The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Within a year he had other things to think about. Those who had been seeking a marriage arrangement which might bolster England had a sudden change of luck. A proposal came, unsolicited, from Bohemia. Dark-eyed, wonderfully gentle Princess Anne was interested in alliance through marriage with (from the Czech point of view) mighty England. The negotiators—they may well have included Geoffrey Chaucer—studied the proposal with a touch of incredulity, and the more they studied it the better it looked: the Bohemians brought with them their own system of German and Slavic alliances. As for Richard, who married Anne in 1382, it was an incredible stroke of luck, considering the usual course of the marriage of convenience. He loved her and would continue to love her so devotedly that, years later, when she died, his grief would lead him to order the dismantling of a favorite palace on account of the memories that there assailed him.

  It has seemed necessary to speak at some length about the conditions which led to the peasants’ uprising and about the attitudes of Richard and his court advisers, since in important ways they illuminate both Chaucer’s later poetry and his devoted though sometimes critical friendship with the king. But discussion of such general historical matters, though it may give us insight into Chaucer’s prejudices and apprehensions, hurries us past the equally important specifics of Chaucer’s life from Richard’s coronation to the time of the revolt, so it will be worth while here to backtrack a little.

  The period between 1377 and 1382 was not only a time of apprehension for Chaucer—not only a time when the peasants’ enmity toward government officials directly threatened his safety and his family’s—it was also a time of nearly continual nuisance, frustration, and annoyance. He put up, almost constantly, with the inconvenience of medieval travel. After his first work as negotiator on the ultimately abortive marriage treaty for the hand of Marie of France (1376), he had traveled during late February and most of March 1377 to Flanders and parts of France, including Paris and Montreuil, probably still partly on the same mission (if Marie died in May).10 In any event, he traveled abroad “on the king’s secret business” and was probably in company, for at least part of the time, with the famous general and veteran peace negotiator Sir Thomas Percy, who was away at the same time and, according to crown records, went to some of the same places. During the spring of 1377 Chaucer made various other voyages to divers parts overseas, presumably difficult and important missions, since in April Chaucer received £20 ($4,800) for his work; and apparently he was off again in May, when he was given a deputy at the port of London, Thomas Evesham—a “citizen of London” and moneylender to the king, for years associated with customs collection—to cover Chaucer’s absence while he traveled to “remote parts.” Riding mile after mile on his horse, or jouncing along in his medieval carriage through bandit-filled forests, or standing unsteadily on the deck of some ship as it plowed through French- and pirate-infested seas, his mind running back to England where thieves ran the customhouse putting his reputation and even life in jeopardy, the poet must have found it took all his famous good humor to keep his heart up. He was off again on June 22 (or so), 1377, this time to negotiate a marriage between some second princess of France and King Richard—a mission for which the government did not get around to paying him until March 6, 1381.

  Nor was that the last of it. Between May 28 and September 19, 1378, Chaucer was given another deputy, Richard Barrett, associated with the London customhouse for some fourteen years. During this period Chaucer made what is usually called his second (but possibly his third) trip to Italy, this time (as we’ve said in another connection) to Lombardy, to deal with Bernabo Visconti, lord of Milan, concerning a possible marriage alliance with Caterina. The negotiations may also have had to do with Sir John Hawkwood, Bernabo’s son-in-law, on war-related matters (Chaucer was paid out of the war account), and may have had to do with England’s tangled relationships with Galeazzo Visconti, the Pope.

  Chaucer apparently traveled to Italy as head of a party of five persons beside himself, sailing from Dover to Calais, and then making, once again, the dreary journey overland, covering at best about fifty miles a day through the beautiful though scarred summer scenery of France, then up into the lonely, terrifying Alps, making poorer time now, travailing on to the music of waterfalls—horses sweating and straining, pushing back against the load as the road sloped downward, and our hero sweating too, perhaps, because the traveling party was small, this time, more vulnerable to the mountains’ wild-man bandits, unless, possibly, his party had by now been joined by that of Sir Edward Berkeley, ten men and ten horses probably traveling on the same mission.11 While in Lombardy, the poet must certainly have seen and spent time in the Visconti Libraries, of which the Visconti were rightly proud and which contained at this time one of the most beautiful books ever made, the Visconti Hours. Chaucer apparently admired Bernabo, as did Richard II. Bernabo’s love of food, art, women, and fine horses made him, in Chaucer’s book, a “God of delit.”

  To protect him from lawsuits while he was away in Italy, Chaucer appointed two attorneys, John Gower the poet, and Richard Forester (or Forster), probably the man who was his fellow esquire in 1369 and his successor as tenant of the mansion over Aldgate. Why Chaucer needed lawyers no one knows for sure. It may well be that he was merely being cautious. It was standard procedure to get “letters of protection” when one left for abroad, that is, letters of protection against suits in one’s absence. But these may not have seemed to him enough just now. They covered a man against litigious aggression, but they could not provide him with legal means of suing others for gain or self-defense. The general hostility against government officials may have led him to feel it would be well to take every precaution.

  The discomfort of the endless journey to Italy was not its only inconvenience. It seems not to have been very profitable for Chaucer. Moreover, back in England again the poet was immediately annoyed by trifling debts to the crown from the year before, among others two red-tape fees (for the sealing of letters patent—fees a little like the heavy charge made in present-day England for a notary’s seal) and a London sheriff’s charge from 1377 that Chaucer must return an overpayment made him by the crown. Chaucer got both of these annoyances waived, along with others later, and in November won from the Exchequer the arrears on his wife’s annuity since Richard’s confirmation of the grant. Almost certainly John of Gaunt had a hand in getting the payments made up.12

  As all this suggests, and as much of Chaucer’s later experience confirms, working for government in the fourteenth century, whatever its advantage in the way of prestige, was a great deal of trouble. Chaucer’s troubles with the Exchequer in the late seventies were only the beginning. Though at times he and Philippa received full and prompt payment—for instance, when he was in personal attendance at the wool quay, and thus in close relations with Exchequer personnel (he generally did better at collecting his wages than almost anyone else among English civil servants of the fourteenth century)—he as often as not had to win what was owed him by getting his own debts to the crown excused (as when he was robbed of crown money while serving as clerk of the king’s works), by appealing for patronage gifts, by borrowing from the Exchequer and then asking to have the debt forgiven (Alice Perrers’s old trick), or—probably as last resort—by dropping a word in the ear of John of Gaunt. For his French negotiations in 1376-7 he received no pay until 1381, and that in the form of a “gift” from the king (£22, or $5,280), and for his Lombardy trip he was not paid until the end of November 1380. His troubles, of course, were not with Richard or the regents but with the crown’s officious—and rightly officious—employees. The unwritten rule of the debt-hounded government was, “Never pay anything till your creditor threatens to kill you.”

  Though collecting from the crown was always difficult, that is not to say that Chaucer was at this time in financial straits. Besides his annuity he had his customhouse wages of £10 ($2,400) yearly plus his annual “reward” (or regardum) of 10 marks ($1,600), plus bo
nuses of various kinds; and the work may have brought him considerably more. As controller of customs he had taken an oath never to receive any “gift” for performing his duties, but that oath was not always strictly honored; indeed it was probably broken far more often than not, as in the case of one John Bell, who was shown in court to have accepted tips—and Chaucer may have done the same. He also received wages—no one knows how much—for his second office, controller of petty customs,13 and, beyond that, for his work as controller of the wool custom and subsidy. Besides these wages and rewards, it should be added, Chaucer had received for some time benefits from wardships granted him by the king. When Edmund Staplegate of Kent died in 1375, leaving as his heir a son by the same name, still a minor, Chaucer was granted wardship of the child, which meant he was responsible for maintaining the heir in a manner appropriate to his estate and keeping his property from deterioration, all for a price; and meant, further, that when the heir married it was by the warden’s sufferance, for which the warden, Chaucer, was to receive payment—in this case £104 ($24,960). Chaucer was also given custody over William, son of John Soles, also of Kent, and over William’s feudal lord, another minor, Richard Lord Poyning—both of which custodies brought Chaucer handsome income.

  When we begin to put together all of Chaucer’s activities in the late seventies and early eighties—repeated trips for the king to remote parts, repeated battles with the Exchequer to get payment for his work, trips down into Kent to inspect the properties of his wards, meetings with Gaunt and other officials on foreign policy, that is, the government position on the treaties he and his fellow commissioners must negotiate, record keeping for the customhouse (when he was not replaced by a deputy), and, despite all that, the writing of at least one long and difficult poem (the Parliament), the fruit of much study and thought—we begin to get the full richness of Chaucer’s little dig at the Man of Law in the Canterbury Tales: “Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, / And yet he semed bisier than he was.” For all his easygoing ways, his willingness to stop and look at a young man’s poetic effort, or to chat with strangers about this and that (as he shows himself doing in various poems), Chaucer knew as well as any man in England what it was to be busy.

  It seems possible, if not downright likely, that into his busy schedule of 1379 or ’80 Chaucer managed to fit at least one pretty wench. On May 1, 1380 (Chaucer must have relished the symbolism), he was released by Cecily Champain, or Cecilia Chaumpaigne, daughter of William Champain, baker (he had died in 1360), and his wife Agnes, from a charge of raptus. A study of court records involving raptus, or rapere, shows that the word covered a multitude of sins in fourteenth-century law, and that in the case against Chaucer the poet may have been either a principal or an accessory. Most Chaucerians, on the general principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty—and in this case we will probably never get proof—have inclined to think Chaucer was more or less innocent, that is, that at worst he was somehow involved in an attempted abduction of some young person, perhaps to make an advantageous marriage. His father, they remind us, was the victim, while a young man, in a similar case. But there are reasons for taking a darker—or perhaps more cheerful—view. In the opinion of one eminent legal historian, Professor Plunkett of the University of London, in Chaucer’s case raptus can only be interpreted as either “rape” or, more probably, “seduction”; for “if only abduction had been involved, then the release would have proceeded from the injured party, viz., the feudal lord, parent, husband, or employer of Cecilia,” rather than from Cecilia herself. Plunkett continues, “There is really no evidence [for the charge of rape]. That Chaucer seduced Cecily we may well believe. But there is nothing to suggest that she could have convicted him of a felony” [which rape would be, whereas seduction would not].14

  It is difficult to believe on other grounds as well that the case involved only abduction or that Chaucer was only an accessory. As witnesses to Cecily Champain’s release, Chaucer called in some of his most powerful friends, busy, enormously important men he would hardly have called in to help with some mere trifle. He called Sir William Beauchamp, Lord Abergavenny, chamberlain of the king’s household, captain of Calais, diplomatic envoy under whom Chaucer served on various occasions and whom the king made custodian of Pembroke Castle for the minority of the heir of the late earl of Pembroke in 1378. He called in Sir John Philipot, wealthy merchant, collector of the customs (whose doubtful records Geoffrey Chaucer approved), moneylender to the crown (enormous sums, which brought enormous interest), and lord mayor of the city of London. He called in William Neville, knight of the king’s chamber and Admiral of the Fleet from the Thames northward; called in the gracious old poet and veteran diplomat Sir John Clanvowe, another of Richard’s own household knights; and, finally, called in Richard Morel, who lived near Chaucer in the Aldgate ward and was a member of the huge and powerful Grocers’ Company.15 Against such firepower, Cecilia brought forward one cutler and one armorer, citizens of London known to court records only for debt suits, small business transactions, and the sale of used arms and artillery from the petty wardrobe of the Tower of London to raise money for the king. The baker’s daughter, it seems, had no real chance. Just possibly (though improbably), since the coincidence of dates is notable, Cecily got for all her trouble the quick-witted “little son Lewis” whom Geoffrey Chaucer dearly loved and for whom he wrote the book of the Astrolabe and perhaps two other astronomical books. It should be mentioned that Lewis did, apparently, grow up with Chaucer’s name, which makes it unlikely that he was the child of anyone but Philippa. In 1403 both he and Thomas Chaucer received payment as men-at-arms at Camarthen royal castle. But the fact that Lewis was almost certainly not Cecily’s son is no proof that Chaucer, now forty years old, rich and powerful, more often away from his wife on business for the king than not, never slipped into bed with a pretty and soft baker’s daughter.

  Critics have sometimes been annoyed by Chaucer’s failure to make more of such matters as the Peasants’ Revolt and have often declared him a moral trimmer. Aldous Huxley complains that “Where Langland cries aloud in anger, threatening the world with hell-fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles,” and G. G. Coulton objects, in exactly the same vein, that “Where Gower sees an England more hopelessly given over to the Devil than even in Carlyle’s most dyspeptic nightmares—where the robuster Langland sees an impending religious Armageddon…there Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry England.”16 Such objections are nonsense. When we study his opinions as embodied in his poetry, we find that, as Professor Howard Patch once put it, “considering the chief interest of the polite literature of his day, it is remarkable, after all, what democratic sympathy Chaucer shows—how little he has confined his material to people of high station, and what a wealth of knowledge he has of the lower classes.”17 In fact, in all his later poetry and especially the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer actively argues for a balanced view of all estates, a social program of mutual concern and “commune profit,” a willingness to forgive, bargain, take responsibility, understand. All Chaucer’s poetry carries sentiments like that expressed in the Parson’s Tale with regard to pride in riches:

  …of swich seed as cherles spryngeth, of swich seed sprygen lordes. As wel may the cherl be saved as the lord.…I rede [counsel] thee, certes [certainly] that thou, lord, werke in swiche wise with thy cherles that they rather love thee than drede. I woot [understand] wel ther is degree above degree, as reson is, and skile [sensible] it is that men do hir devoir duty] ther as it is due; but certes, extorcions and despit of youre underlynges is dampnable.

  With this compare the Wife of Bath’s ideas on “gentilesse,” presented as a kind of joke in context, but serious just the same, since Chaucer will again and again work them into his poetry and prose (as he does in his entirely serious short poem, Gentilesse), as if in an attempt to make the lords in his courtly audience wake up to the truth. Or compare the Clerk’s celebration of the patient peasant girl, Griselda, married to a lord w
hose whimsical and willful tyranny—and whose failure to understand the proper feudal interdependence and love of lord and vassal—hint at problems visible in England. The Wife has just insisted that women cannot stand being tyrannized, and where tyranny appears wives, that is, in effect, the subjugated, will rebel. The Clerk presents a wife who does not rebel and, in asides to the pilgrims, points out repeatedly the painfulness of her situation and the oddity of her husband’s behavior. For instance, he says of Griselda’s tyrannical husband,

  He hadde assayëd hire ynogh biforë [tested]

  And foond hire everë good; what neded it

  Hirë for to tempte, and alwey moore and morë,

  Though som men preise it for a subtil wit?

  But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit

  To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nedë,

  And putten hire in angwyssh and in dredë.

  In calling attention to Griselda’s position as vassal to her husband, and in emphasizing the relationship of Griselda and other tyrannized vassals, Chaucer makes as explicit as possible the political implications of his tale. And he makes equally clear his political warning. Griselda is a model of patient submission, but let no husband or king imagine that those subject to him will behave as did Griselda. This story is not told, he tells the pilgrims, in order that other wives should follow Griselda in humility, “For it were importable, though they wolde—it cannot be done.” Chaucer will appeal even more directly for justice and reason in his ballade addressed to King Richard, Lack of Steadfastness: