The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (51 page)

Rare among medieval institutions, it brought together on speaking terms men and women of all ranks and conditions. Kings and peasants, doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, were not just in one another’s presence, as they might have been in church. On a long journey together they relieved boredom by learning about one another with conversation and tale-telling. The pilgrims tried other sorts of entertainment, not always decorous or edifying. A priest in Chaucer’s time, William Thorpe, preached against that passion “to seek and visit the bones or images … of this saint or that.” “Runners thus madly hither and thither into pilgrimage borrow hereto other men’s goods (yea and sometimes they steal men’s goods hereto), and they pay them never again.” The pardoner himself warns:

Organizers of these pleasure trips, Thorpe noted, “will ordain beforehand to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs; and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the king came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels.” And pilgrims were tempted to become “great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars.”

The pilgrimage proved to be an admirable vehicle for Chaucer’s rich contribution to the human comedy. His worldly-wise career had gathered a colorful store of personal experience. If he could only persuade all in the pilgrim party to speak for themselves and entertain one another, the varied bouquet of tales could not fail to entertain all readers. And incidentally create a warm encyclopedic narrative of England in his time. Chaucer’s tales revealed the tellers, and even his animal fables acquired human dimension. Chantecleer, his favorite wife, and the fox would tell us more than the Nun’s Priest who recounted the fable intended. Chaucer’s lively wit and unforgettable poetry gave to twice-told tales a new life.

Yet for Chaucer, unlike Boccaccio, literature was only an avocation. And he wrote the first great poem in the English language in the interstices of a busy public life. In an age of plagues, volatile politics, and civil disorder, he managed to keep the goodwill and patronage of three kings—Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. From all of them he received substantial favors, remunerative posts at home, and distinguished missions abroad. His official positions were the outline of his biography.

Geoffrey Chaucer, born into a prosperous London family about 1340, did start with advantages. His father, a successful wholesale wine merchant, could send him to a good London school for the rudiments of Latin and science. He knew French (the language of his father’s business and of the court), and he may have done his translation of Boethius into English from Jean de Meung’s French. In 1357 Chaucer’s family secured for him a desirable place as page in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, the second son of Edward III. There he, like other sons and daughters of rising merchants and professionals, received a courtly education and the opportunity to make useful “contacts.” The personable Chaucer took full advantage of his opportunities. Traveling widely in the retinue of the countess, he saw the country and met people of influence.

Courts like that of the countess were entertained by literature read aloud.
Unlike Latin classics, these works were not designed for the scholar in his study. For group entertainment they had to be written in the vernacular. English in place of French was beginning to come into its own as the literary language at court. It carried an aura of patriotism, too, while the Hundred Years’ War against France was in full flood. The apprentice courtiers—pages and young ladies—were expected to participate by singing and versifying. There was a lot to know about the ways of the court, which Chaucer was learning despite his mercantile origins. In his early long verse works about the noble classes he embroidered the familiar themes of chivalry and courtly love.

When Edward III crossed the Channel in 1359 to enforce his claim on the throne of France, young Chaucer joined in the siege of Reims. And when Chaucer was captured by the French, the king ransomed him for the considerable sum of sixteen pounds, then enlisted him as a trusted messenger during peace negotiations. Chaucer married well, to a knight’s daughter who received a lifetime annuity for her service to the queen, and whose position at court would help him. He himself soon received an annuity from the king, who continued to keep him busy. After a diplomatic mission to Spain in 1366, royal assignments took him to Flanders and France. In Italy, if he did not meet Boccaccio, he at least became acquainted with Boccaccio’s work, and he acquired manuscripts of Petrarch’s works and of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. For miscellaneous services the king favored him with a grant for life of a daily pitcher of wine.

In 1374, when Chaucer was appointed to the remunerative position of controller of the customs for the Port of London, he and his wife received a convenient rent-free house on London Wall above Aldgate. The duties of this job required daily attendance at the office to keep records in his own hand. By now his numerous salaries, annuities, and fringe benefits had made him a wealthy man. When Edward III died in 1377, Chaucer’s friend and patron John of Gaunt had the boy king Richard II confirm Chaucer’s posts and benefits, and graciously commute the daily wine to a life annuity. Still more favors, including the peculiarly medieval wardships, forfeitures, and grants, piled up.

Chaucer must have filled his posts creditably, for he continued to be reappointed. As clerk of the works at Westminster, the Tower of London, and other royal estates he supervised the construction and maintenance of public buildings, and carried large sums of payroll money. In 1390, the year before he gave up the job, he was robbed and beaten up three times within four days. After appointment as justice of the peace in 1385, he became knight of the shire attending Parliament for Kent.

Consummate tact was required for a public person to survive the troubled times of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the tense years that followed. He
was embarrassed as defendant in a legal action for rape, but his accuser finally released him. Still, he managed somehow to stay in royal favor, in an age when the good opinion of one king might bring a death warrant from his successor. When the exiled Henry IV returned to England and was crowned in 1399, he too confirmed Chaucer’s grants and benefits and even added another handsome annuity. The political tribulations of Chaucer’s lifetime were the raw material for Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II and his Henry IV. Chaucer died in London in 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where few commoners before him had been so honored.

During these busy troubled times Chaucer produced the first great body of English poetry. But the works of his early years bear the mark of his courtly education and tell us little of the life of his time. In the tradition of the popular French
Roman de la Rose
, which Chaucer himself undertook to translate, he wrote four long dream-vision poems. His first,
The Book of the Duchess
, was an elegy to Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s first wife, who had died in the plague of 1369. After his discovery of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, Chaucer wrote three more long poems in heroic couplets, all as dream-visions.
The House of Fame
recounts what happened to Aeneas after the fall of Troy.
The Parliament of Fowls
reveals the poet’s vision of the Court of Nature on Saint Valentine’s Day “when every fowl cometh there to choose his mate” and the competition of three male eagles for a single beautiful female. It is best known for its opening lines:

In
The Legend of Good Women
the poet, as penance, tells “a glorious legend” of good women and the evil men who betrayed them.

Troilus and Cressida
, Chaucer’s longest poem, of some eight thousand
lines, completed about 1385, still rewards us with its passion, eloquence, and suspense. Set in the age of the Trojan War, the story is borrowed and whole lines are translated from Boccaccio. The romance of Troilus and Cressida was not found in the
Iliad
, which anyway Chaucer knew only secondhand. Five books in rime royal tell the love of Troilus, son of Priam, king of Troy, for Cressida, daughter of a Trojan soothsayer Calchas, who foresees the fall of Troy. Troilus and Cressida consummate their love with the scheming of Cressida’s uncle, Pandarus. When Calchas takes refuge in the camp of the besieging Greeks, he persuades them to take Cressida into their camp in an exchange of prisoners. Cressida promises the desolate Troilus that she will return after ten days. But, once in the Greek camp, she abandons Troilus and yields to the Greek Diomede. She does not return to Troy on the appointed tenth day, and Troilus is convinced of her faithlessness when on armor taken from Diomede he sees the brooch he had given her as a token of their love. Troilus fails to kill Diomede in battle, but is himself killed by Achilles. The poem ends in the Boethian spirit, with Troilus looking down from above on the folly and transience of earthly love.

Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, written in the last decade of his life, marks a surprising new vision, a work that would outshine all his others. What led Chaucer the poet to turn from polite literary conventions to cast the people of his time in a human comedy of his own creation? To us it seems odd that this should need explaining. We take it for granted that our literature should deal with everybody. But the medieval world of letters in a learned language known to few had long diverged from everyday experience. Chaucer turned to that experience for the materials of a new contemporary epic, his contribution to the human comedy. His productive literary years after about 1380 were especially turbulent for England. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 burned manors, murdered landlords, lawyers, and officials, and brought one hundred thousand marchers to London. They entered through Aldgate, over which Chaucer had his official lodgings. They burned the Savoy, the palace of Chaucer’s friend and patron John of Gaunt. Chaucer survived these events, though some of his friends did not. But the sanguine Chaucer somehow never wrote these disasters into his copious poems.

In the busy years between about 1386 and 1399 when Chaucer was writing
The Canterbury Tales
he had found a scheme that lent itself to writing piecemeal, and so could be produced in the intervals of his public duties. To offer many narrators in a frame was not new. Boccaccio had used a similar scheme in his
Decameron
, which Chaucer may have known. About the same time Chaucer’s English friend the “moral Gower” to whom he dedicated
Troilus and Cressida
was writing his
Confessio amantis
, a bouquet of stories told by the same narrator. But Chaucer deftly used the
pilgrimage to widen all the dimensions—the kind of people who told the tales, the actors in the tales, and the audience—into a saga of his time.

Now, Chaucer said, he would write “some comedy,” which, in the language of his day, meant a narrative poem with an agreeable ending. The term probably came from the Italian, where, as we have heard Dante explain, a comedy was in a style “lax and unpretending … written in the vulgar tongue, in which women and children speak.”
The Canterbury Tales
was not meant for reading aloud to a polite circle. The turmoil of the years when Chaucer began this work had made the court a less agreeable audience. Chaucer’s “comedy” would be about ordinary people and for ordinary people. Just as the
Divine Comedy
adds interest by Dante’s reaction to what he sees, so we come to know the pilgrims by what they tell and how they reacted to what they heard.

Chaucer then created his own popular “court” of thirty-one pilgrims en route from London to Canterbury. This motley company was not random but wonderfully representative. Pilgrims from nearly all ranks of English life meet at the Tabard Inn (which really existed at the time) just across the Thames from London (nowadays this neighborhood would be called a red-light district). Harry Bailly (the real name of Tabard’s innkeeper in Chaucer’s day) offers to come along as their guide. Others in the party have also been identified as Chaucer’s contemporaries. “To shorten the way” Bailly suggests that they entertain one another “at no cost.” Each will tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. The prize for the best story will be a dinner at the Tabard. By a show of hands, all agree to the plan and to let Bailly preside as judge.

Chaucer is plainly reaching out. His pilgrims do not include the classes with whom he has been consorting, the junior members of the royal family, and the upper nobility. Nor at the other end of the social scale does he include serfs or farm workers. All the rest are represented—from the gentry (the Knight and his son) through church women and men of the upper classes (a Prioress and a Monk), clergy of the lower ranks (Nuns, Nun’s Priest, Friar, and Parson), hirelings of the church (Summoner, Pardoner), the professions (the Clerk, the Man of Law, and the Doctor of Physic), the petty officials and employees (Summoner, Bailiff, Manciple), middle-class persons of property (Franklin, Wife of Bath, Merchant), craftsmen and guildsmen (Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-maker, Haberdasher, Miller), and the lower orders (Yeoman, Cook, Shipman, Plowman). Even the omissions help make the company a persuasive sample of real life.