+victories so numerous and unexpected that this people, which formerly was
+inferior to the miserable Scots, has now (not to speak of that lamentable
+and undeserved fall of a great king which I cannot recall without a sigh)
+so wasted with fire and sword the whole kingdom of France that I, when I
+last crossed the country on business, could scarce believe it to be the
+same land which I had seen before."[222] The events which so startled
+Petrarch were indeed immediately attributable to the business qualities
+and the ambitions of two English kings; but their ultimate cause lay far
+deeper. During all the first stages of the war, in which the English
+superiority was most marked, the conflict was practically between the
+French feudal forces and the English national levies. While French kings
+ignored the duty of every man to serve in defence of his own home, or
+remembered it only as an excuse for extorting money instead of personal
+service, Edward III. brought the vast latent forces of his whole kingdom,
+and (what was perhaps even more important) its full business energies, to
+bear against a chivalry which at its best had been unpractical in its
+exclusiveness, and was now already decaying. "Edward I. and III. ... (and
+this makes their reigns a decisive epoch in the history of the Middle
+Ages, as well as in that of England) were the real creators of modern
+infantry. We must not, however, ascribe the honour of this creation only
+to the military genius of the two English Kings; they were driven to it by
+necessity, the mother of invention. The device which they used is
+essentially the same which has been employed in every age by countries of
+small extent and therefore of scanty population, viz. compulsory military
+service. Although the name of _conscription_ is obviously modern, the
+thing itself is of ancient use among the very people who know least of it
+nowadays; and it may be proved conclusively that Edward III., especially,
+practised it on a great scale. The documentary evidence for this fact is
+so plentiful that to draw up the briefest summary of it would be to write
+a whole chapter--neither the least interesting nor the least novel, be it
+said--of English history; and that is no part of my plan here." So wrote
+Siméon Luce, the greatest French specialist on the period, thirty years
+ago; but the point which he here makes so clearly has hardly yet been
+fully grasped by English writers.[223] It may therefore be worth while to
+bring forward here some specimens of the mass of evidence to which Luce
+alludes. Compulsory service is, of course, prehistoric and universal; few
+nations could have survived in the past unless all their citizens had been
+ready to fight for them in case of need; and the decadence of imperial
+Rome began with the time when her populace demanded to be fed at the
+public expense, and defended by hired troops. In principle, therefore,
+even 14th-century France recognized the liability of every citizen to
+serve, while England had not only the principle but the practice. Her old
+Fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia system, was reorganized by Henry II. and
+again by Edward I. By the latter's "Statute of Winchester" every
+able-bodied man was bound not only to possess arms on a scale
+proportionate to his wealth, but also to learn their use. A fresh impulse
+was given to this military training by Edward I., who learned from his
+Welsh enemies that the longbow, already a well-known weapon among his own
+subjects, was far superior in battle to the crossbow. Edward, therefore,
+gradually set about training a large force of English archers. Falkirk
+(1298) was the first important battle in which the archery was used in
+scientific combination with cavalry; Bannockburn (1314) was the last in
+which the English repeated the old blunder of relying on mounted knights
+and men-at-arms, and allowing the infantry to act as a more or less
+disordered mass. While Philippe de Valois was raising money by the
+suicidal expedients of taxing bowstrings and ordaining general levies from
+which every one was expected to redeem himself by a money fine, Edward
+III. was giving the strictest orders that archery should take precedence
+of all other sports in England, and that the country should furnish him
+all the men he needed for his wars.[224] Of all the documents to which
+Luce refers (and which are even more numerous than he could have guessed
+thirty years ago) let us here glance at two or three which bring the whole
+system visibly before us. In this matter, as in several others, the
+clearest evidence is to be found among Mr. Hudson's invaluable gleanings
+from the Norwich archives.[225] He has printed and analyzed a number of
+documents which show the working of the militia system in the city between
+1355 and 1370--that is, at a time when it is generally asserted that we
+were conducting the French wars on the voluntary system. In these
+documents we find that the Statute of Winchester was being worked quite as
+strictly as we are entitled to expect of any medieval statute, and a great
+deal more strictly than the average. The city did in fact provide, and
+periodically review, an armed force equal in numbers to rather more than
+one-tenth of its total population--a somewhat larger proportion, that is,
+than would be furnished by the modern system of conscription on the
+Continent. Many of these men, of course, turned out with no more than the
+minimum club and knife; the next step was to add a sword or an axe to
+these primitive weapons, and so on through the archers to the numerous
+"half-armed men," who had in addition to their offensive weapons a plated
+doublet with visor and iron gauntlets, and finally the "fully-armed," who
+had in addition a shirt of mail under the doublet, a neck-piece and
+arm-plates, and whose total equipment must have cost some Ł30 or Ł40 of
+modern money. Mr. Hudson also notes that "it is plain that the Norwich
+archers were many of them men of good standing."
+
+Moreover, this small amount of compulsion was found in medieval England,
+as in modern Switzerland, to stimulate rather than to repress the
+volunteer energies of the nation. Not only did shooting become the
+favourite national sport, but many of whom we might least have expected
+such self-sacrifice came forward gladly to fight side by side with their
+fellow-citizens for hearth and home. In 1346, when the Scots invaded
+England under the misapprehension that none remained to defend the country
+but "ploughmen and shepherds and feeble or broken-down chaplains," they
+found among the powerful militia force which met them many parsons who
+were neither feeble nor infirm. Crowds of priests were among those who
+trooped out from Beverley and York, and other northern towns, to a victory
+of which Englishmen have more real reason to be proud than of any other in
+our early history. Marching with sword and quiver on their thigh and the
+good six-foot bow under their arm, they took off shoes and stockings at
+the town gates and started barefoot, with chants and litanies, upon that
+righteous campaign. In 1360, again, when there was a scare of invasion and
+all men from sixteen to sixty were called out, then "bishops, abbots, and
+priors, rectors, vicars, and chaplains were as ready as the abbots [_sic_]
+had been, some to be men-at-arms and some to be archers ... and the
+beneficed clergy who could not serve in person hired substitutes." In 1383
+priests and monks were fighting even among the so-called crusaders whom
+Bishop Despenser led against the French in Flanders.[226]
+
+To have so large a proportion of the nation thus trained for home defence
+was in itself a most important military asset, for it freed the hands of
+the army which was on foreign service, and enabled it to act without
+misgivings as to what might be happening at home. This was in fact the
+militia which, while Edward III. was with his great army at Crécy and
+Calais, inflicted on the Scottish invaders at Neville's Cross one of the
+most crushing defeats in their history, and added one more crowned head to
+the collection of noble prisoners in London.[227] But, more than this, it
+formed a recruiting-field which alone enabled English armies, far from
+their base, to hold their own against the forces of a country which at
+that time had an enormous numerical superiority in population. It had
+always been doubtful how far the militia was bound to serve abroad. Edward
+III. himself had twice been forced to grant immunity by statute (first and
+twenty-fifth years), but with the all-important saving clause "except
+under great urgency." Such great urgency was in fact constantly pleaded,
+and the cities did not care to contest the point. Several calls were made
+on Norwich for 120 men at a time, a proportion which, in figures of modern
+town population, would be roughly equivalent to 1200 from Northampton,
+8000 from Birmingham, and 10,000 from Glasgow. In the year before Crécy
+the less populous town of Lynn was assessed at 100 men "of the strongest
+and most vigorous of the said town, each armed with breastplate, helmet,
+and gauntlets ... for the defence and rescue of Our duchy of Aquitaine."
+The drain on London at the same time was enormous, as I have already had
+occasion to note in Chapter X. The briefest summary of the evidence
+contained in Dr. Sharpe's Letter-Books will suffice here. On the outbreak
+of war in 1337, in addition to a considerable tribute of ships, the city
+was called upon for a contingent of 500 men--which would be equivalent to
+the enormous tribute of 50,000 soldiers from modern London. Presently "the
+king ... took occasion to find fault with the city's dilatoriness in
+carrying out his orders, and complained of the want of physique in the
+men that were being supplied. At the request of John de Pulteneye, who was
+then occupying the Mayoral chair for the fourth time, he consented to
+accept 200 able-bodied archers at once, and to postpone the selection of
+the remainder of the force. At the same time he issued letters patent
+declaring that the aid furnished by the city should not become a
+precedent. The names of the 200 archers that went to Gascony are set out
+in the Letter-Book...." But Royal promises are unstable. Another
+contingent of 100 was sent soon after. In 1338 London was ordered to fit
+out four ships with 300 men to join the home defence fleet at Winchelsea;
+the citizens protested so strongly that this was reduced by a half. In
+1340 the King seized all ships of forty tons' burden and raised 300 more
+soldiers from London, who took part in the glorious victory of Sluys. In
+1342 another levy; in 1344, 400 archers again; in 1346 "the sheriffs of
+London were called upon to make proclamation for all persons between the
+ages of sixteen and sixty to take up arms and to be at Portsmouth by March
+26th"--a command which, however interpreted with the usual elasticity,
+must yet have produced several hundred recruits for the army which fought
+at Crécy. Next year two ships were demanded with 180 armed men, and two
+more again later in the year. In 1350 two London ships with 170 armed men
+were raised for the battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer. In 1355, again, 520
+soldiers were demanded from the city.
+
+While this was going on in the towns, the Berkeley papers give us similar
+evidence of conscription in the counties, though the documents are not
+here continuous. In 1332 the Sheriff of Gloucester was bidden to raise 100
+men for service in Ireland; next year 500 for Scotland. Three years later
+the country was obliged to send 2500 to Scotland, besides the Gloucester
+city and Bristol contingents. Then comes the French war. In 1337 and 1338
+Lord Berkeley spends most of his time mustering and arraying soldiers for
+France. In the latter year, and again in 1339, Edward commissions him to
+array and arm _all the able men_ in the country, as others were doing
+throughout the kingdom; 563 were thus arrayed in the shire, and Smyth very
+plausibly conjectures that the small number is due to Lord Berkeley's
+secret favour for his own county. In 1345, when Edward made the great
+effort which culminated at Crécy, the county and the town of Bristol had
+to raise and arm 622 men "to be conducted whither Lord Berkeley should
+direct." And so on until 1347, when there is a significant addition of
+plenary powers to punish all refractory and rebellious persons, a riot
+having apparently broken out on account of these levies.[228] From this
+time forward the scattered notices never refer to levies for service
+abroad; but they are still frequent for home defence, and Smyth proudly
+records in three folio volumes the numbers of trained and disciplined men
+in his own time (James I.), with their "names and several statures," in
+the single hundred of Berkeley. The national militia always remained the
+most valuable recruiting ground, and kept up that love of archery for
+which the English were famous down to Elizabeth's days and beyond; yet,
+for purely foreign wars, Edward's frequent drains broke the national
+patience before the end of his reign. The evidence from London points most
+plainly in this direction. In 1369 at last we find the tell-tale notice:
+"It was frequently easier for the City to furnish the King with money than
+with men. Hence we find it recorded that at the end of August of this year
+the citizens had agreed to raise a sum of Ł2000 for the king in lieu of
+furnishing him with a military contingent." Already by this time the tide
+had turned against us in France; not that the few English troops failed to
+keep up their superiority in the field, but Du Guesclin played a waiting
+game and wore us steadily out. Castle after castle was surprised; isolated
+detachments were crushed one by one; reinforcements were difficult to
+raise; and before Edward's death three seaports alone were left of all his
+French conquests. He had at one time wielded an army almost like
+Napoleon's--a mass of professional soldiers raised from a nation in arms.
+But, like Napoleon, he had used it recklessly. Such material could not be
+supplied _ad infinitum_, and our victories began again only after a period
+of comparative rest, when France was crippled by the madness of her King
+and divided by internecine feuds.
+
+Edward's conscription, it will be seen, was somewhat old-fashioned
+compared with that of modern France and Germany. Men were enrolled for a
+campaign partly by bargain, partly by force; and, once enrolled, the wars
+generally made them into professional soldiers for life. No doubt
+Shakespeare's caricature in the second part of _King Henry IV._ may help
+us a little here, so long as we make due allowance for his comic purpose
+and the rustiness of the institution in his time. For already in Chaucer's
+lifetime there was a great change in our system of over-sea service. As
+the sources of conscription began to dry up, the King fell back more and
+more upon the expedient of hiring troops: he would get some great captain
+to contract himself by indenture to bring so many armed men at a given
+time, and the contractor in his turn entered into a number of
+sub-contracts with minor leaders to contribute to his contingent. Under
+this system a very large proportion of aliens came into our armies; but
+even then we kept the same organization and principles as in those earlier
+hosts which were really contingents of English militia.
+
+An army thus drawn from a people accustomed to some real measure of
+self-government inevitably broke through many feudal traditions; and from
+a very early stage in the war we find important commands given to knights
+and squires who had fought their way up from the ranks. The most renowned
+of all these English soldiers of fortune, Sir John Hawkwood, married the
+sister of Clarence's Violante, with a dowry of a million florins; yet he
+is recorded to have begun as a common archer. He was probably a younger
+son of a good Essex house; but this again simply emphasizes the democratic
+and business-like organization of the English army compared with its
+rivals. Du Guesclin, though he was the eldest son of one of the smaller
+French nobles, found his promotion terribly retarded by his lack of birth
+and influence. He was probably the most distinguished leader in France
+before he even received the honour of knighthood. At the date of the
+battle of Cocherel he had fought with success for more than twenty years,
+and was by far the most distinguished captain present; yet he owed the
+command on that day only to the rare good fortune that the greatest noble
+present recognized his own comparative incapacity, and that the rest
+agreed in offering to fight under a man of less social distinction but
+incomparably greater experience than any of themselves. In the English
+army there would from the first have been no doubt about the real
+commander--Hawkwood, perhaps, who was believed to have begun life as a
+tailor's apprentice, or Knolles, whom this war had taken from the weaver's
+loom.
+
+Even the magnificent Edward, with all his Round Table and his Order of the
+Garter, was forced to recognize clearly that war is above all things a
+business. In the earlier days he did indeed defy Philippe de Valois to
+single combat; but during the campaign of Crécy he made light of the laws
+of chivalry. He had penetrated close to Paris; his army was melting away;
+provisions were scarce; and the French had broken the bridges in his
+rear. At this point Philip sent him a regular chivalric challenge in form
+to meet him with his army on a field and a day to be fixed at his own
+choice, within certain reasonable limits. Edward returned a misleading
+answer, made a corresponding feint with his troops, rapidly rebuilt the
+bridge of Poissy, and had crossed to a place of safety before Philip
+realized that a clever piece of strategy had been executed under his very
+nose and behind the forms of chivalry. Then only did Edward throw off the
+mask, and declare his intention of choosing his own place and time for
+battle. His Royal great-grandson was even more business-like. When the
+French nobles asked Henry V. to give a great tourney in honour of his
+marriage, as had always been the custom, he refused in the bluntest and
+most soldierly fashion. He and his men, he replied, would be engaged for
+the next few weeks at the siege of Sens; if any gallant Frenchman wished
+to break a lance or two, he might come and break them there. While this
+mimic warfare was at its highest favour in France, the three Edwards had
+always kept jealous control over it in England, and constantly forbidden
+tournaments without Royal licence. This policy is, no doubt, partly
+explained by some deference to ecclesiastical prohibitions, and partly by
+the disorders to which jousts constantly gave rise; but we may pretty
+safely infer (with Luce) that our kings had little belief in the direct
+value of the knightly tournament as a school of warfare, and that here, as
+on so many other points, the practical genius of the race broke even
+through class prejudices.[229]
+
+It is impossible better to sum up the results of English business methods
+in warfare than in the words which are forced reluctantly from M. Luce's
+impartial pen. "In my opinion, five or six thousand English archers, thus
+drilled and equipped, and supported by an equal number of knifemen, would
+always have beaten even considerably larger forces of the bravest chivalry
+in the world--at least in a frontal attack and as a matter of sheer hard
+fighting. Such, moreover, seems to have been the opinion of Bertrand du
+Guesclin, the most renowned captain of the Middle Ages, who never fought a
+great pitched battle against a real English army if he could possibly help
+it. At Cocherel his adversaries were mostly Gascons, and at Pontvallain he
+crushed Knolles's rear-guard by one of those startling marches of which he
+had the secret; but he was beaten at Auray and Navarette." Gower might
+complain without too poetical exaggeration that the vortex of war swept
+away not only the serf from his plough but the very priest from his altar;
+yet even Chaucer's Poor Parson may well have conceded that, if we must
+have an army at all, we might as well have it as efficient and as truly
+national as possible.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: BODIAM CASTLE, KENT
+
+BUILT DURING CHAUCER'S LIFETIME BY SIR EDWARD DALYNGRUDGE, WHO HAD FOUGHT
+AT CRÉCY AND POITIERS]
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE BURDEN OF THE WAR
+
+  "[Edward], the first of English nation
+    That ever had right unto the crown of France
+  By succession of blood and generation
+    Of his mother withouten variance,
+    The which me thinketh should be of most substance;
+  For Christ was king by his mother of Judee,
+  Which surer side is ay, as thinketh me."
+                                  HARDYNG, "Chronicle," 335
+
+
+It must, however, be admitted that so terrible a weapon in so rough an age
+was only too dangerous. When Edward III. found that his cousin of France
+not only meant to deal treacherously with him in Aquitaine, but had also
+allied himself with our deadly enemies of Scotland, he found a very
+colourable excuse for retaliation by raising a claim to the throne of
+France. But for the Salic law, which forbade inheritance through a female,
+Edward would undoubtedly be, if not the rightful heir, at least nearer
+than Philippe de Valois, who now sat on that throne. The Biblical colour
+which he gave to his claim by pleading the precedent of "Judee" was of
+course the after-thought of some ingenious theologian; the real strength
+of Edward's claim lay in his army. To appreciate the strength of Edward's
+temptations here, we must imagine modern Germany adding to her other
+armaments a navy capable of commanding the seas, a Kaiser fettered by even
+less constitutional checks than at present, and sharing with his people
+even greater incitements to cupidity. Beyond the prospect, always dazzling
+enough to a statesman, of an enormous indemnity and a substantial
+increase of territory, medieval warfare offered even to the meanest
+English soldier only too probable hopes of riot and booty. Froissart,
+though he seldom feels very deeply for the mere people, describes our
+first march through the defenceless districts of Normandy in words which
+make us understand why this unhappy, unprepared country could only mark
+time for the next hundred years, while we, in spite of all our faults and
+follies, went on slowly from strength to strength. England, with her own
+four or five millions and a little help from Aquitaine, rode roughshod
+again and again over the disorganized ten millions north of the Loire;
+while the French--even during those thirty years of union which elapsed
+between the recovery of Guienne and the murder of the Duke of
+Orleans--frequently enough burned our southern seaports, but never
+penetrated more than a few miles inland in the face of our shire-levies.
+
+The contrast is in every way characteristic of Chaucer's England, and
+Froissart's description is of the deepest significance, not only to the
+student of political and social history, but even to the literary
+historian. It has been noted that Chaucer's deepest note of pathos is for
+the sorrows of the helpless--the irremediable sufferings of those whose
+frailty has tempted murder or oppression, and to whom the poet himself can
+offer nothing but a tear on earth and some hope of redress in heaven. Let
+us remember, then, that Chaucer fought in two French campaigns, identical
+in kind and not even differing much in degree from the invasion of 1346
+which Froissart describes. "They came to a good port and to a good town
+called Barfleur, the which incontinent was won, for they within gave up
+for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that the town was robbed, and much
+gold and silver there found, and rich jewels; there was found so much
+riches, that the boys and villains of the host set nothing by good furred
+gowns; they made all the men of the town to issue out and to go into the
+ships, because they would not suffer them to be behind them for fear of
+rebelling again. After the town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed
+without brenning, then they spread abroad in the country and did what they
+list, for there was none to resist them. At last they came to a great and
+a rich town called Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent
+part thereof, but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong
+and well furnished with men of war. Then they passed forth and came to
+Montebourg, and took it and robbed and brent it clean. In this manner they
+brent many other towns in that country and won so much riches, that it was
+marvel to reckon it. Then they came to a great town well closed called
+Carentan, where there was also a strong castle and many soldiers within to
+keep it. Then the lords came out of their ships and fiercely made assault;
+the burgesses of the town were in great fear of their lives, wives and
+children; they suffered the Englishmen to enter into the town against the
+will of all the soldiers that were there; they put all their goods to the
+Englishmen's pleasures, they thought that most advantage. When the
+soldiers within saw that, they went into the castle; the Englishmen went
+into the town, and two days together they made sore assaults, so that when
+they within saw no succour, they yielded up, their lives and goods saved,
+and so departed. The Englishmen had their pleasure of that good town and
+castle, and when they saw they might not maintain to keep it, they set
+fire therein and brent it, and made the burgesses of the town to enter
+into their ships, as they had done with them of Barfleur, Cherbourg and
+Montebourg, and of other towns that they had won on the sea-side.... The
+lord Godfrey as marshal rode forth with five hundred men of arms, and rode
+off from the king's battle a six or seven leagues, in brenning and exiling
+the country, the which was plentiful of everything--the granges full of
+corn, the houses full of all riches, rich burgesses, carts and chariots,
+horse, swine, muttons and other beasts; they took what them list and
+brought into the king's host; but the soldiers made no count to the king
+nor to none of his officers of the gold and silver that they did get; they
+kept that to themselves.... Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled,
+robbed, wasted and pilled the good, plentiful country of Normandy.... It
+was no marvel though they of the country were afraid, for before that time
+they had never seen men of war, nor they wist not what war or battle
+meant. They fled away as far as they might hear speaking of the
+Englishmen, and left their houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn,
+they wist not how to save and keep it." Hitherto Froissart has only
+deigned to record the fire and pillage; but the melancholy catalogue now
+goes on to Coutances, Saint-Lô, and Caen, where at last the citizens
+fought boldly in defence of their unwalled town, "greater than any city in
+England except London." In spite of their numbers, and of an obstinate
+courage which extorted the admiration of their adversaries, the half-armed
+and untrained citizens were at last hopelessly beaten, and the town given
+over to the infuriated soldiery; though here Sir Thomas Holland, an old
+Crusader, who might have sat for Chaucer's Knight, "rode into the streets
+and saved many lives of ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,
+for the soldiers were without mercy."[230]
+
+At a later stage, when the horrors of civil war were added to those of the
+English invasion, the Norman chronicler, Thomas Basin, describes the
+fertile country between Loire, Seine, and Somme as a mere wilderness, half
+overgrown with brambles and thickets. "Moreover, whatsoever husbandry
+there was in the aforesaid lands, was only in the neighbourhood and
+suburbs of cities, towns, or castles, for so far as a watchman's eye from
+some tower or point of vantage could reach to see robbers coming upon
+them; then would the watchman sound the alarm ... on a bell or hunting
+horn, or other bugle. Which alarms and incursions were so common and
+frequent in very many places, that when the oxen and plough-horses were
+loosed from the plough, hearing the watchman's signal, they took flight
+and galloped away forthwith of their own accord, by the force of habit, to
+their places of refuge; nay, the very sheep and swine had learnt by long
+use to do the same." The French Bishop Jean-Jouvenel des Ursins, in 1433,
+speaks of the sufferings of his diocese in language too painful and too
+direct to be reproduced here.[231]
+
+To realize the full force of these descriptions, it is necessary to
+compare them with those of the good monk Walsingham, who drily records how
+Edward "attacked, took, sacked, and burnt Caen, and many other cities
+after it." It is only when Edward comes back from Calais with his
+victorious army that Walsingham waxes eloquent. "Then folk thought that a
+new sun was rising over England, for the abundance of peace, the plenty of
+possessions, and the glory of victory. For there was no woman of any name,
+but had somewhat of the spoils of Caen, Calais, and other cities beyond
+the seas. Furs, feather-beds, or household utensils, tablecloths and
+necklaces, cups of gold or silver, linen and sheets, were to be seen
+scattered about England in different houses. Then began the English ladies
+to wax wanton in the vesture of the French women; and as the latter
+grieved to have lost their goods, so the former rejoiced to have obtained
+them."[232] In an age of brute force, when popes hesitated no more than
+kings to shed rivers of blood for a few square miles of territory, when
+every sailor was a potential pirate and every baron a potential
+highwayman[233]--in such an age as this, no nation could have resisted the
+lust of conquest when it had once realized the wealth and supine
+helplessness of a neighbour. "The English," wrote Froissart, when old age
+had brought him to ponder less on feats of arms and more on eternity, "The
+English will never love or honour their king but if he be victorious, and
+a lover of arms and war against his neighbours, and especially against
+such as are greater and richer than themselves.... Their land is more
+fulfilled of riches and all manner of goods when they are at war, than in
+times of peace; and therein are they born and ingrained, nor could a man
+make them understand the contrary.... They take delight and solace in
+battles and in slaughter: covetous and envious are they above measure of
+other men's wealth."[234] But when exhausted France could no longer yield
+more than a mere livelihood to the armies which overran her, then at last
+things found their proper level, and the nation wearied of bloodshed.
+"Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace.
+To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market
+stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful
+service, where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand;
+and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had
+measured all the misery."[235]
+
+But, terribly as it might press upon our enemies in those days, when the
+private soldier had almost an unrestricted right of pillage, the Statute
+of Winchester was none the less necessary to the full development of our
+political freedom. Indeed, it is scarcely a paradox to say that those
+civic and Parliamentary liberties which made such rapid strides during the
+sixty years of Chaucer's lifetime owed as much to this burden of personal
+service as to anything else. To begin with, it was a police system also;
+and, for by far the greater part of the country, the only police system.
+When the hue and cry was raised after a robber or a murderer, all were
+then bound to tumble out of doors and join in the chase with such arms as
+they had, just as they were bound to turn out and take their share in the
+national war. When all the disorders of the 14th century have been counted
+up in England, they are as dust in the balance compared with those of
+foreign countries. The Peasants' Rising of 1381 astonishes modern
+historians in nothing so much as in its sudden rise, its sudden end when
+the King had promised redress, and its comparative orderliness in
+disorder. But, on second thoughts, does not this seem natural enough among
+a people accustomed to rough military discipline, and liable any day to be
+arrayed, as they had laboured, side by side?[236] Lastly, we have the
+repeated testimony of our most determined enemies to the superiority of
+English over French discipline. Bishop des Ursins, in a letter written to
+the French Parliament in 1433, describes the worst horrors of the war as
+having been committed by French upon French; and he expressly adds, "at
+present, things are somewhat amended by the coming of the English." This
+modified compliment he repeats again in a letter to Charles VII., adding,
+"[the English] did indeed at least keep their assurances once given, and
+also their safe conducts"; while the French (as he complains) often made
+light of their own engagements.[237] Indeed, the whole array of documents
+collected by the astounding diligence of the late subprefect of the
+Vatican Library is calculated--we may not say, to make us read with
+equanimity the tale of horrors perpetrated by our countrymen in
+France--but at least to shift much of the blame from the individuals to
+the times in which they lived. The English were not cruel merely because
+they were strong; the weaker French were on the whole more cruel; nowhere
+has the bitter proverb _Gallus Gallo lupus_ been more terribly justified.
+The main difference was that, in an age when a man must needs be hammer or
+anvil, our national character and organization, no doubt assisted also by
+fortune, enabled us to play the former part. Father Denifle shows very
+clearly how even great and good Frenchmen like Des Ursins, living in Joan
+of Arc's time, were ashamed of her because she seemed to have failed. The
+impulses of actual chivalry--apart from its nominal code--were at best
+even more capricious in France than in England. Knightly mercy and
+forbearance seldom even professed to include the mere rank and file of a
+conquered army. When a place was taken by storm, it was common to ransom
+the officers and kill the rest without mercy. Here and there a knight
+earns special praise from Froissart by pleading for the lives of the
+unhappy privates who had fought as bravely as himself; but I remember no
+case of one who actually insisted on sharing the fate of his men. The
+Black Prince tarnished his fair fame by the massacre of Limoges; yet in
+this he did but follow the example of the saintly Charles de Blois, who
+thanked God for victory in the cathedral of Quimper while his men were
+making a hell of the captured city. His orisons finished, Charles stayed
+the slaughter; and the Black Prince, after watching the butchery of
+Limoges from his litter, and turning his face away from women and
+children who knelt to implore his mercy, was at last appeased by the manly
+spectacle of three French warriors fighting boldly for their lives against
+three Englishmen.[238] Their courage saved them, and what we might now
+call their conqueror's sporting instincts; just as Queen Philippa's timely
+pleading saved the citizens of Calais. All honour to the noble impulse in
+both cases; but greater honour still to the manly independence and
+discipline which saved our English commonalty from the need of appealing
+to a conqueror's mercy; which defended them alike from robbers at home and
+Frenchmen over the seas, and left us free to work out our own liberties
+without foreign interference. No doubt the Wars of the Roses were partly a
+legacy of our unjust aggression in France; but English civil wars have
+been among the least disorderly the world has known; in all of them the
+citizen-levies have fought stoutly on the side of liberty; and for
+centuries after Chaucer's death the national militia was recognized as a
+strong counterpoise to the unconstitutional tendencies of the standing
+army.
+
+Of all this Froissart recognized little indeed; though we, in the light of
+a hundred other documents, can see how all went on under Froissart's eyes.
+He saw clearly that this was the most warlike nation in Europe; he saw
+also that it was the most democratic; but he seems neither to have traced
+any connection here on the one hand, nor on the other to have been
+troubled by any sense of contrast; it was not in his genius to look for
+causes, but rather to repeat with child-like vivacity what he saw and
+heard. Yet for us, to whom nothing in Chaucer's England can be more
+interesting than to watch, under the great trees of the forest, the
+springing of that undergrowth which was in time to become the present
+British people, it is delightful to turn from pictures of mere successful
+bloodshed to Froissart's bitter-sweet judgments on the national character.
+"Englishmen suffer indeed for a season, but in the end they repay so
+cruelly that it may stand as a great warning; for no man may mock them;
+the lord who governs them rises and lays him down to rest in sore peril of
+his life.... And specially there is no people under the sun so perilous in
+the matter of its common folk as they are in England. For in England the
+nature and condition of the nobles is very far different from that of the
+common folk and villeins; for the gentlefolk are of loyal and noble
+condition, and the common people is of a fell, perilous, proud and
+disloyal condition: and wheresoever the people would show their fierceness
+and their power, the nobles would not last long after. But now for a long
+time they have been at good accord together, for the nobles ask nothing of
+the people but what is of full reason; moreover none would suffer them to
+take aught from him without payment--nay, not an egg or a hen. The
+tradesmen and labourers of England live by the travail of their hands, and
+the nobles live on their own rents and revenues, and if the kings vex them
+they are repaid; not that the king can tax his people at pleasure, no! nor
+the people would not or could not suffer it. There are certain ordinances
+and covenants settled upon the staple of wool, wherefrom the king is
+assisted beyond his own rents and revenues; and when they go to war, that
+covenant is doubled. England is best kept of all lands in the world;
+otherwise they could by no means live together; and it behoveth well that
+a king who is their lord should order his ways after them and bow to their
+will in many matters; and if he do the contrary, so that evil come
+thereof, bitterly then shall he rue it, as did this king Edward II." "And
+men said then in London and throughout England 'we must reform and take a
+new ordinance [with our king]; for that which we have had hath brought us
+sore weariness and travail, and this kingdom of ours is not worth a straw
+without a good head; whereas we have had one as bad as a man can find....
+We have no use for a sluggish and heavy king who seeketh too much his own
+ease and pleasure; we would rather slay half a hundred of such, one after
+the other, than fail to get a king to our use and liking.'" "The King of
+England must needs obey his people, and do all their will."[239]
+
+We with our present liberties must not of course take these words of
+Froissart's too literally; but they must have conveyed a very definite
+and, on the whole, a very true impression to his French contemporaries;
+for no language but that of hyperbole could adequately have described the
+contrast between their polity and that of England. Moreover, it must be
+remembered that Froissart wrote this with the Peasant's Revolt not far
+behind him, and the deposition of Richard II. fresh in his mind. The truth
+is that the feudal system was already slowly but surely breaking down in
+England: our lower classes, with recognized constitutional rights on the
+one hand, and on the other hand a rough military organization and
+discipline of their own, were, in many ways, far more free in 1389 than
+the French peasants of 1789. Chaucer and Froissart always felt at the
+bottom of their hearts this coming of the People; it lends a breadth to
+their thoughts and colour to their brush even when they paint the gorgeous
+pageantry of overripe feudalism; labouring the more earnestly, perhaps, to
+record these fleeting hues because of the night which must needs come
+before the new day. And how vivid their pictures are! The prologue to the
+"Book of the Duchess," the castle garden and the tournament in the
+Knight's Tale, Troilus with his knights pacing the aisles of the temple to
+gaze on the ladies at their prayers, or riding home under Criseyde's
+balcony after the victorious fight: Froissart's stories of the Chaplet of
+Pearls, the Court of Gaston de Foix, the Dance of the Wild Men, Queen
+Isabella's entry into London--what an enchanted palace of tapestries and
+stained glass we have here, and what a school of stately manners! But
+time, which takes away so much, brings us still more in compensation; and
+without treason to Chaucer or his age we may frankly admit that his
+perfect knight is only younger brother to Colonel Newcome, and that
+Froissart himself can show us no figure so deeply chivalrous as the
+Lawrences or the Havelocks of our later Indian Wars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE POOR
+
+  "Misuse not thy bondman, the better mayst thou speed;
+  Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven
+  That he win a worthier seat, and with more bliss;
+  For in charnel at the church churls be evil to know,
+  Or a knight from a knave there; know this in thine heart."
+                                  "Piers Plowman," B., vi., 46
+
+
+It has sometimes been contended in recent years that the Middle Ages
+lacked only our smug middle-class comfort; and that, as the upper classes
+were nobler, so the poor were healthier and happier then. It is probable
+that the latter part of this theory is at least as mistaken as the first:
+but the question is in itself more complicated, and we have naturally less
+detailed evidence in the poor man's case than in the rich man's. Among the
+great, we find many virtues and many vices common to both ages; but a
+careful comparison reveals certain grave faults which put the earlier
+state of society, as we might expect, at a definite and serious
+disadvantage. No gentleman of the present day would dream of striking his
+wife and daughters, of talking to them like the Knight of La Tour Landry,
+or like the Merchant in the presence of the Nuns, or of selling marriages
+and wardships in the open market. All the redeeming virtues in the world,
+we should feel, could not put the man who saw no harm in these things in
+the front rank of real gentility. Such plain and decisive methods of
+differentiation, however, begin to disappear as we descend the social
+scale; until, at the very bottom, we find little or no difference in
+coarseness of moral fibre between our own contemporaries and Chaucer's.
+For it stands to reason that the development of the poor cannot be so
+rapid as that of the upper classes. In all human affairs, to him that hath
+shall be given; the superior energy and abilities of one family will
+differentiate it more and more, as life becomes more complicated, from
+other families which still vegetate among the mass; and in proportion as
+the wealth of the world increases, the gap must necessarily widen between
+the man who has most and the man who has least; since there have always
+been a certain number who possess, and are capable of possessing or
+keeping, virtually nothing. In that sense, the terrible contrast between
+wealth and poverty is undoubtedly worse in our days; but this fact in
+itself is as insignificant as it is unavoidable. The tramp on the highroad
+is not appreciably unhappier for knowing that his nothingness is
+contrasted nowadays with Mr. Carnegie's millions instead of de la Pole's
+thousands; and again, until we can find some means of distributing the
+accumulations of the rich among the poor without doing far more harm than
+good, the community loses no more by allowing a selfish man to lock up his
+millions, than formerly when they were only hundreds or thousands. The
+securities afforded by modern society for possession and accumulation of
+wealth do indeed often permit the capitalist to sweat his workmen
+deplorably; but these are the same securities which allow the workman to
+sleep in certain possession of his own little savings. While the
+capitalist is accumulating money, the foresight and self-restraint of the
+workmen enables them to accumulate votes, which in the long run are worth
+even more. Much may no doubt be done in detail by keeping in eye the
+simpler methods of our ancestors; but no sound principle can be modelled
+on an age when nothing prevented capitalists from hoarding but lack of
+decent security, when strikes were rare only because of penal laws against
+all combinations of workmen, and when the peasant was partly kept from
+starving by his recognized market value as the domestic animal of his
+master. We could easily remedy many desperate social difficulties--for the
+moment at least--if we might reduce half the population of England again
+to the status of serfs.
+
+"The social questions of the period cannot be understood, unless we
+remember that in 1381 more than half the people of England did not possess
+the privileges which Magna Charta secured to every 'freeman.'"[240] The
+English serf was indeed some degrees better off than his French brother,
+to whose lord the legist Pierre de Fontaines could write in the 13th
+century "by our custom there is between thee and thy villein no judge but
+only God."[241] The English serf could not be evicted, but neither could
+he leave his holding; he was transferred with the estate from master to
+master as a portion of the live stock. By custom, as the master had rights
+to definite services or money dues from him, so he had definite rights as
+against his master; but though in cases of manslaughter or maiming the
+serf could appeal to the king's courts, all other cases must be heard in
+the manor court, where the lord was judge in his own cause. Let us hear
+Chaucer himself on this subject, in his Parson's Tale: "Through this
+cursed sin of avarice and covetise come these hard lordships, through
+which men be distrained by tallages, customs, and carriages more than
+their duty or reason is: and eke take they of their bondmen amercements
+which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements. Of
+which amercements, or ransoming of bondmen, some lords' stewards say that
+it is rightful, forasmuch as a churl hath no temporal thing that is not
+his lord's, as they say. But certes these lordships do wrong that bereave
+their bondmen [of] things that they never gave them." In theory, the
+Reeve was indeed a sort of foreman, elected by the workers to represent
+their interests before their master; but it will be noticed how Chaucer
+looks upon him as the lord's servant; and in "Piers Plowman" he is even
+more definitely put among the enemies of the people, with beadles,
+sheriffs, and "sisours," or jurors.[242] It must be remembered, too, that
+the general reliance everywhere on custom rather than on written law, the
+difference of customs on various manors, and the petty vexations
+constantly entailed even by those which were most certainly recognized,
+bred constant discontent and disputes. The heavy fine which the serf owed
+for sending his son to school fell, of course, only in very exceptional
+cases, and may be set off against the few who were enfranchized in order
+to enable them to take holy orders. But the _merchet_, or fine paid for
+marriage, must have been a bitter burden, while the _heriot_, or
+_mortuary_, is to modern ideas an exaction of unredeemed iniquity. In most
+manors, though apparently not in all, the lord claimed by this custom the
+best possession left by his dead tenant; and (so long as he had left not
+less than three head of live stock) the parish clergyman claimed the
+second best. The case of a widow and orphans in a struggling household is
+one in which no charity can ever be misplaced; yet here their natural
+protectors were precisely those who joined hands to plunder them; and
+every parish had its two licensed wreckers, who picked their perquisites
+from the deathbeds of the poor.[243] No doubt here, as elsewhere, the
+strict law was not always enforced, even though its enforcement was so
+definitely to the interest of the stronger party; self-interest, apart
+from a fellow-feeling which seldom dies out altogether, prevents a man
+from taxing even his horse beyond its powers; but there is definite
+evidence that merchets and heriots were no mere theoretical grievance.
+Moreover, these were only the worst of a hundred ways in which law and
+custom gave the lord a galling, and apparently unreasonable, hold upon the
+peasants; and they must needs have chafed against such a yoke as this even
+if their position as domestic animals had been more comfortable than it
+was. Let us suppose--though this needs better proof than has yet been
+advanced--that the serf was as well fed and housed as the modern English
+labourer;[244] suppose that he was far more of a real man than his legal
+status gave him a right to be; then he must only have smarted all the
+more, we may safely say, under his beastlike disabilities. "We are men
+formed in Christ's likeness, and we are kept like beasts"; such are the
+words which Froissart puts into the serfs' mouths. "To the sentiment"
+(comments a modern writer) "there is all the difference between economic
+compulsion, apparently the outcome of inevitable conditions, and a legal
+dependence upon personal caprice. Even comfortable circumstances, which he
+apparently enjoyed, created in the Malmesbury bondman no satisfaction with
+his lot. There is a pathetic ring in the words which, in his old age, he
+is recorded to have used, that 'if he might bring that [his freedom]
+aboute, it wold be more joifull to him than any worlie goode.'" Nor was
+this the cry of a single voice only, but also of the whole peasantry of
+England at that moment of the Middle Ages when they most definitely
+formulated their aims. "The rising of 1381 sets it beyond doubt that the
+peasant had grasped the conception of complete personal liberty, that he
+held it degrading to perform forced labour, and that he considered freedom
+to be his right."[245]
+
+Moreover, the general voice of medieval moralists is here on the peasants'
+side. It is true that (in spite of the frequent reminders of our common
+parentage in Adam and Eve) few men of Chaucer's day would have agreed with
+Wycliffe in objecting on principle to hereditary bondage; but still fewer
+doubted that the landlords, as a class, did in fact use their power
+unmercifully. "How mad" (writes Cardinal Jacques de Vitry), "how mad are
+those men who rejoice when sons are born to their lords!" Many knights (he
+says) force their serfs to labour, and give them not even bread to eat.
+When the knight does call his men together, as if for war, it is too often
+only to prey on the peasant. "Many say nowadays, when they are rebuked for
+having taken a cow from a poor peasant: 'Let it suffice the boor that I
+have left him the calf and his own life. I might do him far more harm if I
+would; I have taken his goose, but left him the feathers.'"
+
+Here, again, is a still more living picture from "Piers Plowman"--
+
+  "Then Peace came to Parliament and put up a bill,
+  How that Wrong against his will his wife had y-taken
+  And how he ravished Rose, Reginald's leman,
+  And Margaret of her maidenhood, maugre her cheeks.
+  'Both my geese and my griskins his gadlings fetchen,
+  I dare not for dread of him fight nor chide.
+  He borrowed my bay steed, and brought him never again,
+  Nor no farthing him-for, for nought I can plead.
+  He maintaineth his men to murder mine own,
+  Forestalleth my fair, fighteth in my cheapings,               [markets
+  Breaketh up my barn-door and beareth away my wheat;
+  And taketh me but a tally for ten quarter oaten;
+  And yet he beat me thereto, and lieth by my maiden,
+  I am not so hardy for him up for to look.'
+  The King knew he said sooth, for Conscience him told."
+
+That this kind of thing was far less common in England than elsewhere, we
+have Froissart's and other evidence; but that it was far too common even
+in Chaucer's England there is no room whatever to doubt. As M. Jusserand
+has truly said, a dozen Parliamentary documents justify the poet's
+complaints; and he quotes an extraordinarily interesting case from the
+actual petition of the victims.[246]
+
+The time, however, was yet unripe for such far-reaching changes as the
+peasants demanded. The circumstances and incidents of their revolt have
+been admirably described by Mr. Trevelyan, and lately in more detail by
+Prof. Oman; and its main events are prominent in all our histories;
+probably no rebellion of such magnitude was ever so sudden in its origin
+or its end; all was practically over in a single month. Discontent had, of
+course, been seething for years; yet even so definite a grievance as the
+Poll Tax of 1381 could not have raised half England in revolt within a few
+days, but for a sense of power and a rough discipline among the
+working-classes. For more than a century the men who were now so wronged
+had been compelled to keep arms, to learn their use, and to muster
+periodically under captains of twenties and captains of hundreds. For a
+whole generation Edward III. had proclaimed, at frequent intervals, that
+he could not meet his enemies without a fresh levy from town and country;
+and, under a system which allowed the purchase of substitutes, such levies
+fell heaviest on the lower classes. What was more natural than that these
+same lower classes should muster now to free the King from his other
+enemies--and theirs too, as they thought--incapable, bloodsucking
+ministers and unjust landlords? They had only to turn out as on a muster
+and march straight upon London, each village contingent picking up others
+on the way; and this is exactly what they did.[247] The chroniclers
+definitely record their order even in disorder; it was removed by a whole
+horizon from the contemporary Jacquerie in France, in which the peasants
+rose like wild beasts, with no ideas but plunder, lust, and revenge. These
+English rebels resisted manfully at first all temptation to plunder among
+the rich houses of London. "If they caught any man thieving, they cut off
+his head, as men who hated thieves above all things"--such is the
+testimony of their bitter enemy Walsingham. When they gutted John of
+Gaunt's palace, nothing was kept of the vast wealth which it contained;
+all things were treated as accursed, like the spoils of Jericho. The
+rioters were loyal to the King, had a definite policy, and aimed at making
+treaties in due form with their enemies. They "had among themselves a
+watchword in English, 'With whome haldes you?' and the answer was, 'With
+Kinge Richarde and the true comons.'" "They took [Chief Justice Belknap]
+and made him swear on the Bible." At Canterbury "they summoned the Mayor,
+the bailiffs and the commons of the said town, and examined them whether
+they would with good will swear to be faithful and loyal to King Richard
+and to the true commons of England or no." "The commons, out of good
+feeling to [the King], sent back word by his messengers that they wished
+to see him and speak with him at Blackheath." At Mile End they were
+arrayed under "two banners, and many pennons," drew out willingly into two
+lines at Richard's bidding, and made an orderly bargain with him. In the
+final meeting at Smithfield, "the king and his train ... turned into the
+eastern meadow in front of St. Bartholomew's ... and the commons arrayed
+themselves on the west side in great battles." After Tyler's death, again,
+they followed at Richard's command into Clerkenwell fields, where they
+were presently surrounded partly by the mercenary troopers of Sir Robert
+Knolles, but mainly by the citizen levies, "the wards arrayed in bands, a
+fine company of well-armed folks in great strength." The very suddenness
+of their collapse is not only perfectly explicable under these
+circumstances, but it is just what we might expect in a case where the
+conflicting parties have learnt, under some sort of common discipline, the
+priceless lesson of give and take, and can see some reason in each other's
+claims; the Cronstadt Mutiny is the latest example of this, and perhaps
+not the least instructive.[248] Their main claims had been granted by the
+King, and, in proportion as the rioters were loyal and orderly at heart,
+in the same proportion they must have seen clearly that Wat Tyler's fate
+had been thoroughly deserved. No wonder that they cowered now before the
+King and his troops, and dispersed peaceably to their homes. Even
+Walsingham's satirical account of their arms, with due allowance for
+literary exaggeration, is exactly what the most formal documents would
+lead us to expect. "The vilest of commons and peasants," he says; "some of
+whom had only cudgels, some rusty swords, some only axes, some bows that
+had hung so long in the smoke as to be browner than ancient ivory, with
+one arrow apiece, many whereof had but one wing.... Among a thousand such,
+you would scarce have found one man that wore armour."[249] Compare this
+with the actual muster-roll of a Norwich leet, a far richer community than
+these villages from which most of the rebels came (Conesford, A.D. 1355).
+Out of the 192 mustered, 33 wear defensive armour; 7 only are archers (an
+unusually small proportion, of course); 44 turn out with knife, sword,
+and bill or hatchet; 108 have only two weapons, which in nine out of ten
+cases consist of knife and cudgel. The rioters, of course, would in most
+cases have come from this lowest class; and in reading through the Norwich
+lists one seems to see the very men who followed after John Ball. "Thomas
+Pottage, with knife and cudgel"; "William Mouse, with knife and cudgel";
+"Long John, with knife and cudgel"; "Adam Piper and Robert Skut, with
+knife and bill"; "John Cosy, Hamo Garlicman, Robert Rubbleyard, John
+Stutter, Roger Dauber, William Boardcleaver, William Merrygo, Nicholas
+Skip, Alice Brokedish's Servant,"--all with knife and cudgel again.
+Gower's mock-heroic catalogue of the rioters' names in the first book of
+his "Vox Clamantis" is not so picturesque as these actual muster-rolls.
+
+These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his
+fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on
+grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind
+of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round
+Chaucer's tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate.
+Chroniclers note with astonishment the paralysis of the upper classes all
+through this revolt, or at least until Wat Tyler's death; and though
+Richard revoked his Royal promise of freedom, and bloody assizes were held
+from county to county until the country was sick of slaughter, and
+Parliament re-enacted all the old oppressive statutes, yet the landlords
+can never entirely have forgotten this lesson. Professor Oman, in his
+anxiety to kill the already slain theory that the Revolt virtually put an
+end to serfdom, seems hardly to allow enough for human nature; but Mr.
+Trevelyan sums the matter up in words as just as they are eloquent: "[The
+Revolt] was a sign of national energy, it was a sign of independence and
+self-respect in the medieval peasants, from whom three-quarters of our
+race, of all classes and in every continent, are descended. This
+independent spirit was not lacking in France in the 14th century, but it
+died out by the end of the Hundred Years' War; stupid resignation then
+took hold of burghers and peasantry alike, from the days when Machiavelli
+observed their torpor, down to the eve of the Revolution. The _ancien
+régime_ was permitted to grow up. But in England there has been a
+continuous spirit of resistance and independence, so that wherever our
+countrymen or our kinsmen have gone, they have taken with them the undying
+tradition of the best and surest freedom, which 'slowly broadens down from
+precedent to precedent.'"[250]
+
+This chapter could not be complete without at least a passing allusion to
+the general uncleanliness of medieval life, even in a city like London,
+where there was some real attempt at organized scavenging of the streets,
+and where the laws commanded strictly "he that will keep a pig, let him
+keep it in his own house."[251] Four great visitations of the bubonic
+plague occurred in Chaucer's lifetime; the least of them would have been
+enough to mark an epoch in modern England. The sixty years of his life are
+exceptional, on the other hand, in their comparative freedom from severe
+famine; but there hung always over men's lives the shadow of God's
+hand--or rather, as they too often felt, of Satan's. During the great
+storm of 1362 "beasts, trees and housen were all to-smit with violent
+lightning, and suddenly perished; and the Devil in man's likeness spake to
+men going by the way"; and a good herald who watched the march past of the
+rioters in 1381 "saw several Devils among them; he fell sick and died
+within a brief while afterwards."[252]
+
+It has often been noted how little Chaucer refers either to this Revolt
+or the Great Pestilence; but the multitude interested him comparatively
+little. He felt with the pleasures and pains of the individual poor man;
+but with regard to the poor in bulk, he would only have shrugged his
+shoulders and said "they are always with us." His Griselda is own sister
+to King Cophetua's beggar-maid in the Burne-Jones picture. For all the
+real pathos of the story, her rags are draped with every refinement of
+consummate art. We believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection
+that they are there only to point an artistic contrast. Again, in the
+"Nuns' Priest's Tale" the "poure wydwe, somdel stope in age," with her
+smoky cottage and the humble stock of her yard, are just the subdued and
+tender background which the poet needs for the mock-chivalric glories of
+his Chanticleer and Partlet. For glimpses of the real poor, the poor poor,
+we must go to "Piers Plowman." Here we find them of all sorts, and at the
+top of the scale the Plowman, the skilled agricultural labourer or almost
+peasant-farmer--
+
+  "I have no penny, quoth Piers, pullets for to buy,
+  Neither goose nor griskin; but two green cheeses     [new
+  A few curds and cream, and a cake of oats,
+  And bread for my bairns of beans and of peases.
+  And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon;
+  Not a cockney, by Christ, collops to make,           [egg: eggs and bacon
+  But I have leek-plants, parsley and shallots,
+  Chiboles and chervils and cherries, half-red ...     [onions
+  By this livelihood we must live till Lammas-time,
+  And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft,
+  Then may I dight my dinner as me dearly liketh."
+
+Piers speaks here of a bad year; but even his modest comfort required hard
+work of all kinds and in all weathers. As the Ploughman says in another
+place--
+
+  "I have been Truth's servant all this fifty winter,
+  Both y-sowen his seed and sued his beasts,
+  Within and withouten waited his profits.
+  I dike and I delve, I do what Truth biddeth;
+  Some time I sow and some time I thresh,
+  In tailor's craft and tinker's craft, what Truth can devise,
+  I weave and I wind, and do what Truth biddeth."[253]
+
+
+[Illustration: THE PLOUGHMAN
+
+FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER (EARLY 14TH CENTURY)]
+
+
+In contrast with Piers stands the great crowd of beggars--soldiers
+discharged from the wars, and sturdy vagrants who fear nothing but
+labour--"beggars with bags, which brewhouses be their churches," as the
+poet writes in the racy style affected in modern times by Mrs. Gamp. The
+roads were crowded with wandering minstrels "that will neither swink nor
+sweat, but swear great oaths, and find up foul fantasies, and fools them
+maken; and yet have wit at will to work, if they would." Lowest of all
+(except the outlaws and felons who haunt the thickets and forests) come
+the professional tramps--
+
+  "For they live in no love, nor no law they holden,
+  They wed no woman wherewith they dealen,
+  Bring forth bastards, beggars of kind.
+  Or the back or some bone they breaken of their children,
+  And go feigning with their infants for evermore after.
+  There are more misshapen men among such beggars
+  Than of many other men that on this mould walken."
+
+But the Great Pestilence had bred yet another class odious to Piers
+Plowman--strikers, as they would be called in modern English--the men who
+thought their labour was worth more than the miserable price at which
+Parliament was constantly trying to fix it under the heaviest penalties.
+These were they of whom the Commons complained in 1376 that "they contrive
+by great malice prepense to evade the penalty of the aforesaid Ordinances
+and Statutes; for so soon as their masters chide them for evil service, or
+would fain pay them for their aforesaid service according to the form of
+the said Statutes, suddenly they flee and disperse away from their service
+and from their own district, from county to county, from hundred to
+hundred, from town to town, into strange places unknown to their said
+masters, who know not where to find them.... And the greater part of such
+runaway labourers become commonly stout thieves, wherefrom robberies and
+felonies increase everywhere from day to day, to the destruction of the
+aforesaid realm."[254] The worst effect of a law which attempted to fix
+wages everywhere and chain the labourer to one master or one parish, was
+to drive into rebellion indiscriminately the honest man who wanted to sell
+his work in an open market, and the idler who was glad to escape in
+company with his betters. No doubt there was a half-truth in the satire on
+the pretensions of these labourers for whom the old wages no longer
+sufficed, and who, in spite of the law, often managed to enforce their
+claim--
+
+  "Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands,
+  Deigned not to dine to-day on last night's cabbage;
+  May no penny-ale please them, nor a piece of bacon,
+  But it be fresh flesh or fish, fried or y-baken,
+  And that _chaud_ and _plus chaud_ for the chill of their maw."[255]
+
+But sometimes the law too had its way; and for years before the Great
+Revolt the countryside swarmed with such Statute-made malefactors,
+together with those other outcasts so graphically described in Jusserand's
+"Vie Nomade" (Pt. II., c. 2).
+
+Meanwhile there lived and died, in the background, the thousands who, for
+all their honest toil, struggled on daily from hand to mouth, knowing no
+Bible truth more true than this, that God had cursed the ground for Adam's
+sake. These are the true poor--"God's minstrels," as they are called in
+"Piers Plowman"; those upon whom our alms cannot possibly be ill-spent--
+
+  "The most needy are our neighbours, an we take good heed,
+  As prisoners in pits and poor folk in cotes
+  Charged with children and chief lordës rent;
+  That they with spinning may spare, spend they it in house-hire,
+  Both in milk and in meal to make therewith papelots
+  To glut therewith their children that cry after food.
+  Also themselves suffer much hunger,
+  And woe in wintertime, with waking a-nights
+  To rise to the ruel to rock the cradle ...
+  Both to card and to comb, to clout and to wash
+  To rub and to reel, and rushes to peel,
+  That ruth is to read, or in rime to show
+  The woe of these women that woneth in cotes;
+  And many other men that much woe suffren,
+  Both a-hungered and athirst, to turn the fair side outward,
+  And be abashëd for to beg, and will not be a-known
+  What them needeth to their neighbours at noon and at even.
+  This I wot witterly, as the world teacheth,
+  What other men behoveth that have many children
+  And have no chattels but their craft to clothe them and to feed
+  And fele to fong thereto, and few pence taken.
+  There is payn and penny-ale as for a pittance y-taken,
+  Cold flesh and cold fish for venison y-baken;
+  Fridays and fasting-days, a farthing's worth of mussels
+  Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles."[256]
+
+How many such cottages did Chaucer, like ourselves, pass on his ride to
+Canterbury? In all ages the sufferings of the very poor have been limited
+only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+MERRY ENGLAND
+
+    "In the holidays all the summer the youths are exercised in leaping,
+    dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone, and practising their
+    shields; the maidens trip in their timbrels, and dance as long as they
+    can well see. In winter, every holiday before dinner, the boars
+    prepared for brawn are set to fight, or else bulls and bears are
+    baited. When the great fen, or moor, which watereth the walls of the
+    city on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice;
+    some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make
+    themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many
+    hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall
+    together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels; and
+    shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a
+    bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two
+    run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both
+    do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but
+    youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the
+    time of war."--FITZSTEPHEN'S "Description of London," translated by
+    John Stow.
+
+
+Where in the meantime was Merry England? In the sense in which the phrase
+is often used, as a mere political or social catchword, it lay for
+Chaucer, as for us, in the haze of an imaginary past. Englishmen were even
+then more fortunate in their lot than many continental nations; but they
+had already serious responsibilities to bear. The glory of that age lies
+less in thoughtless merrymaking than in a brave and steady struggle--with
+the elements, with circumstances, and with fellow-man. Even in Chaucer's
+time Englishmen took their pleasures sadly in comparison with Frenchmen
+and Italians. We cannot say that our forefathers enjoyed life less than we
+do, but we can certainly say that theirs was a life which we could enjoy
+only after a process of acclimatization; and they lacked almost
+altogether one of the most valued privileges of modern civilization--the
+undisturbed conduct of our own little house and our own small affairs, the
+established peace and order under cover of which even an artisan may now
+pursue his own hobbies with a sense of personal independence and a
+tranquil certitude of the morrow for which Roger Bacon would cheerfully
+have sacrificed a hand or an eye. Such tranquillity might conceivably be
+bought at the price of nobler virtues, but it is in itself one of the most
+justly prized conquests of civilization, and we may seek it vainly in our
+past.
+
+However, as life was undoubtedly more picturesque in the 14th century, so
+the enjoyment also was more on the surface. Fitzstephen's brief catalogue
+of the Londoners' relaxations is charming; and, even when we have made all
+allowance for the poetical colours lavished by an antiquary who saw
+everything through a haze of distant memory and regret, Stow's
+descriptions of city merrymakings are among the most delightful pages of
+history. Hours of labour were long,[257] and for village folk there was no
+great choice of amusements; yet there is a whole world of delight to be
+found in the most elementary field sports. Moreover, the most expansive
+enjoyment is often natural to those who have otherwise least freedom;
+witness the bank-holiday excitement of our own days and the negro passion
+for song and dance. The holy-days on which the Church forbade work
+amounted to something like one a week; and though there are frequent
+complaints that these were ill kept, equally widespread and emphatic is
+the testimony to noisy merriment on them; they bred more drunkenness and
+crime, we are assured by anxious Churchmen, than all the rest of the
+year.[258] Indeed, it is from judicial records that we may glean by far
+the fullest details about the games of our ancestors; and a brilliant
+archivist like Siméon Luce, when he undertakes to give a picture of
+popular games in the France of Chaucer's day, draws almost exclusively on
+Royal proclamations and court rolls.[259]
+
+From the Universities, sacred haunts of modern athleticism, down to the
+smallest country parish, we get the same picture of sports flourishing
+under considerable discouragement from the powers in being, but
+flourishing all the same, and taking a still more boisterous tinge from
+the injudicious attempts to suppress them altogether. "Alike in the
+Universities and out of them," writes Dr. Rashdall on the subject of
+games, "the asceticism of the medieval ideal provoked and fostered the
+wildest indulgence in actual life." Even chess was among the "noxious,
+inordinate, and unhonest games" expressly forbidden to the scholars of New
+College by William of Wykeham's Statutes,[260] and indeed throughout the
+Middle Ages this was a pastime which led to more gambling and quarrels
+than most others. A very curious quarrel at cudgel-play outside the walls
+of Oxford is recorded in the "Munimenta Academica" (Rolls Series, p. 526).
+At Cambridge it was forbidden under penalty of forty pence to play tennis
+in the town. At Oxford we find four citizens compelled to abjure the same
+game solemnly before the vice-chancellor; and readers both of Froissart
+and of the preface to "Ivanhoe" will remember violent feuds arising from
+it.[261] In 1446 the Bishop of Exeter, while pleading that he has always
+kept open the doors of the cathedral cloisters at all reasonable times,
+adds, "at which times, and in especial in time of divine service,
+ungodly-ruled people (most customably young people of the said Commonalty)
+within the said cloister have exercised unlawful games, as the top, queke,
+penny-prick, and most at tennis, by the which all the walls of the said
+cloister have been defouled and the glass windows all to-burst."[262]
+
+As early as 1314, the laws of London forbade playing at football in the
+fields near the city; and this was among the games which, by Royal
+proclamation of 1363, were to give place to the all-important sport of
+archery. Others forbidden at the same time were quoits, throwing the
+hammer, hand-ball, club-ball, and golf. Indeed, from this ancient and
+royal game down to leap-frog and "conquerors," nearly all our present
+sports were familiar, in more or less developed forms, to our ancestors.
+In 1332, Edward III. had to proclaim "let no boy or other person, under
+pain of imprisonment, play in any part of Westminster Palace, during the
+Parliament now summoned, at bars [_i.e._ prisoners' base] or other games,
+or at snatch-hood"; and John Myrc instructs the parish clergy to forbid to
+their parishioners in general all "casting of ax-tree and eke of stone ...
+ball and bars and suchlike play" in the churchyard.[263] Wrestling, again,
+was among the most popular sports, and one of those which gave most
+trouble to coroners. The two great wrestling matches in 1222 between the
+citizens of London and the suburbans ended in a riot which assumed almost
+the dignity of a rebellion. Fatal wrestling-bouts, like fatal games of
+chess, are among the stock incidents of medieval romance; whether the
+enemy was to be got rid of through the hands of a professional champion
+(as in the quasi-Chaucerian "Tale of Gamelyn") or by such foul play as is
+described in the Pardoner's Tale--
+
+  Arise, as though thou wouldest with him play,
+  And I shall rive him through the sidës way,
+  While that thou strugglest with him as in game;
+  And with thy dagger look thou do the same.
+
+Moreover, the same tragedy might only too easily be played
+unintentionally, as in the ballad of the "Two Brothers"--
+
+  They warsled up, they warsled down
+    Till John fell to the ground;
+  A dirk fell out of Willie's pouch,
+    And gave him a deadly wound.
+
+Or, as it is recorded in the business-like prose of an assize-roll:
+"Richard of Horsley was playing and wrestling with John the Miller of
+Tutlington; and by mishap his knife fell from its sheath and wounded the
+aforesaid John without the aforesaid Richard's knowledge, so that he died.
+And the aforesaid Richard fled and is not suspected of the death; let him
+therefore return if he will, but let his chattels be confiscated for his
+flight. (N.B. He has no chattels)."[264] In this same assize-roll, out of
+forty-three accidental deaths, three were due to village games, and three
+more to sticks or stones aimed respectively at a cock, a dog, and a pig,
+but finding their fatal billet in a human life. Ecclesiastical
+disciplinarians endeavoured frequently, but with indifferent success, to
+put down the practice of wrestling in churchyards, with the scarcely less
+turbulent miracle-plays or dances, and the markets which so frequently
+stained the holy ground with blood. Even the State interfered in the
+matter of churchyard fairs and markets "for the honour of Holy Church";
+but they went on gaily as before. Dances, as I have already had occasion
+to note, were condemned with a violence which is only partially explained
+even by Chaucer's illuminating lines about the Parish Clerk--
+
+  In twenty manners could he skip and dance,
+  (After the School of Oxenfordë, though,)
+  And with his leggës casten to and fro.[265]
+
+To quote here again from Dr. Rashdall, "William of Wykeham found it
+necessary for the protection of the sculpture in the Chapel reredos to
+make a Statute against dancing or jumping in the Chapel or adjoining Hall.
+His language is suggestive of that untranslatable amusement now known as
+'ragging,' which has no doubt formed a large part of the relaxation of
+students--at least of English students--in all ages. At the same College
+there is a comprehensive prohibition of all 'struggling, chorus-singing,
+dancing, leaping, singing, shouting, tumult and inordinate noise, pouring
+forth of water, beer, and all other liquids and tumultuous games' in the
+Hall, on the ground that they were likely to disturb the occupants of the
+Chaplain's chamber below. A moderate indulgence in some of the more
+harmless of these pastimes in other places seems to be permitted."[266]
+
+In this, the good bishop was only following the very necessary precedent
+of many prelates before him. As early as 1223, when the reform of the
+friars had stimulated a great effort to put down old abuses throughout the
+Church, Bishop Poore of Salisbury and his diocesan council decreed "we
+forbid the holding of dances, or base and unhonest games which provoke to
+lasciviousness, in the churchyard.... We forbid the proclaiming of
+scot-ales in church by layfolk, or by priests or clerks either in or
+without the church." Similar prohibitions are repeated by later councils
+with an emphasis which only shows their inefficiency. The University of
+Oxford complained to Henry V. in 1414 that fairs and markets were held
+"more frequently than ever" on consecrated ground; and the Visitation of
+1519 among churches appropriated to York Cathedral elicited the fact that
+football and similar games were carried on in two of the churchyards.
+These holy places sometimes witnessed rougher sports still; especially
+cathedral cemeteries during the great processions of the ecclesiastical
+year. "Moreover," writes Bishop Grosseteste in a circular letter to all
+his archdeacons, "cause it to be proclaimed strictly in every church that,
+when the parishes come in procession for the yearly visitation and homage
+to the Cathedral church, no parish shall struggle to press before another
+parish with its banners; since from this source not only quarrels are wont
+to spring, but cruel bloodshed." Bishop Giffard of Worcester was compelled
+for the same reason to proclaim in every church of his diocese "that no
+one shall join in the Pentecostal processions with a sword or other kind
+of arms"; and a similar prohibition in the diocese of Ely (1364) is based
+on the complaint that "both fights and deaths are wont to result
+therefrom." Even more were the minds of the best clergy exercised by the
+corpse-wakes in churches, which "turned the house of mourning and prayer
+into a house of laughter and excess"; and again by "the execrable custom
+of keeping the 'Feast of Fools,' which obtains in some churches," and
+which "profanes the sacred anniversary of the Lord's Circumcision with the
+filth of lustful pleasures"; yet here again the tenacity of popular custom
+baffled even the most vigorous prelates.[267]
+
+We must not pass away from popular amusements without one glance at these
+above-mentioned scot-ales, which were probably relics of the Anglo-Saxon
+semi-religious drinking-bouts. In the later Middle Ages they appear as
+forerunners of the modern bazaar or religious tea; a highly successful
+device for raising money contributions by an appeal to the convivial
+instincts of a whole parish or district. In the early 13th century we find
+them denounced among the methods employed by sheriffs for illegal
+extortion; and about the same time they were very frequently condemned
+from the religious point of view. The clergy were not only forbidden to be
+present at such functions, but also directed to warn their parishioners
+diligently against them, "for the health of their souls and bodies," since
+all who took part at such feasts were excommunicated. But the custom died
+hard; or rather, it was probably rebaptized, like so many other relics of
+paganism; and the change seems to have taken place during Chaucer's
+lifetime. In 1364 Bishop Langham of Ely was still fulminating against
+scot-ales; in 1419, if not before, we find an authorized system of
+"church-ales" in aid of the fabric. These were held sometimes in the
+sacred edifice itself; more often in the Church Houses, the rapid
+multiplication of which during the 15th century is probably due to the
+equally rapid growth of church-ales. The puritanism of the 13th century
+was by this time somewhat out of fashion; parish finances had come far
+more under the parishioners' own control; and it was obviously convenient
+to make the best of these time-honoured compotations, as of the equally
+rough-and-ready hock-day customs, in order to meet expenses for which the
+parish was legally responsible. Earnest Churchmen had, all through this
+century, more important abuses to combat than these quasi-religious
+convivialities; and we find no voice raised against church-ales until the
+new puritanism of the Reformation. The Canons of 1603 forbade, among other
+abuses, "church ale drinkings ... in the church, chapel, or churchyard."
+While Bishop Piers of Bath and Wells testified that he saw no harm in
+them, the puritan Stubbes accused the participants of becoming "as drunk
+as rats, and as blockish as brute beasts." No doubt the truth lies between
+these extremes; but church-ales must not be altogether forgotten when we
+read the numerous medieval testimonies to the intimate connection between
+holy days and crime.[268]
+
+Perhaps the most widespread and most natural of all country sports was
+that of poaching. As Dr. Rashdall has pointed out, it was especially
+popular at the two Universities, where the paucity of authorized
+amusements drove the students into wilder extremes. We have also abundant
+records of clerical poachers; and in 1389 Richard II. enacted at the
+petition of the Commons "that no priest or clerk with less than ten pounds
+of yearly income should keep greyhounds, 'leetes' or other hunting dogs,
+nor ferrets, nets, or snares." The same petition complained that
+"artificers and labourers--that is to say, butchers, cobblers, tailors,
+and other working-folk, keep greyhounds and other dogs; and at the time
+when good Christians are at church on holy-days, hearing their divine
+services, these go hunting in the parks, coney-covers, and warrens
+pertaining to lords and other folk, and destroy them utterly." It was
+therefore enacted that no man with an income of less than forty shillings
+should presume to keep hunting dogs or implements.
+
+But in spite of squires and church synods, the working-man did all he
+could to escape, in his own untutored fashion, from the dullness of his
+working days. Every turn of life, from the cradle to the grave, was seized
+upon as an excuse for rough-and-ready sports. When a witness wishes to
+give a reason for remembering a christening on a certain day, he testifies
+to having broken his leg in the baptismal football match. Bishops
+struggled against the practice of celebrating marriages in taverns, lest
+the intending bride and bridegroom should plight their troth in liquor;
+and weddings in general were so uproarious as to be sometimes ruled out as
+too improper not only for a monk's attendance but even for that of serious
+and pious layfolk. Similar survivals of barbaric sports clung to the
+funeral ceremonies--the _wakë-pleyes_ of Chaucer's Knight's Tale; and
+Archbishop Thoresby's constitutions of 1367 seem to speak of wrestling
+matches held even in the church by the side of the dead man's bier. Such
+things could scarcely have happened without some clerical connivance; and
+in fact, the sporting parson was as common in Chaucer's as in Fielding's
+day. The hunting Monk of his "Prologue" is abundantly vouched for by the
+despairing complaints of ecclesiastical disciplinarians; and the parish
+parson, so often a peasant by birth, constantly set at naught the
+prohibitions of his superiors, to join with tenfold zest in the least
+decorous pastimes of his village flock. While archbishops in council
+legislated repeatedly and vainly against the hunting and tavern-haunting
+priest, swaggering about with a sword at his side or the least decent of
+lay doublets and hosen on his limbs, the homely Lollard satirist vented
+his scorn on this Parson Trulliber, who contrasted so startlingly with
+Chaucer's Parson Adams--
+
+  For the tithing of a duck
+    Or of an apple, or of an ey                   [egg
+  They make man swear upon a book;
+    Thus they foulen Christës fay.                [faith
+    Such bearen evilly heaven's key;
+  They may assoil, and they may shrive,
+    With mennës wivës strongly play,
+  With truë tillers sturt and strive              [struggle
+
+  At the wrestling, and at the wake,
+    And chiefë chanters at the ale;
+  Market-beaters, and meddling-make,
+    Hopping and hooting with heave and hale.
+    At fairë fresh, and at wine stale;
+  Dine, and drink, and make debate;
+    The seven sacraments set a-sale;
+  How keep such the keys of heaven gate?
+                                  ("Political Poems" (R.S.), i., 330).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE KING'S PEACE
+
+    "Accident plays a greater part in the fourteenth century than perhaps
+    at any other epoch.... At bottom society was neither quite calm nor
+    quite settled, and many of its members were still half
+    savage."--JUSSERAND, "English Wayfaring Life."
+
+
+The key to these contrasts, and much else that we are slow to imagine in
+medieval life, lies in the comparative simplicity of that earlier
+civilization. We must indeed beware of exaggerating this simplicity; there
+were already many complex threads of social development; again, the subtle
+tyranny of custom and opinion has in all primitive societies a power which
+we find it hard to realize. But certainly work and play were far less
+specialized in Chaucer's day than in ours; far less definitely sorted into
+different pigeon-holes of life. The drinking-bouts and rough games which
+scandalized the reformers of the 13th century had once been religious
+ceremonies themselves; and the two ideas were still confused in the
+popular mind. If, again, Justice was so anxious to forbid popular sports,
+this was partly because some of her own proceedings still smacked strongly
+of the primeval sporting instinct for which her growing dignity now began
+to blush. The scenic penances of the pillory and cucking-stool were among
+the most popular spectacles in every town; and a trial by battle "till the
+stars began to appear" must often have been a better show than a
+tournament, even without such further excitement as would be afforded by
+the match between a woman and a one-armed friar, or the searching of a
+bishop's champion for the contraband prayers and incantations sewn under
+his clothes, or the miracle by which a defeated combatant, who was
+supposed to have been blinded and emasculated in due course of justice,
+was found afterwards to be perfectly whole again by saintly intercession.
+Still more exciting were the hue and cry after a felon, his escape to some
+sanctuary, and his final race for life or "abjuration of the realm." What
+vivid recollections there must have been in Chaucer's family, for
+instance, of his great-uncle's death under circumstances which are thus
+drily recorded by the coroner (November 12, 1336): "The Jurors say that
+Simon Chaucer and one Robert de Upton, skinner, ... after dinner,
+quarrelled with one another in the high street opposite to the shop of the
+said Robert, in the said parish, by reason of rancour previously had
+between them, whereupon Simon wounded Robert on the upper lip; which John
+de Upton, son of Robert, perceiving, he took up a 'dorbarre,' without the
+consent of his father, and struck Simon on the left hand and side, and on
+the head, and then fled into the church of St. Mary of Aldermari-chirche;
+and in the night following he secretly escaped from the same. He had no
+chattels. Simon lived, languishing, till the said Tuesday, when he died of
+the blows, early in the morning.... The Sheriffs are ordered to attach the
+said John when he can be found in their bailiwick, ..." There was an
+evident sporting element in this race for sanctuary, and the subsequent
+secret escape; and we cannot help feeling some sympathy with the son whose
+dorbarre had intervened so unwisely, yet so well. But this affair, except
+for its Chaucerian interest, is commonplace; to realize the true humours
+of criminal justice one needs to read through a few pages of the records
+published by the Surtees Society, Professors Maitland and Thorold Rogers,
+Dr. Gross, and Mr. Walter Rye. We may there find how Seman the hermit was
+robbed, beaten, and left for dead by Gilbert of Niddesdale; how Gilbert
+unluckily fell next day into the hands of the King's serjeant, and the
+hermit had still strength enough to behead his adversary in due form of
+law, the Northumberland custom being that a victim could redeem his stolen
+goods only by doing the executioner's dirty work; how, again, Thomas the
+Reeve wished to chastise his concubine with a cudgel, but casually struck
+and killed the child in her arms, and the jury brought it in a mere
+accident; how an unknown woman came and bewitched John of Kerneslaw in his
+own house one evening, so that the said John used to make the sign of the
+cross over his loins when any man said _Benedicite_; how in a fit of fury
+he thrust the witch through with a spear, and her corpse was solemnly
+burned, while he was held to have done the deed "in self-defence, as
+against the Devil;" or, again, how Hugh Maidenlove escaped from Norwich
+Castle with his fellow sheep-stealer William the Clerk, and carried him
+stealthily on his back to the sanctuary of St. John in Berstreet, by
+reason that the said William's feet were so putrefied by the duress of the
+prison that he could not walk.[269] Let us take in full, as throwing a
+more intimate light on law and police, another case with a different
+beginning and a different ending to Simon Chaucer's (November 6, 1311).
+"It came to pass at Yelvertoft ... that a certain William of Wellington,
+parish chaplain of Yelvertoft, sent John his parish clerk to John
+Cobbler's house to buy candles, namely a pennyworth. But the same John
+would not send them without the money; wherefore the aforesaid William
+waxed wroth, took a stick, and went to the house of the said John and
+broke in the door upon him and smote this John on the fore part of the
+head with the same stick, so that his brains gushed forth and he died
+forthwith. And [William] fled hastily to the Church of Yelvertoft....
+Inquest was made before J. of Buckingham by four neighbouring townships,
+to wit, Yelverton, Crick, Winwick and Lilbourne. They say on their oath as
+aforesaid, that they know no man guilty of John's death save the said
+William of Wellington. He therefore came before the aforesaid coroner and
+confessed that he had slain the said John; wherefore he abjured the realm
+of England in the presence of the said four townships brought together
+[for this purpose]. And the port of Dover was assigned to him."[270]
+
+This "abjuration of the realm," a custom of English growth, which our
+kings transplanted also into Normandy, was one of the most picturesque
+scenes of medieval life. It was designed to obviate some of the abuses of
+that privilege of sanctuary which had no doubt its real uses in those days
+of club-law. What happened in fact to William of Wellington, we may gather
+not only from legal theorists of the Middle Ages, but from the number of
+actual cases collected by Réville.[271] The criminal remained at bay in
+the church; and no man might as yet hinder John his clerk from bringing
+him food, drink, or any other necessary. The coroner came as soon as he
+could, generally within three or four days at longest; but he might
+possibly be detained for ten days or more, and meanwhile (to quote from an
+actual case in 1348) "the parish kept watch over him ... and the coroner
+found the aforesaid William in the said church, and asked him wherefore he
+was there, and whether or not he would yield himself to the King's peace."
+The matter was too plain for William to deny; his confession was duly
+registered, and he took his oath to quit the realm within forty days.[272]
+Coming to the gate of the church or churchyard, he swore solemnly before
+the assembled crowd: "Oyez, oyez, oyez! Coroner and other good folk: I,
+William de Wellington, for the crime of manslaughter which I have
+committed, will quit this land of England nevermore to return, except by
+leave of the kings of England or their heirs: so help me God and His
+saints!" The coroner then assigned him a port, and a reasonable time for
+the journey; from Yelverton it would have been about a week. His bearing
+during this week was minutely prescribed: never to stray from the
+high-road, or spend two nights in the same place; to make straight for his
+port, and to embark without delay. If at Dover he found no vessel ready to
+sail, then he was bound daily to walk into the sea up to his knees--or,
+according to stricter authorities, up to his neck--and to take his rest
+only on the shore, in proof that he was ready in spirit to leave the land
+which by his crimes he had forfeited. His dress meanwhile was that of a
+felon condemned to death--a long, loose white tunic, bare feet, and a
+wooden cross in his hand to mark that he was under protection of Holy
+Church.
+
+Such abjurations were matters of common occurrence; yet Dover beach was
+not crowded with these unwilling pilgrims. A few, of course, were
+overtaken and slain on the way, in spite of their sacred character, by the
+friends of the murdered man. But many more must have reflected that, since
+they would find neither friends nor welcome abroad, there was less risk in
+taking their chance as runaways at home. If caught, they were liable to be
+strung up out of hand; but how many chances there must have been in the
+fugitive's favour! and, even in the last resort, some plausible excuse
+might possibly soften the captors' hearts. One criminal, who might
+possibly even have rubbed shoulders with Chaucer in London, pleaded that
+he had taken sanctuary and been torn from the altar. This was disproved,
+and he took refuge in a convenient dumbness. For such afflictions the
+Middle Ages knew a sovereign remedy, and he was led forthwith to the
+gallows. Here he found his tongue again, and pleaded clergy; but he failed
+to read his neck-verse, and was hanged. Often the miserable homesick
+wanderers came back and tried to save their lives by turning approvers
+against fellow-criminals. In 1330 Parliament had to interfere, and ruled
+that John English [_Lengleyse_], who three years before had slain the
+Mayor of Lynn, taken sanctuary, and abjured the realm, could not now be
+suffered to purchase his own pardon by accusing others.
+
+What happened, it may be asked, if William refused either to acknowledge
+his guilt or to stand his trial, and simply clung to the sanctuary? At
+least half the criminals thus refused; and here even theory was uncertain.
+If, at the end of his forty days of grace, the lay authorities tore him
+from the altar, then they were pretty sure of excommunication from the
+bishop. The lawyers held, therefore, that it was for the Ordinary, the
+Archdeacon, the Parson, to expel this man who had outstayed even the
+ecclesiastical welcome; but we all know the risk of dragging even a
+good-tempered dog from under a chair where he has taken refuge; and how
+could the poor bishop be expected to deal with this desperado? The matter
+was thus, like so many others, left very much to chance. The village did
+its best to starve the man out, and meanwhile to watch him night and day.
+One offending William, whose forty days had expired on August 12, 1374,
+held out against this blockade until September 9, when he fled. Then there
+was a hue and cry of the whole village; he might indeed run the gauntlet
+and make good his escape, leaving his quondam neighbours to prove before
+the justices that they had done all they could, or to pay a fine for their
+negligence. Often, however, a stick or stone would bring him down at close
+quarters, or an arrow from afar; then in a moment he was overpowered and
+beheaded, and that chase was remembered for years as the greatest event in
+Yelvertoft.
+
+There was indeed one gross irregularity in the case of Sir William de
+Wellington, but an irregularity which modern readers will readily pardon.
+Becket had given his life for the freedom of the Church as he conceived
+it, and especially for the principle that no cleric should be punished by
+the lay courts for any offence, however heinous. The death of "the holy
+blissful martyr" did indeed establish this principle in theory; and, with
+the most powerful corporation in the world to protect it, it was, in fact,
+kept far more strictly than most legal theories. William, therefore, after
+dashing John the Cobbler's brains upon the floor, might well have found it
+necessary to take refuge in the church from the blind fury of summary and
+illegal vengeance; but he need not have abjured the realm. In theory he
+had simply to confess his offence, or to stand his trial and suffer
+conviction from the King's judges; then the bishop's commissary stepped
+forward and claimed the condemned clerk in the name of the Church. The
+bishop, disregarding the verdict of the jury, would try him again by the
+primitive process of compurgation; that is, would bid him present himself
+with a specified number of fellow-clergy or persons of repute, who would
+join William in swearing on the Bible to his innocence. In this particular
+case William would probably have failed to find proper compurgators, and
+the bishop might, if he had chosen, have imprisoned him for life. But this
+involved very considerable expense and responsibility; it was a more
+invidious and costly matter than to prosecute nowadays for alleged illegal
+practices, and the documents show us very clearly that only the smallest
+fraction of these criminous clerks were imprisoned for any length of time.
+Indeed, for any such strict system, the episcopal prisons would have
+needed to be ten times their actual size. Equally seldom do we find
+notices of the next drastic punishment in the bishop's power--the total
+degradation of the offender from his Orders, after which the lay judges
+might punish him unchallenged for his second crime. Many of the guilty
+parties did, in fact, "purge" themselves successfully, and were thus let
+loose on society as before; this we have on the unimpeachable testimony of
+the Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne, even if it were not sufficiently evident
+from the records themselves. The notoriously guilty received more or less
+inadequate punishments, and were sometimes simply shunted on to another
+diocese, a shifting of responsibility which was practised even by the
+strictest of reforming prelates. The curious reader may trace for himself,
+in the English summaries from Bishop Giffard's register, the practical
+working of these clerical privileges.[273] First, there are frequent
+records of criminous clerks handed over to the bishop, in the ordinary
+routine, by the lay justices. Sometimes the bishop had to interfere in a
+more summary fashion, as when he commissioned four rural deans "to cause
+Robert, rector of the Church of the Blessed Mary in the market of Bristol,
+to be released, he being suspected of homicide having fled to the church,
+and having been besieged here; and to excommunicate all who should oppose
+them" (49). Robert had not yet gone through any formal trial; the bishop
+apparently rescued him merely from the fury of the people; but, even if he
+had been tried and condemned by the King's courts, he had still a liberal
+chance of escape. A few pages further in the register (79) we find a
+declaration "that whereas William de Capella, an acolyte, was accused and
+condemned for the death of John Gogun of Pershore, before the justices
+itinerant at Worcester, and was on demand of the bishop's commissary
+delivered up by the same justices, the same William being afterwards
+examined before the sub-prior of Worcester and Geoffrey de Cubberlay,
+clerk, solemnly declared that he was in nowise guilty; and at length upon
+proclamations, no one opposing, with four priests, two sub-deacons, and
+six acolytes, his compurgators, he was admitted to purgation and declared
+innocent of the said crime; and after giving security to answer any
+accusers if required, he was permitted to depart freely. And it is
+forbidden under pain of anathema to any one to lay such homicide to the
+charge of the said William." Sometimes, however, the scandal was too
+notorious; and, though no mere layman had the least legal right to
+interfere with the bishop's own private justice, the King would apply
+pressure in the name of common sense. So on page 408 we find a "letter
+from King Edward I. to John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, desiring
+him to refuse purgation to Robert de Lawarre, a clerk accused of theft and
+homicide and in the gaol of Worcester;" and a few months later the same
+strenuous champion of justice sent a more general warning to the Bishop of
+Worcester, "forbidding him to take the purgation of clerks detained in his
+prison, whose crimes are notorious; but with regard to others he may take
+such purgation" (410). The system was, indeed, notoriously faulty, and did
+much to encourage that venality in the clerical courts which moved
+Chaucer's laughter and the indignation of his contemporaries. The clergy,
+says Gower, are judges in their own cause, and each shields the other: "My
+turn to-day; to-morrow thou shalt do the like for me." In vain did
+councils decree year after year that they should bear no arms; rectors (as
+we have seen in Chapter VIII.) imperturbably bequeathed their formidable
+daggers by will, and duly registered the bequest in the Bishop's court. "O
+Priest, answer to my call; wherefore hast thou so long a knife dangling at
+thy belt? art thou armed to fight in God's quarrel or the devil's?... The
+wild beast in rutting-season becomes fiercer and more wanton; if ever he
+be thwarted, forthwith he will fight and strike; and that is the same
+cause why the priests fight when they turn to lechery like beasts; they
+wander idly everywhere seeking and hunting for women, with whom they
+corrupt the country."[274] A century later the Commons pressed the King
+for fresh and more stringent laws to remedy the notorious fact that "upon
+trust of the privilege of the Church, divers persons have been the more
+bold to commit murder, rape, robbery, theft, and other mischievous deeds,
+because they have been continually admitted to the benefit of the clergy
+as often as they did offend in any of the [aforesaid]."
+
+This petition of the Commons and the Act which resulted from it, had
+already often been anticipated by the rough-and-ready justice of the
+people themselves. In 1382, the citizens of London took these matters into
+their own hands, and Chaucer had probably seen more than one unchaste
+priest marched with his guilty partner to the common lock-up in Cornhill,
+to the accompaniment of derisive music, and amid the jeers of the
+populace. Eight years after his death, the city authorities began to keep
+a regular record of such cases, and "Letter-Book," I, "contains some
+dozens of similar charges, mostly against chaplains celebrating in the
+city, temp. Henry IV. to Henry VI."[275] This lynch-law is abundantly
+explained by the very disproportionate numbers of criminous clerks whom we
+often find recorded in coroners' or assize rolls, and who were frequently
+no mere shavelings, but priests and substantial incumbents.[276] In 1200
+these men were almost above the law; in 1600 they were amenable to justice
+as though they had not been anointed with oil; in 1400 it depended (as in
+London and in this Yelvertoft case) whether the popular indignation was
+strong enough to beat down the clerical privilege.
+
+"Accident plays a more important part in the 14th century than in any
+other age," and in many ways England was no doubt the merrier for this.
+Prosaic and uniform modern Justice, bewigged as well as blindfolded,
+could no more have been foreseen by Chaucer than railways or life
+insurance. First of all, there was the chance of bribing the judge in the
+regular and acknowledged way of business.[277] Then, the prospect of a
+Royal pardon; Edward III. more than once proclaimed such a general
+amnesty; and a petition of the Commons in 1389, forthwith embodied in an
+Act of Parliament, is eloquent on the "outrageous mischiefs and damages
+which have befallen the Realm because treasons, murders, and rapes of
+women are too commonly perpetrated; and all the more so because charters
+of pardon have been too lightly granted in such cases." The terms of the
+petition and bill, and the heroic measures of remedy, are sufficiently
+significant of the state of things with which the reformers had to
+contend.[278]
+
+Moreover, justice offered at every point a series of splendid
+uncertainties, and a thousand giddy turns of fortune's wheel. Apart from
+the practical impunity of the powerful, even the poorest felon had more
+chances in his favour than the modern plutocrat; for there is no higher
+prize than a man's own life, and no American millionaire enjoys facilities
+for homicide equal to those of our 14th-century villagers. Such
+regrettable incidents, as reckoned from the coroners' rolls, were from
+five to forty times more frequent then than in our days--it depends
+whether we count them as mere manslaughters or, according to the stricter
+idea of modern justice, as downright murders. No doubt stabbing was never
+so frequent or so systematic in England as at Naples; but thousands of
+worthy Englishmen might have cried with Chaucer's Host, "for I am
+perilous with knife in hand!" Many readers have doubtless noted how, in
+this very passage, Harry Bailey reckons as probable punishment for
+homicide not the gallows, but only outlawry--
+
+  I wot well she will do me slay some day
+  Some neighëbour, and thennë go my way....
+
+The fact is that judicial statistics of the Middle Ages show the murderer
+to have had many more chances of survival than a convicted thief. The
+Northumberland Roll of 1279 (to choose a typical instance) gives 72
+homicides to only 43 accidental deaths. These 72 deaths were brought home
+to 83 culprits, of whom only 3 are recorded to have been hanged. Of the
+remainder, 69 escaped altogether, 6 took sanctuary, 2 were never
+identified, 1 pleaded his clergy, 1 was imprisoned, and 1 was fined. To a
+mind of any imagination, such bare facts will often open wider vistas than
+a great deal of so-called poetry. There can be no truer commentary on the
+"Tale of Gamelyn" or the "Geste of Robin Hood" than these formal assize
+rolls. The justice's clerk drones on, with damnable iteration, paragraph
+after paragraph, "Alan Fuller ... and he fled, and therefore let him be
+outlawed; chattels he hath none"; "Patrick Scot ... fled ... outlawed";
+"William Slater ... fled ... outlawed"; but all the while we see the broad
+sunshine outside the windows, and hear the rustle of the forest leaves,
+and voices whisper in our ear--
+
+  He must needës walk in wood that may not walk in town.
+
+    *       *       *       *       *
+
+  In summer, when the shaws be sheen,
+    And leaves be large and long,
+  It is full merry in fair forest
+    To hear the fowlës' song.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+PRIESTS AND PEOPLE
+
+    "Charity is a childlike thing, as Holy Church witnesseth;
+  As proud of a penny as of a pound of gold,
+  And all so glad of a gown of grey russet
+  As of a coat of damask or of clean scarlet.
+  He is glad with all glad, as girls that laughen all,
+  And sorry when he seeth men sorry; as thou seest children ...
+  Laugh when men laughen, and lower where men low'ren....
+  And in a friar's frock he was found once,
+  But that is far and many years, in Francis' time;
+  In that suit since too seldom hath he been found."
+                                  "Piers Plowman," B., xvii., 296, 352
+
+
+When the greatest Pope of the 13th century saw in his dream a vision of
+St. Francis propping the tottering church, both he and the saint augured
+from this happy omen a reformation more sudden and complete than was
+actually possible. Church historians of all schools have often seemed to
+imply that if St. Francis had come back to earth on the first or second
+centenary of his death, he would have found the Church rather worse than
+better; and certainly Chaucer's contemporaries thought so. It is probable
+that in this they were mistaken; that the higher life was in fact
+unfolding no less surely in religion than in the State, but that men's
+impatience of evils which were only too obvious, and a restlessness bred
+by the rapid growth of new ideas, tempted them to despair too easily of
+their own age. The failure of the friars became a theme of common talk, as
+soon as enough time had gone by for the world to realize that Francis and
+Dominic had but done what man can do, and that there was as yet no visibly
+new heaven or new earth. Wycliffe himself scarcely inveighed more
+strongly against many of the worst abuses in the Church than Bonaventura a
+century before him--Bonaventura, the canonized saint and Minister General
+of the Franciscans, who as a boy had actually seen the Founder face to
+face. The current of thought during those hundred years is typified by
+Dante and the author of "Piers Plowman." Dante, bitterly as he rebuked the
+corruptions of the age, still dreamed of reform on conservative lines. In
+"Piers Plowman" it is frankly recognized that things must be still worse
+before they can be better. The Church is there described as already
+succumbing to the assaults of Antichrist, aided by "proud priests more
+than a thousand"--
+
+  'By Mary!' quoth a cursed priest of the March of Ireland,
+  'I count no more conscience, if only I catch silver,
+  Than I do to drink a draught of good ale!'
+  And so said sixty of the same country,
+  And shotten again with shot, many a sheaf of oaths,
+  And broad hookčd arrows, '_God's heart!_' and '_God's nails!_'
+  And had almost Unity and Holy Church adown.
+  Conscience cried 'Help, clergy,[279] or else I fall
+  Through imperfect priests and prelates of Holy Church.'
+  Friars heard him cry, and camen him to help;
+  But, for they knew not their craft, Conscience forsook them.
+
+One friar, however, is admitted, Brother "Creep-into-Houses," but he turns
+out the worst traitor of all, benumbing Contrition by his false
+absolutions--
+
+  Sloth saw that, and so did Pride,
+  And came with a keen will Conscience to assail.
+  Conscience cried oft, and bade Clergy help him,
+  And also Contrition, for to keep the gate.
+  'He lieth and dreameth,' said Peace, 'and so do many other;
+  The friar with his physic this folk hath enchanted,
+  And plastered them so easily, they dread no sin.'
+    'By Christ!' quoth Conscience then, 'I will become a pilgrim,
+  And walken as wide as all the world lasteth
+  To seek Piers the Plowman;[280] that Pride may be destroyed,
+  And that friars have a finding,[281] that for need flatteren,
+  And counterplead me, Conscience. Now, Kind me avenge
+  And send me hap and heal, till I have Piers the Plowman.'
+  And sith he cried after grace, till I gan awake.
+
+So ends this dreamer on the Malvern Hills, and so thought many more good
+Christians of Chaucer's time. It would be tedious even to enumerate the
+orthodox authorities which testify to the deep corruption of popular
+religion in the 14th century. Two books of Gower's "Vox Clamantis" (or
+one-third of the whole work) are devoted to invectives against the Church
+of his time; and he goes over the same ground with equal minuteness in his
+"Mirour de l'Omme." The times are out of joint, he says, the light of
+faith grows dim; the clergy are mostly ignorant, quarrelsome, idle, and
+unchaste, and the prelates do not correct them because they themselves are
+no better. The average priests do the exact opposite of what Chaucer
+praises in his Poor Parson; they curse for tithes, and leave their sheep
+in the lurch to go mass-hunting into the great towns. If, again, they stay
+unwillingly in the villages, then instead of preaching and visiting they
+waste their own time and the patrimony of the poor in riot or debauchery;
+nay, the higher clergy even encourage vice among the people in order to
+gain money and influence for themselves. Their evil example among the
+multitude, and the contempt into which they bring their office among the
+better laity, are mainly responsible for the decay of society. Of monks
+and nuns and friars, Gower writes even more bitterly; the monks are
+frequently unchaste; nuns are sometimes debauched even by their own
+official visitors, and the friars seriously menace the purity of family
+life. In short, the reign of Antichrist seems to be at hand; if the world
+is to be mended we can only pray God to reform the clergy. Wycliffe
+himself wrote nothing more bitter than this; yet Gower was a whole
+horizon removed from anti-clericalism or heresy; he hated Lollardy, and
+chose to spend his last days among the canons of Southwark. Moreover, in
+the next generation, we have an equally scathing indictment of the Church
+from Gascoigne, another bitter anti-Wycliffite and the most distinguished
+Oxford Chancellor of his generation. St. Catherine of Siena, who knew Rome
+and Avignon only too well, is proportionately more vehement in her
+indignation. Moreover, the formal records of the Church itself bear out
+all the gravest charges in contemporary literature. The parish churches
+were very frequently reported as neglected, dirty, and ruinous; the very
+service books and most necessary ornaments as either dilapidated or
+lacking altogether; priests and people as grossly irreverent.[282]
+Wherever we find a visitation including laity and clerics alike, the
+clergy presented for unchastity are always numerous out of all proportion
+to the laity; sometimes more than ten times as numerous. Episcopal
+registers testify plainly to the difficulty of dealing with monastic decay
+and to the neglect of proper precautions against the intrusion of unworthy
+clerics into benefices. Many of the anti-Lollard Articles solemnly
+presented by the University of Oxford to the King in 1414 might have been
+drawn up by Wycliffe himself. These pillars of the Church pray Henry V.,
+who was known to have religion so much at heart, to find some remedy for
+the sale of indulgences, the "undisciplined and unlearned crowd which
+daily pressed to take sacred orders"; the scandalous ease with which
+"illiterate, silly, and ignorant" candidates, even if rejected by the
+English authorities, could get ordained at the Roman court; the system
+which allowed monasteries to prey upon so many parishes; the pardoners'
+notorious frauds, the irreverence of the people at large, the embezzlement
+of hospital endowments, the debasement of moral standards by flattering
+friar-confessors, and lastly the numbers and practical impunity of
+fornicating monks, friars, and parish priests. As early as 1371, the
+Commons had petitioned Edward III. that, "whereas the Prelates and
+Ordinaries of Holy Church take money of clergy and laity in redemption of
+their sin from day to day, and from year to year, in that they keep their
+concubines openly ... to the open scandal and evil example of the whole
+commonalty," this system of hush-money should now be put down by Royal
+authority; that the ordinary courts of justice should have cognizance of
+such cases; and that such beneficed clergy as still persisted in
+concubinage should be deprived of their livings.[283]
+
+To comment fully on Chaucer's clerical characters in the light of other
+contemporary documents would be to write a whole volume of Church history;
+but no picture of that age could be even roughly complete without such a
+summary as I have just given. We must, of course, discount to some extent
+the language of indignation; but, to understand what it was that drew such
+bitter words from writers of such acknowledged gravity, we must try to
+transport ourselves, with our own common human feelings, into that strange
+and distant world. So much of the old framework of society was either
+ill-made or long since outworn; a new world was struggling to grow up
+freely amid the mass of dying conventions; the human spirit was surging
+vehemently against its barriers; and much was swept boisterously away.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSSEX, BEFORE ITS RECENT
+RESTORATION
+
+(FOR PLAN AND SECTION SEE P. 97)]
+
+
+Think for a moment of the English boy as we know him; for in most
+essentials he was very much the same even five hundred years ago. At
+fifteen or sixteen (or even at an earlier age, if his family had
+sufficient influence) he might well receive a fat rectory or canonry.
+Before the Black Death, an enormous proportion of the livings in lay
+advowson were given to persons who were not in priest's orders, and often
+not in holy orders at all.[284] The Church theoretically forbade with the
+utmost severity this intrusion of mere boys into the best livings; but all
+through the Church the forbidden thing was done daily, and most
+shamelessly of all at the Papal court. A strong bishop in the 13th century
+might indeed fight against the practice, but with slender success. Giffard
+of Worcester, a powerful and obstinate prelate, attempted in 1282 to
+enforce the recent decree of the Ecumenical Council of Lyons, and declared
+the rectory of Campden vacant because the incumbent had refused for three
+years past to qualify himself by taking priest's orders. After four years
+of desperate litigation, during which the Pope twice intervened in a
+half-hearted and utterly ineffectual fashion, the Bishop was obliged to
+leave the case to the judgment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose
+court enjoyed a reputation for venality only second to that of Rome. Other
+bishops seem to have given up all serious attempts to enforce the decree
+of the Council of Lyons; Stapeldon of Exeter, for instance, permitted
+nearly three-quarters of the first presentations by laymen to be made to
+persons who were not in priest's orders; and he commonly enjoined, after
+institution, that the new rector should go forthwith and study at the
+University. To appreciate the full significance of this, we must remember
+that boys habitually went up to Oxford in those days at from thirteen to
+sixteen, and that the discipline there was of almost incredible laxity.
+The majority of students, after inscribing their names on the books of a
+master whose authority over them was almost nominal, went and lodged where
+they chose in the town. At the time when Chaucer might have gone to Oxford
+there were, perhaps, 3000 students; but (apart from the friaries and
+collegiate provision for a few monks) there were only five colleges, with
+accommodation in all for something less than eighty students. Only one of
+these was of stone; not one was yet built in that quadrangular form which,
+adopted in Chaucer's later days by New College, has since set the pattern
+for both Universities; and the discipline was as rudimentary as the
+architecture. A further number of students were accommodated in "Halls" or
+"Hostels." These had originally been ordinary private houses, rented by
+two or more students in common; and the Principal was simply an older
+student who made himself responsible for the rent. Not until thirty years
+after Chaucer's death was it enacted that the Principal must be a B.A. at
+least; and since we find that at Paris, where the same regulation was
+introduced about the same time, it was necessary even fifty years later to
+proceed against women who kept University halls, it is quite probable that
+the salutary statute was frequently broken at Oxford also. The government
+of these halls was entirely democratic, and only at a later period was it
+possible even to close the gates on the students at night. These boys
+"were in general perfectly free to roam about the streets up to the hour
+at which all respectable citizens were in the habit, if not actually
+compelled by the town statutes, of retiring to bed. They might spend their
+evenings in the tavern and drink as much as they please. Drunkenness is
+rarely treated as a University offence at all.... The penalties which are
+denounced and inflicted even for grave outrages are seldom severe, and
+never of a specially schoolboy character." "It is necessary to assert
+emphatically that the religious education of a bygone Oxford, in so far as
+it ever had any existence, was an inheritance not from the Middle Ages but
+from the Reformation. In Catholic countries it was the product of the
+Counter-reformation. Until that time the Church provided as little
+professional education for the future priest as it did religious
+instruction for the ordinary layman."[285] The only religious education
+was that the student, like other citizens, was supposed to attend Mass
+regularly on Sundays and holy days, and might very likely know enough
+Latin to follow the service. But the want of proper grounding in Latin was
+always the weak point of these Universities; it is probable that at least
+half the scholars left Oxford without any degree whatever; and we have not
+only the general complaints of contemporaries, but actual records of
+examinations showing that quite a considerable proportion of the clergy
+could not decently construe the language of their own service-books.
+
+How, indeed, should the ordinary idle man have learned anything to speak
+of, under so rudimentary a system of teaching and discipline? Gower
+asserts as strongly as Wycliffe that the beneficed clergy escaped from
+their parishes to the University as to a place of riot and
+self-indulgence. If Exeter was a typical diocese (and there seems no
+reason to the contrary) there must have been at any given time something
+like six hundred English rectors and vicars living at the Universities
+with the licence of their bishops; and the Registers show definite traces
+of others who took French leave. Here, then, was a society in which boys
+were herded together with men of middle or advanced age, and in which the
+seniors were often the least decorous.[286] No doubt the average boy
+escaped the company of those "chamberdekyns," of whom the Oxford
+authorities complained that "they sleep all day, and prowl by night about
+taverns and houses of ill fame and occasions of homicide"; no doubt it was
+only a small minority at Cambridge of whom men complained to Parliament
+that they scoured the country in gangs for purposes of robbery and
+blackmail. But the average man cared no more for learning then than now,
+and had far fewer opportunities of study. The athleticism which is the
+refuge of modern idleness was severely discouraged by the authorities,
+while the tavern was always open. The Bishop himself, by instituting this
+boy in his teens, had given his approval to the vicious system which gave
+the prizes of the Church to the rich and powerful, and left a heavy
+proportion of the parish work to be done by a lower class of hireling
+"chaplains." These latter (who, like Chaucer's Poor Parson, were mostly
+drawn from the peasant class) were willing to accept the lowest possible
+wages and the smallest possible chance of preferment for the sake of a
+position which, at the worst, put them far above their father or their
+brothers; and meanwhile the more fortunate rectors, little controlled
+either by their bishops or by public opinion, drifted naturally into the
+position of squarsons, hunters, and farmers. The large majority were
+precluded from almost all intellectual enjoyments by their imperfect
+education and the scarcity of books. The regular and healthy home life,
+which has kept so many an idle man straight in the world, was denied to
+these men, who were professionally pledged to live as the angels of God,
+while they stood exposed to every worldly temptation. The consequence was
+inevitable; orthodox writers for centuries before the Reformation
+complained that the real fount and origin of heresy lay in the evil lives
+of the clergy. In outlying districts like Wales, probably also in Ireland,
+and certainly in parts of Germany, clerical concubinage was systematically
+tolerated, and only taxed for the benefit of the bishop's or archdeacon's
+purse. The reader has already seen that this same system was often
+practised in England, though with less cynical effrontery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+    "Although the style [of Chaucer] for the antiquity may distaste you,
+    yet as under a bitter and rough rind there lieth a delicate kernel of
+    conceit and sweet invention."--HENRY PEACHAM, "The Compleat
+    Gentleman," 1622
+
+
+Into this state of things suddenly came the "Black Death" of 1348-9, the
+most terrible plague that ever raged in Christendom. This was at once
+hailed by moralists as God's long-delayed punishment upon a society rotten
+to the core. At first the world was startled into seriousness. Many of the
+clergy fought the plague with that self-sacrificing devotion which, in all
+denominations, a large fraction of the Christian clergy has always shown
+at similar moments. But there is no evidence to show that the priests died
+in sensibly larger proportions than their flocks; and many contemporary
+chroniclers expressly record that the sick were commonly deserted even by
+their spiritual pastors. After the first shock was over, the multitude
+relapsed into a licence proportionate to their first terror--a reaction
+described most vividly by Boccaccio, but with equal emphasis by other
+chroniclers. Many good men, in their bitter disappointment, complained
+that the world was grown more careless and irreligious than before the
+Plague; but this can hardly be the verdict of most modern students who
+look carefully into the mass of surviving evidence.
+
+To begin with, the Black Death dealt a fatal blow to that old vicious
+system of boy-rectors. Half the population perished in the plague, half
+the livings went suddenly begging; and in the Church, as on the farm,
+labour was at a sudden premium. Such curates as survived dropped naturally
+into the vacant rectories; and, side by side with Acts of Parliament
+designed to keep the labourer down to his old wages, we find
+archi-episcopal decrees against the "unbridled cupidity" of the clergy,
+who by their pernicious example encouraged this demand of the lower
+classes for higher wages. The incumbent, who ought to be only too thankful
+that God has spared his life, takes advantage of the present stress to
+desert his parish and run after Mass-money.[287] Chaplains, again, are
+"not content with their competent and accustomed salaries," which, as a
+matter of fact, were sometimes no higher than the wages of a common archer
+or a farm bailiff. But the economic movement was irresistible; and the
+Registers from this time forward show an extraordinary increase in the
+number of priests instituted to livings. In the same lists where the
+priests were formerly only thirty-seven per cent. of the whole, their
+proportion rises during and after the Pestilence to seventy-four per cent.
+The Black Death did in one year what the Ecumenical Council of Lyons had
+conspicuously failed to do, though summoned by a great reforming Pope and
+inspired by such zealous disciplinarians as St. Bonaventura and his
+fellow-Franciscan, Eudes Rigaud of Rouen.
+
+Again, the shock of the Pestilence, the complete desertion of so many poor
+country benefices by the clergy, and the scandal generated by this quarrel
+over wages between chaplains and their employers, naturally threw the
+people back very much upon their own religious resources. The lay control
+over parish finances in 15th-century England, which, limited as it was,
+still excites the wonder of modern Catholicism, probably dated from this
+period. Men no longer gave much to monks, or even (in comparison with past
+times) to friars; but they now devoted their main religious energies to
+beautifying and endowing their own parish churches, which became far
+larger and more richly furnished in the 15th century than in the 13th.
+Moreover, Abbot Gasquet is probably right in attributing to the Black
+Death the rise of a new tone in orthodox religious feeling, which "was
+characterized by a [more] devotional and more self-reflective cast than
+previously." There was every probability of such a religious change; all
+earnest men had seen in the plague the chastening hand of God; and in the
+end it yielded the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which were
+exercised thereby.
+
+But this bracing process could not possibly, under the circumstances of
+the time, work entirely on the lines of orthodox conservatism. When we
+count up the forces that produced Wycliffism--the notorious corruption of
+the papal court, its unpopular French leanings, the vast sums drawn from
+England by foreign ecclesiastics, the unpopularity of the clergy at home,
+the growth of the English language and national spirit--among all these
+causes we must not forget to note that Wycliffe and his contemporaries, in
+their early manhood, had struggled through a year of horrors almost beyond
+modern conception. They had seen the multitude run wild, first with
+religious fanaticism and then with blasphemous despair; had watched all
+this volcanic matter cool rapidly down into dead lava; and were left to
+count one more abortive reform, and re-echo the old despairing "How long,
+O Lord!" "Sad to say, it seemeth to many that we are fallen into those
+unhappy times wherein the lights of heaven seem to be turned to darkness,
+and the stars of heaven are fallen upon the earth.... Our priests are now
+become blind, dark, and beclouded ... they are now darker than the
+laity.... Lo, in these days there is neither shaven crown on their head,
+nor religious decency in their garments, nor modesty in their words, nor
+temperance in their food, nor shamefastness in their gestures, nor even
+chastity in their deeds."[288] Such is the cry of an orthodox contemporary
+of Wycliffe's; and words like these explain why Wycliffe himself became
+unorthodox against his will. If he had died at the age of fifty or
+thereabouts, towards the beginning of Chaucer's business career, posterity
+would have known him only as the most distinguished English philosopher of
+his time. The part which he played in later life was to a great extent
+forced upon him by the strong practical sense which underlay his
+speculative genius. Others saw the faults of religion as clearly, and
+exposed them as unmercifully, as he. But, while they were content to end
+with a pious "Well, God mend all!" Wycliffe was one of those in whom such
+thoughts lead to action: "Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him to mend
+it!" No doubt there were errors in his teaching, and much more that was
+premature; otherwise the authorities could never have managed so nearly to
+exterminate Lollardy. On the other hand, it is equally certain that
+Wycliffe gave a voice to feelings widespread and deeply rooted in the
+country. Orthodox chroniclers record their amazement at the rapid spread
+of his doctrines. "In those days," says Knighton, with picturesque
+exaggeration, "that sect was held in the greatest honour, and multiplied
+so that you could scarce meet two men by the way whereof one was not a
+disciple of Wycliffe." Walsingham speaks of the London citizens in general
+as "unbelieving towards God and the traditions of their fathers,
+supporters of the Lollards."[289] In 1395 the Wycliffite opinions were
+openly pleaded before Parliament by two privy councillors, a powerful
+Northamptonshire landlord, and the brother of the Earl of Salisbury; the
+bishops had to recall Richard II. in hot haste from Ireland to deal with
+this open propaganda of heresy. Ten years after Chaucer's death, again, a
+Bill was presented by the Commons for the wholesale disendowment of
+bishoprics and greater monasteries, "because of priests and clerks that
+now have full nigh destroyed all the houses of alms within the realm." The
+petitioners pleaded that, apart from the enormous gain to the finances of
+the State, and to a proposed new system of almshouses, it would be a
+positive advantage to disendow idle and luxurious prelates and monks, "the
+which life and evil example of them hath been so long vicious that all the
+common people, both lords and simple commons, be now so vicious and
+infected through boldship of their sin, that scarce any man dreadeth God
+nor the Devil." The King and the Prince of Wales, however, would not
+listen either to this proposal or to those upon which the petitioners
+afterwards fell back, that criminous clerks should be dealt with by the
+King's courts, and that the recent Act for burning Lollards should be
+repealed.[290]
+
+The Lollard movement in the Parliament of 1395 was led by Chaucer's old
+fellow-ambassador, Sir Richard Stury, the "valiant ancient knight" of
+Froissart's chronicles; and Chaucer himself has often been hailed, however
+falsely, as a Wycliffite. The mere fact that he speaks disparagingly of
+the clergy simply places him side by side with St. Bernard, St.
+Bonaventura, and St. Catherine of Siena, whose language on this subject is
+sometimes far stronger than his. As a fellow-protégé of John of Gaunt,
+Chaucer must often have met Wycliffe in that princely household; he
+sympathized, as so many educated Englishmen did, with many of the
+reformer's opinions; but all the evidence is against his having belonged
+in any sense to the Lollard sect. The testimony of the poet's own writings
+has been excellently summed up in Chap. VI. of Professor Lounsbury's
+"Studies in Chaucer." In early life our hero seems to have accepted as a
+matter of course the popular religion of his time. His hymn to the Virgin
+even outbids the fervour of its French original; and in the tales of
+miracles which he versified he has taken no pains to soften down touches
+which would now be received with scepticism alike by Protestants and by
+the papal commissioners for the revision of the Breviary. (Tales of the
+"Second Nun," "Man of Law," and "Prioress.") Even then he was probably
+among the many who disbelieved in tales of Jewish ritual murder, though
+not sufficiently to deter the artist in him from welcoming the exquisite
+pathos of the little scholar's death. But his mind was naturally critical;
+and it was further widened by an acquaintance with many cities and many
+men. The merchants and scholars of Italy were notorious for their
+free-thinking; and we may see in the unpriestly priest Froissart the
+sceptical habit of mind which was engendered in a 14th-century
+"intellectual" by a life spent in courts and among men of the world. It is
+quite natural, therefore, to find Chaucer scoffing openly at several small
+superstitions, which in many less sceptical minds lived on for
+centuries--the belief in Arthur and Lancelot, in fairies, in magic, in
+Virgilian miracles, in pagan oracles and gods, in alchemy, and even in
+judicial astrology. These last two points, indeed, supply a very close
+analogy to his religious views. It is difficult to avoid concluding, from
+his very intimate acquaintance with the details of the pursuit, that he
+had himself once been bitten with the craze for the philosopher's stone.
+Again, if we only looked at his frequent poetical allusions to judicial
+astrology, we should be driven to conclude that he was a firm believer in
+the superstition; but in the prose "Astrolabe," one of his latest and
+most serious writings, he expressly repudiates any such belief.
+
+The analogy from this to his expressions on religious subjects is very
+close. At first sight we might judge him to have accepted to the last,
+though with growing reserve and waning enthusiasm, the whole contemporary
+system of doctrines and practices which Wycliffe in later life so
+unreservedly condemned. But one or two passages offer startling proof to
+the contrary. Take the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women"--
+
+  A thousand timës have I heard men tell
+  That there is joy in heaven and pain in hell,
+  And I accordë well that it is so.
+  But natheless yet wot I well also
+  That there is none dwelling in this countree
+  That either hath in heaven or hell y-be,
+  He may of it none other wayës witen                   [know
+  But as he hath heard said or found it written,
+  For by assay there may no man it prove.
+
+And, again, the reflections which he adds upon the death of Arcite,
+without the least authority from the original of Boccaccio--
+
+  His spirit changčd house, and wentë there,
+  As I came never, I can not tell where:
+  Therefore I stint, I am no divinister;                [stop
+  Of soulës find I not in this register,
+  Nor list me those opinions to tell
+  Of them, though that they writen where they dwell.
+
+It is difficult to believe that the man who gratuitously recorded those
+two personal impressions, without the least excuse of artistic necessity,
+was a perfectly orthodox Catholic. It is more than possible that he would
+not have accepted in cold blood all the consequences of his words; but we
+may see plainly in him that sceptical, mocking spirit to which the
+contemporary Sacchetti constantly addresses himself in his sermons. This
+was indeed one of the most obvious results of the growing unpopularity of
+the hierarchy, intensified by the shock of the Black Death. That great
+crisis had specially stimulated the two religious extremes. Churches grew
+rapidly in size and in splendour of furniture, while great lords built
+themselves oratories from which they could hear Mass without getting out
+of bed. The Pope decreed a new service for a new Saint's Day, "full of
+mysteries, stuffed with indulgences," at a time when even reasonable men
+began to complain that the world had too many. Richard II. presented his
+Holiness with an elaborate "Book of the Miracles of Edward late King of
+England"--that is, of the weak and vicious Edward II., whose attempted
+canonization was as much a political job as those of Lancaster and
+Arundel, Scrope and Henry VI.; and this popular canonization ran so wild
+that men feared lest the crowd of new saintlings should throw Christ and
+His Apostles into the shade. On the other side there was the "new
+theology," which had grown up, with however little justification, from the
+impulse given by orthodox and enthusiastic friars--pantheistic doctrines,
+minimizing the reality of sin; denials of eternal punishment; attempts to
+find a heaven for good pagans and Jews.[291] Even in the 13th century,
+willingly or unwillingly, the friars had raised similar questions; a
+Minister-General had been scandalized to hear them debating in their
+schools "whether God existed"; and Berthold of Ratisbon had felt bound to
+warn his hearers against the subtle sophism that souls, when once they
+have been thoroughly calcined, must reach a point at which anything short
+of hell-fire would feel uncomfortably chilly. This is the state of mind
+into which Chaucer, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have
+drifted. He had no reasoned antagonism to the Church dogmas as a whole; on
+the contrary, he was keenly sensible to the beauty of much that was
+taught. But the humourist in him was no less tickled by many popular
+absurdities; and he had enough philosophy to enjoy the eternal dispute
+between free-will and predestination. As a boy, he had knelt unthinkingly;
+as a broken old man, he was equally ready to bow again before Eternal
+Omnipotence, and to weep bitterly for his sins. But, in his years of ripe
+experience and prosperity and conscious intellectual power, we must think
+of him neither among the devout haunters of shrines and sanctuaries nor
+among those who sat more austerely at the feet of Wycliffe's Poor Priests;
+rather among the rich and powerful folk who scandalized both Catholics and
+Lollards by taking God's name in vain among their cups, and whetting their
+worldly wit on sacred mysteries. We get glimpses of this in many
+quarters--in the "Roman de la Rose," for instance, but still more in
+Sacchetti's sermons and the poem of "Piers Plowman." Here the poet
+complains, after speaking of the "gluttony and great oaths" that were then
+fashionable--
+
+  "But if they carpen of Christ, these clerks and these layfolk    [discuss
+  At the meat in their mirth, when minstrels be still,
+  Then tell they of the Trinity a tale or twain
+  And bringen forth a bald reason, and take Bernard to witness,
+  And put forth a presumption to prove the sooth.
+  Thus they drivel at their dais the Deity to know,
+  And gnawen God with the gorge when the gut is full ...
+    I have heard high men eating at the table
+  Carpen, as they clerkës were, of Christ and His might
+  And laid faults upon the Father that formed us all,
+  And carpen against clerkës crabbed words:--
+  'Why would our Saviour suffer such a worm in His bliss
+  That beguiled the Woman and the Man after,
+  Through which wiles and words they wenten to hell,
+  And all their seed for their sin the same death suffered?
+  Here lieth your lore,' these lords 'gin dispute.
+  'Of that ye clerks us kenneth of Christ by the Gospel ...        [teach
+  Why should we, that now be, for the works of Adam
+  Rot and be rent? reason would it never ...'
+  Such motives they move, these masters in their glory,
+  And maken men to misbelieve that muse much on their words."[292]
+
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY
+
+VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER'S TOMB]
+
+
+More unorthodox still were those whom Walsingham would have made partly
+responsible for the horrors of the Peasants' Revolt. "Some traced the
+cause of these evils to the sins of the great folk, whose faith in God was
+feigned; for some of them (it is said) believed that there was no God, no
+sacrament of the altar, no resurrection from the dead, but that as a beast
+dies so also there is an end of man."
+
+There is, of course, no such dogmatic infidelity in Chaucer. Even if he
+had felt it, he was too wise to put it in writing; as Professor Lounsbury
+justly says of the two passages quoted above, "the wonder is not that they
+are found so infrequently, but that they are found at all." Yet there was
+also in Chaucer a true vein of religious seriousness. "Troilus and
+Criseyde" was written not long before the "Legend of Good Women"; and as
+at the outset of the later poem he goes out of his way to scoff, so at the
+end of the "Troilus" he is at equal pains to make a profession of faith.
+The last stanza of all, with its invocation to the Trinity and to the
+Virgin Mary, might be merely conventional; medieval literature can show
+similar sentiments in very strange contexts, and part of this very stanza
+is translated from Dante. But however Chaucer may have loved to let his
+wit play about sacred subjects "at meat in his mirth when minstrels were
+still," we can scarcely fail to recognize another side to his mind when we
+come to the end of those "Troilus" stanzas which are due merely to
+Boccaccio, and begin upon the translator's own epilogue--
+
+  O youngë freshë folkës, he or she
+  In which ay love up-groweth with your age,
+  Repair ye home from worldly vanitee ...
+
+"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is
+played out." But, though we have nothing of the reformer in our
+composition; though we are for the most part only too frankly content to
+take the world as we find it; though, even in their faith, our
+fellow-Christians make us murmur, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
+though we most love to write of Vanity Fair, yet at the bottom of our
+heart we do desire a better country, and confess sometimes with our mouth
+that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
+
+Indeed, if our poet had not been keenly sensible of the beauty of
+holiness, then the less Chaucer he! As it is, he stands the most
+Shakespearian figure in English literature, after Shakespeare himself. Age
+cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. We venerate him
+for his years, and he daily startles us with the eternal freshness of his
+youth. All springtide is here, with its green leaves and singing-birds;
+aptly we read him stretched at length in the summer shade, yet almost more
+delightfully in winter, with our feet on the fender; for he smacks of all
+familiar comforts--old friends, old books, old wine, and even, by a
+proleptic miracle, old cigars. "Here," said Dryden, "is God's plenty;" and
+Lowell inscribed the first leaf of his Chaucer with that promise which the
+poet himself set upon the enchanted gate of his "Parliament of Fowls"--
+
+  Through me men go into the blissful place
+  Of the heart's heal and deadly woundës' cure;
+  Through me men go unto the well of Grace,
+  Where green and lusty May doth ever endure;
+  This is the way to all good aventure;
+  Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow off-cast,
+  All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast!
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  Abjuration of the Realm, 285
+
+  Aldersgate, 117
+
+  Aldgate, 30, 56, 76, 77, 93 ff., 116, 117;
+    tower, 78, 266
+
+  All Hallows Stonechurch, 77
+
+  Angle, Sir Guichard de, 51
+
+  Anne of Bohemia, Queen, 56, 208
+
+  Antwerp, 13, 14
+
+  Archery, 232, 235, 236, 240
+
+  Architecture, 119
+
+  Arundel, Archbishop, 142
+
+    "      Earl, 311
+
+  Attechapel, Bartholomew, 26
+
+
+  B
+
+  Badlesmere, Lord, 297
+
+  Banastre, Katherine, 184
+
+  Becket, St. Thomas ŕ, 142, 143, 169, 288
+
+  Bedfellows, 87, 140
+
+  Belknap, Chief Justice, 264
+
+  Berkeley, the family of, 52, 179, 195 ff., 239, 240
+
+  Bishopsgate, 15
+
+  Black Death, 304
+
+  Black Prince, 17, 176
+
+  Blanch Apleton, 78
+
+  Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 37
+
+  Blountesham, Richard de, 96
+
+  Boccaccio, 47, 48
+
+  Books, cost of, 99
+
+  Boughton-under-Blee, 167
+
+  Brembre, Sir Nicholas, 60, 94, 135, 193
+
+  Brerelay, Richard, 63
+
+  Bribery, 200
+
+  Bristol, 239, 240
+
+  Buckholt, Isabella, 65
+
+  Bucklersbury, 16
+
+  Bukton, 68
+
+  Burley, Sir John, 51
+
+  Burley, Sir Simon, 54, 60
+
+  Burne-Jones, 29
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cadzand, 133
+
+  Caen, 77;
+    siege of, 248, 249
+
+  Calais, 10, 174, 183
+
+  Cambridge, 8, 77, 274, 302
+
+  Canterbury, 76, 140, 143, 145, 167, 169, 170, 271, 297
+
+  Chandos, Sir John, 175
+
+  Charing Cross Mews, 61
+
+  Charles V. of France, 33, 52, 122
+
+    "     VI. of France, 70
+
+    "     de Blois, 252
+
+  Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Aldgate, 56, 93 ff., 101;
+    his aloofness, 69, 95;
+    his birth, 3, 15;
+    and Boccaccio, 47;
+    and books, 95 ff.;
+    his childhood, 17;
+    clerk of Love, 222;
+    his Clerkship of Works, 60;
+    his Comptrollership, 54;
+    at Court, 173;
+    at the Custom House, 76, 79;
+    and Dante, 43, 74;
+    his death and tomb, 73;
+    in debt, 54, 59, 64, 65;
+    his debt to Dante, 45;
+    his family, 12;
+    his favour from Henry IV., 66;
+    his freshness, 114;
+    at Greenwich, 62;
+    his house at Westminster, 72;
+    his last poems, 68;
+    his literary development, 137;
+    in London, 53;
+    loses Clerkship, 63;
+    loses Comptrollership, 58;
+    in love, 22;
+    his love of Nature, 112;
+    and Lynn, 15;
+    his marriage, 27;
+    optimistic, 10;
+    origin of name, 12;
+    his originality, 39, 45;
+    as page, 21;
+    in Parliament, 56;
+    his pathos, 246;
+    and Petrarch, 46, 48;
+    his philosophy, 70;
+    and Piers Plowman, 71;
+    his raptus, 54;
+    and religion, 44, 149, 309 ff.;
+    his retractation, 72;
+    robbed, 63;
+    as royal yeoman, 27, 31;
+    as squire, 32;
+    his times, 1;
+    his travels, 35, 40 ff., 51;
+    in war, 25;
+    his wide experiences, 74;
+    his wife's death, 59;
+    and wine, 79;
+    and women, 119;
+    his writings, 36, 56, 64;
+    and Wycliffe, 308
+
+  Chaucer, Elizabeth, 74
+
+    "      John, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 193
+
+    "      Lowys, 55, 64, 73
+
+    "      Philippa, 27, 28, 29, 30, 59, 96, 101, 103, 104, 178
+
+    "      Richard, 13
+
+    "      Robert Malyn le, 12, 13
+
+    "      Simon, 283, 284
+
+    "      Thomas, 31, 73
+
+  Chaumpaigne, Cecilia, 54, 55
+
+  Chausier, Elizabeth, 74
+
+  Cheapside, 16, 81, 88, 89, 90
+
+  Child-marriages, 198, 204, 206, 207
+
+  Children beaten, 215
+
+  Chiltern Hills, 117
+
+  Chimneys, 86
+
+  Chivalry, decay of, 190;
+    golden age of, 189;
+    and marriage, 202;
+    theory of, 188
+
+  Church, buildings decayed, 297;
+    corruption of, 296;
+    talking in, 140
+
+  Churchman, John, 79
+
+  Clarence, Lionel of, 13, 21, 22, 48, 49, 52
+
+  Clergy, and hunting, 280, 281;
+    in Parliament, 7;
+    unpopular, 306, 308;
+    youth of, 299
+
+  Clerical, criminals, 288 ff.;
+    education, 300 ff.;
+    immunity, 288 ff.;
+    influence, decay of, 8 ff.;
+    morality, 156, 157, 159, 197, 281, 291, 296, 297, 298, 303
+
+  Clerkenwell, 264
+
+  Comfort, ideal of, 191, 192, 257
+
+  Compostella, 140, 141, 142
+
+  Compurgation, 289
+
+  Conscription, 234 ff.;
+    and liberty, 251, 253, 263;
+    and peace, 250
+
+  Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, 30
+
+  Contrasts, 176
+
+  Cornhill, 81, 107, 112, 291
+
+  Crécy, 232, 233, 238, 239, 240, 242
+
+  Crime and punishment, 283
+
+  Cripplegate, 77, 93, 94
+
+  Crusades, decay of, 190
+
+
+  D
+
+  Dancing, 108
+
+  Dartford, 154
+
+  Dartmouth, 133, 134
+
+  David, King of Scots, 17
+
+  Dennington, 13
+
+  Despenser, Bishop, 237
+
+    "        Edward, 49
+
+  Dilapidation, 297
+
+  Divorce, 205
+
+  Douglas, Sir James, 238
+
+  Dovecotes, manorial, 196
+
+  Du Guesclin, Bertrand, 241, 242, 244
+
+
+  E
+
+  Eavesdroppers, 83
+
+  Edward I., 6, 77, 122, 194, 213, 234, 235, 290
+
+    "    II., 179, 254, 297, 311
+
+    "    III., 4, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 35, 38, 42,
+               53, 59, 70, 88, 122, 123, 126, 133, 172 ff., 191, 194, 197,
+               234, 235, 237, 238, 240 ff., 249, 263, 275, 292, 298;
+    bankrupt, 126;
+    his character, 173;
+    his court, 33;
+    his marriage, 178;
+    his Rhine journey, 13
+
+  England, growing wealth of, 126;
+    unsettled state, 67
+
+  English, commerce, 122 ff.;
+    democratic, 253;
+    fickleness of, 134;
+    language, 3 ff.;
+    language in Chaucer's poems, 74;
+    in war, 244, 254
+
+  Epping, 116
+
+  Exeter, 99, 182, 301
+
+
+  F
+
+  Fastolf, Sir John, 211, 212
+
+  Florence, 40, 42, 43, 48
+
+  Food of the poor, 268
+
+  Foreigners in England, 123
+
+  Forrester (Forster), Richard, 52, 94
+
+  Frederick II., Emperor, 190
+
+  Free-thought, 44, 125, 309 ff.
+
+  French and English nobles, 33;
+    language, decay of, 3 ff.
+
+  Friars, 294, 298;
+    and usury, 124
+
+
+  G
+
+  Games, 109, 272 ff., 275
+
+  Gascoigne, Chief Justice, 211, 212
+
+  Gaston, Count of Foix, 175, 209, 211
+
+  Gauger, William le, 15
+
+  Gaunt, John of, 13, 17, 22, 30, 37, 54, 59, 60, 73, 74, 96, 227, 264, 308
+
+  Genoa, 40, 42, 78, 122
+
+  Giffard, Bishop, 278, 299
+
+  Gisers, John, 16
+
+  Glass windows, 83
+
+  Gloucester, Thomas, Duke of, 60, 186, 187, 239
+
+  Gower, John, 52, 73, 117, 145
+
+  Gravesend, 80
+
+  Greenwich, 62, 64
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hampstead, 116
+
+  Harbledown, 169
+
+  Hatfield, William of, 184
+
+  Hawkwood, Sir John, 52, 242
+
+  Henry II., 235
+
+    "   III., 72, 193
+
+    "   IV., 4, 59, 66, 67, 68, 72, 73
+
+    "   V., 73, 243, 278, 297
+
+    "   VI., 311
+
+  Heriot, 260
+
+  Highgate, 116
+
+  Hoccleve, 73, 175
+
+  Holborn, 19, 115, 117
+
+  Holidays, 273
+
+  Holland, Sir Thomas, 248
+
+  Home life, 84, 96, 104, 218
+
+  Hornchurch, Prior of, 78
+
+  Hospitals, and bad meat, 132
+
+
+  I
+
+  Infidelity, 313
+
+  Inns, 139
+
+  Invasion of England threatened, 94
+
+  Ipswich, 12, 13
+
+  Irreverence, 140, 141, 157, 275, 276, 277 ff., 297, 298
+
+  Isabella, Queen, 21, 51, 178
+
+  Isle of Wight, 133
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jean de Saintré, 23, 223
+
+  John XXII., Pope, 206
+
+  John, King of France, 17, 32, 33, 41, 194, 197, 223
+
+  Justice, 282 ff.;
+    and money, 197, 200
+
+
+  K
+
+  Kent, John, 80
+
+  Knighthood, of boys, 212;
+    cheapening of, 193;
+    decay, 242;
+    imperfect, 252;
+    and trade, 194, 210, 211
+
+  Knightsbridge, 115
+
+  Knolles, Sir Robert, 265
+
+
+  L
+
+  La Rochelle, battle of, 133
+
+  Lancaster, Thomas of, 311
+
+  Langham, Bishop, 279
+
+  Laws and penalties, 129
+
+  Lisle, Lord, 198
+
+  Lollardy, popularity of, 306
+
+  London, its byelaws, 126;
+    citizens' furniture, 85;
+    city walls, 77;
+    its churches, 82;
+    and country, 114, 193;
+    its Custom House, 79;
+    gardens, 115;
+    gate dwellings, 93;
+    growth of, 121;
+    its houses, 82, 84;
+    and Lollardy, 307;
+    population of, 115;
+    power of, 135;
+    sanitation, 267;
+    sports, 275;
+    its streets, 81, 84, 88;
+    suburbs, 116;
+    view of, 145;
+    water, 128
+
+  London Bridge, 51, 145
+
+  Louis, St., 190, 191
+
+  Love, and chivalry, 217 ff.;
+    earthly and heavenly, 222;
+    in M. A., 22, 28 ff.
+
+  Ludgate, 93, 116
+
+  Lynn, 15, 17, 77, 80, 193, 238
+
+
+  M
+
+  Manslaughter, 292;
+    and punishment, 283
+
+  Marriage, ceremonies, 109;
+    of children, 198, 204, 206, 207;
+    and chivalry 202;
+    and the Church, 204;
+    and irreverence, 281;
+    laws lax, 206;
+    and love, 227;
+    and money, 195, 206, 209 ff., 227.
+
+  Massingham, John, 28
+
+  Mauny, Walter de, 175
+
+  May-day, 107
+
+  Mazelyner, John le, 15
+
+  Mercenary troops, 241
+
+  Mercer, 134
+
+  Merchants, tricks of, 125
+
+  Merchet, 260
+
+  Michael, St., Aldgate, 77
+
+  Mile End, 264
+
+  Militia, 240;
+    and liberty, 253
+
+  Money, power of, 99, 132, 191, 200, 258
+
+  Moorfields, 15, 18
+
+  Moorgate, 15
+
+  Morris, William, 29, 81
+
+  Mortuary, 260
+
+  Murder, 89
+
+
+  N
+
+  Nations at universities, 6
+
+  Nature in the Middle Ages, 104
+
+  Neville's Cross, 183, 238
+
+  Newcastle coal, 114
+
+  Newgate, 61, 93
+
+  Norfolk pilgrimages, 140
+
+  Northbrooke, Bishop, 184
+
+  Norwich, 48, 82, 129, 131, 236, 238, 265, 284
+
+
+  O
+
+  Oaths, 155, 163, 169
+
+  Ospringe, 167
+
+  Oxford, 6, 8, 84, 115, 274, 278, 300, 301
+
+
+  P
+
+  Paris, 83, 233, 300
+
+  Parliament, growth of, 7, 9, 132;
+    power of, 58
+
+  Paston, the family of, 229
+
+  Peasants' Revolt, 261 ff.
+
+  Peckham, Archbishop, 290
+
+  Percy, Sir Harry, 51
+
+    "    Henry, 17
+
+    "    Sir Thomas, 51
+
+  Perjury, 201
+
+  Perrers, Alice, 186
+
+  Petrarch, Francis, 48, 50, 166
+
+  Pevensey, 176
+
+  Philippa of Hainault, Queen, 13, 14, 33, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184,
+        185, 253;
+    description of, 181
+
+  Philippe de Valois, King of France, 174, 191, 235, 242, 243, 245
+
+  Philpot or Philipot, John, 134, 193
+
+  Picard, Sir Henry, 16, 17, 193
+
+  Piers, Bishop, 279
+
+  Pilgrimage, decay of, 138 ff., 171
+
+  Pillory, 131
+
+  Pisa, 43
+
+  Police, 251
+
+  Poor and rich, 257 ff.
+
+  Poore, Bishop, 277
+
+  Portsmouth, 133, 239
+
+  Priests and people, 260
+
+  Privacy, want of, 88
+
+  Processions, 88;
+    and bloodshed, 278
+
+  Punishment, corporal, 213 ff.;
+    public, 91
+
+  Purgation, 289
+
+
+  R
+
+  Ransoms, 198, 200, 233
+
+  Reims, 25
+
+  Rich and poor, 176, 254, 257 ff.
+
+  Richard II., 7, 17, 32, 34, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 73, 79,
+        88, 90, 135, 175, 187, 208, 209, 217, 255, 264, 266, 280, 308, 311
+
+  Rochester, 159
+
+  Roet, Katherine, 30
+
+  Rottingdean, 133
+
+  Rye, 133
+
+
+  S
+
+  Saint Mary Aldermary, 283
+
+  Sanctuary, 283 ff.
+
+  Scalby, John, 59
+
+  Scarborough, 134
+
+  Schools, 20
+
+  Scogan, Henry, 64, 68
+
+  Scrope, Archbishop, 311
+
+    "     Stephen, 211, 212
+
+  Serfs, 259
+
+  Sluys, 10
+
+  Smithfield, 62, 88, 264
+
+  Somere, William, 73
+
+  Southampton, 249
+
+  Southwark, 19, 115
+
+  Stace, Thomas, 13
+
+  Stapledon, Bishop, 89, 299
+
+  Stepney, 116
+
+  Stodey, John de, 193
+
+  Stratford bread, 114
+
+  Strikers, clerical, 305
+
+  Strode, Ralph, 117, 118
+
+  Stury, Sir Richard, 26, 51, 62, 308
+
+  Sudbury, Archbishop, 90, 142
+
+  Swaffham, John de, 130
+
+  Swynford, Sir Thomas, 30
+
+
+  T
+
+  Tavern company, 92
+
+  Thoresby, Archbishop, 281
+
+  Thorpe, 142
+
+  Tottenham, 116
+
+  Tournaments, 88, 197;
+    forbidden, 243
+
+  Town and country, 115, 120
+
+  Trades' Unions, 270
+
+  Travel, dangers of, 41
+
+  Tyler, Wat, 19, 142, 145, 264, 265
+
+
+  U
+
+  Ulster, Countess of, 21, 27
+
+  University, 6, 8;
+    discipline, 300 ff.;
+    and sports, 274, 277, 280
+
+  Upton, John de, 283
+
+    "    Robert de, 283
+
+  Urban VI., Pope, 70
+
+  Usury, 194
+
+
+  V
+
+  Vintry Ward, 15, 16
+
+  Violante Visconti, 48
+
+
+  W
+
+  Wager of Battle, 213, 282
+
+  Wages of workmen, 269
+
+  Walbrook, 15, 16
+
+  Walworth, 193
+
+  War, conscription and liberty, 133, 242, 246, 251, 253, 255;
+    the Hundred Years', 232;
+    losses in, 199;
+    private, 133;
+    ravage of, 246 ff.
+
+  Wardships, 195, 197, 211
+
+  Warham, Archbishop, 143
+
+  Wells, 87
+
+  Wenceslas, Emperor, 70
+
+  Westhale, Joan de, 13, 55
+
+  Westminster, 16, 32, 33, 57, 60, 63, 64, 88, 89, 115, 116, 184, 189
+
+  Winchelsea, 133, 239, 249
+
+  Windsor, 21, 53, 61, 62, 64, 96, 175, 176, 185
+
+  Women, beaten, 213;
+    emancipation of, 220;
+    life of, 107;
+    manners of, 109, 219 ff.
+
+  Woodstock. See _Gloucester_
+
+  Worcester, 289, 290
+
+  Wycliffe, 8, 10, 22, 306, 307, 308, 310;
+    and serfage, 262
+
+  Wykeham, William of, 274, 277
+
+
+  Y
+
+  York, 179, 184
+
+
+  PRINTED BY
+  WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+  LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] See Jusserand, "Hist. Litt.," L. III., ch. i., and the Preface to his
+"Vie Nomade"; also chap. xix. of Prof. Tout's volume in the "Political
+Hist. of Engd." It is nearly one hundred and fifty years since Tyrwhitt
+showed, by abundant quotations, the stages by which English fought its way
+to final recognition as the national language.
+
+[2] Froissart, ed. Luce, i., 359, 402. There was in 1444 a similar attempt
+to keep up Latin and French among the Benedictine monks, since from
+ignorance of one or the other language "they frequently fall into shame."
+Reynerus, "De Antiq. Benedict," p. 129.
+
+[3] "He chalenged in Englyssh tunge" ("Chronicles of London," ed.
+Kingsford, p. 43, where the exact form of words used by Henry is recorded;
+cf. Dymock's challenge, ibid., p. 49).
+
+[4] It is difficult to go altogether with Prof. Skeat in his repudiation
+of the sense commonly attached to this phrase (note on Prologue, i., 126).
+Chaucer seems to say that the Prioress (_a_) knew French, but (_b_) only
+French of Stratford, just as he explains that the parish clerk (_a_) could
+dance, but (_b_) only after the School of Oxenford. For this Oxford
+dancing, see Dr. Rashdall's "Universities of Europe," ii., 672.
+
+[5] For the most interesting account of this fusion, see Jusserand, "Hist.
+Litt.," p. 236. (Bk. III., ch. i.)
+
+[6] "English Garner," 15th century, ed. A. W. Pollard, p. 240; J. R.
+Green's "Short History," p. 291. "And one of them named Sheffield, a
+mercer, came into a house and asked for meat, and especially he asked
+after eggs; and the goodwife answered that she could speak no French, and
+the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but would have
+had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said, that
+he would have 'eyren'; then the goodwife said that she understood him
+well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?"
+
+[7] See the cases given in full by Thorold Rogers, "Oxford City
+Documents," pp. 168, 170, 173, and H. Rashdall's "Universities of Europe,"
+ii., 363, 369, 403.
+
+[8] See the articles by Prof. Maitland and Mr. A. L. Smith in vol. ii. of
+"Social England."
+
+[9] Cf. Reynerus, "De Antiq. Benedict," pp. 107, 136, _425_, _468_, 595.
+The pages in italics contain startling lists of defaulting abbeys and
+priories.
+
+[10] See Gower's "Vox Clamantis," Bk. III., c. 28, for a description of
+the worldly aims of the 14th-century universities.
+
+[11] It seems extremely probable, to say the least, that the poem of Piers
+Plowman was by more than one hand; but, in any case, the authors were
+contemporaries, and seem to have held very much the same views; so that it
+is still possible for most purposes of historical argument to quote the
+poem under the traditional name of Langland.
+
+[12] Bartholomćus Anglicus (Steele, "Medićval Lore," 1905), p. 86.
+
+[13] Besant quotes accounts recording (_inter alia_) a gift of wine to the
+"Chaucer" on the occasion of a mayoral procession, but apparently without
+realizing its significance. ("Medićval London," i., 303.)
+
+[14] Mr. V. B. Redstone, in _Athenćum_, No. 4087, p. 233, and _East
+Anglian Daily Times_, April 8, 1908, p. 5, col. 7. It is not my aim, in
+this chapter, to trouble the reader with discussions of doubtful points,
+but rather to present what is certainly known, or may safely be inferred
+about Chaucer's life.
+
+[15] At Wycombe, too, "every citizen from twelve years old could serve on
+juries for the town business." Mrs. Green, "Town Life," i., 184. I shall
+have occasion in the next chapter to note how early men began life in
+those days.
+
+[16] Pauli, "Pictures of Old England," chap. v.
+
+[17] "Life Records," iv., 232. The industry of Mr. Walter Rye has
+collected a large number of documentary notices which establish a probable
+connection of some kind between Chaucer and Norfolk; but the evidence
+seems insufficient as yet to prove Mr. Rye's thesis that the poet was born
+at Lynn; and in default of such definite evidence, it is safer to presume
+that he was born in the Thames Street house. (_Athenćum_, March 7, 1908;
+cf. "Life Records," iii., 131.)
+
+[18] At Rouen, Caudebec, and Gisors, for instance, are very exact
+counterparts of the Walbrook, except that the overhanging houses are a
+century or two later, and proportionately larger.
+
+[19] The illustration on page 177 represents a similar royal banquet--the
+celebrated Peacock Feast of Lynn. Robert Braunche, mayor, entertained
+Edward there _circa_ 1350, and caused the event to be immortalized on his
+funeral monument. Henry Picard himself was King's Butler at Lynn in 1350
+(Rye, _l. c._).
+
+[20] Fitzstephen, in Stow, p. 119.
+
+[21] See "The Hanseatic Steelyard," in Pauli's "Pictures," chap. vi.
+
+[22] "Oeuvres," ed. Buchon, vol. iii., pp. 479 ff.; cf. Lydgate's
+account of his own schooldays, in "Babees Book," E.E.T.S., p. xliii.
+
+[23] Prof. Hales, in "Dict. Nat. Biog."
+
+[24] See the Queen's vow before the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War, in
+Wright's "Political Poems," R.S., p. 23.
+
+  "Alors dit la reine: 'Je sais bien que piecha         [il y a longtemps
+  Que suis grosse d'enfant, que mon corps sentit la,
+  Encore n'a t-il gučre qu'en mon corps se tourna;
+  Et je voue et promets ŕ Dieu qui me créa....
+  Que jamais fruit de moi de mon corps n'istera,        [sortira
+  Si m'en aurez menée au pays par delŕ.'"
+
+[25] "P. Plowman," B., x., 157, and xi., 402.
+
+[26] "Chronicles of London," ed. Kingsford, p. 13.
+
+[27] These sums should be multiplied by about fifteen to bring them into
+terms of modern currency.
+
+[28] The poet's grandmother was married at least thrice. Did he find hints
+for the "Wife of Bath" in his own family?
+
+[29] Quoted by Dr. Furnivall on p. xv. of his introduction to "Manners and
+Meals" (E.E.T.S., 1868).
+
+[30] This tunic would, no doubt, be a cote-hardie, or close-fitting bodice
+and flowing skirt in one line from neck to feet; it may be seen, buttons
+and all, on the statuette of Edward III.'s eldest daughter which adorns
+his tomb in Westminster Abbey.
+
+[31] "La Chevalerie," Nouvelle Edition, pp. 342, 345 ff.
+
+[32] See the author's "From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., pp. 350 ff.
+
+[33] That tales like these were read before ladies appears even from
+Bédier's judicial remarks in Petit de Juleville's "Hist. Litt.," vol. ii.,
+p. 93; and I have shown elsewhere that these represent rather less than
+the facts. ("From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., pp. 358, 359.) For
+girls' behaviour, see T. Wright's "Womankind in Western Europe," pp. 158,
+159; "Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour," chap. 124 ff.; or "La Tour
+Landry," E.E.T.S., pp. 2, 175 ff.
+
+[34] "House of Fame," Bk. II., l. 108; "Troilus," Bk. III., l. 41; Prof.
+Hales, in "Dict. Nat. Biog."
+
+[35] "Life Records," IV., Doc. No. 286.
+
+[36] "Dole," "ration."
+
+[37] "Mess of great meat," _i.e._ from one of the staple dishes, excluding
+such special dishes as would naturally be reserved for the King or his
+guests.
+
+[38] The legal tariff in the City of London at this time for shoes of
+cordwain (Cordova morocco) was 6_d._, and for boots 3_s._ 6_d._ Cowhide
+shoes were fixed at 5_d._, and boots at 3_s._ Riley, "Liber Albus," p. xc.
+
+[39] This was exactly the commons of a chaplain of the King's chapel
+("Life Records," ii., 15). The Dean of the Chapel was dignified with "two
+darres of bread, one pitcher of wine, two messes de grosse from the
+kitchen, and one mess of roast." Some of this, no doubt, would go to his
+servant. All the King's household, from the High Steward downwards (who
+might be a knight banneret), were allowed these messes from the kitchen as
+well as their dinners in hall.
+
+[40] "This same year [1359] the King held royally St. George Feast at
+Windsor, there being King John of France, the which King John said in
+scorn that he never saw so royal a feast, and so costly, made with tallies
+of tree, without paying of gold and silver" ("Chronicles of London," ed.
+1827, p. 63). Queen Philippa received for this tournament a dress
+allowance of Ł3000 modern money (Nicolas, "Order of the Garter," p. 41).
+
+[41] Froissart, ed. Luce, vol. v., p. 289, ff. Walsingham ("Hist. Ang.,"
+an. 1389) bears equally emphatic testimony to the good natural feeling
+existing between the English and French gentry.
+
+[42] "Knight of La Tour-Landry," E.E.T.S., p. 30 (written in 1371-2).
+
+[43] Eustache Deschamps, whose life and writings often throw so much light
+on Chaucer's, shows us the difficulties of married men at court, and says
+outright--
+
+  "Dix et sept ans ai au Satan servi
+  Au monde aussi et ŕ la chair pourrie,
+  Oublié Dieu, et mon corps asservi
+  A cette cour, de tout vice nourrie."
+
+(Sarradin, "Eustache Deschamps," pp. 92 ff., 104, 160.)
+
+[44] Quoted by Nicolas from Rymer's "Foedera" new ed., iii., 964.
+
+[45] E.E.T.S., "Stacions of Rome," etc., p. 37. (The whole English poem
+describes a journey to Spain; but as yet the pilgrims are not out of the
+Channel.)
+
+[46] Froissart (Globe ed.), pp. 83, 134; "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 206, 213.
+
+[47] Dante, "Purg.," iii., 49.
+
+[48] Sarradin, "Deschamps," pp. 67, 69.
+
+[49] "Hist. of Eng. Lit.," vol. ii., p. 57, trans. W. C. Robinson.
+
+[50] "Cant. Tales," G., 57 ff. It will be noted how ill the phrase "son of
+Eve" suits the Nun's mouth. In this, as in other cases, Chaucer simply
+worked one of his earlier poems into the framework of the "Canterbury
+Tales."
+
+[51] See a correspondence in the _Athenćum_, Sept. 17 to Nov. 26, 1898
+(Mr. C. H. Bromby and Mr. St. Clair Baddeley), and Mr. F. J. Mather's two
+articles in "Modern Language Notes" (Baltimore), vol. xi., p. 210, and
+vol. xii., p. 1.
+
+[52] See Dr. Koch's paper in "Chaucer Society Essays," Pt. IV.
+
+[53] Froissart's great poem of Méliador thus became anonymous for nearly
+five centuries, and was only identified by the most romantic chance in our
+own generation.--Darmesteter, "Froissart," chap. xiii.
+
+[54] _Athenćum_, as above.
+
+[55] Froissart, ed. Buchon, i. 546, 555; Darmesteter, p. 32.
+
+[56] C. L. Kingsford, "Chronicles of London," p. 63.
+
+[57] Chaucer Soc., "Life Records," iv., p. xxx.
+
+[58] "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 357: Statutes of Parliament, Ric. II., an. 6,
+c. 6. The preamble complains that such "malefactors and raptors of women
+grow more violent, and are in these days more rife than ever in almost
+every part of the kingdom," and it implies that married women were
+sometimes so carried off. Cf. Jusserand, "Vie Nomade," p. 85, and "Piers
+Plowman," B. iv., 47--
+
+  "Then came Peace into Parliament, and put forth a bill,
+  How wrong against his will had his wife taken,
+  And how he ravished Rose, Reginald's love," etc., etc.
+
+[59] "Life Records," iv., p. xxxv.
+
+[60] Riley, "Memorials," pp. 410, 445.
+
+[61] Oman, "England, 1377-1485," p. 100.
+
+[62] "Eulog. Hist.," iii. 359.
+
+[63] Ibid., 360.
+
+[64] That is, they contributed to maintain the Minster, and were admitted
+to a share of the spiritual benefits earned by "all prayers, fastings,
+pilgrimages, almsdeeds, and works of mercy" connected therewith. Edward
+III., and at least three of his sons, were already of the fraternity of
+Lincoln, and Richard II., with his queen, were admitted the year after
+Philippa Chaucer.
+
+[65] Riley, "Memorials," pp. 271, 285, 321. The Masons' regulations given
+on p. 281 of the same book are interesting in connection with Chaucer's
+work; but still more so are the documents in "York Fabric Rolls" (Surtees
+Soc.), pp. 172, 181.
+
+[66] "Life Records," iv. 282, 283.
+
+[67] A well-to-do youth could be boarded at Oxford for 2_s._ a week, and
+it was reckoned that the whole expenses of a Doctor of Divinity could be
+defrayed for thrice that sum, or half Chaucer's salary. (Riley,
+"Memorials," p. 379; Reynerus, "de Antiq. Benedict," pp. 200, 596.)
+
+[68] A. 3907. "Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne."
+
+[69] "Little Lowys my son, I aperceive well by certain evidences thine
+ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions; and as well
+consider I thy busy prayer in special to learn the treatise of the
+Astrelabie." Excusing himself for having omitted some problems ordinarily
+found in such treatises, Chaucer says, "Some of them be too hard to thy
+tender age of X. year to conceive."
+
+[70] "Life Records," iv., Nos. 250, 270, 277. The great significance of
+this fact is obscured even by such excellent authorities as Prof. Skeat,
+Prof. Hales, and Mr. Pollard, who all follow Sir Harris Nicolas in
+misinterpreting the last of these three documents. Chaucer had not lost,
+as they represent, Henry's own letters patent of only five days before,
+but Richard's patents for the yearly Ł20 and the tun of wine. It is quite
+possible that Chaucer may have been obliged to leave them in pledge
+somewhere, or that they were momentarily mislaid; but it is natural to
+suspect that the poet would not so lightly have reported them as lost
+unless it had been to his obvious interest to do so. We must remember the
+trouble and expense constantly taken by public bodies, for instance, to
+get their charters ratified by a new king.
+
+[71] Globe ed., p. 464; Buchon, iii., 349.
+
+[72] "Complaint to his Purse," last stanza.
+
+[73] "Life Records," iv., p. xlv. In 1395 or 1396 Chaucer received Ł10
+from the clerk of Henry's great wardrobe, to be paid into Henry's hands.
+
+[74] Though the subject-matter of this poem is mainly taken from Boethius,
+yet it evidently has the translator's hearty approval, and is in tune with
+many more of his later verses.
+
+[75] Michelet, "Hist. de France," Liv. VI., _ad fin._ A cardinal explained
+the extreme violence of Urban VI.'s words and actions by the report "that
+he could not avoid one of two things, lunacy or total collapse; for he
+never ceased drinking, yet ate nothing." Baluze, "Vit. Pap. Aven.," vol.
+i., col. 1270. Compare Walsingham's tone with regard to the Pope, "Hist.
+Angl.," an. 1385.
+
+[76] Chaucer's religious belief will be more fully discussed in Chapter
+XXIV.
+
+[77] W. R. Lethaby, "Westminster Abbey," 1906, p. 2.
+
+[78] Stow (Routledge, 1893, p. 414) seems to imply that the poet was first
+buried in the cloister, but this is an obvious error. Dr. Furnivall has
+pointed out a line of Hoccleve's which certainly seems to imply that the
+younger poet was present at his master Chaucer's death-bed. We may also
+gather from Hoccleve's account of his own youth many glimpses which tend
+to throw interesting sidelights on that of Chaucer (Hoccleve's Works,
+E.E.T.S., vol. i., pp. xii., xxxi.).
+
+[79] This was occasionally the case even in Normandy until the English
+invasion. The great city of Caen, for instance, was still unwalled in
+1346. ("Froissart," ed. Buchon, p. 223.) A piece of London Wall may still
+be found near the Tower at the bottom of a small passage called Trinity
+Place, leading out of Trinity Square. It rises about twenty-five feet from
+the present ground-level.
+
+[80] Riley, "Memorials," p. 79. This was in 1310.
+
+[81] See pp. 50, 59, 79, 95, 115, 127, 136, 377, 387, 388, 489. My
+frequent references to this book will be simply to the name of Riley.
+
+[82] Ed. Morley, pp. 154-157.
+
+[83] Riley, p. 270.
+
+[84] From his first Italian journey Chaucer returned on May 23, 1373; but
+his second was during the summer and early autumn of 1378. (May 28 to
+Sept. 19.)
+
+[85] "Cant. Tales," Prol. i., 400.
+
+[86] Walsingham, "Hist. Angl.," an. 1406, _ad fin._
+
+[87] "P. Plowman," B. Prol., 216. The French words in italics were the
+first line of a popular song. Gower has an equally picturesque description
+in his "Mirour de l'Omme," 25,285 ff.
+
+[88] "London was, in very truth, a city of Palaces. There were, in London
+itself, more palaces than in Venice and Florence and Verona and Genoa all
+together." "Medieval London," i., 244, where the context shows that the
+author refers not only to royal residences, but still more to noblemen's
+houses.
+
+[89] This was at least the theoretical provision of the regulation of
+1189, known as Fitz Alwyne's Assize, which is fully summarized and
+annotated in the "Liber Albus," ed. Riley (R.S.), pp. xxx. ff. We know,
+however, that similar decrees against roofs of thatch or wooden shingles
+were not always obeyed.
+
+[90] "Menagier de Paris," i., 173; Addy, "Evolution of English House," p.
+108; cf. "Piers Plowman's Creed," i., 214.
+
+[91] An earthen wall is mentioned in Riley, p. 30. The slight structure of
+the ordinary house appears from the fact that the rioters of 1381 tore so
+many down, and that the great storm of 1362 unroofed them wholesale.
+(Walsingham, an. 1381, and Riley, p. 308.) Compare the hook with wooden
+handle and two ropes which was kept in each ward for the pulling down of
+burning houses. ("Liber Albus," p. xxxiv.)
+
+[92] Cooper, "Annals of Cambridge," an. 1445; Rashdall, "Universities of
+Europe," ii., 413. Cf. the "common nightwalkers" and "roarers" in Riley,
+pp. 86 ff.
+
+[93] Riley, p. 65. See the specifications for some three-storied houses of
+a century later quoted by Besant. "Medieval London," i., 250. The furs
+here specified may well have come to Ł3 or Ł4 more (see Rogers,
+"Agriculture and Prices," pp. 536 ff.). The fur for an Oxford warden's
+gown varied from 26_s._ 8_d._ to 83_s._
+
+[94] Besant, _loc. cit._, i., 257, mistakenly calls Hugh a "craftsman,"
+and gives from his imagination a quite untrustworthy description of the
+inquest, the house, and the shop. He had evidently not seen the
+supplementary notice in Sharpe's "Letter Book," F.
+
+[95] Riley, p. 199; cf. Sharpe, "Letter Books," F, pp. 19, 113. A list of
+furniture left by a richer citizen, apparently incomplete, is given in
+Riley, p. 123, and another on p. 283, but this is difficult to separate
+with certainty from his stock-in-trade. The inventory of a well-to-do
+Norman peasant-farmer is given by S. Luce, "Du Guesclin," p. 51. Here the
+strictly domestic items are only "four frying-pans, two metal pots, four
+chests, three caskets, two feather-beds, three tables, a bedstead, an iron
+shovel, a gridiron, a [trough?], and a lantern." This was in 1333.
+
+[96] Addy, "Evolution of English House," pp. 112 ff. "A chamber with a
+chimney" was the acme of medieval comfort. "P. Plowman," B., x., p. 98,
+and "Crede," 209.
+
+[97] "Oeuvres," ed. Buchon, p. 646. A century later, Thomas Elwood's
+Memoirs show that an English squire's family needed their warm caps as
+much indoors as outside.
+
+[98] Cf. the affair in the hall of Wolsingham Rectory in 1370. Raine,
+"Auckland Castle," p. 38.
+
+[99] A. F. Leach, "English Schools before the Reformation," p. 10; "Dame
+Alice Kyteler" (Camden Soc.), introd., p. xxxix. The choir-boys, it may be
+noted in passing, had only half an hour of playtime daily.
+
+[100] It is interesting to note that, when Chaucer was Clerk of the Works
+to Richard II., he superintended the erection of scaffolds for the King
+and Queen on the occasion of one of these Smithfield tournaments.
+
+[101] "French Chron. of London" (Camden Soc.), p. 52; cf. Walsingham, an.
+1326.
+
+[102] "C. T.," B., 645.
+
+[103] "Chronicles of London," ed. Kingsford, p. 15.
+
+[104] Walsingham, an. 1381.
+
+[105] "C. T.," B., 4583.
+
+[106] "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 387.
+
+[107] Walsingham, an. 1382; Riley, p. 464.
+
+[108] "P. Plowman," C., vii., 352 ff. For Clarice and Peronel, see Prof.
+Skeat's notes, _ad loc._, and cf. Riley, pp. 484, 566, and note 3.
+
+[109] Newgate, Ludgate, and Cripplegate were regular prisons at this time;
+but Besant is quite mistaken in saying that all gate-leases provide "that
+they may be taken over as prisons if they are wanted" ("Medieval London,"
+i., 163). A Cripplegate lease (Riley, p. 387) has naturally such a
+provision; the others are silent or (like Chaucer's) definitely promise
+the contrary.
+
+[110] P. 489; cf. "Life Records," IV., xxxiv. Michaelmas Day fell in 1386
+on a Saturday.
+
+[111] Bk. II., lines 122 ff.
+
+[112] Darmesteter, "Froissart," p. 112.
+
+[113] Riley, pp. 194, 285, 338; cf. Mr. W. Hudson's "Parish of St. Peter
+Permountergate" (Norwich, 1889), pp. 21, 45, 60.
+
+[114] Cf. the present writer's "From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., pp.
+6, 160, 167, 380, where proof is adduced from episcopal registers that
+even large and rich monasteries had often no scriptorium, and many monks
+could not write their own names.
+
+[115] "Town Life," ii., 84.
+
+[116] Riley, p. 226. Cf. the similar complaint of a poet against
+blacksmiths in "Reliquić Antiquć," i., 240.
+
+[117] Nominally, the great gate was shut at the hour of sunset, and only
+the wicket-gate left open till curfew; but regulations of this kind were
+generally interpreted with a good deal of laxity.
+
+[118] Busch, "Lib. Ref.," p. 408; Gilleberti Abbatis, "Tract. Ascet.,"
+VII., ii., § 3.
+
+[119] See Oskar Dolch, "The Love of Nature in Early English Poetry;"
+Dresden, 1882.
+
+[120] "Purg.," xxvi., 4; viii., 1; iii., 25; cf. xvii., 8, 12.
+
+[121] "Legend of Good Women," Prol., 30 ff.
+
+[122] "Survey," ed. Morley, 1893, p. 163.
+
+[123] "Monsieur le curé, ... ne dansons pas; mais permettons ŕ ces pauvres
+gens de danser. Pourquoi les empęcher d'oublier un moment qu'ils sont
+malheureux?"
+
+[124] Riley, 571. I have dealt fully with this subject in my "Medieval
+Studies," Nos. 3 and 4.
+
+[125] "Babees Book," E.E.T.S., p. 40; "Ménagier de Paris," i., 15; "C.
+T.," C., 62.
+
+[126] Sharpe's "Letter Book" G., pp. 274, 303; Riley, pp. 269, 534, 561,
+571, 669. In the country, "hocking" was often resorted to for raising
+church funds. See Sir John Phear's "Molland Accounts" (Devonshire Assn.,
+1903), pp. 198 ff.
+
+[127] Cf. "C. T.," E., 2029; F., 908; "Parl. Foules," 121. For his
+personal love of trees, etc., see "C. T.," A., 2920; "Parl. Foules," 175,
+201, 442.
+
+[128] Cf. Riley, pp. 7, 116, 228, 280, 382, 487, 498.
+
+[129] "Herbarium," green and shady spot.
+
+[130] Riley, 388, and _passim_.
+
+[131] "Aetas Prima," l. 23 ff.
+
+[132] Loftie, p. 26.
+
+[133] "Letter Book," G., pp. iii. ff., where there is a very interesting
+case of a Florentine merchant.
+
+[134] It is easy to understand how Jews themselves came back to England
+under the guise of Lombards. We know enough, from many other sources, of
+the evils which followed from the inconsistent efforts to outlaw all
+takers of interest, to appreciate the truth which underlay the obvious
+exaggerations of the Commons in their petition to the King in 1376. "There
+are in our land a very great multitude of Lombards, both brokers and
+merchants, who serve no purpose but that of ill-doing: moreover, several
+of those which pass for Lombards are Jews and Saracens and privy spies;
+and of late they have brought into our land a most grievous vice which it
+beseems us not to name" ("Rot. Parl.," vol. ii., p. 352, § 58).
+
+[135] Benvenuto da Imola, "Comentum," vol. i., p. 579; Etienne de Bourbon,
+p. 254; Nicole Bozon, pp. 35, 226; "Piers Plowman," B., iii., 38; cf.
+Gower, "Mirour," 21409.
+
+[136] "Mirour," 25429 ff., 25237 ff., 25915. Mr. Macaulay remarks that
+Gower seems to deal more tenderly with his own merchant-class than with
+other classes of society; but his blame, even with this allowance, is
+severe.
+
+[137] "Mirour," 25813. The emphasis which he lays on carpets and curtains
+shows how great a luxury they were then considered.
+
+[138] "In justice, however, to these centuries, it must be remarked, that
+they received the institutions of Frankpledge as an inheritance from Saxon
+times" (Riley).
+
+[139] "To these writs return was made [in 1354] to the effect that the
+civic authorities had given orders for butchers to carry the entrails of
+slaughtered beasts to the Flete and there clean them in the tidal waters
+of the Thames, instead of throwing them on the pavement by the house of
+the Grey Friars." Again: "Although this order [of 1369] was carried out
+and the bridge destroyed, butchers continued to carry offal from the
+shambles to the riverside; and this nuisance had to be suppressed in
+1370." But the whole passage should be read in full.
+
+[140] Vol. I., cxxxviii. ff. and 365 ff.
+
+[141] Mrs. Green, "Town Life," ii., 55.
+
+[142] Between 1347 and 1375, for instance, there are only 23 cases of
+pillory in all.
+
+[143] It is pertinent to note in this connection the medieval custom of
+giving condemned meat to hospitals. Mr. Wheatley ("London," p. 196) quotes
+from a Scottish Act of Parliament in 1386, "Gif ony man brings to the
+market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the
+bailie, and incontinent, without ony question, sall be sent to the leper
+folke; and, gif there be na lepper folke, they sall be destroyed all
+utterlie." At Oxford in the 15th century, there was a similar regulation
+providing that putrid or unfit meat and fish should be sent to St. John's
+Hospital. ("Munimenta Academica" (R.S.), pp. 51, 52). Here is a probable
+clue to the tradition that medieval apprentices struck against salmon more
+than twice a week. See _Athenćum_, August 27 and September 3, 1898.
+
+[144] Besant insists very justly on the blood-kinship between the leading
+citizens and the country gentry. ("Medieval London," i., 218 ff.) He shows
+that a very large majority of Mayors, Aldermen, etc., were country-born,
+and of good family.
+
+[145] Michelet, "Hist. de France," l. i., ch. i.
+
+[146] John Philpot, it may be noted, was at this very time one of the
+Collectors of Customs under Chaucer's Comptrollership.
+
+[147] "C. T.," E., 995.
+
+[148] The violent scenes of the years 1381-1391 are summarized in
+Wheatley's "London" (Medieval Towns), pp. 236-9. Among the victims of an
+unsuccessful cause were even Sir William Walworth and Sir John Philpot.
+
+[149] Walsingham, an. 1392; "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 368.
+
+[150] Ed. Luce, vol. i., pp. 224, 243, 249.
+
+[151] Cf. Mrs. Green, _loc. cit._, ii., 31. "In 1499 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
+panniers 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 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."
+
+[152] Etienne de Bourbon, p. 411.
+
+[153] T. Wright, "Homes of other Days," pp. 345 ff., whence I borrow the
+accompanying illustration from a MS. of the 15th century, representing the
+outside and inside of an inn. Incidentally, it illustrates also the common
+medieval phrase "naked in bed." Mrs. Green ("Town Life," ii., 33) quotes
+the grateful entry of a citizen in his public accounts "Paid for our bed
+there (and it was well worth it, witness, a featherbed) 1_d._"
+
+[154] There were _seventy_ places of pilgrimage in Norfolk alone (Cutts,
+"Middle Ages," p. 162). For churches as trysting-places for lovers or
+gossips we have evidence on many sides, _e.g._ the lovers of the
+"Decameron" (Prologue and Epilogue), and the custom of "Paul's Walk" which
+lasted long after the Reformation.
+
+[155] Berthold v. Regensburg, "Predigten," ed. Pfeiffer, i., 448, 459,
+493; Et. de Bourbon, p. 167; "Piers Plowman," B., v., 527, C., v., 123;
+Wharton, "Anglia Sacra," i., 49, 50.
+
+[156] "Wyclif's Works," ed. Arnold, i., 83; cf. other quotations in
+Lechler; "Wiclif," Section x., notes 286, 288; Jusserand, "Vie Nomade," p.
+296; Foxe (Parker Soc.), vol. iii., p. 268.
+
+[157] Chaucer himself tells us the day in the "Man of Lawe's Prologue";
+Prof. Skeat has accumulated highly probable evidence for the year 1387
+(vol. iii., p. 373, and vol. v., p. 75).
+
+[158] About 520 feet from the ground, according to Hollar, but more
+probably a little short of 500 feet. (H. B. Wheatley, "London," p. 333.)
+It must be remembered also how high the cathedral site rises above the
+river.
+
+[159] Bern. Ep. 25; cf. "Liber Guillelmi Majoris," p. 478.
+
+[160] Skeat, v., p. 129. "In the subsidy Rolls (1380-1) for Southwark,
+occurs the entry 'Henri Bayliff, Ostyler ... 2_s._' In the Parliament held
+at Westminster (1376-7) Henry Bailly was one of the representatives for
+that borough, and again, in the Parliament at Gloucester, 2, Rich. II.,
+the name occurs."
+
+[161] The too strict avoidance of oaths had long been authoritatively
+noted as suggesting a presumption of heresy; here (as in so many other
+places) Chaucer admirably illustrates formal and official documents.
+
+[162] About Ł1000 in modern money.
+
+[163] "Its unsuitableness to the Clerk has often been noticed," writes Mr.
+Pollard; but surely those who find fault here have forgotten the obvious
+truth voiced by the Wife of Bath, "For trust ye well, it is impossible
+that any clerk will speakë good of wives."
+
+[164] This highly dramatic addition of the Canon and his Yeoman is
+probably an afterthought of Chaucer's, who had very likely himself
+suffered at the hands of some such impostor.
+
+[165] There is, as Prof. Skeat points out, an inconsistency here in the
+text. We can see from Group H., l. 16 that Chaucer had at one time meant
+the Manciple's tale to be told in the morning; yet now when it is ended he
+tells us plainly that it is four in the afternoon (Group I., 5).
+
+[166] An allusion to the alliterative verse popular among the common folk,
+like that of "Piers Plowman."
+
+[167] It was mostly destroyed by fire in 1865. Most writers on Canterbury,
+misled by the ancient spelling, call the inn "Chequers of the Hope."
+_Hope_, as Prof. Skeat has long ago pointed out, is simply _Hoop_, a part
+of the inn sign. Cf. Riley, "Memorials of London," pp. 497, 524; and
+"Hist. MSS. Commission," Report v., pt. i., p. 448.
+
+[168] Mrs. Green, "Town Life," ii., 33.
+
+[169] A. Murimuth, ed. Hog., p. 225.
+
+[170] Walsingham, an. 1349; Hoccleve, E.E.T.S., vol. iii., p. 93.
+
+[171] Ed. Buchon, i., 286; ed. Luce, iv., 327.
+
+[172] Longman, "Edward III.," i., 225, 413.
+
+[173] Longman, "Edward III.," vol. i., pp. 147, 157, 178.
+
+[174] Ed. Buchon, i., 12, 34; ed. Luce, i., 284-287.
+
+[175] Cf. Darmesteter, "Froissart," p. 16, and Froissart, ed. Buchon, p.
+512. "The good queen Philippa was in my youth my queen and sovereign. I
+was five years at the court of the King and Queen of England. In my youth
+I was her clerk, serving her with fair ditties and treatises of love; and,
+for the love of the noble and worthy lady my mistress, all other great
+lords--king, dukes, earls, barons and knights, of whatsoever country they
+might be--loved me and saw me gladly and gave me much profit."
+
+[176] I cannot refrain here from calling attention to the extraordinary
+historical value of the eight volumes of Exeter registers published by
+Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph, who in this department has done more for
+historical students, during the last twenty-five years, than all the
+learned societies of the kingdom put together.
+
+[177] Ed. 1812, p. 317. The text of this book is frequently corrupt; but
+the evident sense of these ungrammatical lines 3-5 is that the envoys were
+allowed to watch the unsuspecting damsels from some hidden coign of
+vantage. It will be noted that Hardyng speaks of _five_ daughters; there
+had been five, but the eldest was now dead.
+
+[178] Ed. 1841, p. 206. She was Katherine, daughter to Sir Adam Banastre.
+Miss Strickland asserts that the Queen, contrary to the custom of medieval
+ladies in high life, nursed the infant herself. She gives no reference,
+and her authority is possibly Joshua Barnes's "Life of Edward III."
+(1688), p. 44, where, however, references are again withheld. The Black
+Prince was born June 15, 1330, when the King would have been 19 and the
+Queen just on 16 years old according to Froissart; but Edward was in fact
+only 17, and Bishop Stapledon's reckoning would make the Queen about the
+same age.
+
+[179] Throughout this chapter I multiply the ancient money by fifteen, to
+bring it to modern value.
+
+[180] Such acts of vandalism were far more common in the Middle Ages than
+is generally imagined; a good many instances are noted in the index of my
+"From St. Francis to Dante."
+
+[181] Devon, "Issues of the Exchequer," pp. 144, 153, 155, 199; "York
+Fabric Rolls," p. 125; cf. 154. It was one of the privileges of the
+Archbishops of York to crown the Queen. For the mortuary system, see my
+"Priests and People in Medieval England." (Simpkins. 1_s._)
+
+[182] Clough, "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich."
+
+[183] "Mon. Germ. Scriptt.," xxxii., 444.
+
+[184] "Mirour," 23893 ff.
+
+[185] Lénient, "Satire en France" (1859), p. 202.
+
+[186] Sacchetti, "Novelle," cliii.; Ste-Palaye, "Chevalerie," ii., 80.
+
+[187] Mr. Rye (_l. c._) points out how frequent was the interchange
+between London and Lynn. Another colleague of John Chaucer's, John de
+Stodey, Mayor and Sheriff of London, had been formerly a taverner at Lynn.
+
+[188] "Mirour," 7225: Cf. "Piers Plowman," C., vii., 248. Readers of
+Chaucer's "Prologue" will remember this mysterious word "chevisance" in
+connection with the Merchant. Its proper meaning was simply _bargain_: the
+slang sense will be best understood from a Royal ordinance of 1365 against
+those who lived by usury; "which kind of contract, the more subtly to
+deceive the people, they call _exchange_, or _chevisance_."
+
+[189] "Vie Nomade," pp. 33, 46.
+
+[190] These were, of course, fines for breaches of the assize of ale, as
+in the Norwich cases already mentioned.
+
+[191] In 1347 his total income was Ł2460, out of which he saved Ł1150. In
+the two other years given by Smyth he saved Ł659 and Ł977. Some knights
+even made a living by pot-hunting at tournaments. See Ch.-V. Langlois, "La
+Vie en France au M. A.," 1908, p. 163.
+
+[192] Cf. a similar instance in Riley, p. 392.
+
+[193] The Shillingford Letters show us the Bishop and Canons of Exeter
+selling wine in the same way at their own houses (p. 91).
+
+[194] Oman, "Art of War in the Middle Ages," 380 ff.
+
+[195] Buchon, i., 349, 431; Globe, 349.
+
+[196] "Mirour," 24625. Cf. the corresponding passage in the "Vox
+Clamantis," Bk. VI. According to Hoccleve, "Law is nye flemëd [= banished]
+out of this cuntre;" it is a web which catches the small flys and gnats,
+but lets the great flies go (_Works_, E.E.T.S., iii., 101 ff.).
+
+[197] Walsingham, an. 1381. The evil repute of jurors is fully explained
+by Gower, "Mirour," 25033. According to him, perjury had become almost a
+recognized profession.
+
+[198] Gautier, _loc. cit._, p. 352.
+
+[199] Lyndwood, "Provinciale," ed. Oxon., p. 272.
+
+[200] "Piers Plowman," B., xv., 237, and xx., 137.
+
+[201] Pollock and Maitland, "History of English Law," vol. i., p. 387;
+Lyndwood, "Provinciale," pp. 271 ff. It is the more necessary to insist on
+this, because of a serious error, based on a misreading of Bishop Quivil's
+injunctions. The bishop does, indeed, proclaim his right and duty of
+_punishing_ the parties to a clandestine marriage; but, so far from flying
+in the face of Canon Law by threatening to _dissolve_ the contract, he
+expressly admits, in the same breath, its binding force.--Wilkins, ii.,
+135.
+
+[202] Wilkins, "Concilia," i., 478.
+
+[203] Froissart, Buchon, iii., 235, 258.
+
+[204] "Piers Plowman," C., xi., 256. Gower speaks still more strongly, if
+possible, "Mirour," 17245 ff. Chaucer's friend Hoccleve makes the same
+complaint (E.E.T.S., vol. iii., p. 60), and these practices outlasted the
+Reformation. The curious reader should consult Dr. Furnivall's "Child
+Marriages and Divorces" (E.E.T.S., 1897).
+
+[205] "Adam of Usk," p. 3; cf. "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 355 (where the price
+is given as 22,000 marks), and 237, where the negotiations for another
+Royal marriage are described with equally brutal frankness.
+
+[206] Froissart, Buchon, ii., 758.
+
+[207] "Paston Letters," 1901, Introd., p. clxxvi.; cf. for example,
+Thorold Rogers' "Hist. of Ag. and Prices," ii., 608. "Megge, the daughter
+of John, son of Utting," pays only 1_s._ for her marriage; but "Alice's
+daughter" pays 6_s._ 8_d._; and so on to "Will, the son of John," and
+"Roger, the Reeve," who each pay 20_s._ That is, it was possible for the
+lord of the manor to squeeze Ł20 in modern money out of a single peasant
+marriage.
+
+[208] Sarradin, "Deschamps," p. 256.
+
+[209] Riley, p. 379. It must, however, be remembered that the ordinary
+rate of interest then was twenty per cent. Thus Robert de Brynkeleye
+receives the wardship of Thomas atte Boure, who had a patrimony of Ł300
+(14th-century standard). With this Robert trades, paying his twenty per
+cent. for the use of it, so that he has to account for Ł1080 at the heir's
+majority. Of this he takes Ł120 for keep and out-of-pocket expenses, and
+Ł390 for his trouble, so that the ward receives Ł570. The Royal Household
+Ordinances of Edward II.'s reign provide for the maintenance of wards
+until "they have their lands, or the king have given _or sold_
+them."--"Life Records," ii., p. 19.
+
+[210] Ste-Palaye, _loc. cit._, i., 64 ff.; ii., 90. This rule of age, like
+all others, had, however, been broken from the first. As early as 1060,
+Geoffrey of Anjou knighted his nephew Fulk at the age of 17; and such
+incidents are common in epics. Princes of the blood were knighted in their
+cradles.
+
+[211] Walsingham, ann. 1307, 1381; "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 189, 389. The
+woman avoided the battle only by withdrawing her accusation.
+
+[212] Gower, "Mirour," 17521.
+
+[213] "Prediche Volgari," ii., 115, and iii., 176.
+
+[214] I quote from the 15th-century English translation published by the
+E.E.T.S. (pp. 25, 27, 81; cf. 23, 95; the square bracket is transferred
+from p. 23). Between 1484 and 1538 there were at least eight editions
+printed in French, English, and German.
+
+[215] Rashdall, "Universities of Europe," ii., 599.
+
+[216] Pp. 8, 18, 33, 36, 156, 207, 217, 218, and _passim_.
+
+[217] "Most of the girls in our 'Chansons de Geste' are represented by our
+poets as horrible little monsters, ... shameless, worse than impudent,
+caring little whether the whole world watches them, and obeying at all
+hazards the mere brutality of their instincts. Their forwardness is not
+only beyond all conception, but contrary to all probability and all
+sincere observation of human nature." Gautier, _l. c._, p. 378.
+
+[218] There is a very interesting essay on "Chaucer's Love Poetry" in the
+_Cornhill_, vol. xxxv., p. 280. It is, however, a good deal spoiled by the
+author's inclusion of many works once attributed to the poet, but now
+known to be spurious.
+
+[219] Bk. IV., ll. 152, 158, 367, 519, 554, 564.
+
+[220] "Paston Letters" (ed. Gairdner, 1900), ii., 364; iv., ccxc.
+
+[221] Few tales illustrate more clearly the woman's duty of accepting any
+knight who made himself sufficiently miserable about her, than that of
+Boccaccio, which Dryden has so finely versified under the name of Theodore
+and Honoria. Equally significant is one of the "Gesta Romanorum" (ed.
+Swan., No. XXVIII.).
+
+[222] Quoted by S. Luce, "Bertrand du Guesclin," 1882, p. 124.
+
+[223] The essentially compulsory foundation of Edward III.'s armies, for
+at least a great part of his reign, seems to have been overlooked even by
+Prof. Oman in his valuable "Art of War in the Middle Ages."
+
+[224] Froissart, ed. Luce, i., 401. It was at this time that Edward also
+proclaimed the duty of teaching French for military purposes, as noted in
+Chap. I. of this book.
+
+[225] "Norwich Militia in the 14th Century" (Norfolk and Norwich Arch.
+Soc.), vol. xiv., p. 263.
+
+[226] Knighton (R.S.), ii., 42, 44, 109.
+
+[227] The Scots themselves had found out long before this who were their
+most formidable enemies. Sir James Douglas had been accustomed to cut off
+the right hand or put out the right eye of any archer whom he could catch.
+
+[228] Compare the interesting case in Gross, "Office of Coroner," p. 74.
+Two conscripts, on their way to join the army, chanced to meet at Cold
+Ashby the constable who was responsible for their being selected; they ran
+him through with a lance and then took sanctuary. It is significant that
+they were not hanged, but carried off to the army; the King needed every
+stout arm he could muster.
+
+[229] Tournaments not infrequently gave rise to treacherous murders and
+vendettas, as in the case of Sir Walter Mauny's father (Froissart,
+Buchon., i., 199). Compare also the scandal caused by the women who used
+to attend them in men's clothes (Knighton, ii., p. 57). Luce, however,
+very much overstates the Royal objections to jousts (pp. 113, 141). He
+evidently fails to realize what a large number of authorized tourneys were
+held by Edward III.
+
+[230] Froissart, Globe, 94-97.
+
+[231] Denifle, "La Désolation des Eglises," etc., vol. i., pp. 497, 504,
+514. Two pages from English chroniclers are almost as bad as any of the
+iniquities printed in Father Denifle's book, viz. the sack of Winchelsea
+(Knighton, ii., 109) and Sir John Arundel's shipload of nuns from
+Southampton (Walsingham, an. 1379; told briefly in "Social England," illd.
+ed., vol. ii. p. 260).
+
+[232] Cf. Knighton, ii., 102.
+
+[233] Green, "Town Life," i., 130. "At the close of the 14th century a
+certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley,
+raised eight hundred fighting men 'to destroy and hurt the commons of
+Chester'; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey, seized the
+wine, and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor and sheriff
+came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff. When in 1441 the Archbishop
+of York determined to fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair, he engaged
+two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence or a
+shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, gathered
+seven hundred men; and at the battle that ensued, more than a thousand
+arrows were discharged by them."
+
+[234] Ed. Luce, i., 213, 214; cf. 312.
+
+[235] Mrs. Green, _l. c._, i., 131.
+
+[236] This point is treated more fully in the next chapter.
+
+[237] Denifle, _l. c._, pp. 497, 504.
+
+[238] "More than three thousand men, women, and children were beheaded
+that day. God have mercy on their souls, for I trow they were martyrs."
+Froissart (Globe), 201.
+
+[239] Ed. Luce, pp. 214, 249, 337.
+
+[240] Trevelyan, "England in the Age of Wycliffe," 1st Edn., p. 195.
+
+[241] "Conseil" (in Appendix to Ducange's "Joinville"), chap. xxi., art.
+8. The writer insists strongly, at the same time, on the lord's
+responsibility to God for his treatment of a creature so helpless.
+
+[242] C., iii., 177. For the Reeve's duties, see Smyth, "Berkeleys," vol.
+ii., pp. 5, 22.
+
+[243] "Those who demand such mortuaries are like worms preying on a
+corpse" (Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, quoted in Lecoy de La Marche, "Chaire
+Française," p. 388). Having already, in my "Medieval Studies" and my
+"Priests and People," dealt more fully with this and several points
+occurring in the succeeding chapters, I can often dispense with further
+references here.
+
+[244] This is admirably discussed by Mr. Corbett in chap. vii. of "Social
+England."
+
+[245] Froissart, Buchon, ii., 150. Leadam, "Star Chamber" (Selden Soc.),
+p. cxxviii. Trevelyan, _l. c._, p. 185.
+
+[246] Vitry, "Exempla," pp. 62, 64; "P. P.," A., iv., 34 (cf. Lecoy., _l.
+c._, 387); Jusserand, "Epopée Mystique," 114; and "Vie Nomade," 81, 261,
+269.
+
+[247] Walsingham, an. 1381; cf. the record in Powell, "Rising in East
+Anglia," p. 130. The rioters compelled the constable of the hundred of
+Hoxne to contribute ten conscripted archers to their party.
+
+[248] It must be remembered that the loyal soldiers also had shown in this
+matter a pusillanimity which contrasted remarkably with their behaviour in
+the French wars; Walsingham notes this with great astonishment. The
+quotations are from the "Chronicle of St. Mary's, York," in Oman, Appendix
+V., pp. 188-200.
+
+[249] An. 1381; cf. "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 353. The original of both these
+descriptions seems to be Gower, "Vox Clam." i., 853 ff.
+
+[250] _L. c._, p. 255.
+
+[251] The first general Sanitation Act for England was that of the
+Parliament held at Cambridge in 1388, and is generally ascribed to the
+filth of that ancient borough.
+
+[252] "Chronicles of London" (4to., 1827), p. 65. "Eulog. Hist." iii.,
+353.
+
+[253] C., ix., 304; B., v., 549. It will be noted how nearly this diet
+accords with that of the widow and her daughter in Chaucer's "Nuns'
+Priest's Tale"; cf. Langlois, "La Vie en France au M-A.," p. 122.
+
+[254] "Rot. Parl." ii., 340.
+
+[255] _L. c._, C., ix., 331.
+
+[256] _L. c._, C., x., 71 ff. "Papelots" = porridge; "ruel" = bedside;
+"woneth" = dwell; "witterly" = surely; "and fele to fong," etc. = "and
+many [children] to clutch at the few pence they earn; under those
+circumstances, bread and small beer is held an unusual luxury." "Pittance"
+is a monastic word, meaning extra food beyond the daily fare.
+
+[257] An Act of 1495 provided that "from the middle of March to the middle
+of September work was to go on from 5 a.m. till between 7 and 8 p.m., with
+half an hour for breakfast, and an hour and a half for dinner and for the
+midday sleep. In winter work was to be during daylight. These legal
+ordinances were not perhaps always kept, but they at least show the
+standard at which employers aimed" ("Social England," vol. ii., chap.
+vii.).
+
+[258] Bishop Grosseteste asserted that honest labour on holy days would be
+far less sinful than the sports which often took their place. "Epp."
+(R.S.), p. 74.
+
+[259] "La France pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans" (1890), 95 ff. The essay
+describes a state of things very similar to what we may gather from
+English records.
+
+[260] "Universities of Europe," ii., 669 ff.
+
+[261] Cooper, "Annals of Cambridge," an. 1410; "Munim. Acad." (R.S.), 602;
+Riley, 571; Strutt (1898), p. 49.
+
+[262] "Shillingford Letters," p. 101. _Queke_ was probably a kind of
+hopscotch, and _penny-prick_ a tossing game; both enjoyed an evil repute,
+according to Strutt.
+
+[263] "Rot. Parl." ii., 64; Myrc., E.E.T.S., i., 334.
+
+[264] "Northumberland Assize Rolls," p. 323. There is another fatal
+wrestling-bout in the same roll (p. 348), another in the similar Norfolk
+roll analysed by Mr. Walter Rye in the _Archćological Review_ (1888), and
+another exactly answering to John and Willie's case in Prof. Maitland's
+"Crown Pleas for the County of Gloucester," No. 452.
+
+[265] "C. T.," A., 3328. Etienne de Bourbon has no doubt that "the Devil
+invented dancing, and is governor and procurator of dancers"; and he
+explains the popular proverb, that God's thunderbolt falls oftener on the
+church than on the tavern, by the notorious profanations to which churches
+were subjected. ("Anecdotes," pp. 269, 397.)
+
+[266] _L. c._ ii., 672.
+
+[267] Wilkins, "Concilia," i., 600; iii., 61, 68, 365; "York Fabric
+Rolls," 269 ff; Grosseteste, "Epp." (R.S.), pp. 75, 118, 161; Giffard's
+"Register" (Worcester), p. 422; and Cutts, "Parish Priests," p. 122.
+
+[268] Wilkins, i., 530, 719; iii., 61 and _passim_; _Archćological
+Journal_, vol. xl., pp. 1 ff; "Somerset Record Society," vol. iv.
+
+[269] Eight men died in Northampton gaol between Aug. 1322 and Nov. 1323
+(Gross, p. 79). The jury casually record: "He died of hunger, thirst, and
+want."... "Want of food and drink, and cold."... "Natural death."...
+"Hunger and thirst and natural death." One is really glad to think that so
+small a proportion of criminals ever found their way into prison.
+
+[270] Gross, "Office of Coroner," p. 69.
+
+[271] "Eng. Hist. Rev.," vol. 50.
+
+[272] This still allowed him to migrate to another part of the King's
+dominions--_e.g._ Ireland, Scotland, Normandy.
+
+[273] Worcestershire Record Society.
+
+[274] Gower, "Mirour," 20125, 20653.
+
+[275] Riley, 567; cf. Preface to "Liber Albus," p. cvii., and Walsingham,
+an. 1382.
+
+[276] Cf. Mr. Walter Rye's articles in "Norf. Antq. Misc.," vol ii., p.
+194, and _Archćological Review_ for 1888, p. 201.
+
+[277] The complaints which meet us in Gower and "Piers Plowman" on this
+score are more than borne out by the "Shillingford Letters" (Camden Soc.,
+1871). The worthy Mayor of Exeter reports faithfully to his
+fellow-citizens what bribes he gives, and to whom.
+
+[278] Chaucer's pupil Hoccleve speaks almost equally strongly on the
+mischief of such pardons ("Works," E.E.T.S., vol. iii., pp. 113 ff).
+
+[279] _Clergy_ is of course here used in the common medieval sense of
+_learning_; it does not refer to any body of men.
+
+[280] _I.e._ the type of perfect religion, "the Christ that is to be."
+
+[281] Be "found" or provided for, so that they need no longer to live by
+begging and flattery.
+
+[282] This was very commonly the case even in the greatest cathedrals:
+typical reports may be found in the easily accessible "York Fabric Rolls"
+(Surtees Soc.). With regard to Canterbury, a strange legend is current to
+the effect that Lord Badlesmere was executed in 1322 for his irreverent
+behaviour in that cathedral. Apart from the extraordinary inherent
+improbability of any such story, the execution of Lord Badlesmere is one
+of the best known events in the reign. He was hanged for joining the Earl
+of Lancaster in open rebellion against Edward, against whom he had fought
+at Boroughbridge.
+
+[283] Wilkins, iii., 360 ff; "Rot. Parl." ii., 313. I have given fuller
+details and references in the 8th of my "Medieval Studies," "Priests and
+People" (Simpkins, 1_s._).
+
+[284] Taking eight test-periods, which cover four dioceses and a space of
+nearly forty-five years, I find that, before the Black Death, scarcely
+more than one-third of the livings in lay gift were presented to men in
+priest's orders--the exact proportion is 262 priests to 452 non-priests.
+
+[285] Rashdall, "Universities of Europe," ii., 613, 701. Merely to reckon
+the number of years theoretically required for the different degrees, and
+to argue from this to the solid education of the medieval priest (as has
+sometimes been done), is to ignore the mass of unimpeachable evidence
+collected by Dr. Rashdall. Only an extremely small fraction of the
+students took any theological degree whatever.
+
+[286] The list of indictments for grave offences in "Munim. Acad." (R.S.),
+vol. ii., contains a very large proportion of graduates, chaplains, and
+masters of Halls; and Gerson frequently speaks with bitter indignation of
+the number of Parisian scholars who were debauched by their masters.
+
+[287] In Chaucer's words--
+
+  He set ... his benefice to hire
+  And left his sheep encumbred in the mire,
+  And ran to London, unto Saintë Paul's
+  To seeken him a chanterie for souls.
+
+The Archbishop's decree may be found in the "Register of Bp. de Salopia,"
+p. 639; cf. 694 (Somerset Record Society).
+
+[288] Quoted from a MS. collection of 14th-century sermons by Ch.
+Petit-Dutaillis in "Etudes Dédiées ŕ G. Monod.," p. 385.
+
+[289] Knighton (R.S.), ii., 191; at still greater length on p. 183.
+Walsingham, ann. 1387, 1392; cf. "Eulog. Hist.," iii., 351, 355.
+
+[290] Kingsford, "Chronicles of London," p. 64; Walsingham, an. 1410.
+
+[291] "P. Plowman," B., xv., 383: Jusserand, "Epop. Myst.," p. 217. See
+especially the remarkable words of Chaucer's contemporary, the banker
+Rulman Merswin of Strassburg, quoted by C. Schmidt, "Johannes Tauler," p.
+218. After setting forth his conviction that Christendom is now (1351) in
+a worse state than it has been for many hundred years past, and that evil
+Christians stand less in God's love than good Jews or heathens who know
+nothing better than the faith in which they were born, and would accept a
+better creed if they could see it, Merswin then proceeds to reconcile this
+with the Catholic doctrine that none can be saved without baptism. "I will
+tell thee; this cometh to pass in manifold hidden ways unknown to the most
+part of Christendom in these days; but I will tell thee of one way....
+When one of these good heathens or Jews draweth near to his end, then
+cometh God to his help and enlighteneth him so far in Christian faith,
+that with all his heart he desireth baptism. Then, even though there be no
+present baptism for him, yet from the bottom of his heart he yearneth for
+it: so I tell thee how God doth: He goeth and baptiseth him in the baptism
+of his good yearning will and his painful death. Know therefore that many
+of these good heathens and Jews are in the life eternal, who all came
+thither in this wise."
+
+[292] "P. Plowman," B., x., p. 51; cf. Langlois, _l. c._, pp. 211, 264-5.
+
+
+
+
+
+
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