by John Gardner
It’s natural to wonder what poem it was that Chaucer read on St. George’s Day, 1374—if the wine-gift was really for his reading of a poem. Most Chaucerians agree that it cannot be among the surviving works and that it can therefore never be identified; yet it’s interesting to notice that on the basis of Chaucer’s lists of his poems (in the Legend of Good Women, the Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale, and the “Retraction”) no major work seems to be missing except for the mysterious “Book of the Lion,” which was probably a translation from a famous French poem of the same title. A first-rate translation of a courtly French poem might well qualify for Order of the Garter festivities, especially when we remember that “translation” in the Middle Ages often meant imaginative reworking. We know that, not too much earlier than 1374, Chaucer had borrowed heavily from French poetry for his Book of the Duchess, and despite his borrowing had made that work a poem of extraordinary originality. We know too that soon after his first Italian trip, Chaucer began to draw more and more from Italian sources—Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante. It is thus quite possible that the lost “Book of the Lion,” still largely French in influence, if the title gives us any clue, was the poem with which Chaucer won his pitcher of wine.
When he was made controller of customs and subsidies for the port of London, Chaucer was required, as we’ve said, to attend to the work in person and write the rolls with his own hand. These obligations were not, as some writers have thought, mere technicalities. They involved Chaucer in personal hard work of great importance to the crown finances. It is true that, by means of an official or unofficial deputy, the obligation to do the work in person could sometimes be sidestepped or temporarily dropped, if the king had need of his controller’s talents elsewhere. We know that Chaucer went abroad more than once during his years as controller. But the House of Fame tells us that Chaucer did fulfill his obligations in person much of the time, or at least wanted his courtly audience to think he did, and that like most of Chaucer’s work for the crown it was laborious. In that poem, in a passage I’ve quoted earlier in this book, the eagle says of him:
Thou herist neyther that ne this;
For when thy labour doon al ys,
And hast mad allë thy rekenyngës,
In stede of reste and newë thyngës,
Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look.… [dazed]
There was good reason for the requirement that Chaucer do the customhouse reckonings himself. Aside from borrowing from London merchants or foreign bankers, customs collection was the crown’s chief source of revenue, and in Chaucer’s time, as throughout the fourteenth century, customs collectors—the men whose figures Chaucer must audit and check against his own—were notoriously crooked. They were also, as it happens, men of great power, often London mayors with a penchant for hanging their enemies without trial. Needless to say, this put Chaucer in an awkward position. Most Chaucerian scholarship assumes that Chaucer deplored the goings on of the crooks all around him. But one may wonder if that is so.
As controller Chaucer dealt with a number of important and influential London merchants, all friends of Alice Perrers, all of doubtful character. The city’s economic life was for the most part dominated by the powerful victuallers’ guild, which was dominated in turn by a few wealthy merchants who, according to complaints in the House of Commons, conspired to keep up food prices, lent money to the king at inflated interest, and through their personal and financial influence persuaded the king to issue edicts profitable to themselves. Among these wealthy merchants, the ringleaders were William Walworth (the man we will encounter later as the murderer of Wat Tyler), John Philipot, and Nicholas Brembre. Their main competition, which had the support of John of Gaunt, came from the mercers’ guild (traditional enemies of the victuallers), led by two merchants, Richard Lyons and John Northampton, men of perhaps equally doubtful character. The extent of these merchants’ dishonesty is a little uncertain—the “trial” which sentenced Brembre to hang was hardly a fair one even by medieval standards—but Professor George Williams’ assessment is probably not far wrong.
Brembre, the victualler, turned out to be a political gangster and murderer, as well as a large-scale grafter, who was later hanged for his crimes; Lyons was an utter scoundrel who was beheaded by the peasants in the rising of 1381; Northampton was imprisoned for his lawless and dictatorial deeds as Lord Mayor (and £22, or $4,400 [now as much as $5,280] was paid to his enemy Brembre for conducting him to Corfe Castle!). Walworth and Philipot were far less crude operators than these three. Indeed, there is nothing especially heinous in the records of either. Yet Walworth kept a string of bawdy houses, was one of those who lent money to the government and, by devious means, secured an exorbitant rate of return, was the leader of a monopolistic group of food profiteers, influenced the government that was in debt to him to issue trading regulations that profited him and his clique enormously, was closely associated for years with Brembre, and (despite his extensive interests otherwise) found time to be a customs collector in a port whose mere wool trade alone grossed, in customs fees of various sorts, sums mounting up to $4 million [now $4,800,000] annually. Philipot is also pictured in conventional history as an honorable man devoted to his country, and hostile to the evil machinations of John of Gaunt. But he too was a food monopolist, a lender to the king, a collector of the customs, and an associate of the unspeakable Brembre.1
During all but two of the twelve years Geoffrey Chaucer was controller, one of the trio of Brembre, Walworth, and Philipot was a collector of customs, paying Chaucer’s salary of £10 ($2,400) out of their immense takings in fees, and dividing fines and bonuses with him. How did Chaucer feel about these shady associations? He himself, after all, was in a position for considerable crookedness, if he felt the inclination.
In Professor Williams’ view—the standard view in Chaucer studies—the poet invariably sided with John of Gaunt and Gaunt’s friends or political supporters the mercers against victuallers Brembre, Walworth, and Philipot. But issues in the court of senile King Edward, those last three years, and in the court of his grandson and successor Richard II, afterward, were not so clear-cut. Young Richard’s advisers, as we’ll see, urged a theory of monarchial absolutism, and the victuallers, who opposed moderates like Gaunt, were among King Richard II’s most loyal supporters.2 The “unspeakable Brembre” died, in fact, because instead of fleeing with his friends he stayed in London trying to raise an army for the king. Chaucer’s later career—his promotions and favors while Gaunt was away from England in the late 1380’s, his diplomatic associations with Ricardian absolutists like Simon Burley, his known friendship with men like Richard Stury, who were at various times jailed for profiteering and the like, and his choice, almost certainly manipulated by Richard, as representative from Kent in the opposition parliament of 1386, a parliament Richard knew would be devoted to clipping the wings of his favorites—suggests that Chaucer was in his earlier days not merely tolerant of Richard’s supporters but was himself one of the principles. This is not to deny that he was John of Gaunt’s friend; but he was also (as was Gaunt, despite disagreements) a friend of the king. Compared to men like Brembre, Chaucer was a relatively powerless royalist, of course, but royalist and absolutist he surely was; in other words, he was one of those troublesome “court favorites.” The view that Chaucer was infallibly high-minded and incorruptible requires us to believe that Chaucer was the exception to the rule among Richard’s courtiers and friends. Possibly that view is right, but in general, at least, corruption corrupts, and in a whole barrel of rotten apples it is extraordinary to find one absolutely sound one. The truth is perhaps that we’re applying here modern standards of morality (standards seldom realized even in modern politics) to a world that would blink at such standards in amazement.
At very least we must say that if Chaucer was a devotedly honest man, he was certain
ly fortunate in always happening to be looking the wrong way. A few of his friends and fellow poets spoke out or took action against government corruption, and some of them—for instance, young Thomas Usk—were hanged for it. Geoffrey Chaucer was a survivor and, incidentally, a man who repeatedly fell into appointments normally sought after by people notoriously unscrupulous. (His later office as justice of the peace was outrageous in this regard.) And surely we may add that if Chaucer was not himself a rascal, he certainly is, in the poetry he wrote, one of the world’s great celebrators of rascals.
But whatever Chaucer thought, there was nothing he could do about his friends’ or, at the least, associates’ activities in those last years of King Edward’s reign or later when he served Edward’s grandson. Brembre and company could be dangerous enemies to anyone who opposed them. Though he may have disliked Nick Brembre personally and may perhaps have preferred John of Gaunt’s friend, the rival crook Northampton (who achieved the execution of the poet Thomas Usk), Chaucer stirred up no trouble, merely waited for things to mend.
Meanwhile, the office he received under Edward III in 1374 had its good points, among them the mansion over Aldgate. It was a grand house, a veritable town castle which had sometimes been used as a prison. The grant from the mayor and aldermen gave Chaucer “the whole dwelling house above Aldgate Gate, with the chambers thereon built and a certain cellar beneath the said gate, on the eastern side thereof, together with all its appurtenances, for the lifetime of the said Geoffrey.” The mayor and aldermen promise in this grant to lodge no prisoners in the place during Chaucer’s tenancy, but stipulate that the city may take the gate back if that should prove necessary for London’s defense. It was, for the time, a “good address”—an earlier occupant had paid 13s. 4d. ($160) a year besides upkeep and repairs, high rent for the time. In fact it was the kind of house not beneath the notice of the Black Prince, who for one of his followers, Thomas of Kent, personally asked the mayor for a similar mansion, Cripplegate. Aldgate was splendidly furnished, if we may judge by the expensive cups the duke of Lancaster was to give Philippa Chaucer on New Year’s Day, 1380, 1381, and 1382; and not the least of its appointments was Chaucer’s for-the-time enormous library of sixty books. Chaucer would keep the house until 1385, when he would move to Kent.
As we’ve said, five days after his appointment to the controllership, Chaucer received an annual pension of £10 ($2,400) from Gaunt. He was now firmly established in government—as he would remain all his life—a valuable servant of unquestionable loyalty, capable and politic, not tiresomely fussy (from the king’s point of view) about ideals irreducible to practice. One sign of the esteem John of Gaunt and the crown had for Chaucer is the fact that he was frequently abroad on the king’s business in the next few years. According to one record, dated April 11, 1377, the year of Edward’s death, Chaucer had already at that time made “divers voyages” to France; and in a record dated May 10, 1377, he is mentioned as having been “often” abroad in the king’s service.
Most if not all of Chaucer’s diplomatic missions at this time, the late seventies, seem to have involved, at least in part, proposed peace treaties and marriage alliances. On December 23, 1376, he set out through snow and ice for a journey abroad on some secret mission with Sir John Burley, captain of Calais. A month and a half later, on February 13, 1377, he received a letter of protection for another trip in the king’s service, and from February 17 to March 25 he was in France. His friend Richard Stury was in France at exactly the same time, also on some secret mission, and from Froissart we learn what the mission was. Stury and Chaucer—along with his old friend Sir Guichard d’Angle—were in France to negotiate a marriage agreement between young Richard and King Charles V’s daughter Marie.
Since Chaucer’s mission with John Burley and his later mission with Stury and Guichard came so close together, and since Chaucer would later work with Burley toward marriage treaties, we may assume that both Chaucer’s December ’76 and February ’77 missions dealt with the same matter. The proposed marriage was of course of the greatest possible importance to England: King Edward’s health was rapidly slipping, and the war he had begun with such gusto had long since lost its appeal. Repeated truces had broken down, driving both England and France back to costly and, especially on the English side, futile war. Plagues, crop failures, and social changes of a kind still obscure in most men’s minds but decidedly ominous—a rumbling among the peasants of both England and France that had already led, in France, and would soon lead, in England, to rioting and widespread destruction and to still more serious social change—had made the danger and waste of war all too obvious. The exorbitant cost of war had given new power to the English Commons, on whom Edward largely depended for funds and to whom he had granted, through the years, such concessions that the ancient prerogatives of the throne were now threatened or even, in some respects, irretrievably lost. Not only was parliament seeking to oversee the king’s expenses; outrageously, as it seemed to John of Gaunt and Geoffrey Chaucer, who would put some of his annoyance into a poem, the Commons made a serious try in 1376, at driving some of the king’s most loyal servants out of government, among them John of Gaunt and Chaucer’s fellow diplomat in 1377, Richard Stury. And England had other, even more serious troubles.
Edward’s practice of paying wages to his army to avoid its dissolution every forty-five days (the maximum legal stint of the unpaid army of feudal vassals) and the general practice in both England and France of hiring foreign mercenaries had filled all Europe with a battle-trained peasantry—a dangerous element in times of peace, capable of stealing, kidnapping, or murdering with terrorist efficiency—and had created roving “free companies” often indifferent to the laws and customs of the lands through which they roved. Also, as often happened when the throne was weak, England was now troubled by quarrels and bloody private wars between rival barons (“birds of rapine,” Chaucer would call them). Achieving peace with France had become a necessity, and the old sovereignty dispute which kept the war alive could only be resolved, it seemed, by marriage between the two royal houses.
By all rights, the commission on which Chaucer served ought to have been successful. It was as prestigious and elegant a diplomatic team as Gaunt, who was running the government, could put together—three men picked for their devastating charm more than anything else, but men of proven ability as negotiators. Chaucer himself was a poet much admired in France, where his poetry was considered an artistic advance on French poetic tradition. Like the greatest of the young French lyric poets, he was a master at working out intricate schemes and discovering new uses for old conventions, yet he was equally at ease with the longer, more substantial form, the allegorical dream vision. Guichard d’Angle, of course, was honored everywhere, even in France, for the chivalric integrity which had made him a follower of the Black Prince, for his heroism in every battle he joined, for his sufferings in Spain, for his rare knowledge of visual art, music, and poetry, and above all for his basic gentleness and wisdom. The third member of the commission, Sir Richard Stury, was a man loved and respected in aristocratic circles, however he might fare with the Commons in the English parliament.
Throughout Stury’s career, he and Chaucer would be closely associated.3 Stury had been with Chaucer in the campaign of 1359-60 and, like Chaucer, had been taken prisoner. For Stury, who was apparently in the king’s direct employ, Edward had paid a ransom of £50 ($12,000). (Toward Chaucer’s ransom, as we’ve seen, the king contributed £16.) The 1368 royal Household Accounts show payments for Christmas robes to Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer, Richard Stury, and others, and Chaucer’s name appears again with Stury’s in a record dated July 26, 1377—Chaucer as “scutifer regis,” Stury as “miles.” Some years later, in March 1390, Chaucer and Stury would again be appointed together, partly because both had middle-class experience, as members of a commission to repair the dikes and drains of the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich. Stury was a knight of the privy chamber, a recipient of numer
ous royal grants, and, like others of Chaucer’s circle, a man who loved poetry. His will includes an expensive manuscript of the Roman de la Rose—what we would call an art treasure—and he had various other literary interests and connections. He was a staunch loyalist all his life; an intellectual, a Lollard, a gentle and chivalrous knight, also a brave one.
The marriage commission failed, tragically enough, not because its members were unpersuasive but because, as they neared conclusion of their work, Marie of France quite suddenly died. Chaucer and his fellow diplomats shifted their attention to King Charles’s second daughter; but now, for reasons not entirely clear, the French apparently drew back. King Edward was dead and England weakened by the struggle of Commons against barons, barons against barons, and upper classes against peasants. French raiders were hitting England’s coasts with impunity, and French pirates controlled the Channel. For all these reasons and, perhaps, others, those in the French government who opposed the alliance won the day; at any rate, the commission turned homeward. Almost at once, Chaucer was chosen, again in company with Sir John Burley, former retainer to the Black Prince, to set off on a new diplomatic mission, this time to Lombardy to negotiate, among other things, a proposed marriage alliance of young Richard and Caterina, daughter of the duke of Milan. The idea of course was to secure the Italian state as an ally against France, threatening King Charles V with war from the south. At least with respect to the marriage alliance, the mission failed. Chaucer once again made the tedious, seemingly endless trek back to England and was no doubt glad enough to see the house over Aldgate, the scales and piled-up goods of the customhouse. He went back to his reckonings, perhaps also to examining plans for the building projects that were beginning now, the expansion and renovation of the government’s dock facilities. And nights, when his work at the customhouse was finished, he went back to his endless reading, poring over volumes of Boethius and Macrobius and now, increasingly, Dante.
