A New Introduction to Chaucer

D. S. Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138458437
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317895367
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new introduction to Chaucer has been radically rewritten since the previous edition which was published in 1984. The book is a controversial and modern restatement of some of the traditional views on Chaucer, and seeks to present a rounded introduction to his life, cultural setting and works. Professor Brewer takes into account recent literary criticism, both challenging new ideas and using them in his analysis of Chaucer's work. Above all, there is a strong emphasis on leading the reader to understand and enjoy the poetry and prose, and to try to understand Chaucer's values which are often seen to oppose modern principles.

A New Introduction to Chaucer is the result of Derek Brewer's distinguished career spanning fifty years of research and study of Chaucer and contemporary scholarship and criticism. New interpretations of many of the poems are presented including a detailed account of the Book of the Duchess. Derek Brewer's fresh and narrative style of writing will appeal to all who are interested in Chaucer, from sixth-form and undergraduate students who are new to Chaucer's work through to more advanced students and lecturers.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

THE NEW AND THE OLD, ARCHAIC AND MODERN

Geoffrey Chaucer, the most varied of our half-dozen greatest English poets, is well documented as a courtier, customs officer, diplomat, occupant of a flat over Aldgate in London Wall, traveller to France and Italy, married, with children, and so forth. His poetry tells us about him as a poet. Put together the records, the poetry, and the history of the fascinating fourteenth century, and we find a remarkably full and interesting picture of a man and an age. It was a great creative period. Many new things were starting or, having started, were gaining strength. The modern world was beginning. Towns were established, capitalist enterprise raised standards of living, serfdom was being eroded, new inventions such as clockwork and a new numeracy and power to calculate, were developing. New feelings, for the family, for the individual, a new tenderness for suffering, were being experienced. These have to be seen against a background of special sorrows and troubles. Things went badly for England in much of Chaucer’s lifetime, even when they prospered for him personally, and he was fully responsive to the sadness of life. Ancient sorrows continued: those caused by mankind, the savage warfare, the brutal rapine of cities; and those caused by nature, starvation and disease from poor harvests, illnesses unmitigated by medicine, and plague. Religion ancient and new offered consolations. The message of Christianity has always been the conquest of suffering and death, the triumph of love and significance. Religious experience increased the emphasis on the individual’s internal values. The very success of Christianity in preaching higher ideals, more gentleness, more pity, led to men judging the Church unfavourably by its own divinely inspired ideals as inefficient and corrupt. On the other hand the higher value which was being set on secular life gave that more vividness, more splendour, and consequently, because it was so swiftly passing and so full of suffering, gave it more pathos.

One of the driving engines of all these developments was the spread of schooling derived from the Church, which created literacy and the multiplication of books. Books were still in manuscript, painfully copied with many errors, for the last great medieval invention, printing, was still a century away. But there were many books, the more powerful ones in Latin – the Bible, the great theological tomes, and the classics of Antiquity themselves, still used as schoolbooks. There were also many books in French, which was still, since William of Normandy’s Conquest in 1066, one of the main languages of England, though it was now more of a local dialect, limited to the upper classes, and losing its hold. There was a rapidly increasing flow of books in English: sermons, romances, encyclopedias, works of instruction, often translated, but with more original work also. The steady advance of literacy had been at first limited to the clergy. To be literate was indeed to be a cleric, a clerk. But now in the second half of the fourteenth century the literate layman, secular, advanced in thought, appears, and his supreme manifestation is Geoffrey Chaucer.

For all his advanced interests, Chaucer was solidly a part of traditional culture. The mixture of tradition and innovation which he supremely illustrates is one of his great qualities. Literate, son of a citizen of London, numerate, secular in his occupations, and thus a part of what was new, he was also a ‘courtman all his life’, as one of his characters says. The court, with its fierce loyalties and betrayals, its focus on the king, its basis in the ethos of fighting, its interest in sexual love, was a flourishing example of traditional archaic patterns of thought and feeling. The court flourished partly because it was so well allied with the city. The court at Westminster, and two miles away the City of London, with the law courts on the way, sum up the spread of Chaucer’s life, an axis which gave unique opportunities to a unique genius.

THE LIFE OF A PAGE AT COURT

Chaucer first appears in a court record. Medieval England is notably rich in administrative records of many kinds, but this record has survived by a marvellous accident. It is a couple of pages which were later used for binding up another book and were preserved by pure chance. They are pages from the accounts, kept as usual in a curious mixed jargon of Anglified Latin and French, mingled with actual English words, of the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, who was the third son of the glamorous and long-reigning King Edward III. From these scraps we learn that various people were given ribbons and robes worth so much, and that ‘Galfridus’ (Latin for Geoffrey) Chaucer was given, on Monday 4 April 1357 a ‘paltok’ or short cloak, costing four shillings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of shoes which cost his lady a further three shillings. He must have been a page, probably now 17 years old, and was being set up in bright new clothing for Easter, which fell on 9 April. His outfit was quite expensive to the Countess. Twelve pence made a shilling, and 20 shillings a pound. We would have to multiply these sums at least 300 or 400 times to get their rough modern equivalents, though on the other hand labour was terribly cheap and the gap between rich and poor immensely greater than in modern Britain. A ploughman was paid about 12 shillings a year, while the Black Prince when at war drew pay of 20 shillings a day, and an archer sixpence a day.

Our sight of Chaucer in this princely household shows his connection, at his most impressionable age, with all the splendour, elegance and sophistication of Edward Ill’s court – the most magnificent in Europe and also the most efficiently run. It was the Edwardian court rather than the ‘Ricardian’ (of Richard II, Edward’s grandson) which formed Chaucer’s poetic nature, though his later poems were produced in the youthful Richard’s court. Chaucer’s lady, the Countess Elizabeth, travelled about the country a great deal, and probably took Chaucer with her. London, Southampton, Reading, Hatfield, Windsor, Hertford Castle, Anglesey, Liverpool all saw her and her train in those four years, some places several times. State weddings and funerals held at Edward’s court, as well as the normal feasts of the year, were duly kept by her, and no doubt by Chaucer in her train. As her page he helped to serve her at table, and attend her at various ceremonies, according to the strict and elaborate etiquette of a great household, which he had to learn. Some slight care would be taken of his general education, as well as of his manners. Much of what he learned, of politeness, of good manners, of noble behaviour (as well, doubtless, as scandalous talk and comic stories) came to him by watching and waiting at table, talking with his fellow pages and the older squires, and so forth. The chaplain might supervise his serious reading. He picked up an interest in music. He listened to, and read for himself, the current songs and romances, both English and the fashionable French ones. French was losing its domination as the language of the court, but the royal family spoke it. However, Chaucer learned Continental French, the ‘French of Paris’, and any influence from Anglo-French was indirect and general. Chaucer had a remarkable memory for the poems of the fashionable Continental French poet Machaut, as The Book of the Duchess shows. The last item of this courtly education by living was instruction in military exercises, given by the knight or gentleman in the Countess Elizabeth’s household to whom this important duty was assigned. Chaucer is never cynical about fighting.

What was Chaucer’s background for this courtier’s life?

CHAUCER’S FAMILY

Chaucer came, like a number of other courtiers, from a well-to-do merchant family whose progress can be traced from modest beginnings in Ipswich, and whose increasing prosperity depended on being equally at home, in a modest way, in both Court and City.

Both Chaucer’s father and grandfather were prosperous men, with varying amounts of property, whose principal income came from their connection with the wine trade. Apart from their own business as wholesale importers and wine merchants, they were both (like Chaucer himself) employed at various times in the collection of the king’s customs. The family had property in Ipswich and had probably lived there, but before Chaucer was born his father had moved to London. He was drawn, doubtless, by that city’s increasing importance as a financial and business centre, and by its nearness to the king’s court and administrative offices.

About the poet’s grandfather, Robert, little is known. He owned property in Ipswich and was a vintner. In 1308 and 1310, he was deputy to the king’s chief butler (an important official, who was sometimes a man of considerable wealth). Part of the butler’s duties was the collection of taxes on imported wines, and this was Robert Chaucer’s department. His wife Mary came from the prosperous Ipswich family of the Westhales, and when he married her she was already a widow, presumably with property.

Robert and Mary Chaucer had a son, John Chaucer (who became the poet’s father), born in 1313. He inherited his father’s Ipswich property and carried on the family business as a vintner. A curious sidelight is thrown on the fourteenth century by an incident in his childhood, when at 11 years of age his aunt (Robert Chaucer’s sister), and others, abducted him with the intention of marrying him to her daughter Joan, thereby joining his Ipswich property to hers. This was no unusual event at the time, but fortunately for us she and her accomplices were prevented. They were then sued at law. Her principal accomplice was very heavily fined. Having escaped this early marriage, John Chaucer is next seen at the age of 25, as a member of the great and splendid retinue which the king took to the Continent in 1338, though we do not know in what capacity John Chaucer travelled. Probably around this time he married a widow, Agnes Northwell, who also owned property. John Chaucer prospered. He became one of the main vintners in the City of London; for two years he, like his father, was deputy to the king’s chief butler in the collection of duty on wines, and he was also deputy to the same person in April 1347 in the collection of export duties on woollen cloths. By this time he was an important figure in the general affairs of the City. To this wealthy wine merchant, man of affairs, connected with the court, Geoffrey Chaucer was born; perhaps in his father’s house in Thames Street, about 1340, to judge from his own remarks about his age made in the Scrope-Grosvenor trial in 1386.

THE CITY OF LONDON

London was Geoffrey Chaucer’s earliest experience. It was unique among English cities, being the centre of commercial power, with a special relationship to the king. It was that square mile on the north bank of the Thames, still called in English the City, and thus near the main seat of the royal power, which was the city of Westminster, further along the river. London was the biggest of English cities with a population of about 45 000. (Estimates for other towns are: York, about 11 000; Bristol, about 10 000; Plymouth and Coventry, about 7000; no other town is thought to have had above 6000; by contrast, contemporary Florence, one of the biggest cities in Europe, had about 90 000.) London also had substantial suburbs south of the Thames, especially at Southwark, by London Bridge. From Southwark, just over the river, the Dover Road, and the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury began. In Southwark was the Tabard Inn, at which Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered, and the church (now the Cathedral) where the effigy of the poet John Gower, a friend of Chaucer, can still be seen. North of the river, the road which is still called the Strand (or Bankside) ran between London and the palace of Westminster, passing the law courts, and then the large town houses owned by rich merchants and nobles, including the Savoy, John of Gaunt’s palace already mentioned. To get to Westminster from the City you could go along the Strand from London, but the Exchequer and Privy Seal clerks, like Chaucer’s younger friend and poetic follower Hoccleve, who worked at Westminster and usually lodged in London, often preferred, like many others, to go by water, especially in winter when the roads were so muddy.

The River Thames was a fine highway, though the famous bridge, with houses on it (like the Ponte Vecchio still to be seen in Florence) was a dangerous hazard with its great supports which caused a six-foot drop in the water level when the tide was running strong. It also bore grim reminders of the rough punishments of the times, with its rotting heads of offenders stuck upon spikes. Within the city many houses had their gardens, often with vegetable plots and fruit trees. Since the houses were mostly of no more than two storeys it must have been easy to see the blossom in spring, and church towers everywhere, with over all the Gothic spire of Old St Paul’s, destroyed in the seventeenth-century Great Fire of London. There were big markets, and masses of shops, all governed by complex laws. There was a sewage-system, advanced for the times, a number of public latrines, and despite arrangements for street-cleaning, much filth in the streets, with pigs rooting about in the rubbish, and streams that were open sewers. It must have smelt like a farmyard in summer. We cannot estimate the city by our own standards of comfort and cleanliness; the great medieval European cities, of which London was a small example, were a remarkable achievement, with all their faults, in the art of living, won against heavy odds: of physical difficulty in an age without machines; of administrative difficulty in an age when communication was slow and limited; of disciplinary difficulty in an age when men were often as violent, unruly and unstable as children; and of the sheer difficulty of survival in an age of primitive medical science, ignorant of microbes. The fourteenth century saw the growth of some great cities such as Hamburg, Paris, Florence, on the Continent. London, alone of all English cities in the fourteenth century, achieved something of their quality.

In the great cities of Europe in the fourteenth century a new urban consciousness was developing, of which we are the direct heirs. Many of the things we now take for granted in cities and towns, like the common services of street-cleaning and sewerage, and complex matters of shopping regulations, uniformity of measures and proper time-keeping, were being established. They relied on a greater communal sense, a certain amount of democratic self-government, and created more privacy, less domination of the collective over the individual. Out of them emerged the most powerful social structures the world has devised, of bourgeois liberal democracy, the ultimately triumphant foe of tyranny and hierarchy. In the fourteenth century, however, this was far in the future, though the seeds were sown. Despite social mobility like that of Chaucer’s family, authority, hierarchy, inherited inequality were the norm. Chaucer’s questing spirit was to some extent the result of tensions between ancient and modern. For things were changing.

There were many other influences encouraging the privacy of the individual. Many came from religion, and the education in literacy that the Church gave, and some came from the court, especially in the sentiment of love, ‘derne’ (secret) love, as the poets called it. But the sense of privacy and individuality in Chaucer must be considerably due to his rich bourgeois background. The city was the place of trade, of specialised work, of regular time, and a serious concern for this world. We shall see that Chaucer became a kind of accountant, and with this urban numeracy we can associate what eventually became his strong sense of regular metre, and his unusual sensitivity to the passage of time in his poetry. Chaucer’s secular humanism and realism, which were not at all anti-religious (for the cities were very pious in their worldliness) must be related in a general way to that strand in his make-up represented by his City background, as were his rationalism, his individualism and his self-awareness. All these aspects will be summed up in that great original work of a series of portraits, The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Worldliness, work, social experience, a concentration on the rich centre of society (the middle classes), privacy, a loosening of feudal personal bonds, and at the end a certain loneliness; these are the gifts of the city. There must also have been an emphasis on vernacular English, to be discussed later.

The gifts of the city must be seen in context, especially in the case of Chaucer. The countryside with its alternating seasons of harshness and joy was never far away. There was a certain social mobility among all classes, much of it prompted by the presence of cities and towns, leading to a general mingling of country, city and court. It was becoming possible for peasants to enrich themselves and to rise in society, even apart from the Church which had for long offered the only chance of escape from the ignorant, sweated poverty which was the lot of the peasantry. Even a knight might have a serf as ancestor, while at the end of the century John Greyndor, a yeoman from the Forest of Dean, rose by his capacity as a ruthless captain (he beheaded 300 captives after a battle with the Welsh in 1405) to become Member of Parliament, sheriff of Glamorgan and of Gloucester, and constable of four border castles. In later life he turned merchant of Bristol (and was in fact guilty of something like piracy), and this is yet another example of the way in which, among the upper classes in England, trade and the professions (including that of war), merchants and the nobility, found it easy to mix. When Gaunt, the greatest noble in England (and about this time the most hated), was pursued by the mob in 1381, he was having dinner with a great merchant, Sir John Ypres. Sir John Montague, later Earl of Salisbury, was the third husband of a rich mercer’s daughter. Nicholas Brembre, the grocer, was rich enough to make loans to Richard II and John of Gaunt. He was knighted for his bold behaviour during the Revolt, and was closely associated with the ruling court faction which was displaced by the barons in 1388. He paid for his social mobility and his financial and political power by being executed for political reasons.

The older upper classes often resisted the new tendency to move from class to class, and Parliament in 1363 passed a ‘sumptuary’ law, regulating the food and clothing that each class should have. Naturally, it was not obeyed. A chronicler complains that yeomen dress like squires, squires like knights, knights like dukes, and dukes like kings. Chaucer, in his description of those social climbers par excellence, the city merchants, or gildsmen, describes them, no doubt deliberately, as wearing clothing above their station.

All this shows that along with much unease (there were often riots in London), and much oppression, English society by the second half of the century was reasonably well mixed and united, if not harmonious. The legal distinction between a crime committed by an Englishman, and one committed by a Norman, introduced by William the Conqueror for holding down a defeated English nation with a small Norman-French force, had long been out of date when it was abolished by Parliament in 1340. Of this sense of unity London was a signal example. That did not mean that it was not often in conflict with the Court. But neither Court nor City could do without each other.

Though Chaucer’s origins were ‘bourgeois’, city-man as he was, he remained also a ‘court-man’. There is no need to think of him as an embarrassed ‘middle-class’ person in a servile position in an ‘aristocratic’ court. Court and City had many levels, many mansions; Chaucer was at home in all.

Chapter 2

Chaucer’s Education

There is first-class evidence that Chaucer went to school – his poetry. It is full of school-learning, like the passage from the Latin author Claudian, used as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• Chapter 1 In the beginning
• Chapter 2 Chaucer’s education
• Chapter 3 The courtly life
• Chapter 4 The English and European literary traditions
• Chapter 5 Courtier and soldier
• Chapter 6 The Book of the Duchess I: quest and commemoration
• Chapter 7 The Book of the Duchess II: dreaming the spoken and written self
• Chapter 8 The Book of the Duchess III: death, laughter, repetition and comfort
• Chapter 9 Diplomat and civil servant: private and public trouble
• Chapter 10 From House of Fame to Parliament of Fowls: discontent and search
• Chapter 11 The Parliament of Fowls: communality and conflict
• Chapter 12 The fair chain of love: the consolations of philosophy and Venus
• Chapter 13 The Tale of Palamon and Arcite: love and death
• Chapter 14 Troilus and Criseyde I: from a view to a death
• Chapter 15 Troilus and Criseyde II: characters and critics
• Chapter 16 Troilus and Criseyde III: the lore of love
• Chapter 17 The Legend of Good Women: Cupid’s saints
• Chapter 18 Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
• Chapter 19 The Canterbury Tales I: love and rivalry; tragedy and comedy
• Chapter 20 The Canterbury Tales II: constancy and inconstancy; love and anger; trouthe and gentilesse
• Chapter 21 The Canterbury Tales III: family honour; you find what you seek
• Chapter 22 The Canterbury Tales IV: a gift returned; virginity and martyrdom; parody and prudence; flattery and reversal
• Chapter 23 The Canterbury Tales V: spirit and matter; restraint and repentance
• Chapter 24 Closure and beyond
• Select bibliography
• Index