The Life and Times of Chaucer
Page 17
It may be useful to pause here to answer some commonly advanced objections to the idea of Chaucer’s having served, like every adventuresome young man around him, as a poet and disciple of Venus. It is true that Chaucer speaks repeatedly in his poetry of knowing nothing about love. In Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, he calls himself the servant of Love’s servants, because he himself is, in Cupid’s court, a hopeless case. From his earliest great poem, the Book of the Duchess, to some of his last, he presents himself as a ludicrously unsuccessful lover, a man pious by default—that is, a man devoted to God because the ladies won’t have him. That consistent stance, repeatedly adopted, must mean one of two—no, three—things. Either Chaucer is telling the truth, jokingly apologizing for the ineptitude or perhaps piety which keeps him aloof from the court’s normal love play; or he’s telling the truth but throwing a polite tease to the ladies in his audience (several of his patrons were noblewomen—Elizabeth of Ulster, Blanche of Lancaster, Queen Philippa, Queen Anne); or he’s working for a laugh because everyone in his original audience knew that his claim of innocence was the opposite of the truth. There can be very little doubt, I think, that the last of these explanations is the right one. His early love complaints are less conventional than most and have the unmistakable ring, or so it seems to me, of serious attempts at persuasion. They do not merely praise and flatter, like French and Italian persuasions to love from this period. They also tease, amuse, and hint, in the age-old fashion of successful seducers. Moreover, no poet in the whole literary tradition of England can write more titillating poetry than Chaucer’s—unabashed celebrations of the joys of swyving, as in the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, and so on. One thinks, for instance, of that glorious moment in the Reeve’s Tale when the clerk plays his trick on the miller’s wife. The first clerk, Allan, has crept into bed with the miller’s daughter, so the second clerk, John, considers it his duty to mount the miller’s wife. Since the room where they’re all sleeping is very dark, John moves the baby’s cradle from the foot of the bed where the miller and his wife sleep and places it at the foot of his own bed. Result:
Soone after this the wyf hir rowtyng leet, [snoring stopped]
And gan awake, and wente hire out to pissë,
And cam agayn, and gan hir cradel myssë,
And gropëd heer and ther, but she foond noon.
“Allas!” quod she, “I hade almoost mysgoon;
I hadde almoost goon to the clerkës bed.
Ey, benedicite! thanne hadde I foule ysped.”
And forth she gooth til she the cradel fond.
She gropeth alwey forther with hir hond,
And foond the bed, and thoghtë noght but good,
By causë that the cradel by it stood,
And nystë wher she was, for it was derk;
But faire and wel she creep in to the clerk,
And lith ful stille, and wolde han caught a sleep.
Withinne a while this John the clerk up leep,
And on this goodë wyf he leith on soorë.
So myrie a fit ne haddë she nat ful yoorë;
He priketh harde and depe as he were mad.
This joly lyf han thisë two clerkës lad
Til that the thriddë cok bigan to syngë.
The pun in the last line, by the way, is pretty typical Chaucer. He writes not labored puns of the sort Dr. Johnson found (rightly) so offensive in Shakespeare—for instance, those spoken by the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II:
Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old:
Within me Grief hath kept a tedious fast;
And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt?
For sleeping England long time have I watch’d;
Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt.…
Chaucer’s puns are throwaways, easily missed until the fifteenth reading, such jokes as that ghastly double entendre in the portrait of the Wife of Bath, where after speaking of the Wife’s many husbands and lovers and then of her three pilgrimages to Jerusalem (notorious at the time as occasions for promiscuity), Chaucer says innocently (head tipped, eyes heavenward, hands behind his back), “She haddë passëd many a straungë strem [stream]”!
But we were speaking of the knowledge of love revealed in Chaucer’s poems. He knows more than just the sexual side of love. Part of what makes Troilus and Criseyde one of the two or three finest narrative poems in English is its detailed and wise analysis of what love feels like and does in men and women. The effect is cumulative, so that quotation cannot do the analysis justice, but one may mention as an example of Chaucer’s way of working in this poem the long soliloquy by Criseyde in which she debates with herself whether or not she should allow herself to fall in love with the young prince. She reasons at length and with great subtlety but in the end still cannot make up her mind. At last she goes to bed, still torturing herself with questions. And what happens is this:
A nyghtyngale, upon a cedir grenë,
Under the chambre wal ther as she ley,
Ful loudë song ayein the moonë shenë,
Peraunter, in his briddës wise, a lay [Peradventure]
Of lovë, that made hire hertë fressh and gay.
That herkned she no longe in good ententë,
Til at the lastë the dedë slep hire hentë.[took away]
And as she slep, anonright tho hirë mettë [then she dreamed]
How that an egle, fetherëd whit as bon,
Under hirë brest his longë clawes settë,
And out hire herte he rentë, and that anon,
And dide his herte into hirë brest to gon,
Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smertë; [felt dread]
And forth he fleigh, with hertë left for hertë.
After passages like this one—and we find many such passages—it is hard to take very seriously Chaucer’s claim that he knows nothing about love from personal experience.
Granted, writing about love was standard in the fourteenth century (though often, as we’ve seen, love is not the poet’s real subject). But the central and most admired figure in every court young Chaucer knew was a lady-killer—Edward, the Black Prince, Lionel, John of Gaunt. How could a young man of seventeen or eighteen resist such influence, especially when the love affairs he witnessed were chivalrous and, in their own way, marked by fidelity? How could a man not conspicuously ugly (as we know from portraits), a man with extraordinary understanding of women (as we know from his poems), a man often praised by those who knew him for his remarkable charm and gentleness, and in later years a man who, as poetry reader in England’s greatest courts, stood out as a sort of star performer—how could such a man be anything but attractive to women? But above all, where did he learn so much about the behavior of women and men in bed? And, finally, whether we take the “Retraction” at the end of the Canterbury Tales as a deathbed lament for sins committed (the sin of writing poems that pull lovers toward the woods) or as something else (a carefully planned aesthetic close after the Parson’s Tale or a sly way of listing his most important works), the Retraction says plainly that Chaucer was aware of sex as a major theme in much of his life’s work, both early and late. Sex was in fact for Geoffrey Chaucer the heart of the matter—sex and the sharpening of awareness, the heightened nobility that go with it, as they do for young Troilus:
In allë nedës, for the townës werrë, [war]
He was, and ay, the first in armës dyght, [arrayed]
And certeynly, but if that bokës errë,
Save Ector most ydred of any wight;
And this encrees of hardynesse and myght
Come hym of love, his ladiës thank to wynnë,
That alterëd his spirit so withinnë.
In tyme of trewe, on haukyng wolde he ridë, [truce]
Or ellës hontë boor, beer, or lyoun;
The smalë bestës leet he gon bisidë.
And whan that he com ridyng into town,
Ful ofte his lady from hirë wyndow down,
A
s fressh as faukoun comen out of muwë, [falcon]
Ful redy was hym goodly to saluwë.
And moost of love and vertu was his spechë,
And in despit hadde allë wrecchednessë;
And douteles, no nedë was hym bisechë
To honouren hem that haddë worthynessë,
And esen hem that weren in destressë. [ease]
And glad was he if any wyght wel ferdë,
That loverë was, whan he it wiste or herdë. [knew]
In 1359, by his own account in the Scrope-Grosvenor trial of 1386 (where he testified on a question of heraldic precedence), Chaucer went to war. He was at least technically a soldier from that time to the time of the trial, when he testified that he had “borne arms for twenty-seven years,” but it may have been only in a few campaigns, including the winter campaign of 1359-60, that he served as an actual fighting man, since he seems to have served later primarily as diplomat.
King John of France had been in England since his capture at Poitiers by the Black Prince. He’d been living in high style, mostly in Lincolnshire, with forty-some attendants: two chaplains, a secretary, a clerk of the chapel, a doctor, a maître d’hôtel, three pages, four valets, three wardrobe men, three furriers, six grooms, two cooks, a fruiterer, a spiceman, a barber, a washer, a chief minstrel (who also made musical instruments and clocks), a fool or jester, and so forth. He had with him his son Philip, captured in the same battle, and numerous furnishings and conveniences—hangings, curtains, cushions, ornamented chests, etc., wines, spices, sugar (he dearly loved sweets), innumerable expensive robes, one trimmed with fur made of 2,550 skins, and much, much more. He whiled away his time playing music, chess, and backgammon; his son filled his days working hunting dogs, falcons, and gamecocks. John gave parties and attended all the great English parties, but his welcome presence did nothing to settle the debate between England and France, where the young dauphin Charles now ruled in John’s stead. Edward III, still claiming the crown of France through the line of his mother Queen Isabella, decided it was time to set things straight.
He made his preparations slowly and carefully, and at last, in the autumn of 1359, his knights all over England began mustering their troops. Much of the year’s harvest had been transported, by the king’s command, to the ports of Kent. There would be nothing much to be found in France—raiding outfits like that which had accidentally captured King John had left her rich fields in ruins. Children gathered wood for bows and arrows, lance shafts, spear handles; men who spoke strange languages arrived from Wales and the Forest of Dean to fell timber in the woods of eastern England for carts, wagons, and ships. According to Froissart, eight thousand carts were knocked together, each to be pulled by four horses commandeered from English villages, and blacksmiths were impressed into service to make portable grain mills, ovens, horseshoes, and weaponry. Butchers were issued quotas of skins to give to tanners who must cure them for footwear and the coracles needed for fishing to provide for fast days. Shipping firms gave up their most valuable cogs, twenty-ton coalboats from the Tyne, fifty-ton trading ships from East Anglican ports. And new ships were built, like the flagship New St. Mary, with a capacity of three hundred tons and a crew of a hundred.
On October 28, 1359, “between daybreak and sunrise,” the cream of England’s manhood, including the Black Prince, Lionel, and Gaunt, and including Geoffrey Chaucer—nearly a hundred thousand in all, if one can believe contemporary reckonings, though only some five thousand were actual combatants—set sail across the Channel. It was the largest invasion force Edward had ever mustered, and its size was to be its undoing.
Henry of Lancaster, Gaunt’s father-in-law, had set off with his army some months ahead of the rest and had encountered at Calais a distressing situation. Various lords and knights of the empire, old allies of King Edward, had gathered up horses, harness, and attendants and had ridden to Calais to await the king’s coming, which was scheduled for August. Edward failed to arrive on schedule; but more and more adventurers arrived, “so that they wyst nat wher to lodge, nor to have stablyng for their horses; also bredde, wyne, hay and otes, and other provisyons were very dere and scant, so that ther was none to gette for golde nor sylver; and ever it was said the kyng commeth the next weke.” To survive in Calais, where prices had gone sky-high, the adventurers were forced to sell all they had, horses, saddles, implements and weapons. When Lancaster arrived, with “four hundred speares and two thousand archers,” by Froissart’s exaggerated count, they had no place to stay, nothing to eat except the rations they’d brought with them, and no way of replenishing the supplies of their volunteer allies, who were by now turning hostile. Lancaster stalled.
“Fayre lordes,” he said, “the taryeng here is no profyte. I woll go ryde forthe into Fraunce, and to see what I can fynde ther: wherefore sirs, I requyre you to ryde forthe with me, and I shall delyver you a certayne somme of money, to pay withall your costes in your lodgynges, that ye have spent here in this towne of Calays, and ye shall have provision of vitayle to carry on your somers.” The allies accepted, Lancaster provided down payment on his promise, and the whole mixed horde moved through France to live by ravaging. There was not much to ravage. They took the town of Bray-sur-Somme by assault and found nothing there to steal, then moved on to Cerisy, where their luck was slightly better. There they spent Halloween and the next day learned of the king’s arrival at Calais. They turned back and met, four leagues from Calais, “so gret multytude of people that all the countrey was covered therwith, so rychely armed and besene, that it was great joye to beholde the fresshe shinyng armours, baners wavynge in the wynde, their companies in good order ridyng a soft pase.” One of that “gret multytude of people,” wearing a vest and light helmet of iron and showing at his collar and sleeves the livery of Prince Lionel, was the twenty-year-old poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
Edward could offer no better to the adventurers than Henry of Lancaster had offered, but he persuaded them to follow him and take whatever Fortune might send. The unwieldy provision carts, draught horses, and heavily armed knights kept the advance down to nine miles a day, the huge horde moving in three parallel columns, cutting broad highways of litter and devastation through an already abandoned countryside, many of the adventurers now traveling on foot, having sold their horses for bread or having slaughtered them for meat. Chaucer and his company, advancing with Lionel in the battle wing commanded by the Black Prince, rode for days on end without encountering a soul—no French army, not the shadow of a peasant. Wherever Chaucer looked, gazing past the blur of his helmet’s noseguard (the sounds around him muted, closed off where the helmet pressed snugly against his ears), the landscape was barren and black, lifeless—or lifeless except for an occasional gray specter of smoke. Wheatfields, cottages, whole towns had been burned, some by raiding bands of Englishmen earlier, some by the French so they could offer no comfort to the invaders. When Chaucer rode out with small foraging expeditions, he was forced to travel farther and farther to find food, and as the desolation became an increasing burden, emptying the wagons of the long provision trains, the army’s three great columns were forced to travel farther apart. The Black Prince and his army, we know from the Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray of Heton,
took the way of Montreuil and Hesdin, through Ponthieu and Picardy, crossing the Somme and passing by Neuilly and Ham into Vermandois, near which place Sir Baudouin Daukin, knight, Master of the Crossbowmen of France, with other French knights, was taken in fight by the men of the Prince’s train, as he would have overrun by night the quarters of the earl of Stafford, who defended himself well.…So the Prince held his way aforesaid by St Quentin and Retieris, where the enemy themselves burned their town to hinder the passage; but the Prince’s men passed [the river] by main force at Château-Porcein.…12
We know it was with this wing of the army—the only wing that was to pass this way—that Chaucer served, and it was sometime after the battle near “Retieris” that he was almost certainly ambushed while
on a foraging mission, captured by the French, and held for ransom. He would testify in the Scrope trial, years later, that before his capture, he saw Sir Thomas Scrope bearing certain arms “before the town of Retters.” Scholars have debated whether Chaucer’s “Retters” should be identified with Retiers in Brittany or Rethel in the Ardennes,13 but Sir Thomas Gray’s remarks in the Scalacronica would appear to settle the matter. None of Edward’s army went near Retiers in Brittany. The “Retieris” mentioned by Gray no longer exists, but apparently it once did: Château-Porcein is near Rethel.
Chaucer was captured after the army arrived at Rheims for the siege, since at the Scrope trial he speaks of “the whole expedition,” implying that he made it clear to Rheims. He must have been captured between December 4, 1359, and January 11, 1360.14 On March 1,1360, while the siege was still in progress—Rheims was to capitulate on the 8th of May—Chaucer was ransomed, the king himself contributing £16 ($3,840). This was probably only a part of the total ransom. T. R. Lounsbury remarked some eighty years ago:
The language of the document leaves uncertain whether this was only a part or the whole of the amount paid. The former is rather the more natural interpretation.…There has, however, been some comment, not altogether good-natured, on the sum paid by the king for the poet. It has been contrasted with other entries in the same roll, not very favorably to his majesty’s appreciation of literature. These show that at about the same time he gave Robert de Clinton between sixteen and seventeen pounds for a horse, and John de Beverley twenty pounds for a war-horse. But.…[Chaucer] was ransomed, so far as the king had anything to do with it, not for his literary qualifications, but for his business usefulness; as a soldier, not as a poet. The censure, moreover, is based upon a mistaken conception of the comparative value of human beings and horses. There has never been a period in the history of the race when that somewhat indefinite individual, the average man, if burdened with the encumbrance of freedom, could bring the price of a good horse.15