The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Her star was rising fast in the early 1370’s, a woman in her early twenties, ten years younger than Chaucer. She persuaded the king—or the king decided without Alice’s persuasion—to grant her Wendover, which had been, ever since Edward the Confessor had held it, one of the most desirable manors in the possession of the crown. It was a beautiful little township in the shire of Buckingham, with fertile land and access to valuable timber and swine food in the wooded hills. It was thirty miles from London but easy to reach, since it straddled Icknield Way, one of the busiest trading routes across the windmill-strewn flats from the ports of East Anglia to the green and rolling wool, leather, and grain-producing areas of the English southwest; and it was also approached by another major road, the ancient, chestnut-lined Via Londoniensis. Wendover was in the district where both John of Gaunt and the Black Prince had country estates. The Black Prince was living in the great castle of Berkhamsted, an excellent place for displaying his booty and receiving official guests, but draughty and uncomfortable and not good for his health, more a fortress than a home. He had also a smaller place in the same general area, a fortified castle at the foot of a steep escarpment, an ideal part-time home and stud farm for breeding warhorses. John of Gaunt was lord of the manor of Chalfont St. Peter, which he used only as a source of food and revenue for his vast household at the Savoy Palace in London; and he was also lord of the manor of Weston Turville, which almost adjoined the Wendover lands and was one of his favorite country residences.

  The three near neighbors may not have seen each other often, since the king did not like Alice Perrers to leave his side, and since the princes were constantly involved in the crown’s troubled business; but they got along amicably, despite the fact that Joan of Kent, wife of the Black Prince, did not care for Alice. (Though known once herself for extravagant dress, Joan found Alice vulgar and thoroughly distrusted her.) The peace between Gaunt, the Black Prince, and Dame Alice, their apparent agreement on all important issues, was a remarkable thing in fourteenth-century England and attests to the basic nobility of all three, whatever the general moral flaccidity of the Edwardian court or the flaws of character in Edward’s mistress. If the Black Prince should die, leaving his young son Richard heir to England’s throne, it was possible, especially if the child too should die, as medieval children all too commonly did, that John of Gaunt might succeed to the throne; and it was almost equally possible, as shown by England’s position on the succession in Castile, that if Alice should bear an illegitimate child to King Edward, that child might also have a claim. Equally striking, Alice’s ties were, as we’ve said, with the mercantile class of London, chief source of royal revenue (through customs) and with the mayors and moneylenders whom England’s barons distrusted, even hated. Gaunt and Prince Edward were not only landed aristocrats but were, indeed, the two most powerful magnates in England. All this might have made for friction; yet in all important business, the three were in agreement, impartially and staunchly defending the rights of the crown, whoever might wear it. When outsiders needed help from England, now that Edward was growing more and more uninterested—he was in fact incapable of remembering even the names of his chief enemies—it was to the two princes and Alice that they appealed. For instance, when the new Pope, Gregory XI, crowned at Avignon on January 5, 1371, needed help in persuading the constable of Aquitaine to ransom the Pope’s captured brother, he sent his appeal to the prince of England, John of Gaunt, and Alice Perrers.

  King Edward was sliding into senility. He could no longer dream up, as once he’d done, brilliant or crackpot schemes for saving England from her financial woes; and this, along with the tendency of all favorites to snatch at whatever wealth they could, led Alice into evil ways. Even Queen Philippa, who lived very simply for a royal consort of her time and place, had grappled continually with domestic crises, loaded down with bills, frantically struggling to cope with the problems of keeping a half dozen houses ready for his majesty’s use: Westminster, the Tower, Eltham, Sheen, Woodstock, Havering, and Wallingford, not to mention the houses farther from London where the king might need to go if there were trouble with Scotland or he felt inclined to do some hunting. To pay such bills—and to add to her own power—Alice turned to connivance with her old friends and cohorts, the less honest London merchants, many of them Chaucer’s intimate associates, and also, by subtle and somewhat shocking means, to dipping into the royal till. One method she used—one of the least offensive—was to borrow money from the king personally, taking care that the amount was meticulously entered by the clerk of the wardrobe, and then to persuade the king to excuse the debt. Another trick, a good deal meaner, was to show Edward jewels he himself had given her, explaining that a merchant had let her borrow them to show him. The vague old king, for love of Alice, would desire the jewels now as much as he’d desired them the first time he’d seen them and would happily give her the money for them. On one occasion, or so it was later alleged by parliament at the time of her downfall, she obtained £397 ($95,280) in this way. Eventually she got, by the king’s grant, all the jewels of Queen Philippa.

  Despite such faults, which old King Edward clearly failed to remark and his sons, apparently, were willing to overlook, King Edward’s love for Alice grew to manic proportions. The extreme was the great celebration of the Lady of the Sun. At a time when England was financially desperate and Londoners were furious at the crown’s unending and merciless taxation, King Edward decided (or someone decided) to give Londoners a spectacle they would never forget. He, or someone, arranged a great procession and a seven-day tournament in honor of Alice Perrers—ostensibly a celebration of the end of Lent. Princes from all over Europe came, as well as street vendors, fortune-hunting mercenaries, pardoners, whores, friars, and cutpurses. The procession formed on the hill behind the Tower, Geoffrey Chaucer taking his place with the rest of the royal courtiers, arrayed in his finest, looking dignified and exceedingly pleased with the celebration, whatever he may privately have thought of it. The noisy, colorful procession moved along Tower Street into Chepe and on through Aldersgate to the area of the joust, and all the way, in the center of the glorious cavalcade—everyone else walking—rode the Lady of the Sun in her golden chariot. It may have been about this time that Chaucer began composing his Anelida and Arcite, which contains a striking image Chaucer might well have drawn from this very spectacle. Theseus returns from war with the Amazons leading his queen and a great procession:

  [His lady] Faire in a char of gold he with him laddë,

  That al the ground about her char she spraddë

  With brightnesse and the beauté in her facë,

  Fulfillëd of largesse and of allë gracë.

  The broad hint of paganism in the title given to Alice Perrers, “Lady of the Sun,” was no accident. She was meant to be viewed as the courtly lover’s mistress par excellence. As we see throughout the poetry of Chaucer, including his majestic Book of the Duchess, the poetic scheme of courtly love made Neoplatonic Christianity and a fanciful version of pagan religion or nature worship (with the lady as emblem of idealized nature) into analogues: as the Christian loves God, or Christ, or the Virgin, and is purified and improved by that love, his soul rising higher and higher toward the perfection of heaven, so the pagan worshipper of Pan, Cupid, or Venus—the god or goddess embodied in his lady—is purified and improved, provided, of course, that the lady and the love are “worthy.” Just as pagan and Christian religion interpenetrate and at best present man with the same ideals, as even St. Augustine had grudgingly admitted and as classicists like Boccaccio now boldly asserted—that is, just as pagan religion, especially in the writings of inspired men like Virgil, “touched and almost grasped the truth”—so this neo-pagan love religion, or this curious acting out of the Canticle of Canticles, might elevate the spirit by the metaphor of desirable flesh.

  To Edward it must have seemed literally true that his lady had raised him “fro deth to lyve.” His sons—and all London—apparently agreed that Alice h
ad done a splendid thing in giving King Edward the will to live. If the whole festival seems to modern historians a trifle outrageous, it did not seem so then. The king’s rejuvenation, the end of Lent, nature’s springtime “resurrection,” all called for observance, as spring always does in Chaucer. Even the sober Knight of the Canterbury Tales wholeheartedly approves, telling of the May worship of beautiful Emelye,

  that fairer was to senë

  Than is the lylie upon his stalkë grenë,

  And fressher than the May with floures newë—

  For with the rosë colour stroof hire hewë, [strove]

  I noot which was the fyner of hem two— [know not]

  Er it were day, as was hir wonë to do, [habit]

  She was arisen and al redy dight;

  For May wole have no slogardie a-nyght.

  The sesoun priketh every gentil hertë,

  And maketh hym out of his slep to stertë,

  And seith, “Arys, and do thyn observauncë…”

  It was only later, when her ambition and greed became boundless, that Englishmen began to say of her, as the allegorist William Langland did in his portrait of Alice as Lady Meed, or Reward/Bribery:

  I looked on my left hand, as the Lady [the Church] told me,

  And was aware of a woman [Lady Meed] wonderfully clad,

  Her robe fur-edged, the finest on earth,

  Crowned with a crown, the King hath no better;

  Fairly her fingers were fretted with rings,

  And in the rings red rubies, as red as a furnace,

  And diamonds of dearest price, and double sapphires—

  Sapphires and beryls, poison to destroy.

  Her rich robe of scarlet dye,

  Her ribbons set with gold, red gold, rare stones;

  Her array ravished me; such riches saw I never;

  I wondered who she was, and whose wife she were.

  “What is this woman,” said I, “so wonderfully clad?”

  Quoth she, “That is Meed the maid; she oft hath harmed me;

  She hath slandered my love that is named Loyalty,

  And belied her to lords that have laws to keep.

  In the Pope’s palace, she is private as I,

  But Truth would not have it so, for Meed is a bastard…”

  The so-called Good Parliament of 1376—which Chaucer and John of Gaunt despised—would demand that Alice be stripped of all honors and removed from Edward’s court. Chaucer could well understand, of course, the Commons’ annoyance at the strain crafty Alice could put on the treasury; nevertheless, from Chaucer’s point of view (as, of course, from Gaunt’s), the Good Parliament was not only grossly unfeeling but it also, and more important, meddled with the crown’s personal business and thus dangerously eroded the king’s “ancient right.” Nevertheless, Alice was forced out, and though she would return briefly from time to time, her power would from this point go down and down, one great drop after Edward died, in 1377, and another on the death of her husband, Sir William Windsor. One hopes she was not the lady mentioned in the Monmouth court record of 1397: Item quod Jankyn ap Gwillum fornicatur cum Alicia Parrer—a woman caught in fornication with a Welshman. (Alice would have been about fifty at the time.) However she may have ended up, it is certain that Alice Perrers became, as the years passed, increasingly cynical, increasingly litigious, increasingly corrupt. Declines of that sort were not uncommon in the late fourteenth century.

  The eminent French historian Simeon Luce speaks of Chaucer as “le protége dé la favorite Alice Perrers.”6 Whether or not he has direct authority for the statement, it is undoubtedly true, at least in a broad sense. At very least they were a part of the same world, and if Chaucer had met with Alice’s displeasure he would never have thrived there. Connections between Chaucer and Alice show up everywhere. Sir Philip la Vache, the friend to whom Chaucer addressed his short poem Truth, was associated in 1375 with Sir Philip of Courtenay, “admiral of the fleet towards the west,” in the “gift and sale” of the marriage of a ward to “Dame Alice Perrers.”7 Chaucer’s friend Sir Lewis Clifford, and Sir Guichard dAngle, Prince Edward’s beloved old retainer and the poet’s fellow ambassador to France in 1377, were two of the seven mainpernors or guarantors of good conduct who, on August 20, 1376, won the release of Alice’s husband William Windsor from the Tower. Sir Richard Stury, who was with Chaucer on numerous missions in England and abroad, was one of Alice’s most fervent supporters. One anonymous contemporary chronicler asserts, no doubt correctly, that (along with Gaunt and Prince Edward) Stury, Lord Latimer (whom Chaucer knew well), and that “shameless woman & wanton harlott, called Ales Peres” were all close friends of Edward III, “That att there beck the Kynge permitted all matters of the realms to be disposed, & commyted also the government of hym selfe.”

  On some occasions, Dame Alice seems to have been either Chaucer’s direct patron or the means by which John of Gaunt was able to get advantages for the poet. In 1374, Chaucer received free lease for life to the mansion over Aldgate. Most Chaucerians agree that Gaunt must have been influential in getting this prize for his friend. But Haldeen Braddy points out, rightly, that Gaunt had never owned property in the Aldgate area, whereas Alice had there valuable holdings, and that the rent-free grant (from London merchant-politicians) was one of Alice Perrers’ specialties. She repeatedly won from the king rent-free holdings for herself and others, usually—as probably in this case—by finagling favors from London moneylenders, especially mayors (who controlled the property), when short finances were cramping the king. (Braddy goes on to say, “It is interesting that Chaucer’s loss of the deed to Aldgate in 1386 should coincide so strikingly with Alice’s own waning prosperity.”8 We now know that, almost certainly, Chaucer did not “lose” Aldgate but instead took a royal promotion and a much better house as a faithful friend of Richard II in his time of troubles.)

  No one has suggested that Alice Perrers shows up in Chaucer’s poetry. But given the way writers alter and redesign experience, we may well suspect that this brilliant and attractively vulgar woman did indeed leave her traces. Chaucer’s court audience, who knew Alice well, may have thought of her briefly when they heard of that wonderful sex-kitten by the same name and the same affectionate diminutive, “Alisoun,” who purrs and romps through the Miller’s Tale. There is, heaven knows, nothing courtly about the Miller’s Alisoun; nothing directly connects her with Alice Perrers but her name and the fact that, as Alice Perrers must sometimes have done, despite hostile chroniclers, she oozes sexuality:

  She was ful moorë blisful on to see

  Than is the newë pere-jonettë tree, [a kind of pear tree]

  And softer than the wolle is of a wether.

  And by hir girdel heeng a purs of lether,

  Tasselëd with silk, and perlëd with latoun. [a cheap metal]

  In al this world, to seken up and doun, [seek]

  There nys no man so wys that koude thenchë [think up]

  So gay a popelote or swich a wenchë. [doll]

  Ful brighter was the shynyng of hir hewë

  Than in the Tour the noble yforged newë

  But of hir song, it was as loude and yernë

  As any swalwe sittynge on a bernë.…

  Without rashly insisting that the portrait is anything like a lampoon aimed at Alice, we may note that here and throughout the tale the country wench and the king’s mistress have certain trifles in common. The pere-jonette, or early pear, is associated in popular lyrics of the fourteenth century (for reasons no longer entirely clear) with illegitimacy; Alice was regularly accused by her enemies of bastardy. The cheap purse of latten, or imitation gold, might seem to the audience appropriate, since gold in the Middle Ages often symbolized (as for Plato) the aristocracy, and Alice was not quite the real thing. The image of the bright “shynyng of hir hewë” might easily suggest her character as Lady of the Sun; and she was indeed, to Edward, more precious than the “noble,” a coin he invented and one which earned him both profit and prestige,
as much profit and prestige as, loosely speaking, he lost on Alice Perrers. To elaborate the parallels would be to distort the poem, since the Alisoun of the Miller’s Tale is much more and much less than Alice Perrers. The point is merely this: Chaucer’s audience could hardly help but think of Alice Perrers from time to time as they listened to the poem.

  Similarly, Alice Perrers, famous for her wit and intelligence, sexuality and ambition, may have provided part of the inspiration for Chaucer’s single most magnificent character, middle-aged Dame Alice, the inexhaustible Wife of Bath. As J. M. Manly proved years ago, Chaucer and his audience delighted in in-jokes, personal satire or praise. It’s true that, because of his association with Petherton Forest, Chaucer may have known various weavers, even some named Alice, from Walcot, the tiny village “besyde Bathe,” and his courtly audience may just possibly have known this. Nevertheless, they might not unnaturally have remembered Alice Perrers when they considered the intelligence, humor, shameless sexuality, greed, ambition, sensitivity to slight, and, above all, the opinions of the Wife of Bath—her comically over-protested conviction that birth is irrelevant to true “gentillessë,” her sympathetic view (which she shared with John of Gaunt and the Black Prince) of certain Lollard tenets, and her ability, given the right lover, to love truly and well. They might think of Alice, too, when it occurred to them that the Wife’s tale is Irish in part of its origin, that is, that it came from the country where Alice Perrers’ husband was lord lieutenant. The magical hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale is the traditional ghostly figure of Erin; and the implied political philosophy of the Wife’s tale is the Irish persuasion that the subject should have a say in things. As the Wife claims that women, subject to men, should have a voice in family government, Irishmen claimed that the Irish, subject to England, should have a voice in the governing of Ireland. Needless to say, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, as a character in a fiction, is drawn from any number of real-life and literary models, but it may well have seemed to his original audience that Alice Perrers was one of them. If so, his at once comic and sympathetic portrait can have done her no harm with those in a position to support her.