The Adventure of English (9 page)

Henry, Duke of Lancaster, became King Henry IV and English was once again a royal language. It had been touch-and-go many times. And Latin and French had not lost their grip as the languages of official business and of the Church. But English had made its boldest public gain for three centuries and it sat once more on the throne. At last the tide seemed to be turning in its favour, although there would be much blood spilled before it gained status as the first language in all matters to do with English life.

Now, though, as if in celebration of this victory, it would welcome its first truly great literary champion, a writer who could harness its new capabilities to produce great stories, and poetry, a literature fit for the language that had come through.

C
haucer was the first writer of the newly emerged England. He told us what we were. In
The Canterbury Tales
in particular he describes characters we can still see around us today and he writes of them in the new English, Middle English, English that had somehow withstood the battering given by French and come back to begin its fight to regain control of the country in which it had been nourished.

David Crystal in his
Encyclopaedia of the English Language
writes: “In no other author . . . is there better support for the view that there is an underlying correspondence between the natural rhythm of English poetry and that of English everyday conversation.”

Here, at the end of the fourteenth century, English speakers talk directly to us, through skilful stories told by a group of pilgrims to ease the time as they ride from Southwark in London to Canterbury Cathedral. There are several reasons to pause and look around the world of English with Chaucer but most importantly for me, he brings on to the stage the range of individually realised characters, high and low, broad and refined, and of words apt for each, coarse and delicate, satirical and mockheroic, which signpost not only much of future English literature but much of English life. Most importantly of all, he decided to write not in Latin — which he knew well — not in the French from which he translated and which might have given him greater prestige, but in English, his own English, London-based English. Power had moved out of Wessex away from Winchester and it was now London, together with the twin universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which increasingly would set the often much resented and resisted Standard English.

Chaucer was not alone. There is Langland's
Piers Plowman,
there is
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
there are homilies, sermons, rhymes and verses bursting out all over, a springtime of English not just released from bondage but energised and fortified by it. Chaucer was supreme at that time and by concentrating on him, telling his story along the way of our journey as his pilgrims did on their journey, we will, I hope, get some understanding of what English had achieved in these three hundred Normanised years. There is plenty to work on: he wrote forty-three thousand lines of poetry, two substantial prose works and curiosities such as
A Treatise on the Astrolabe
for the education of his son, Lewis.

The man's life is well enough known, probably more certain in its details than the life of Shakespeare two centuries later. He was a Londoner, born in the mid 1340s, son of a London vintner, John Chaucer. In his adolescence, he became a page in the service of the Duke of Clarence and later served in the household of Edward III. It is important to emphasise that London was tiny by modern-day comparisons — a population of about forty thousand. Grandeur and the gutter were twinned in confined, crowded, sometimes dangerously infected places in which you did not risk drinking the water. A page at court would most likely be sent on messages and little missions all over the city and be able to savour all the variety of life on offer, life then being much lived on the streets. Dickens, the great fictional cartographer of London, is prefigured in Chaucer and both were steeped in the place.

Chaucer served in one of the campaigns in the Hundred Years War, was taken prisoner, and ransomed. There was material here well used and his rather grand marriage, to the daughter of Sir Payne Roet, whose sister later linked him by marriage to John of Gaunt, gave him high gossip at least, and access very likely to the centre of power. The idea of a writer making a living solely through writing was not entertained at that time. Chaucer had an income to find. He discovered ways to do this which in retrospect seem brilliantly planned to develop his art as a writer while satisfying his need for a purchase on the worlds of money, intellectual engagement, diplomacy and status. In the 1370s he began to travel abroad on diplomatic missions for the king. There was a trade agreement he negotiated at Genoa; on a mission to Milan he encountered the dazzling achievements of Italian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were alive and Dante was cherished and much discussed. There is evidence of their influence in much of his work.

After about ten years in the saddle abroad, during which time he composed
The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde
and translated Boethius'
The Consolation of Philosophy,
he settled in London to become Controller of the Petty Customs. In 1386 he was elected as a Knight, or MP, for the shire of Kent. He began work on
The Canterbury Tales
and it is in this period that his fortunes fluctuate as the youth of Richard II helped provoke court intrigue: Chaucer gets into debt; he recovers to become Clerk of the King's Works; he soon quits that for the unprepossessing post of Deputy Forester at Petherton in Somerset; he takes a lease on a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey in 1399 and dies the following year. It is a life which covered much of the important waterfront of the time and that knowingness, that lived experience, is one of the factors which gives
The Canterbury Tales
its historical strength. Of course the characters and the stories are inventions but nevertheless, we feel, grounded in close observation of and some participation in the world as it was then. Chaucer's England is a believable place.

These are the opening lines of
The Canterbury Tales
in a Modern English translation; they begin in spring in the rain:

So in his own language, a language written to be read aloud to a public more than read alone in private, Chaucer calmly, leisurely, gathers his listeners and readers together:

About twenty to twenty-five percent of the vocabulary used by Chaucer is from the French. In that short extract there's an average of at least one French word per line: “April,” “March,” “perced,” “veyne,” “lycour,” “vertu,” “engendred,” “flour,” “inspired.” Often they have meanings now lost: “lycour” = moisture; “vertu” = power. Later, “corage” = heart; “straunge” = foreign, distant. “Zephirus” is from Latin, “root” is from Old Norse. But there is no sense that English had been taken over. This language is English. All the words called by linguists “function words” — pronouns and prepositions — are from Old English; the nuts and bolts and the basic structure held.

The martyr was the murdered Archbishop, Thomas à Becket.

And that is the basic structure of the tales. Within that, as within the language, the variations through the stories themselves are numerous and exhilarating. They meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, five minutes' walk from where the Globe would be built. In Chaucer's as in Shakespeare's time and until quite recently, it was a “mixed” area of London, a place of pickpockets, prostitutes, markets, pubs, traffic and foreign seamen crowding the twisting streets from the Thames, “real London” in Chaucer's day and still now.

The characters ride in:

Here Chaucer has inherited and appropriated the language and the ideas brought over by Eleanor of Aquitaine and in doing so he has created a figure who would feature in English history and in English literature deep into the twentieth century. He may be lurking yet: the man of quality and privilege who was also a man of integrity, modest and courteous especially to women, a man prepared to fight for a cause that was good but not brutalised by war, a gentle man. The element of irony is there: this roll-call of battle honours can also be described as a catalogue of massacres. Yet, idealised, satirised, caricatured, lovingly rediscovered century after century, Chaucer's Knight is the first of many characters who defined what we thought or wanted to believe one aspect of being English was.

This brief paragraph could be repeated for almost all the pilgrims. Through his English, Chaucer gave England its first National Portrait Gallery.

Perhaps part of the appeal is what we might call the canny cross-class cluster. Not only from different parts of England but from different strata of society they come, joined in a common purpose, and whipped into line by the landlord, Harry Bailey. They take their turn to tell their stories. This gallery rises above feudalism, it presents a society of people happy to deal on equal terms before God and in story-telling. It has the deep attraction of a Golden Age and gives off the warm feeling that these were people who had come through a long tunnel and wanted to go together towards a new light, riding on the pleasure of their language and its new subtle abilities to etch them into history.

What Chaucer did most brilliantly was to choose and tailor his language to suit every story and its teller. The creation of mood and tone and the realisation of characters through the language they use is something we expect of writers today, so it is difficult to realise how extraordinary it was when Chaucer did it. He proved that the re-formed English was fit for great literature.

The range and variety of the language can clearly be seen by looking at just two of the stories. In the Nun's Priest's Tale, the language of high Romance — used with open sincerity and admiration in the Knight's Tale — is used satirically to tell the mock-Romantic comic story of a vain cockerel and his favourite chicken:

French words dominate here — “governaunce,” “plesaunce,” “paramours.” “Governaunce” and “plesaunce” are quite new, first recorded around the middle of the fourteenth century. Chaucer liked French borrowings and enjoyed introducing his own synonyms. English had the noun “hard”: Chaucer introduced the French (from Latin) “difficulte.” He gave us “disadventure” for “unhap,” “dishoneste” for “shendship,” “edifice” for “building,” “ignoraunt” for “uncunning.” Chaucer's reputation in France was high in his own lifetime and looting the old conqueror's language was fair game. He was unself-conscious about this new English: there was no rigid fundamentalism about it, eclecticism and elasticity were all.

The greatest contrast to the Nun's Priest's Tale is the Miller's Tale, where Absolon, the parish clerk, makes a midnight assignation with a neighbour's wife which, as it were, backfires:

The style is direct, colloquial, with few French words. For earthy words he goes to Old English — or to the streets for “ers.”

Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, courtier and scholar, had no problem with what we might call rude or saucy words. When Harry Bailey tells the Chaucer character to shut up (Chaucer has sent himself up with a tale of Sir Thopas in dreadful doggerel), he says:

There are plenty of other examples, the bluntest of which is probably that uttered by the sexually demanding Wife of Bath:

What really offended people then was swearing by God or by parts of God. When Harry Bailey asks them to tell a tale “For Goddes bones,” the Parson protests at this sinful swearing.