The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Young Chaucer, as he grew older, would learn to laugh at such stories, and in comic poems like the Miller’s Tale would poke fun at the ignorant and credulous. Yet it seems likely that Chaucer may have harbored—as Dr. Johnson would, four centuries later—a superstitious streak. Chaucer’s was an age, we must remember, in which belief in the miraculous was sometimes the most natural available means of accounting for nature’s more mysterious processes. If the ignorant of the time held curious beliefs, so did those wise men who scoffed at them—that sage thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, for instance, who says that “to the ignorant it seemeth miraculous that the magnet draweth iron, or that a little fish holdeth back a ship.” Aquinas’s fish, here, is the remora, an imaginary beast less than a foot in length, through whose queer activities sailors explained otherwise unaccountable hindrances or disturbances of navigation.

  Even within the safe walls of London, magic and witchcraft were everywhere. Little Geoffrey’s playmates could frighten him with stories of the Evil Eye—stories both they and (at least in some instances) their elders believed, not altogether without reason. Witches were not, in Chaucer’s day, bent, warty strangers who lived in shanties far from town and had little intercourse with ordinary Christians. Except among the well-educated, Christianity and the old pagan religion were interlocked like two tree trunks grown together; the practice of witchcraft was not a separate way of life from the Christian but a matter of degree—not a question of whether one said magic spells or engaged in ritual acts but of how many spells one said and how benevolent one’s choice of acts. Berthold or Regensburg had said in one of his sermons about a hundred years earlier, “Many of the village folk would come to heaven, were it not for their witchcrafts.…The woman has spells for getting a husband, spells for her marriage; spells on this side and on that; spells before the child is born, before the christening, after the christening; and all she gains with her spells is that her child fares the worse all its life long.…”12

  If it wasn’t from the old religion that the magic was drawn, it came from the new: the old woman who crumbled consecrated Hosts over her cabbages to kill the caterpillars, the priest who used a Host as a love philtre, the innumerable priests who used holy water to drive off grasshoppers or exorcize ghosts. Chaucer, like all medieval children, filled his head with such things and presumably, like most medieval people, had terrible nightmares. (The “night mare,” technically, was a horselike thing that came to your bed and sat on you.) In his maturity, of course, Chaucer would make distinctions between things Christian and things not; but there would remain all around him—no doubt to Chaucer’s delight—men like his carpenter in the Miller’s Tale who, to save his seemingly ensorcelled guest Nicholas, cries out in a hodgepodge of old and new,

  “What! Nicholay! what, how! what, looke adoun!

  Awak, and thenk on Cristës passioun!

  I crouchë thee from elvës and fro wightës.” [sign with a cross]

  Therwith the nyght-spel seyde he anon-rightës

  On fourë halvës of the hous aboutë,

  And on the thresshfold of the dorë withoutë:

  “Jhesu Crist and seintë Benedight,

  Blessë this hous from every wikked wight,

  For nyghtës veryë, the whitë pater-noster!

  Wherë wentestow, seintë Petres soster?” [the meaning of verye is unknown]

  When he was seven or so (in 1347), Geoffrey Chaucer moved with his parents, his older brother, and by now, probably, his younger sister Kate, to the city of Southampton, where his father had been made deputy to the king’s butler. As deputy, John Chaucer was mainly responsible, as I’ve said, for collecting import duties on each shipment of wine that came into the Southampton area (Chichester, Seaford, Shoreham, and Portsmouth). He was made, the same year, collector of the king’s customs on woolen goods made in England for export. Meanwhile, since a child’s formal schooling began at about seven, Geoffrey was about now entering a new period of his life. In all probability the future poet had already learned to read a little, with the help of a clerical tutor back in London. Now he perhaps, along with his brother, began study with whatever rector served as schoolmaster in the Chaucers’ district, giving lessons in the vestry of the church, in a room above it, or in his own home. The school may have been a song-school of the kind we read of in the Prioress’s Tale, a small school attached to some church or cathedral, where children were taught manners, prayers, and hymns, and introduced to the rudiments of reading and writing Latin.

  Something of what he learned in the way of manners can be gathered, perhaps, from a set of rules written for boarding-school children in the fifteenth century. The child was to get out of bed promptly, cross himself, wash his hands and face, comb his hair, “ask the grace of God to speed you in all your works, then go to mass and ask mercy for all your trespasses” and to “say ‘Good morning’ courteously to whomsoever you meet by the way.” He was to make the sign of the cross over his mouth before eating (“Your diet will be the better for it”), then say his grace (“it occupies but little time”), and after that say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria for the souls that lie in pain, and then—only then, apparently—begin eating. He is told to be truthful, to keep his promises, to be silent when his betters address him, “and in speaking to any man keep your hands and feet quiet, and look up into his face.…” The rules admonish the child:

  Point not with your finger at anything, nor be ready to tell tidings. If any man speaks well of you or of your friends, he must be thanked. Have few words and wisely placed, for so may you win a good name.…Get your money honestly, and keep out of debt and sin.…Whether you spit near or far, hold your hand before your mouth to hide it. Keep your knife clean and sharp, and cleanse it on some cut bread, not on the cloth, I bid you; a courteous man is careful of the cloth. Do not put your spoon in the dish or on the edge of it, as the untaught do, or make a noise when you sup, as do boys [i.e., ruffians].…When your better hands you a cup, take it with both hands, lest it fall, and drink yourself and set it by; and if he speaks to you, doff your cap and bow your knee.

  Do not scratch yourself at the table so that men call you a jackdaw, or wipe your nose or nostrils, else men will say you are come of churls. Make neither the cat nor the dog your fellow at table. And do not play with the spoon, or the trencher, or your knife, but lead your life in cleanliness and honest manners.13

  The likelihood is that a boy with Geoffrey’s background had been given already a fair start on his manners. All the same, it was a painful time for children, especially the energetic child with a lively sense of humor. Medieval teachers were notoriously stern, though there were of course some teachers, then as now, who were less stern than they pretended. And so that cold eye was always on him, as he sneaked his gristly mutton to the dog or by a sudden movement upset his cup. The reproach of the teacher or usher came, and if Geoffrey was so wicked as to repeat his mistake or, what was worse, laugh, a more ferocious reproach came—perhaps that theologically stupid cliche from the time of St. John Crysostom, “Christ is crucified, and dost thou laugh?”—and the boy was snatched from the table and given his beating.

  At elementary school Chaucer began his study—reading and writing Latin—with the help of a hornbook, that is, a piece of parchment protected by a transparent layer of horn on which were written the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer (in Latin), and one or two other things useful to beginners. When he’d learned the rudiments of reading and writing, he moved on to the Psalter, from which he learned more complicated Latin. The lessons were taught in French. (By 1385 all lessons would be in English, with the result, a writer of the time tells us, “that now the children of [English] grammar schools know no more French than their left heel.”14) But French was no problem for the children of gentlemen or well-to-do merchants in Chaucer’s day, though it was by no means the language of the London streets. Children of the better families, we’re told, were taught French “from the time they are rocked in their cradles, a
nd can speak and play with a child’s brooch.”15 Possibly in Chaucer’s time, though the invention is thought to be somewhat later, the so-called Primer was used. Chaucer’s seven-year-old “clergeoun” in the Prioress’s Tale is still at his Primer, a book mainly of psalms and ordinary church prayers but also containing the alphabet and other things suitable in a textbook for the very young. The Primer was supposed to give the child his start on both literacy and religion, and if Geoffrey used one, it was probably, in his case, successful; but quite commonly, it seems, children learned their songs and prayers, as does Chaucer’s little clergeoun, without understanding a word or letter of what they said.16

  At just about this point, Geoffrey’s studies were briefly interrupted; his family moved back to London, where schools were closed.

  The Chaucers had been in Southampton for two years. It was probably a peaceful time for them, though by 1347 evils were brewing in the rest of the world, evils of which John Chaucer, at the customshouse, was one of the first to hear. There was war on the continent—civil war in Rome and war on land and sea between the English and French. (The English fleet had again proved its might, defeating the French at Le Crotoy, on the Somme; and in a siege of Calais, Edward III had introduced a new weapon—cannon, strange machines used primarily for frightening horses.) War raged everywhere, in fact, the king of Hungary fighting Apulia, the king of Bohemia fighting Bavaria, the Eastern Empire fighting the Turks.

  But there was also stranger, more frightening news reaching England by 1347. In Constantinople, Naples, Genoa, and south France there was pestilence. There were stories of whole cities depopulated, great castles abandoned, and drifting Genoese merchant ships—a great, dark cog riding deep in the water, loaded down with treasure, and not a live man on board and no pirate who’d touch her. In 1348—the year Edward founded the Order of the Garter—the Black Death reached England. It reached Dorset in August, crept to Bristol, then to Gloucester. It reached Oxford by September, and in October struck London.

  Modern historians agree that the effect of the Black Death has been exaggerated, though no one denies that it was the greatest single disaster in European history. It is true in only the most general sense that—as F. A. Gasquet claimed in 1893, in his book The Great Pestilence—the plague marks the dividing point between medieval and modern history. Europe entered a period of social and economic crisis in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the Black Death capped it; but the Black Death was not the cause. At the beginning of the thirteenth century all Europe was greatly overpopulated—not in modern terms, of course, but in terms of what medieval farming and manufacture could support. With or without the plague, the medieval way of life was failing. By 1250 population had already begun to decline, but migration into towns made for desperate overpopulation there and resulted in increased sickness, starvation and bloodshed. By the 1340’s, conditions had grown stifling. Even in an exceptionally clean town like London, there was some unavoidable piling up of garbage, poor people lived in dangerously overcrowded houses, rickety firetraps in a city where fires were not easy to put out, and rats bred everywhere along with rat-fleas, vectors of the pestilence. Feeding and clothing this population was a clumsy business, since guilds jealously guarded their privileges, including all conceivable kinds of job segmentation and featherbedding (the man who carried in kindling must have a helper to stack it), and since guilds similar enough in function to allow possibilities of job overlap (for instance, the fullers and weavers, both processing wool) frequently had street wars, in which many people died. The year 1340 had been one of famine—the worst since 1315-17. Seven years later England had still not fully recovered. The weather was changing, all Europe entering a new climatic phase involving longer, colder winters and cooler, wetter summers, so that farming was hard to plan. (A century earlier, England could still grow grapes for wine.) As Professor Nicholas has pointed out, “Europe was undernourished at the best of times.…[T]he diet of most was grain, chiefly wheat and rye. The carbohydrates were supplemented with some poultry and eggs, but there was little milk, since it soured so rapidly.…”17 As for meat, the upper class got some from hunting, and some was available at the town markets; but the need for animals to sell, to use in war, and to pull plows ruled them out as food for the lower classes. Since animals were so valuable, providing grazing space put severe pressure on arable land used for feeding human beings. And so it was to an undernourished, grossly inefficient, sick and overcrowded London that the Black Death came.

  The pestilence, we know now, was not one plague but two simultaneously: bubonic plague, which sent the victim’s fever soaring and raised ugly pustules on his armpits or groin, and which in many instances did not kill him; and pneumonic plague, which attacked the victim’s lungs and was therefore much more contagious and almost invariably fatal. Before the first wave of pestilence was finished (late in 1350), it had killed perhaps as many as twenty-five million people, between one-fourth and one-third of the total population of Europe. Statistical examinations show that the plagues struck mainly the weakest—the aged and the young—and those most frequently in contact with the dying, the clergy. (The Dominican order, once the intellectual élite of Christendom, suffered so severely that it was forced to accept postulants with little education or culture, and as a result, by the end of Chaucer’s century, the quality of the order had so greatly declined that it could no longer compete for first-rate minds.) Partly because those who did the everyday work were least hard hit, that is, young adults and the early middle-aged, business went on almost as usual in London, strange as that now seems. Parliament’s meeting was canceled in 1348 and many schools closed down, but bread was baked, church bells were rung, arrests were made, wills were probated, and the war with France ground on.

  Men of vision and imagination—for instance Chaucer in the Pardoner’s Tale, and in modern times Edgar Allan Poe and Ingmar Bergman—have left us grim images of the pestilence, stories which form their own literary genre, the so-called plague legend: maniacal revelers, drunkenness and blasphemy in a tavern or castle, some bright place buzzing and full of life, then a dark shadow, a hooded old man (sometimes woman) in black or red (Death!), then pain, anger, recriminations, hellish dancing, finally darkness and silence. Because of such images handed down by poets, we probably do not see the plague in at all the way ordinary Londoners did in 1348. Let us try to get closer to the reality of that time.

  The official word was of course that the plague was a punishment for sins, a view promoted in colorful terms all over Christendom. For instance, the Leicester cloisterer Knighton writes:

  In those days [1348] there arose a huge rumour and outcry among the people, because when tournaments were held, almost in every place, a band of women would come as if to share the sport, dressed in divers and marvellous dresses of men—sometimes to the number of 40 to 50 ladies, and the fairest and comeliest (though I say not, of the best) among the whole kingdom. Thither they came in party-coloured tunics, one colour or pattern on the right side and another on the left, with short hoods that had pendants like ropes wound round their necks, and belts thickly studded with gold or silver—nay, they even wore, in pouches slung across their bodies, those knives which are called daggers in the vulgar tongue; and thus they rode on choice war-horses or other splendid steeds to the place of tournament. There and thus they spent and lavished their possessions, and wearied their bodies with fooleries and wanton buffoonery, if popular report lie not.…But God in this matter, as in all others, brought marvellous remedy; for He harassed the places and times appointed for such vanities by opening the floodgates of heaven with rain and thunder and lurid lightning, and by unwonted blasts of tempestuous winds.…That same year and the next came the general mortality throughout the world.18

  Langland and nearly all other poets say the same. “Tremble, brothers! Fear the Lord!” and a favorite theme of mid-fourteenth-century European painters is the dying rich glutton, the dying beauty, the wealth and power of Babylon o
verthrown.

  But that official view was very strange. Most Londoners who lost children or elderly parents were not drunken revelers or people given to such buffoonery as mock transvestite dress. They were imperfect, occasionally sinful, but not so imperfect as to deserve this strange divine wrath, and they knew it. Some, in other parts of Europe, sought scapegoats. In Germany, in 1349, it was decided that the fault must lie with the Jews (who for some reason tended to be immune to the plague, as if protected by Satan), or must lie, rather, with the Christian citizenry which allowed Jews to remain in German ghettos; and so God’s side launched a bloody, pious massacre. (God’s mysterious purpose held firm.) There was some scapegoat hunting in Scotland, too; but this was not the usual way with Londoners, much less the way of those who lived in white, sea-breeze-filled Southampton, where, in any case, the death toll was light.

  The rich of London, like Thomas Heyroun or John Chaucer’s stepfather Richard Chaucer, or leviathan, white-bearded Hamo Copton and his large son Nicholas, looked out from their gates, numbly sorrowing and full of bafflement, watching the cartloads of dead men pass, a bell-ringer walking by the blind lead ox as the heavy wooden wheels jerked and rumbled toward the city’s two communal graves. Their servants watched beside them, keeping their distance, and as the carts came even, and they saw the blank, dehumanized stares or heard the jokes, like garbage men’s jokes, of the ward collectors, both servants and masters glanced away, as if vaguely recalling something, some dream or old saying, and crossed themselves—“I am come to set fire on the earth,” perhaps, or “The end is at hand,” or “Watch and wait!”—some such mumble out of childhood or last Sunday’s sermon, a statement no sensible man much thought about, with the sun streaming in through the stained-glass windows and the incense welming up from thick white smoke; a vision of the world not to be taken too seriously, yet secretly believed, secretly perceived on every side to be true, however incredible, gradually and terribly fulfilling itself. The poor, like the rich, came together in groups yet avoided touching—came together out of fear and to escape too much thinking—yet avoided contact because they partly understood how the disease was passed, by some demonic power that took possession of a body and grew stronger in its ruin and groped out toward others with invisible hands.