The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  That ghost was all over London now, rising from the bodies of the dying and dead, cowering in doorways, wine cellars, bright gardens where rats lay dead along the walls. Outside London it was killing so many sheep, according to the chronicles of Henry Knighton, “that in one place more than 5000 died in a single pasture; and they rotted so much that neither bird nor beast would touch them.” He adds, “Sheep and oxen strayed at large through the fields and among the crops, and there were none to drive them off or herd them, but for lack of keepers they perished in remote by-ways and hedges.…” The Scots were at first not infected, Knighton tells us, and “believing that a terrible vengeance of God had overtaken the English, [they] came together at Selkirk forest with the intention of invading the realm of England.…[There] the fierce mortality overtook them and their ranks were thinned by sudden and terrible death. About 5000 died in a short time. And as the rest, the strong and the feeble, were making ready to return to their own homes, they were pursued and intercepted by the English, who killed a very great number of them.” It must have seemed that the weird, vengeful spirit had power even over wood and stone. Knighton writes: “After the pestilence many buildings both great and small in all cities, boroughs and vills fell into ruins for lack of inhabitants, and in the same way many villages and hamlets were depopulated, and there were no houses left in them, all who had lived therein being dead.…”19 A thousand English villages disappeared forever during the fourteenth century’s fifty years of plague.

  It was an unbelievable thing that God should make use of such a creature as the pestilence. All medieval religious doctrine was unbelievable, in fact; and though we find no evidence that skepticism, to say nothing of atheism, was ever seriously argued in the late Middle Ages, we can be sure there were thousands who felt baffled and helpless—the cautious half-doubters we encounter in sermons and mystery plays. The probability, in fact, is that when the pestilence arrived the Age of Faith came to be made up almost wholly of people riddled by doubts, people who could deal with doubt only by the assertion, common in the religious writing of the time, that the human mind is by nature incapable of even the dimmest understanding of God—people who consciously and in a sense bravely abandoned hope of understanding and simply prayed to the unfathomable.

  At least part of what made the coming of the pestilence such a jolt was that, as a judgment from God, it seemed to confute the past half century’s optimistic tendency in Christian thought. Against the darker visions of some of the early Church Fathers, Aquinas had persuasively argued a theology and metaphysic which justified full confidence in man. Systematically developing ideas of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato, he’d shown that both man and the lower creatures have a natural tendency or love toward God, and that God’s grace could perfect and elevate man’s tendency, bringing knowledge and full love of the divine. Though sin might be tempting, it was not, for Thomas, the crushing weight on the soul it had seemed to some earlier patristic and conciliar writers. Even the secular state was good. Borrowing from Aristotle, Thomas had raised the dignity of civil authority by declaring the state one of this world’s two perfect societies (the other was the Church), a positive good for the promotion of man’s temporal welfare, and a necessary good inasmuch as man cannot live without civil order. Even angels, Thomas argued, must have government.

  Optimism like that of Thomas would equally characterize the philosophical movement that followed and to some extent eclipsed him. Thomas had argued the existence of a “human nature” which might be united to the divine through the person of Christ. Philosophers of the “nominalist” school argued that no reality exists besides the simple entity, that is, that we can find no universal human nature but only individual human beings. Thus nature and supernature, reason and revelation, parted company; natural science was set free of the wide embrace of metaphysics and might pursue facts and concepts one by one; and civil rights and obligations need be referred no higher than the prince. Though these were still basically university ideas, they had at least some effect on every parish priest and were disseminated throughout society by the Dominicans (Thomas Aquinas’s order) and Franciscans (the order of such nominalists as Bacon).

  Whatever their disagreements, both Thomists and nominalists celebrated human reason and tended to check the tradition of contemptus mundi. “My sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me!” the Holy One might have cried. Instead, he sent the pestilence. The nominalist idea (flatly opposed to the opinion of Aquinas) that God’s nature, being unapproachable by science, is unknowable, joined unexpectedly with a less noble line of thought, the older, far gloomier view of human nature, that man is a worm, man is mere clay; and the result was a notion of man as not only base but virtually helpless.

  Intelligent Englishmen like the men and women in John Chaucer’s London family, not trained theologians, had no choice but to leave their feeling of helplessness in the hands of “clerks,” clinging as firmly as they could to their Christian optimism, praying and obeying the commands of the Church—like John Massey’s “jeweler” at the end of Pearl, courageously pushing away doubts, submitting. Supported by beautiful pictures, magnificent Church architecture, great music, and sermons that were themselves works of art—sometimes richly dramatic, as when the carved wooden eagle on the pulpit turned its head and seemed to argue with the priest—they struggled for Christian patience. Insofar as possible, they resisted the panic common among the less stable, who wooed God with assurances of love and loyalty—prayed long and hard, because God could be dangerous, he had loosed upon the world already the fifteen signs of the coming universal destruction—or they sought to appease him with pilgrimages, pardons, and the relics of saints. They prayed, then ran back to life like children who have at last escaped the stern paternal eye, and having escaped for the moment, they laughed and worked or fought their wars with an abandon that would fill them with alarm when they returned to the chapel. Having accepted as their standard an unattainable ideal of saintly virtue, they disbelieved, denied belief in action, and when they saw their doubt, they were alarmed and sought help in their pieces of Mary’s veil or St. Guthlac’s bones. Wherever we look in the Middle Ages, in the period of the plagues, we see signs of this paradoxical doubt and overheated faith. When observers speak of trials by ordeal of combat, supposedly determined by God, they include like a piece of litany some such phrase as “if God indeed be judge of these matters,” a phrase undoubtedly intended ironically, as a man of faith’s assertion that God is certainly judge—yet a phrase so inevitable, so impossible to leave out, that one wonders if the speaker doth protest too much. In the same way, when they speak of men harmed by ghosts or goblins, they unfailingly include some such ironic aside as, “If it be true that the Devil receiveth power over none but such as have lived like swine.…” Yet whatever their doubts, perhaps their admission of absolute ignorance about God’s huge ways proved helpful at the last. They died clutching their rosaries, and gave large portions of what wealth they had for requiem masses in perpetuity, but they died well, by all accounts, died perhaps more nobly than we do.

  It was the dark undercurrent of fear and confusion—which was sometimes transmuted to sublime faith but more commonly expressed itself as stoic calm, and evaded confrontations of doubt and doctrine by, at best, celebration of heaven’s wonder, at worst, wretched cowering and the mortification of the flesh—that made Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy the most important single book of the age and perhaps the key element in Chaucer’s education. It was a book that took medieval Christianity back to its idealist roots, the Neoplatonic doctrines on human potential and the goodness of the universe that had helped move Augustine toward his Christian conversion and had inspired and fortified King Alfred when Viking barbarism, with its belligerent espousal of murder, rape, and the destruction of all things “effete”—all beauty—made civilized and Christian virtue seem a dream of fools.

  In the fourteenth century, Boethius’ popularity was founded, at least in part, on
his usefulness as an interpreter of the slightly schizophrenic condition of the late medieval Christian. The truth of the priest’s darker warnings seemed evident: God was indeed loosing the seven angels of death—evil weathers, pestilence…Yet such divine severity was unthinkable for human minds, especially if God was, as Christianity asserted and one could reasonably believe, a loving father. Given this unbreakable double-bind, whose effect was imprisonment, loss of free will, man must find some way to live free though in chains, doing his work and maintaining his dignity as moral agent in a universe fundamentally foreign and tyrannical (however secretly benevolent), a “wilderness” he must survive without rationally intelligible rules. Boethius offered an account which meshed with Christian doctrine yet had the advantage of seeming clarity, a doctrine which allowed moral agency and did not too obviously violate actual human emotion and intellect, and one which, finally, was not explicitly Christian—Boethius spoke, like Aristotle, of the Prime Mover, never of God—and thus related Christian experience to non-Christian and gave sometimes baffling Christian doctrine philosophical credibility. “The world is very queer,” said Boethius, in effect. “The Prime Mover understands things we don’t, not that he causes them, and with his clear vision of past, present, and future, he knows that all is for the best: the plan of the universe (that is, divine providence) is beautiful and serene. Therefore do not put your money on private hopes or personal plans, but joyfully, freely accept whatever is, however terrible it may appear; work with it as a wise swimmer works with and not against the river’s current; for everything in the universe is in fact linked and orderly and intended for our good, as the soul will recognize when it escapes this physical darkness to spirit’s pure light.” If he’d known about railroads, he might have expressed his idea of freedom with an image Bertrand Russell used (though to darker purpose): The universe is like a train. You can ride on it, freely joining your will to the will of the railroad company, and it will take you to Philadelphia. But if you stand on the track, stubbornly (and freely) seeking to impose your wish on the will of the company, things may not go well for you. Boethius went further, following Plato and (perhaps incidentally) reviving a fundamental teaching of Jesus: One single principle, according to Boethius, governs everything that exists, from winds and tides and inanimate matter to the Prime Mover’s character, namely, the principle of universal attraction degree by degree—the inherent love of “natural place” and overall accord which “inclines” or encourages stones to move downward and souls to fly upward, establishing the stable and orderly ladder of existence, the “fair chain of love.” (This is of course the idea behind Aquinas’ “tendency” of human and lower creatures toward God.) One may, with mad obduracy, deny the principle, closing up one’s heart into selfishness and envy, resisting one’s natural, spiritual place, thus stepping outside the universal order and losing its benefits. (We do this, Boethius might say, when we cynically deny that love, or duty, or heroism exist, or when we impute base motives to seemingly noble acts and thus greed, cruelty, and indifference to our fellow creatures, ultimately undermining our own self-respect and even our will to live.) But however we may resist love’s natural pull, the divine, all-ordering principle is still there, awaiting the will’s free surrender.

  The practical result of the Boethian view was that a man could watch his children die, could weep, then put his grief aside, exercising his free will by rejoining the community, the “common profit”; could “make a virtue of necessity”—as Chaucer was to write in his Knight’s Tale—doing his small but necessary part of London’s business or Southampton’s. In the short view, the temporal view,

  This world nys but a thurgfarë ful of wo, [is not]

  And we been pilgrymës, passyngë to and fro.

  Deeth is an ende of every worldly soorë.

  But God’s domain and the soul’s possibilities are larger than the world we see.

  The Boethian doctrine was of course not available to everyone. One of Chaucer’s services to his age would be his translation of Boethius’ book into English, and later his dramatization of the Boethian message in poem after poem. The Chaucers themselves, as we’ve seen, had need of such comfort in 1349. The future poet’s life was at that time changed utterly: the emotionally close extended family he’d formerly known, the crowd of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins that seems one of the most typical and attractive features of life in the Middle Ages, had been abruptly snuffed out.

  Sometime after the Chaucer family had moved back to the Thames Street house in London, and after the plague had begun to burn itself out, Geoffrey began school somewhere in the Vintry Ward area, probably the Almonry Cathedral School attached to St. Paul’s. It was not quite the closest to his house. St. Mary-le-Bow was slightly nearer, and a third school was situated in this part of London, St. Martin-le-Grand, somewhat farther away. St. Paul’s was almost certainly the best of the three.20 Derek Brewer writes:

  About the middle of the century this song school [attached to the grammar school] had an unusual schoolmaster, William Ravenstone, who had a large collection of books in Latin. Although he was a chaplain, he seems to have had very few theological books, but a great many other books of various interest, including some practical teaching books and a large number of Latin classics. When he died he left these books to the school, to the number of eighty-four, and with them a chest to keep them in, and provision for an annual gift of money to the boys. To feel the full significance of this one must realize the extreme booklessness of the fourteenth century. There are some 76,000 wills surviving from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England. Of these [one researcher] examined 7,568, and found only 388 which bequeath books; yet this was a period when books were valuable and so likely to be mentioned.…So Ravenstone’s eighty-four are really outstanding. Furthermore, it was extremely difficult to get the use of a library. Most of those that existed were in monasteries, and restricted to the use of monks. On the other hand, Chaucer himself from an early period shows a quite unusual knowledge of the classics. So it is possible that Chaucer got his knowledge from Ravenstone’s collection, and that the learned and kindly Ravenstone may have been Chaucer’s own teacher.…21

  Another collection of books was also available at St. Paul’s, a collection left in 1328 by William Tolleshunt, “almoner and schoolmaster of the Almonry School at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.” Tolleshunt left works of grammar, logic, natural history, medicine, and law,22 and evidently Chaucer could use these books if he wanted to, since boys were apparently permitted to take books to their rooms. But the subjects he principally dealt with, during those five remaining years of grammar school, were not history, medicine, and so forth, but early stages of the three courses of language study—grammar, logic, and eloquence (or rhetoric)—which made up the trivium (the word from which, I’m sorry to say, we get our word “trivial”).

  The order of studies in the Middle Ages was more flexible than educational programs are now, depending on the interest of teachers and students, the availability of specialists in a given field, and so on. Ideal patterns for the student’s progress were set out by educational theorists, but such patterns were probably not often followed. Whereas we think, nowadays, of a child’s moving from the subject matter of the first grade to that of the second, then to that of the third, and so forth, medieval teachers worked like teachers in the American country schoolhouse, mixing up the studies of fifth grade and first and emphasizing pretty much whatever they pleased—logic at the expense of grammar or even arithmetic at the expense of language. Since we have no way of knowing how Chaucer’s teacher worked, we must describe not the education he got but the one the theorists of his age recommended—beginning with grammar.

  Having learned the basics of reading and writing at his school in Southampton, Chaucer moved on, in his London school, to more complicated segments of “grammar,” that is, the branch of the trivium which had to do with understanding letters (or grammata)—everything from how to make an “A
” to how to interpret Christian four-level allegory. The parts of speech he learned out of Aelius Donatus’s Eight Parts of Speech, which schoolboys called their Donat, their “given.” It was a book of questions and answers on Latin grammar, a little catechism that ran to what would now be about ten printed pages. It was studied in both prose and rhymed versions and cost about threepence. He then moved on to a collection of alphabetically arranged adages and proverbs attributed to Dionysius Cato—a writer repeatedly mentioned in Chaucer’s poetry. He went next, if his teachers followed the advice of the best educational theorists, to more advanced grammatical problems (shading toward logical problems) with the shorter and longer works of Priscian, where he encountered some ten thousand lines of quotation from the Roman classics—many of which Chaucer would incorporate into his own work years later. Sometime after this, Chaucer read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the wellspring of stories for all medieval poets.