by John Gardner
Froissart’s figures, borrowed from England’s official chronicles, are probably too high, but to fourteen- or fifteen-year-old John Chaucer and his older brother Tom, it must have seemed an immense force that set out for England’s northern moors, where the Scots, in a systematic program of terrorism aimed at preserving their national independence, were sweeping down (wild of hair, half naked), burning villages and fields with such fury that the English could follow their progress from miles away by the billowing smoke. It did not seem systematic or even sane to John Chaucer, devoted, like any young Englishman of the time, to the ideal of chivalry, the armed horseman’s code which began with fair play on the battlefield, Christian nobility of spirit, that is, “courtesy” in imitation of the soldier, Christ, and ultimately extended—not only for horsemen but for all who respected good breeding—to politeness, gentleness toward the weak, respect for women. It was in the broadest sense a code that went back to the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, took on refinements and ritual complexity in thirteenth-century France, and was now, as an ideal, standard among all civilized soldiers, though rarely exercised by practical fighting men.19 To John Chaucer the Scottish attacks were senseless and impudent, barbarian, even fiendish; they would inevitably be punished by God and King Edward’s men-at-arms.
He marched on, his light armor growing heavier, and when he fell behind a little, his older brother perhaps gently teased him. When their contingent reached a hilltop they could see, moving out like giant, dusty serpents, the army’s three huge sections—“thre great batels,” Froissart says—each with two wings of five hundred men of arms (knights and squires on their horses), three hundred thousand additional armed men, half on small horses or hackneys, the other half “men of the country” on foot—and also twenty-four thousand archers on foot, not counting other “raskall and folowers of the [h]oste.” (Froissart’s numbers, as I’ve said, are no doubt inflated.) The Scots burned their way over mountains and through valleys, the English pursuing them in formal and orderly military array, with banners flying and strict rules that no man break ranks or, on pain of death, pass ahead of the marshal’s banners. It was the safest way to travel, with bogs and marshes and places for ambush on every hand, and the way that had served English chivalry well, making the whole army like the best of its knights, controlled, imperturbable; but it meant the English had no prayer of overtaking the Scots.
The English tried strategy, deciding to move at midnight to the river Tyne, where Edward hoped he might cut off the enemy’s return into Scotland. For the sake of swift travel, and from conviction that tomorrow the Scots would be forced at last to make their stand, they abandoned their vast provisions train—the last they would see of it for thirty-two days. John Chaucer and Tom Heyroun and the hundreds all around them started forward in haste, starlight glinting on the metal of their chestplates and the full suits of armor of the mounted knights—moved “through montaignes, valeys, and rokkes, and through many evyll passages,” some falling into marshes, losing horses and carriages; yet the army nevertheless pressed violently on, for they heard shouts ahead of them and believed that the vanguard had met with the Scots. They were wrong. The cries they heard were nothing but the shouting of men who’d raised harts and hinds. Dawn came, and the high grass was soaked with dew.
At last, that afternoon, after traveling all day, they reached and crossed the river Tyne—with much travail, since no one had told them it was full of big stones—and settled for the night without tents or utensils, no axes to make huts or even stakes for the horses, which meant those who’d been mounted must sit up till morning clinging to their horses’ bridles. There was nothing to eat but bread soaked salty by the horses’ sweat, and the ranks of the once-vast army were thinned; some of the footmen were far behind and had no idea which path might be the right one. John Chaucer and Tom Heyroun lay down shivering, to sleep—like most of the army, they’d made the march without bedrolls—but all night long iron men moved noisily back and forth through the trees, grumbling, sometimes shouting, and horses whinnied. When they awakened, half frozen, in the gray morning that followed that endless, miserable night, they stared up through the trees in sorrow and disbelief. It had begun to rain, interminably, drearily, from a charged August sky. The river grew swollen and no one could recross it to forage for food or discover where they were. There was nothing now, not even salty bread, to eat; even the horses had nothing but the leaves of trees. Around noon some peasants of the neighborhood were found, who told the English their location—there was no town within eleven miles. The following day the peasants came back, with others, to sell half-baked bread at profiteering prices.
It rained, with no hint of a let-up, all that week. Soldiers fought among themselves over bread, even murdered for it. By day the army slogged and slithered here and there, up hill and down in that vast, bleak landscape, over slippery-rocked creeks and through dripping woods, hunting for the Scots—who had no idea where the English were either—until at last King Edward found his enemy encamped on the far side of the river Were, high on a mountain, with warm, dry huts of hide and branches at their backs and, hanging from the beams of every tree, a huge store of butchered game.
After counsel, the English took battle positions and advanced, lances upright and flags unfurled, the whole army in chivalric array despite the leaden rain: light horse and foot soldiers like John Chaucer and Thomas Heyroun following behind the ponderous, splendidly skirted destriers—the so-called tanks of the Middle Ages, since two such warhorses, at a slow, clanking gallop, blindered and driven against a studded castle door, could sometimes smash it off its hinges. Young King Edward rode in front, shouting encouragement, until the army came close to the river, and there the army stopped.
What was happening, though no one fully understood it at the time, was what was to happen to the English repeatedly in France. The unbeatable tactics of the English army, horsemen in combination with archers using longbows, had one great drawback before King Edward’s introduction of gunpowder: it only worked if the enemy would come out, like a sport, and fight. The Scots, no sportsmen when their numbers were overmatched, stood pat in their unassailable position overlooking the river Edward’s army must cross, and skirled their obstreperous, ear-splitting pipes, ready to rain down arrows and boulders, and taunting the English: “Syrs, your kyng and his lordis see well how we be here in this realme, and have brent and wasted the countrey as we have passed through; and if they be displeased ther-with, lette them amend it whan they wyll, for here we wyll abyde, as long as it shall please us.” So things continued for three days, Edward’s army trying to apply to a mountain what sometimes worked on a walled city, the siege aimed at starving the enemy out. But it was Edward’s army that was hungry and, moreover, soaking to the skin—saddles, bridles, and horses’ skirts rotting and beginning to smell, foot soldiers like John Chaucer and Thomas Heyroun shivering, coughing from colds and from the pungent smoke of the wet brush they tried in vain to use for fire.
The third night the Scots vanished, later to be found on a second mountain. Again the English settled in, and again the Scots found a weakness in civilized warfare. When the English were asleep, Lord Douglas of the Scots came galloping across to them with two hundred howling, half-naked men, killed some three hundred undressed or half-dressed terrified young Englishmen, scornfully cut the ropes of the king’s own tent, and plunged back, still howling, across the river. The fiasco went on—John Chaucer, patriot all his life, must have been furious—until the Scots sneaked off for good in the middle of the night, and King Edward, in tears, turned back to his base at Durham. There the lords found their provision carts hauled into barns and granges, neatly labeled with heraldic flags to show what baggage belonged to whom—the work of the thoughtful citizenry, done at the town’s expense. The contrast was one John Chaucer would remember for the rest of his life, laughing when he spoke of it: the wild, noisy Scots, the vexed and demoralized army of King Edward, and those tidy, scrupulous, dutiful house
holders of Durham. Such comically humdrum yet substantial English virtue would prove equally appealing to his poet son, who would affectionately mock it again and again, in the too-prudent Monk of the Shipman’s Tale, in the unimaginative simplicity of the old widow who owns Chauntecleer, prince among chickens, or in the genteel Prioress, starchy about her French, which isn’t even Parisian, and (despite her holy office) a spiritual dimwit, but a lady whose manners at the table could never be excelled:
At metë wel ytaught was she with allë:
She leet no morsel from hir lippës fallë,
Ne wette hir fyngres in hir saucë depë;
Wel koudë she carie a morsel and wel kepë,
That no dropë ne fille upon hirë brest.
In curteisië was set ful muchel hir lest. [much]
Hir over-lippë wyped she so clenë
That in hir coppë ther was no ferthyng senë
Of grecë, whan she dronken hadde hir draughtë. [farthing-like grease droplet]
Ful semely after hir metë she raughtë. [reached]
In the dark times that young John Chaucer saw—especially the last days of Edward II—and in the dark times his son would see—the days of another king fated to be murdered, King Richard II—the age-old single-mindedness of the English middle class, “due and regular conduct,” as Defoe would say, would give comforting proof that not all the old verities were fallen.
It was not long after his return from the north that John Chaucer began hearing, on the streets and in his stepfather’s wineshops, that Edward’s army would certainly have won had not Sir Roger Mortimer, the power behind the throne, betrayed the king, “for he toke mede [bribery] and money of the Scottis, to th’entent they might departe pryvely by nyght.…” If Mortimer was guilty, it was the least of his crimes. Everyone who was anyone in England knew the story, the whole sorry chronicle of the mistakes by Edward II that brought Mortimer to power. Since it bears indirectly on the fortunes of John of Gaunt and directly on the behavior of Richard II toward the end of the century—a matter of the greatest importance to Geoffrey Chaucer—the story is worth recalling. It’s a story the young John Chaucer knew well, in one version or another. Mortimer’s improbity sufficiently offended John Chaucer’s sense of what was right that he would join the risky cause of blind Henry, earl of Lancaster, and try to strike Mortimer from power.
During the reign of Edward II (1307-1327) the king and many of his more powerful barons, including the great house of Mortimer, in the Welsh marches, were frequently at odds—as Richard II and his barons would be at the end of the century, and for some of the same reasons. But whereas Richard had a deep concern for the idea and practice of kingship (a concern Geoffrey Chaucer shared and would write about), Edward II thought the whole thing a nuisance. He was athletic and physically powerful—like Edward I, his father—and had certain more or less appealing qualities. He delighted in swimming, boating, and theatrical entertainment, loved the company of minstrels and commoners (with whom, according to hostile chroniclers, he told indecent jokes), had a gift for architecture and shipbuilding, apparently wrote poetry,20 and, prompted perhaps by that pious streak of which Richard II would make so much, borrowed the lives of St. Anselm and St. Thomas from Christ Church, Canterbury—and failed to return them. But whatever his appeal, Edward II was a petty, ineffectual politician, a homosexual who was all his life fatally liable to fall under the influence of ingratiating young men.
May McKisack sums up Edward’s failure as follows:
We may, indeed, pity the weak-willed prince, successor to a famous father, to whom fell not only the administrative problems endemic in the medieval state, but also the damnosa hereditas of a hostile Scotland, financial chaos, and an over-mighty cousin. We may take a less hard view than did the chroniclers of Edward’s rustic tastes, his preference for the company of simple people, his delight in music and acting. Yet underlying such contemporary criticism was the sound instinct that the second Edward lacked altogether the dignity and high seriousness demanded of a king. Our sources afford us no evidence that at any time he tried to rise to his responsibilities or to learn from his misfortunes and mistakes. Alike in his relations with his friends and with his enemies, he showed himself a weakling and a fool. His mishandling of the Scottish war and his neglect of the safety of the north proved him wanting, not only in military capacity, but also in imagination, energy, and common sense. Reforms achieved in household and exchequer were the work of capable officials, not of the lazy and indifferent king. Edward lived a life devoid of noble purpose or of laudable ambition. He lowered the reputation of his country abroad and at home he was the means of bringing the monarchy into the most serious crisis that had faced it since 1066. It was his own folly which delivered him into the hands of his cruel foes; and the consequences of his disposition reached far beyond his own generation. Memories of it were to haunt the dreams of his great-grandson, Richard II; it smoothed the path of the revolutionaries in 1399 and it opened the way for dynastic conflict and the decline of medieval monarchy.21
Contrary to the opinion of some historians, Edward II was well liked when, at the age of twenty-four, he ascended the throne. He was strikingly handsome and muscular, and had an education that befitted his rank. He had for years been suitably betrothed to Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, and under his father he’d fought in Scotland four times and, as Chaucer might say, “had borne him well.” While still a prince—it was the last year of his father’s reign—he had once behaved foolishly; but it was a thing now forgotten. Wishing to show his special love for his fop of a friend Piers Gaveston, he had begged the old king to grant Gaveston one of the crown estates—estates old Edward had intended for no one but a prince of his house. Such a threat to the hard-won solidarity of crown holdings put the king into a passion, and he drove his son from his presence with furious reproaches and banished the favorite—but with such care for his maintenance as to show he was angrier at Edward than at Gaveston. When the old king died, Edward IPs first act was to take revenge for that scolding. He recalled Gaveston, and though the man was a Gascon, scorned by the native nobility, and only the younger son of a knight, Edward put him in possession of the vastly rich earldom of Cornwall and made arrangements for his marriage to no less than the king’s niece, Margaret of Clare, sister of the earl of Gloucester.
That was only the beginning. It was standard opinion in the Middle Ages that homosexuals were arrogant, vengeful creatures, mockers of decency—implacable miscreants like Chaucer’s “gentil Pardoner.” Homosexuality was an “outer sign of the soul’s corruption,” a heretic state in violation of God’s first commandment: Go forth and multiply. Perhaps the universal judgment made the caricature true—so Chaucer suggests in the Canterbury Tales. In any event, the king all his life flaunted his scorn of the nobility and the needs of government, choosing and dismissing his officers not by policy but by favor or grudge; and Gaveston aped him, showing even greater scorn than Edward’s for his former superiors. Powerful barons with private armies and gigantic estates—men like Thomas, earl of Lancaster, elder brother of Henry, who would succeed him as earl—stared dumbfounded or shook with rage at the antics and airs of this puffed-up French donzel who dared to insist that he be present whenever King Edward gave audience, even with the mightiest in the realm.
The result was inevitable. Great magnates, some of them of royal blood, who cared about the nation as the king did not, began, half unwittingly, to move toward power almost equal to the king’s, even power that “accroached,” that is, usurped the king’s. This was not—perhaps even in Mortimer’s case—their original intention. Part of the agony in the struggle of king and parliament in this century was that nearly everyone involved held the crown in awe, willingly accepted the king’s absolute power over life and death, dreaded shame, and hated the smell of treason. But once a baron’s movement toward accroachment began, it often proved uncheckable.
Not the first to encroach on royal privilege, but one of the most t
ragic and important, was Thomas, earl of Lancaster. He was a sober, never overhasty man, graying at the temples and at the sides of his beard. After repeated attempts to humble Gaveston, whose favor with the king was making him the richest parasite in England, and whose banishment by parliament repeatedly proved unenforceable, subject utterly to the king’s whim, Lancaster and others reluctantly decided on a showdown. In open defiance of the king’s decree, Thomas of Lancaster and other earls appeared in parliament fully armed and laid a statement of grievances before Edward. In substance, their complaint was that, led by evil counsellors—by which they meant chiefly Gaveston—the king was so impoverished as to be forced to live by extortion, that the tax grants made to him had been wasted, and that by the loss of Scotland—where Edward had repeatedly refused the gauntlet (as would Richard later)—he had dismembered his crown. They forced him to agree to the appointment of “ordainers” with power to reform his house and realm; and the result of the ordainers’ work was the forty-one Ordinances, beginning with the removal of bad advisers, the foremost of whom was, of course, Gaveston, and covering such matters as the removal of foreigners like the king’s Italian banker, Amerigo dei Frescobaldi, from the position of collector of customs.
