The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  The Temple Chaucer attended was one of the inns of court, institutions where young men studied common law. According to John Fortescue, who wrote an account of his legal studies with the Society of Lincoln’s Inn some fourteen years after Chaucer’s death, law students first entered one of the inns of chancery, “where they studied the nature of original and judicial writs, which are the very first principles of the law.”3 They then advanced into the inns of court. Fortescue writes:

  There is both in the inns of court, and the inns of chancery, a sort of academy, or gymnasium, fit for persons of their station; where they learn singing, and all kinds of music, dancing and such other accomplishments and diversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their quality, and such as are usually practiced at Court. At other times…the greater part apply themselves to the study of the law. Upon festival days, and after the offices of the church are over, they employ themselves in the study of sacred and prophane history: here every thing which is good and virtuous is to be learned: all vice is discouraged and banished. So that knights, barons, and the greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those inns of court; not so much to make the laws their study, much less to live by the profession (having large patrimonies of their own), but to form their manners and to preserve them from the contagion of vice.

  Fortescue speaks of the inns of court as universities and claims that as preparation for practical life, the education to be had from them was preferable to the more specialized, more theoretical education to be had from Cambridge and Oxford. Chaucer’s own description of the Manciple, in his General Prologue, shows that many leading members of the Society of the Temple taught business administration, though they perhaps did not practice business themselves. There were among the lawyers, Chaucer says,

  …a duszeyne in that hous

  Worthy to been stywardës of rente and lond

  Of any lord that is in Engelond,

  To make hym lyvë by his propre good

  In honour dettelees (but if he werë wood),

  Or lyve as scarsly as hym list desirë;

  And able for to helpen al a shirë

  In any caas that myghte falle or happë;

  And yet this Manciple sette hir aller cappë!

  Fortescue mentions two further features of inns of court education which throw light on Chaucer’s life at this time: the expense involved in achieving it, and the classes of society drawn to such education.

  In these greater inns a student can not well be maintained under eight and twenty pounds a year [$6,720]; and, if he have a servant to wait on him (as for the most part they have), the expense is proportionably more: for this reason: the students are sons to persons of quality; those of an inferior rank not being able to bear the expense of maintaining and educating their children in this way. As to the merchants, they seldom care to lessen their stock in trade by being at such large yearly expenses. So that there is scarce to be found, throughout the kingdom, an eminent lawyer, who is not a gentleman by birth and fortune; consequently they have a greater regard for their character and honour than those who are bred in another way.

  As we’ve seen, Chaucer’s father may have been sufficiently well off, though not a born aristocrat, to pay for Chaucer’s education at the Temple; but he may not have found it necessary to foot the bill alone. For a century or so, by Chaucer’s time, there had been conflict in England between canon law and civil law (that is, the tradition of law developed by the Church as opposed to that established by secular authority), most earlier decisions going to canon lawyers. By the time of Edward I, kings and noblemen had grown weary of seeing cases decided in favor of the Church and had developed a practice of sponsoring the education of secular “clerks” who would support their patrons in matters of legal interpretation, historical precedent, and so on. Surviving records of Lincoln’s Inn show, among members of the Inn, numerous squires of the royal household and list in detail the regulations provided for special concessions to such people. (Though technically a yeoman, if Chaucer attended law school under royal protection, he was no doubt treated as a squire.) It should be added, by the way, that if the household regulations of Edward III were similar to those of Edward IV, only half the king’s squires were required to be in attendance at court at a given time; hence for half his time, if a young courtier had ability and royal favor, he could pursue his education.

  If anyone did sponsor Chaucer’s education—at least between 1361 and 1366—it was probably not the king but John of Gaunt. The evidence, complicated and wholly circumstantial, is as follows: (1) Chaucer biographers used to hold that the language of his grant from the king in 1367 implies that Chaucer had already been in the king’s personal service for some time; but it has recently been shown that the language is similar to that used when Philippa Chaucer was appointed domicella to Gaunt’s second wife, Constance of Castile, who had only recently come to England. Hence it is possible that Chaucer was in the service of someone other than the king in the early sixties. (2) On September 12, 1366, “Philippa Chaucy,” that is, Philippa Chaucer, was granted a lifetime annuity, from the royal treasury, of 10 marks (c. $1500) in addition to her regular wages as lady-in-waiting. Chaucer himself is not mentioned in this record, which probably means that, though he was already married to Philippa, he was not yet a member of the royal household. He did become one sometime before June 1367, when he is mentioned as a yeoman, but he was apparently not yet in the king’s service during the summer of 1366, for which we have a very full list of household members who were at that time granted robes. (3) If he was with Prince Lionel in Ireland (highly unlikely), he reached England and married Philippa well before Lionel himself got back, in November 1366. (4) If Chaucer’s reference to an “eight-year love sickness” in his elegy to Blanche of Richmond (Gaunt’s wife) has anything to do with Blanche, who died in 1369, it must have been in 1361 that he came to know her well, that is, perhaps, became one of her attendants. (5) John of Gaunt, who had not been out of England since 1360, except for a brief diplomatic mission to Flanders in 1364, was preparing, in September 1366, to leave England on a military mission, which might account for Chaucer’s showing up as one of the royal household at about this time. In other words, not wishing to go to the wilds of Ireland with Prince Lionel, Chaucer persuaded Countess Elizabeth to transfer him to the household of her young cousin and only sister-in-law, Blanche. (Such transfers were common.) When Blanche’s husband, John of Gaunt, was preparing for war—Blanche was to cross the Channel with him—Chaucer secured a second transfer, this time to the court of Gaunt’s father, Edward III.4

  Though the evidence is circumstantial, it grows stronger when we consider the apparently close relationship, later, between Gaunt and the poet. A reasonable guess, then, is that Chaucer was assisted in his studies by Gaunt, not the king.

  There is a long tradition that he also studied at Oxford University, though again the evidence is indirect and, one may as well add, extremely weak. It was first suggested, so far as we know, by the antiquary Leland, who died insane in 1552. Leland says Chaucer was a studious Oxfordian who ended up a master logician and profound student of philosophy, and that in later years, or perhaps earlier, he studied at the Inner Temple. Much that Leland says we know by other evidence to be true, for instance that Chaucer was admired by the best French poets of the day; but also much that Leland says is mere legend or demonstrably false; hence Leland and those antiquaries who copied his account, Bishop Bale and John Pits, dean of Liverdun, have not been taken very seriously. (Bale begins his history of English poetry with the Flood.) Yet for all that, Leland’s account may be more or less right; at any rate, only the foolhardy can claim, as some have done, that the tradition has been “long since exploded.”

  One of Chaucer’s friends, Ralph Strode, to whom (along with the poet John Gower) Chaucer dedicated Troilus and Criseyde, was a tutor at Oxford in the 1360’s, and in Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (written when his son Lewis was at Oxford), Chaucer m
entions two men contemporary with himself who were Oxford professors. His religious views seem largely in accord with those popular at Oxford—views which interested John of Gaunt, who once visited the religious reformer John Wyclif there (Gaunt visited Oxford on several occasions). We have no good records for the 1360’s, but in later years Gaunt maintained several students at Oxford, establishing them afterward in the king’s court, and he may well have begun this politically useful practice early.* It may be added that one of Chaucer’s most flattering portraits in the Canterbury Tales is that of his Oxford Clerk, and one of his funniest is the Oxford student “hendë Nicholas,” in the Miller’s Tale (perhaps the Miller’s wicked version of that same Oxford Clerk in his youth). As various Chaucerians have pointed out, the poet knew Oxford life in detail; for instance, he mentions the town of Oseney and causes his Oxford carpenter to swear by the locally popular S. Frideswide. Moreover, the books we know to have been available at Merton College, Oxford, before 1385, would go a long way toward accounting for Chaucer’s scientific and philosophical sources. Many of the manuscripts recall specific citations by Chaucer, ranging from religious works to, for instance, all twelve medical writers mentioned by Chaucer’s Doctor in the General Prologue, 11. 431-4. In later life, Chaucer was undoubtedly familiar with affairs at Oxford. Most of his significant astrological allusions appear in poems which can be dated after 1385, when Merton acquired the Rede Library, from which Chaucer could easily have drawn them.5

  The theory that Chaucer started at Oxford sometime between 1360 and 1367, and revisited his old school later, off and on, accounts for what is otherwise hard to explain in his poetry and prose: his sure grasp of all the standard material of the arts course, the trivium, and much of the quadrivium. Except for some knowledge of medicine, Chaucer was probably not familiar with the highest university programs, medicine, canon law, and theology. He may have studied at Oxford first (if he went there at all) and only later at the Temple, as Professor Williams thinks (medieval course levels were not graduated, as we’ve noticed, in the modern way), may have studied at both places more or less concurrently, or may have moved from the Temple to Oxford.

  He never became a full-fledged sergeant of the law, which took at least sixteen years, Fortescue tells us. Chaucer’s work in later life required no such expertise. As a justice of the peace for Kent he served, in all important cases, with another man who would not have been needed if Chaucer himself had reached that rank. But it has been shown that a smattering of legal knowledge would be necessary for him as clerk of the king’s works at Westminster Palace, the Tower of London, and elsewhere; and it has been shown that as subforester for the royal park of North Petherton in Somerset, he would again need some legal ability, since the forest was ruled by a curious special body of laws, different from both common and civil law and enforced in special courts. On the other hand, without university training it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that he could ever have become the “noble philosophical poet” he was, a thinker admired far and wide as one of the most original and learned of his age.

  What he chiefly learned, wherever he may have studied, was the enormously complex art of poetry. Just what this entailed can only be suggested here. For one thing, it meant mastering rhetoric, or eloquence, a rich, confused, and lively field of study in Chaucer’s time.

  Motivated by his discovery that many important ideas brought down from ancient times had been misunderstood because of inaccurate translation, Robert Grosseteste—at Oxford a century before Chaucer’s time and one of the truly outstanding scholars of the period—had developed elaborate and rigorous theories concerning translation from the classics, had promoted the revival of Greek studies in England, had brought Greek scholars from abroad (a minor innovation but one that incalculably broadened and enriched the university program), and had arranged that Greek manuscripts might be brought from Athens and Constantinople. He himself made what were for the time superbly accurate translations from Greek into Latin and organized the work of collaborators in translation, insisting on correct interpretation of the originals and establishing new standards of accuracy.

  To appreciate Grosseteste’s achievement in this regard, we need to recall that before his time “translation” often meant, in effect, rewriting, and though various schools followed various persuasions, the “ rules” of translation normally did not deal with exactly recapturing the original text in a more accessible language but, on the contrary, involved altering the original by compression or expansion, by inserting moralizing asides, enlivening figures, and so forth. It is worth noting that those prose treasures we find most appealing in King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, such as his beautifully poetic axle-tree simile on limited free will, are none of them present in the original.

  After Grosseteste’s time, the Franciscan Roger Bacon, in his work at the universities of Oxford and Paris, had carried Grosseteste’s ideas further, working on and supporting word for word translations from Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic, and developing principles for grammatical studies in languages other than Latin. Though he was not himself much interested in the study of vernacular languages, his emphasis on the commercial and political advantages to be won from a wide extension of language study did result in a general reassessment, especially in France and England, of the language men really spoke. (By 1362, the lord chancellor of England would be opening parliament in English, making it the nation’s official tongue.) Another great contributor to the Oxford revival of letters—in this case not so much an innovator as an apologist for the exciting new techniques worked out by Grosseteste, Bacon, and their students—was Richard of Bury, bishop of Durham (d. 1345), a famous collector and book-lover and author of the Philobiblion (On the Love of Books).

  By Chaucer’s time, three generations of Oxford professors had been picking their cautious way through the classics, encouraging translation in prose and verse, and in bold new ways—without exegetical predispositions—examining the style and structure of ancient literatures. Factions arose, and heated debates, some men judging all writing by Aristotle’s rule, “To speak as the common people do, but to think as the wise,” some stumping for Seneca, “Nothing is pleasing unless refreshed by variety of effect.” On the authority of Augustine and Paul, men like John Wyclif spoke sternly of the dire need for plain, direct speech and scoffed at the rich efflorations of, say, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, the rhetorician who had taught at Oxford his doctrine of decorum, the adaptation of style to hearer and occasion, allowing to the “high style” all manner of verbal flash and structural intricacy. The debate was not, as it may seem, merely academic. It had to do quite fundamentally with the question of how the human mind works, what relationship obtains between language and thought; in short, with the whole fiery question of “nominalism”—to which we’ll turn in a moment. To work out his answers, the Oxford student read all the available masters, old and new, translated what they wrote—concentrating not only on the meaning of words but on the intellectual and emotional effects of subtle repetitions, juxtapositions, and so forth—and then composed, by old and new principles, works of his own. If he believed that thought is essentially rational, he followed Wyclif. If he believed that meters and poetic phrasing can touch the inexpressible, he inclined toward Vinsauf. An early mark of Chaucer’s genius was his recognition, in the Book of the Duchess, that both points of view are valid. Let me try to explain.

  The “Black Knight” of the poem, grieving over the death of his lady, evades direct confrontation of his grief by poetic artifice and figurative, poetically conventional language. He speaks, for instance, of losing a game of chess with Fortune:

  The falsë thef! what hath she doo,

  Trowest thou? By ourë Lord I wol the seyë.

  At the ches with me she gan to pleyë;

  With her falsë draughtës dyvers

  She staal on me, and tok my fers.

  And whan I sawgh my fers awayë, [stole; fers, an Arabic piece, the Queen or Coun
sellor]

  Allas! I kouthë no lenger playë, [could]

  But seydë, “Farëwel, swete, ywys,

  And farëwel al that ever ther ys!”

  Therwith Fortunë seydë “Chek her!” [here]

  And “Mat!” in myd poynt of the chekker…

  The narrator of the poem, to cure the knight of his crippling melancholy, must bring him to the plain English—the direct admission, “She is dead.” But if plain speech has value, so does artful, suggestive speech: only poetic circumlocution can carry the subtlest emotions, surprise the mind by subliminal innuendo, give expression to that side of reality we feel but cannot see. In the poem’s surprising closing lines, a hart-hunt, a heart-hunt, and a darkened, grief-sick soul’s search for God are simultaneously, mysteriously resolved and the poem’s central characters are suddenly, through puns, identified: John (St. Johan!) and Blanche of Richmond (“ryche hil”—Gaunt’s title before he became duke of Lancaster) and Lancaster (“long castel”). The narrator’s love, forcing the Black Knight to the painful admission “She ys ded!”, brings to an end the heart-hunt—what we would call psychoanalysis—putting him once more in touch with his feelings, forcing him to look for help to the huntsman-lover Christ on his rich hill (Paradise), as reported in the Apocalypse of “St. Johan.” The mysterious dream ends:

  “She ys ded!” “Nay!” “Yis, be my trouthë!”

  “Is that yourë los? Be God, hyt ys routhë!”…

  “With that me thoghtë that this kyng [loss…sorrowful]

  Gan homwardës for to rydë

  Unto a placë, was there besydë,

  Which was from us but a lytë.

  A long castel with wallës whitë,

  Be seynt Johan! on a ryche hil