by John Gardner
There is a faint possibility that in King Richard II’s court, for a time at least, the favorite poet was not Chaucer but a man named John Gower, “moral Gower,” as Chaucer called him in his last-minute dedication of Troilus and Criseyde—and, despite one’s hopes, Chaucer was probably not scoffing. Gower wrote in Latin, French, and English—the English book strongly influenced by Chaucer and full of borrowed lines (but fair is fair: Chaucer stole back a hundred times). Gower’s best poem is the Latin Vox Clamantis, the first third of which presents a clear-eyed description, considering the day, of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, though the poem most often read is, naturally, the English Confessio Amantis. Gower is a hard man to talk about briefly, but this much may be said “in generall,” as Gower is always saying: John Gower had the keenest, most orderly of minds, one firmly entrenched in Augustinian attitudes, and also a brilliant eye for detail, as the Vox Clamantis shows, though unfortunately an eye he did not value.
Gower’s Confessio Amantis is the confession of a lover to his love-priest, an interminable confession which, since time has been suspended, allows the love-priest to tell the lover, and sometimes the lover to tell the priest, exemplary stories on the virtues and vices of the love religion. Thus among other things the poem is, like the Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron, a story collection with a dramatic frame. As a piece dealing with the love religion—that is, the courtly lover’s seriocomic parody of Christian devotion, wherein he “worships” his lady, “prays” for her “saving grace,” and so on—the poem may be set beside several poems of Chaucer’s, notably the Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde. Though critics have not always noticed the fact, neither the priest nor the lover in Gower’s poem is very smart. Retelling old stories familiar to the audience, Gower subtly alters details, here exaggerating a trifle, here pretending to have missed his own point, deftly, urbanely revealing for his audience the confusion and ultimate childishness of both priest and lover and, indeed, of all people passionately caught up in love. The poetic result is a delightful court entertainment (though one clocked to self-destruct with the passing of the sophisticated court which occasioned it), a literary trick in which mooning knights and ladies of the court, and all those too stupid to get the literary jokes, are harmlessly ridiculed, while people sufficiently religious, philosophical, and well bred to discern the irony are slyly congratulated. Gentle and compassionate as he was by nature, we may nevertheless be sure Geoffrey Chaucer was not the last to smile.
Gower’s ostensible subject is love, and like Chaucer’s (and like Augustine’s, nearly ten centuries earlier), his handling of that subject sets up an identification between the Lady and the World. As a courtly lover, out of his wits over another man’s wife, may crave more of his lady than he has any right to, so carnal, dim-spirited man may want more of “the World” than Providence allows him. What is the proper use of the world? “Keep aloof,” says moral Gower, “shake hands with it lightly, as if absentmindedly; never squeeze.” Which is to say, Gower’s subject is not love at all; love is his springboard to doctrine. As in his earlier poems, the Mirour de I’Omme and Vox Clamantis, his interest is in surveying the virtues and vices of the world and giving good counsel. This is a program not to be scorned; but also it is a program not to be confused with Geoffrey Chaucer’s.
Chaucer was, not ostensibly but actually, a love poet. Anyone can, at certain times of his life, adopt Gower’s broad, thoroughly adult and philosophical view of love. Young Troilus adopts it; but the invisible arrow strikes, his chest fills with that sharp, not imaginary pain, half agony, half unspeakable joy, that we’ve all experienced, and he has no choice but to take his religion and philosophy head on. So it goes in nearly all of Chaucer’s poetry. He tells no swashbuckling tales of King Arthur (only the Wife of Bath’s little comic love story), presents no grand surveys of man like Langland’s, or like Gower’s in the Mirour or Vox Clamantis. He writes of happy and unhappy lovers, seducers, loyal husbands, a distraught widower, a vindictive homosexual, and, repeatedly, of the diligent and sober-minded philosopher of love, hunting for certainty in a world where there are no certainties, himself. When he writes on other things—the tricks of crooked friars and summoners, the trials of a saint, the troubles of the rich and poor, or the conflict of lords and vassals—love philosophy, in Boethius’s extended sense (on which more later), is invariably the key.
So the question must be: What was Chaucer’s position on love? Did he believe, like Augustine centuries earlier, that love must either be charitable in the old sense—selfless, compassionate, and helpful—or else carnal, that is, piggish? Or did he incline to the persuasion, like Plato, that love of a woman, or of an emerald ring, or of anything else, has in it the potential to lead to a nobler and higher love? To say that his attitude was strictly Augustinian is to say that Chaucer was a “medieval” poet according to the hard-nosed notion of the Middle Ages largely invented by the Renaissance. To say that he inclined (more than Augustine) toward Platonism, that he found ways of rationalizing a fundamental love of life—fine houses, beautiful women, devoted friends—is to identify Chaucer with that aspect of the Middle Ages which came into full or at any rate self-conscious flower in the Renaissance and which we tend to call “modern.” Not that Chaucer had to be either an Augustinian or a Platonist (a false opposition in any case). Most men, including men of genius, are not doctrinal. Most of humanity, including the wise, simply muddle through, suspending judgments, making tentative assertions, hopefully snatching what will serve for the moment, groping emotion by emotion toward the grave. That was especially true in the late fourteenth century, after William Ockham had severed the knot tying science to religion. The orderly universe set forth in Aquinas’s thirteenth-century Summa Theologica had in large part given way, at least in England, under the pressure of the approximately coeval ideas of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, who had discovered through optics that nothing is certain except what we know by revelation in the Bible—and even here there were some efforts at historical criticism. This early version of the uncertainty principle was an idea of shocking importance in its time, and one that became still more important as it became more familiar in the fourteenth century. Brought down to Chaucer’s day by Oxford philosophers who’d been students of Bacon (some of them probably Chaucer’s friends), it would be an idea at the nervous center of everything Chaucer wrote. It was partly his deep sense of the uncertainty of things (not including the love and mercy of God) that enabled Chaucer to take harsh old doctrines with a grain of salt and to affirm the world, celebrate love, in a way a man less well informed on contemporary science and philosophy—John Gower, for example—could not do.
Thus we find that the intuitively satisfying traditional view of Chaucer, which describes him not as a grim satirist who felt contempt for things worldly but as a genial and sympathetic humorist, a “servant of lovers,” as he calls himself in the Troilus—a man amused by and in love with the world, though occasionally critical—is still, at least in general, the right view. It fits with the history of Chaucer’s life and the character of the society in which he moved, and it fits the poems. In Roger Bacon’s terms—“experience” (scientific experiment or direct observation) versus “authority”—Chaucer’s first commitment was to life, although he had also a healthy regard for authority, which is to say, literally, that in treacherous times he kept his head. And the traditional view fits, too, with the abundant evidence that the tendency of medieval thought with which Chaucer was most closely aligned emotionally was that form of Christian Neoplatonism represented by, for instance, Boethius, Macrobius, and St. Bonaventura, who (like Plato) saw the world as a ladder for ascending toward God (with the help of prayer, Bonaventura would say). He was a man comfortable in his relations with both worlds, this one and the next, though no one knew better how hard it is to keep the proper balance.3
He had a critical eye, as all his poetry proves. No fault in man or woman or poem could escape him. But he was more amused t
han judgmental. He enjoyed his green medieval world and all its citizens, enjoyed even execrable poetry, which in his last years he parodied—ironically celebrated—again and again. Others might scoff at the doggerel that delighted the cruder English magnates, but Chaucer saw hilarious potential in those jingling idiotic rhythms and cockeyed rhymes, so that for all his reputation as a “serious” poet he could joyfully write—
Listëth, lordës, in good entent,
And I wol tellë verrayment [truly]
Of myrthe and of solás,
Al of a knyght was fair and gent [genteel]
In bataille and in tourneyment,
His namë was sirë Thopas!
In a dark, troubled age, as it seems to us, he was a comfortable optimist, serene, full of faith. For all his delight in irony—and all his poetry has a touch of that—he affirmed this life, to say nothing of the next, from the bottom of his capacious heart. Joy—satisfaction without a trace of sentimental simple-mindedness—is still the effect of Chaucer’s poetry and of Chaucer’s personality as it emerges from the poems. It is not the simple faith of a credulous man in a credulous age: no poet has ever written better on the baffling complexity of things. But for all the foggy shiftings of the heart and mind, for all the obscurity of God’s huge plan, to Chaucer life was a magnificent affair, though sadly transient; and when we read him now, six centuries later, we are instantly persuaded.
In this introduction I’ve said very little that’s at all specific about what the reader will encounter in the progress of this book. As I’ve mentioned, I speak now and then about particular moments in fourteenth-century English history. Chaucer, as a diplomat and favored court poet, was very much involved with the history of his time and directly affected by its twists and turns. Even events in which he may not have been personally involved can sometimes shed light on his character and art. As for my version of Chaucer’s life, my aim has not been startling originality but completeness, accuracy, and a measure of novelistic vividness; that is, I’ve tried to make the story interesting and—following the best authorities—to avoid the standard misconceptions. It has sometimes been suggested that Chaucer’s origins were humble; that Chaucer was not very happily married; that in his latter years he was sickly and unable to work well at poetry; that he was profligate and in the end died poor, or even—as early biographers like William Godwin believed—in prison. Probably some of this can never be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, but my version of the story—tentative here and there, and usually derivative—is that none of it is true. Chaucer was born rich, relatively speaking, and by diligence, legal ability, intelligence, and the extraordinary charm befitting an ambassador to Italy (on one occasion there to borrow money for the king), he grew steadily richer all his life, or at any rate rich on paper, since it was not always easy, in Chaucer’s day, to collect what the government owed you. However his marriage to Philippa Roet may have come about—an interesting business which I examine at some length—he was happily married and fond of his children, and devoted, too, to his long-time friend, now brother-in-law, Gaunt. At least until very near the end, he was a healthy, vigorous man, a political conservative fearful of the peasantry—because of all he had to lose and for other reasons—and distrustful of the rising power of Commons, even when he sat as a member of that body. He was not only in some loose sense a royalist, or member of the king’s party; he was a man who, even without John of Gaunt’s protection, was willing to risk close partisan involvement with Richard II despite the threat of the magnates who opposed him. He spent the last years of his life putting his affairs in order, dabbling in law, running errands for the king, and, whenever he had time and found himself in the mood, recasting and polishing the whole body of his poetry, many parts of which he left in disarray at his death, with endings excised or never completed and great swatches out of place, never to be put right. He died of old age. (He was fifty-nine or sixty, but not our modern sixty. At sixty-five that former warhorse Edward III was doddering and senile.)
My examination of Chaucer’s life inevitably turns now and then to the poetry, the reason for our interest in the wise and gentle public servant; but this book is not meant to be a critical study of Chaucer’s art. Sometimes the poetry illuminates Chaucer’s life; sometimes—more often than present-day critics generally acknowledge—the poetry directly comments on people, events, and notions his original audience recognized. But for the most part I avoid discussion of the poetry, hoping I may write of that in the detail it deserves another time. I quote in Middle English, but Chaucer’s language is less difficult than one might think. (For help with the poet’s antique tongue, see the Appendix.)
“And now”—to borrow a phrase from one of the first great modern Chaucerians, F. J. Furnivall, who borrowed it from Rabelais—“to our muttons.”
One: Chaucer’s Ancestry and Some Remarks on Fourteenth-Century English History
GEOFFREY CHAUCER WAS BORN AROUND 1340, possibly early in 1341, and possibly a little earlier than 1340. Other years have been suggested, from 1328, the year offered by the Elizabethan commentator Speght and uncritically accepted for centuries, to 1346; but Professor George Williams’ analysis of the evidence has settled the matter beyond reasonable doubt.1
Chaucer’s father, John Chaucer, was born around 1312 or ’13 and died in 1366. He was “a citizen of London,” as he was proud to say, a rich and influential vintner—which is roughly the fourteenth-century equivalent of the modern large brewer in Ireland or England, though John Chaucer was not by any means a personage up to the enormous wealth and power of, say, the Busch family of St. Louis or the greater beer-meisters of Germany, men more nearly comparable with fourteenth-century barons. He was a master craftsman, a guildsman, which, in the case of a vintner, is not like saying a member of a trade union but more like saying a senior professor in a major university (fourteenthcentury professors were in fact “masters” of the craft of knowledge) or, better yet, a senior partner in a large, politically oriented law firm discreetly on the take. The trouble with comparisons of this kind, of course, is that nothing comparable to our huge companies, universities, and law firms, our vast government bureaucracies or our sprawling cities existed in the Middle Ages. There were far fewer people in the world at that time. The members of King Edward’s entire government staff could have at least nodding acquaintance. Even in a fairly large city like London—a mere town by comparison to modern London, though swarming with people packed together in small apartments like chickens in market crates—most people lived out their lives in neighborhoods, tannery workers associating primarily with tannery workers (and the hawkers or stallkeepers who sold them their fruit and vegetables, their pots and pans and the makings for their brooms), wine people associating mostly with wine people, rich men associating mostly with the rich men who attended the same parties or lodged next door, safe in the more comfortable sections of their specialized business districts, in great, sober houses to which the successful, with their servants and apprentices, fled from the noise, stink, and crowding of the poor and, worse, from the violence of such scoundrels as one met “in the suburbës of a toun,” as Chaucer would write in the Prologue to the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,
Lurkynge in hernës and in lanës blyndë, [corners]
Whereas thisë robbours and thisë theves by kyndë [by nature]
Holden hir pryvee fereful residencë,
As they that dar nat shewen hir presencë.
To make clear how small and open the world of Chaucer was, J. M. Manly wrote in 1926,
The area of England itself is smaller than we Americans readily conceive. Exclusive of Wales and Scotland, it is slightly smaller than Alabama, Arkansas, or North Carolina; including Wales but not Scotland, it is slightly larger than Michigan, but smaller than Florida or Georgia. The total population of England in Chaucer’s day and for more than a hundred years thereafter was not over two and a half millions.…2
The city of London itself had only about 40,000 people, which i
s to say it was just slightly larger than Muskogee, Oklahoma (by 1970 census figures). It was not, as it is now, a great sprawling city with miles of cheap housing and vast stretches of factory surrounding an elegant, arched and pillared core. It was a walled city of colorful parks and gardens, with easy access to rivers and fields, a city that smelled of hay and horse manure—far nobler smells than any our cities afford now. Though medieval London houses burned wood, and trash collection was a problem, the city nevertheless was, as William Morris would later describe it, at least relatively “small and white and clean.”
This Londoner John Chaucer was wealthy enough, thanks partly to his wife, to have diversified financial interests. He owned property scattered here and there throughout London and at least as far away as Ipswich, including one London house suitable only for a person of well-above-average means, the stone and timber house on narrow, heavily shaded Thames Street in the posh end of the Vintry Ward (near the present Strand) overlooking the river and the orchards beyond—the house he bequeathed to his son Geoffrey.3 When John Chaucer first occupied this house is impossible to say. The first record of his connection with the place is from July 25, 1345, when he was summoned to answer the prioress of Chestnut Convent, from whom he held the house in fief, for his failure to pay the past two years’ rent (not rent in the modern sense but in the sense, rather, of feudal tribute). He apparently settled the account and kept the house until the time of his death, when it went to his wife Agnes and eventually, no doubt when Agnes died, to Geoffrey, who released it in 1381 to one Henry Herbury, a rich and influential vintner who’d been living in the house, apparently, under arrangement with Geoffrey Chaucer’s mother and stepfather, Bartholomew Attechapel.
