by John Gardner
But no one went out, if he could help it, after curfew. It was against the law. Except for ghosts, criminals, and a few harmless rowdies—the notorious smithies who delighted in keeping their neighbors awake with their hellish music of hissing steam and iron striking iron (the subject of a famous Middle English poem)—men went to bed soon after sunset (candlewax was expensive) and rose with the chickens who crowed all over London and awakened the bells. And morning in London—once a man grew accustomed to the pillories, the gallows, the eyeless, putrid heads (in many districts, of course, one never saw such things)—was another matter entirely.
To foreigners England was “the Ringing Isle,” thanks to all those bells. Bells had spread over England early—they’re mentioned in Anglo-Saxon times—and were used to call Christians to their religious Hours, that is, the seven daily periods of prayer (matins, lauds, etc.). But measured time reached the island only in the early fourteenth century. (The first striking clock in Europe was probably built around 1290.) In the district of John Chaucer’s Thames Street house, where in all probability Geoffrey Chaucer was born, there were no less than thirty-nine parish churches; and, dominating them all with its majestic wooden spire, the highest in the world, gold painted, out-thundering them all with its deep, rich boom, stood St. Paul’s Cathedral. The city’s bells rang as if endlessly, sometimes in the dazzling, intrinsicate rhythms that can still be heard when the bellringers ring the “changes” in York. It was impossible to sleep on, with all that noise, and dawn coming in, as it does much earlier in England than in America. So all London got up, unbarred and threw open its windows, pissed, drew water, fed the dogs, the chickens in the room off the stairs, the pigs and geese in back, and got the charcoal fires going in the grim little ovens—or in the huge stone “chimneys” (that is, fireplaces) if the house was large, like John Chaucer’s. The long, laborious day began, a work day of nine or ten hours for the rich; for the poor, three or four hours longer.
Such was the world into which Chaucer was born, some summer or winter, spring or fall, around 1340—the year of the birth of the king’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. Gaunt opened his eyes in a palace, attended by physicians, courtiers, and royalty—relatives of his mother, Queen Philippa. As for Chaucer—low born and obscure by comparison—no one can say where or when he first saw light. Probably London. Servants, sleepy-eyed, went out to bring in wood, or straw for the parlor, the buttery, the second-floor sitting-room bedrooms, and the first floor’s low, close garret apartments—domestics on one side of the steep, narrow stairs, on the other side the chickens, in the room above the privy. The Chaucer servants met servants from next door and relayed the night’s gossip: a new son born to the Chaucers.
A difficult delivery, the midwives up till dawn; it was feared they’d be forced to toss the mother in a blanket to get the labor spasms right (or else it was not a difficult delivery and took place in, say, the afternoon, and the midwives stood beaming in their nunnish attire, blowing on their fingers because the winter was cold; or they were absent, having gone to the wrong address). He was born, at any rate. His older brother John, Agnes Chaucer’s son by her former husband, was perhaps thrilled and proud, perhaps secretly terrified: now no one would love him.
More gloomy nights came, and bell-filled days. Little Geoffrey began to find the world predictable, this morning the same as all other mornings (“For the whichë,” his mother said, “thankëd be God!”). His ears grew attentive: the sad, ghostly cry of the conch-shell horns on the merchant ships; the lapping of the water; the clean, hard echoes from the wharves of stone. His nose grew attentive: his big stepbrother’s funny smell, the fierce, slightly frightening animal smells of his father and uncle Tom, the smell of his mother, as wide and sweet and otherworldly as a meadow. He slept again. And again the chickens, the bells, the windows thrown open to let in the resurrected air. (Dawn was now one of the Church’s great symbols—the resurrected Lord with his brides all around him, and behind them, sunrise, as Chaucer would impishly set Chauntecleer and his hens. It was the prominent picture in every cathedral.) The city gates opened, not far away, and into the room where the child lay asleep came the clink of horses’ hooves in their heavy iron horseshoes, the clatter of wooden or iron-rimmed cartwheels, the yapping of dogs as men kicked them aside—the fourteenth century was overrich in dogs—the musical, almost operatic cries of London’s innumerable hard-sell vendors (“Hot peascods!” “Ripe strawberries!” “Paris thread, sirs, finest in the land!” “Mackerel!” “Green rushes!” “Hot sheep’s feet!” “Pewter pots!”), and the future poet, wrapped and tied in his cradle like a papoose on his papoose-board—as were all English infants in the days of cold houses and prowling demons, if we can judge by the paintings—opened his eyes and smiled at the motes in the sunbeams, though he couldn’t move a finger to catch them, and after a while changed his mind, being wet and hungry, and bawled for help.
Childhood in some respects is always the same, in other respects different from age to age. Medieval children were apparently suckled for a long time, not weaned until five or so; and, because of the high rate of infant mortality, they seem—judging by hints in the poetry and plays—to have been treasured in a way that would make modern doting parents seem cool and indifferent. In the Chaucer house, little Geoffrey went at once into the care of a wet nurse, a virtuous girl who if all went as expected in a medieval merchant home would be, with the possible exception of his brother, the child’s closest friend and companion for several years. She served his every whim—spoiled him utterly, from a modern point of view. Chaucer’s contemporary, Bartholomew the Englishman, says of the ideal wet nurse that she is
like as the mother…glad if the child be glad, and heavy if the child be sorry, and [she] taketh the child up if it fall, and giveth it suck; if it weep she kisseth and lulleth it still, and gathereth the limbs, and bindeth them together, and doth cleanse and wash it when it is defiled. And for it cannot speak, the nurse lispeth and soundeth the same words to teach more easily the child.…And she cheweth meat in her mouth, and maketh it ready to the toothless child…and so she feedeth the child when it is hungered, and pleaseth the child with whispering and songs when it shall sleep, and swatheth it in sweet clothes, and righteth and stretcheth out its limbs, and bindeth them together with cradlebands, to keep and save the child that it have no miscrooked limbs. She batheth and anointeth it with good anointments.7
Medieval Englishmen were not, like stereotype modern Englishmen, calm and sensible people: they were as passionate, as affectionate, as quick to change moods, and as easily stirred to violence as, say, the stereotype modern Italian. When greeting each other, they hugged and kissed like modern Frenchmen; when insulted or injured they snatched at their daggers without thinking. The younger Henry of Lancaster once, in a fit of pique, forgot and drew his sword on the king himself. To show just how little such things meant in that age, nothing came of it. Without inhibition they showered their affection on their children and, whenever possible, took them with them wherever they went, especially to church, to general fairs, to holy-day outings (which averaged one a week), and to Friday horse fairs. On those days when all England got off work, London and the countryside surrounding became tumultuous with games—noisy, often dangerous games, frequent cause of riots. Even those noble games tennis and chess were illegal inside London, though often played—the one because of the riots tennis regularly incited (this was “real” or “royal” tennis, fast and ferocious), the other because chess, a gamblers’ game, had a name for provoking murders.
The games played by girls are recorded, in poetry and censurious religious writing, merely as dancing until moonrise; but what is usually meant is the ring-game, a kind of dancing that goes back to pagan times and has been preserved until the present in folk tradition. Older girls played ring-dance with boys, especially parish clerks (or so we’re told in popular poetry), and had a way of dropping gloves or scarves which had to be returned late at night through a bedroom window, much to t
he increase of the population. Everyone played games with balls, from city officials to the smallest children, and older boys played, in summertime, at archery, running and jumping contests, wrestling, putting the stone, sling-shot play, and duelling with shields and swords. In winter, an early English writer says, boys like John and Geoffrey would play on the ice:
…some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a crossbow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the time of war.8
Broken bones were no trifle in medieval England; if not fatal, they could leave a child crippled for life. Yet parents rode out to watch their children’s games, shouting encouragement and frequently joining in.
Though he was coddled in infancy, a child in a house like John Chaucer’s had his fair share of troubles. For all the spontaneous displays of affection from his parents, his older brother, and those servants who looked after him, the official view was that a child Geoffrey’s age was a wicked creature, no better than an intelligent wild animal, who must be whipped into humanness, beaten and scolded until his bestial side—province of the Devil—was subdued and enchained, and his higher faculties aimed in the right direction, namely, toward heaven. Consider Bartholomew the Englishman’s remarks on the child between seven and fourteen, from the time “when he is weaned from milk and knoweth good and evil” to what amounts to adulthood. Such children, Bartholomew says,
are soft of flesh, lithe and pliant of body, quick and light to move, intelligent enough to learn, and they lead their lives without thought and care, and set their hearts only on mirth and pleasure, and dread no perils more than beating with a rod, and they love an apple more than gold…they are quickly and soon angry, and soon pleased, and easily they forgive; and because of tenderness of body they are soon hurt and grieved, and cannot well endure hard work. . . . Through great and strong heat they desire much food, and so by reason of excess of food and drink they fall often and many times into various sicknesses and evils.…
Since all children are spotted with evil manners, and think on things that be, and regard not of things that shall be, they love playing, and games, and vanity, and forsake learning and profit; and things most worthy they repute least worthy, and least worthy most worthy. They desire things that be to them contrary and grievous, and set more store by the image of a child than the image of a man, and make more sorrow and woe, and weep more for the loss of an apple, than for the loss of their heritage; and the goodness that is done for them they let it pass out of mind. They desire all things that they see, and pray and ask with voice and with hand. They love talking and counsel of such children as they be, and avoid company of old men. They keep us no counsel, but they tell all they hear or see. Suddenly they laugh and suddenly they weep. Always they cry, jangle, scorn, or disdain, that hardly they be still while they sleep. When they are washed of filth, straightway they defile themselves again. When the mother washeth and combeth them, they kick and sprawl, and put with feet and with hands, and withstandeth with all their might. For they think only on belly joy.9
That this was merely the official view, not necessarily the actual opinion of every London vintner’s wife, is clear enough from the patristic ring of so many of Batholomew’s phrases—“belly joy” (from St. Paul), “regard not of things that shall be,” or the juxtaposition of “apple” and “gold” (from exegetical tradition). Indeed, we may be sure that the frequent admonitions of public officials, priests, and irascible old rhymers, that parents should never spare the rod, are proof that many parents did. We have no evidence, in short, on how Chaucer was raised. But though a sober biographer’s hands may be tied, no novelist can doubt, when he considers the impishness of the poet in maturity, or recalls the almost certainly true story of his beating a friar during his student years, that Chaucer, like Lydgate and Froissart, was helped by an occasional thwack to the piety and gentleness, not to mention the learning, of his adulthood.
There is no evidence, either, that young Chaucer’s parents and their servants told him stories, but they must have. It was a great age for stories, as great as any the world has ever known. Priests told them, minstrels told them, shopkeepers, workers, beggars, and wandering friars told them. Songs, poems, and stories were a way of breaking up the endless, heavy work and expressing the feeling of community that makes Chaucer’s time so profoundly unlike ours. He heard ballads, some of them still heard today in later versions: “The Fox Went Out on the Town One Night,” “The Clerk and the Mermaid,” “The Coventry Carol”…He heard wonderfully obscene poems and blasphemous poems too funny to suppress. He heard, perhaps from his brother and his friends, a thousand farmer’s daughter stories, except that the maiden was seldom a farmer’s daughter; and stories of lecherous old men, lascivious monks, and delicious, brainless nuns; perhaps also stories of impotent old clots like January in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, who labors all night to consummate his marriage to delicious young May, trying to inspire his indifferent member by madcap antics and suggestive songs—alas, all in vain!
He was al coltissh, ful of rageryë,
And ful of jargon as a flekked pyë. [magpie]
The slakkë skyn aboute his nekkë shaketh,
Whil that he sang, so chaunteth he and craketh.
But God woot what that May thoughte in hir hertë,
Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his shertë, [saw]
In his nyght-cappe, and with his nekkë lenë;
She preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a benë.
Thanne seide he thus, “My restë wol I takë;
Now day is come, I may no lenger wakë.”
And doun he leyde his heed, and sleep til prymë.
From everyone around him, chances are—from his grandfathers, his father and his uncle Tom, his great, fat, bald uncle Nicholas Copton, and from Wat the Yorkshireman, his father’s apprentice—little Geoffrey heard stories, partly true, of terrible battles with the Scots, French, and Irish, stories of whole wide kingdoms burning, and of times of starvation when even warlords of royal blood were reduced to eating horse-meat or dog. In his father’s house—sitting restless on the bench, swinging his legs beside his mother and brother John—he may sometimes have heard popular romances read, also classical tales of Orpheus, Theseus, and Theodosius, tales from the (early fourteenth-century) Gesta Romanorum of magicians and monsters, ladies in distress, thrilling escapes from perilous situations, all with appended allegorical interpretations. And undoubtedly, late at night, with the rain drumming steadily on the baked-tile roof, he heard stories of ghosts and mysterious creatures and the Devil.
Even in the absolute darkness of his bedroom, John in bed beside him, young Geoffrey’s London seemed comfortable and safe—light sounds of breathing in the chambers all around him, an occasional cough from the garret, the cluck of a chicken, the sigh of a dog, and behind the house, the startled grunt of a pig in the middle of a dream. But outside London there was another world, he knew. A world of forests and wilderness where devils prowled and only monks dared molest their ancient, solitary reign. There were many who, like the chronicler at Novalese, under Mont Cenis, had seen devils in the woods in the form of serpents and toads, or, like St. Guthlac, heard devils booming like bitterns and sometimes speaking in the Celtic tongue. “Devils rode in the storm that unroofed the monks’ cloister,” G. G. Coulton tells us, “or in the fire that fell from heaven upon their steeple and burned the church.” Coulton tells the story of St. Edmund Rich, who when a young man “saw at sunset a flight of black crows: these he recognized at once as a swarm of devils come to fetch the soul of a lo
cal usurer at Abingdon; and sure enough, when he came to Abingdon, the man was dead.”10
Particularly from the north—Macbeth country—came stories of witches, changelings, and other diabolic things. The regions of cold and bad weather were the Devil’s special province, as Chaucer makes plain in the Friar’s Tale and as texts such as Jeremiah 1.14 and 4.6 make clear: “Out of the north an evil shall break forth,” and “I will bring evil from the north, and a great destruction.” Chaucer heard, for instance, northern tales like this one:
There befell a detestable and marvellous thing in the western parts of Scotland, in Clydesdale, some four miles from Paisley, in the house of one Sir Duncan of the Isles, which should strike terror into sinners and demonstrate the appearance of the damned on the day of the final resurrection. A man who lived wickedly under the habit of holy Religion, and who came to a most evil end under the curse of excommunication for certain sacrileges committed in his own monastery—this man’s corpse, I say, long after his burial in the said monastery, haunted many men with illusions that could be seen and heard amid the shades of night. After which this son of darkness transferred himself to the aforesaid knight’s dwelling, that he might try the faith of the simple and by his adverse deeds deter them [from evil] in plain daylight, or perchance that, by God’s secret judgment, he might thus show who had been implicated in this crime of his. Wherefore, taking to himself a body (whether natural or aerial we know not, but in any case black, gross, and palpable), he was wont to come in noonday light under the garb of a black monk of St. Benedict, and sit upon the gable of the barn or corn-grange; and whensoever a man would shoot him with arrows or pierce him with a pitchfork, then whatsoever material substance was fixed into that damned spectre was burned forthwith, more swiftly than I can tell the tale, to ashes. Those also who would have wrestled with him he threw and shook so horribly as though he would break all their limbs. The lord’s firstborn, a squire grown to man’s estate, was foremost in this attack upon the phantom. One evening, therefore, as the master of the house sat with his household round the hall fire, that sinister shape came among them and troubled them with blows and throwing of missiles; then the rest scattered in flight, and that squire alone fought single-handed with the ghost; but, sad to tell, he was found on the morrow slain by his adversary. If however it be true that the Devil receiveth power over none but such as have lived like swine, then it may easily be divined wherefore that young man met with so terrible a fate.11
