The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  During his stint as clerk, Chaucer did of course oversee work other than that on the wharf and St. George’s Chapel. For instance, he erected the huge scaffolds for jousts at Smithfield in May and October of 1390, as well as scaffolds and barriers for judicial duels whenever an accused man sought to prove his innocence in trial by combat—standard procedure when there were no witnesses to a crime. Such jousting grounds had to be solidly built. For one judicial duel in 1380, the crowd was said to be greater than at Richard’s coronation. Chaucer and his assistants had hundreds of other minor construction jobs in hand, but the great work of the period was, as we’ve said, the Tower and wharf project.

  Chaucer’s clerkship was, all in all, one of the most difficult offices he ever held. The accounting alone might well have been considered full-time work, yet the office involved far more than that. We have no evidence that a clerk had to be an architect, though at least one great builder, William of Wykeham, did hold the post before Chaucer’s time; but the records show that the clerk did in fact, not just in theory, arrange for the buying, hauling, and care of a great variety of building materials, tools, implements, containers, machines, and so on; that if any of these materials were stolen, it was the clerk’s business to get them back; and that when the work was finished, he was responsible for selling off leftovers. He was responsible for sitting in judgment on recalcitrant workers, and responsible for finding laborers, skilled and unskilled, and for seeing that laborers, carters, and so on got their pay.

  Chaucer was thus on the road a good deal between 1389 and 1391. It was not only a tiresome and arduous business but dangerous as well. Even the best fourteenth-century English roads were crooked and narrow, closed in by high walls, overhung by the huge old beams of trees, and oftentimes darkened (as they are in some parts of England today) by rain or fog or, in the winter, drifting snow. After dark there were no lights along the way: medieval houses in the countryside had shutters, not windows of glass, so that even a relatively populous town could be as silent and dark as a present-day mountain village in, say, Crete. English villages were farther apart then than now; it took days to ride from one major center to another—for instance, for Chaucer to reach the king’s works in York; and there were fewer travelers on the walled, rut-filled roads. It was a good time for gangs of highwaymen, and England was full of them.

  On September 3, 1390, near the notorious “foul oak” in Kent, a huge, morose old tree where both hangings and robberies frequently took place—according to the parliament of 1387, Nicholas Brembre one dark night hanged twenty-two felons there without bothering about a trial—a newly formed, professional Kentish gang took position in the limbs and shadows to wait for its prey. They were no country bumpkins: two could plead their clerical knowledge of Latin to escape the penalties of civil law; two were old hands at escaping jail; all the gang’s members had probably had war experience, and they had all been operating for a long time with one gang or another and had never been taken as highwaymen.

  But they miscalculated when they decided to rob the portly, graying servant of the king coming under them now, right on schedule, on his horse. Chaucer’s horse whinnied and violently shied toward the center of the road as the gang dropped suddenly on every side, swords drawn, and shouted (if we may trust old folksongs), “Stand!” Chaucer, as a man of sense, obeyed. The highwaymen took his horse and other property, probably including the property of the one or two guards riding with him, then perhaps beat him up (since the word used in the indictment against them is depredare, take by force, rather than the weaker word furari, steal), took from him £20 ($4,800) belonging to the king, and fled.

  It was of course Chaucer’s business to have contacts all over central England and especially in Kent, and it was the law’s special business to see that the king, above all, should never be robbed with impunity. Even if the gang had not been so foolhardy as to rob Chaucer a second and third time at Westminster and then at Hatcham (both on September 6), the crown might well have tracked them down. The man who seemed such easy pickings was the gang’s undoing.

  The records are confusing, or at any rate inconsistent, and have been variously interpreted. Chaucer may, some think, have been robbed only once, not three times. If we take the records literally, he lost £20 6s. 8d. ($4,880) at the foul oak on September 3, and on September 6 at Westminster £10 ($2,400), and at Hatcham in Surrey approximately the same. The robbers were identified and brought to trial—or to a series of trials—before an unusually powerful commission of judges, with many of whom Chaucer had been acquainted as JP. One of the robbers, Richard Brierly, a member of a gang that worked in various counties, pleaded not guilty then later changed his mind and turned state’s evidence (in effect), naming as his associates an Irishman, Thomas Talbot alias Broad, Talbot’s clerk Gilbert, and William Huntingfield, previously a member of a famous Surrey gang. Later Brierly accused one Adam Clerk of helping him in another robbery in Hertfordshire. Adam pleaded not guilty and challenged Brierly to judicial combat, which took place on May 3, 1391. Brierly was defeated and hanged. Adam was hanged a year later for another crime, a robbery in Tottenham. William Huntingfield, who had a special fondness for stealing horses and who had such charm that Richard Manston of Lancashire was willing to risk being hanged himself to help Huntingfield escape, was brought to trial June 17, 1391, on charges of having robbed Chaucer at Westminster and Hatcham. He was found guilty of the Westminster robbery and pleaded his clergy, that is, proved he could read Latin and thus claimed the right to be judged by a Church court. The Hatcham robbery required a Surrey jury, which was summoned for October 6, by which time Huntingfield had escaped from jail. He was recaptured and tried for prison breaking, to which he confessed. What became of him after that is uncertain. Since his plea of clergy is canceled on the Controlment Rolls, the likelihood is that, for all his Latin, he was hanged. As for Thomas Talbot, he too pleaded clergy and was handed over to the archdeacon of York in 1396 as a clerk convict, at which point he vanishes out of history. His clerk Gilbert was outlawed for failure to surrender himself but was apparently never caught and tried. On January 6, 1391, Chaucer’s concern in the matter ended when he was excused from having to repay the stolen £20. Five months later he was out of the clerkship altogether, though not yet paid all that was owed him by the government. He would go on trying to collect from the crown, and would go on being harassed for small debts, until the end of his life. But he would receive, at the same time—both from Richard and from Gaunt’s son, Henry IV—the honors due him as the greatest living poet in Europe. He would visit Oxford often, where he had various old friends and where his “little son Lewis” was studying, and until Gaunt’s death he would be a frequent guest of John of Gaunt, where Thomas Chaucer was a favorite retainer and where many of Chaucer’s old friends and their numerous children were either retainers or regular visitors.

  Nine: The Deaths of Gloucester, John of Gaunt, and the Hero of this Book

  WE HEAR OFTEN OF POETS WHO AT some point lose their creative power, as Wordsworth and Coleridge both believed they did; and it has often been suggested—at least twice by Chaucer himself—that Chaucer was such a man. It is of course true that he came nowhere near finishing his enormous project the Canterbury Tales; but we may perhaps be mistaken in taking too much to heart his statement that “elde [old age], that in my spirit dulleth me,/ Hath of endyting all the subtilte / Wel nygh bereft out of my remembraunce.” Those lines, from the Envoy to the Complaint of Venus, do sound, I think, like the serious lament of an old man annoyed at his inability, of late, to write poetry as he once did, and they may also suggest, since they appear in a poem addressed to some “princesse” or, perhaps, to certain “prynces” (the manuscripts differ), that at the time he wrote them he was not presenting much poetry at court, or that the poetry he did present was not as favorably received as were his earlier works—such masterpieces from the middle or late eighties as Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, and some of the earlier Canterbury tales
.

  But we should remember, in trying to understand what these lines mean (or in considering the more obviously joking lines about his sleeping muse in the Envoy a Scogan), that even when Chaucer is most serious, the strain of ironic self-mockery runs deep. In poem after poem he jokes about his mental or physical deficiencies, and while the joking reflects a perfectly serious self-critical habit of mind, it also comically exaggerates what the poet sees as his actual defects. His lines to Henry Scogan make clear that he was not, in his last years, as prolific as he had once been, but they do not really say much more than that. In the poem to Scogan he gives joking advice, then imagines Scogan refusing to take him seriously and exclaiming, “Lo, olde Grisel [Gray-head] lyst [loves] to ryme and playe!” To this imagined exclamation Chaucer protests:

  Nay, Scogan, say not so, for I m’ëxcusë—

  God helpë me so!—in no rym, dowteles,

  Ne thynke I never of slep to wakë my musë,

  That rusteth in my shethë stille in pees.

  While I was yong, I put hir forth in press; [urgency, press]

  But al shal passë that men prose or rymë;

  Take every man hys turn, as for his tymë.

  His muse has been sleeping soundly for years and not even for this poem, Chaucer says, will he awaken her. Yet the envoy to Scogan shows anything but a decline in poetic power. Thus Chaucer’s claim that he has forgotten the art of poetry may have meant to Chaucer not at all what it would mean to the rest of us.

  We have fairly good evidence that what actually happened is that in his last years Chaucer did not write less brilliantly than he’d written before (though he was now writing less), but, rather, wrote in a quirky new way. He became less interested in poetry as mimesis, or the imitation of character and action, and increasingly interested in poetry as an exalted and significant form of—in the most literal sense—clowning. Though he may have had his doubts about the odd new direction in which his art had moved, he was in fact discovering an approach to art that would come into general favor among artists only in the twentieth century. How, one asks, did this remarkable shift of direction come about?

  In the early nineties King Richard was doing well; and so, of course, was Chaucer. The poet was relieved of his arduous job as clerk of the king’s works (in 1391) and given employment less demanding, apparently two brief stints as subforester of Petherton Forest but for the most part no work but stewardship over the royal estate at Greenwich, if it is true that he lived there until 1397 or even 1399, when he retreated to a smaller but still fine house protected by sanctuary, where his creditors or (perhaps) the government’s creditors could not trouble him. In other words, for several years—between 1391 and 1397 or so, with only brief interruptions, as we’ll see—Chaucer was, for the first time in his life, his own man, “wel at ease,” reaping the benefits of a life of strenuous public service. He was often in London, where he picked up his annuities and an occasional royal gift, settled out of court, from time to time, with creditors, and visited old friends. He probably gave readings at the royal court—he’d been doing so, off and on, for years, and Richard’s esteem for the poet had not diminished; when the king’s fortune takes a dangerous turn, shortly before his death, Chaucer will be one of the first he will call upon for help.

  Chaucer was now a widower, his sons were away, one in the service of Gaunt’s court, one at school, so he had ample time to write. Phillppa’s death was receding in time, and the emotions which must have attended that wound in the flow of Chaucer’s life were gradually being calmed and ritualized in the accepted medieval way, by the regular singing of requiem masses, the lighting of candles, and, perhaps, by annual memorials. He had company when he liked. His sister Kate and her family lived nearby; Gaunt was back in England; students came to visit and work with him. And the mansion he lived in, with its various servants, its wide lawns and parks, was all any poet in his right mind could desire. Old as in some moods he thought himself, he had not lost all interest in beautiful women or in the royal court’s gossip about ladies and their gentlemen. We have, from the late nineties, one broadly comic invitation to love, which the poet wrote for “Rosemounde,” and two delightful verse-letters on love and marriage, the one to Scogan on the occasion of his renunciation of a lady he’d been pursuing, and one to Bukton, whose approaching marriage seems to have struck Chaucer as not a good idea. The common interpretation that the poem is an outright denunciation of marriage, it should be mentioned, is quite mistaken. Marriage can be bondage, Chaucer says. It can be the very “cheyne of Sathanas [Satan].” But if Bukton is sure of his love he need have no dread whatever, Chaucer adds, and he advises Bukton to look again at what Chaucer has written in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.

  In short, Chaucer had at last achieved what ought to have been an ideal situation for writing poetry. At least during the early nineties, he made good use of that opportunity, composing poetry not much different from the kind that had made him famous. He made during this period a sudden change in his grand plan for the Canterbury Tales. He had written by now, not necessarily in this order (since the Prologue is late), the General Prologue, the Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, Reeve’s Tale, fragmentary Cook’s Tale, along with their prologues and introductions, and several others, including the present Shipman’s Tale. Though the evidence is too intricate for presentation here,1 we can be virtually certain that the original Man of Law’s tale was the present Tale of Melibeus. (The Man of Law’s introduction prepares for a tale in prose but is followed, surprisingly, by a tale in verse, obviously a late insert; and the Melibeus is full of legal jargon.) Watching court affairs from the quiet and seclusion of Greenwich, far from “the stremës hed,” and talking with friends during his visits to London, Chaucer observed with increasing disappointment the growth of his beloved king’s absolutist theory, and at last he was stirred to make his sentiments known in the most effective way available to him as an admired court poet. He began his great revision. He tore out the Man of Law’s tale of Melibeus and inserted, instead, the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, or Constancy, an intentionally overstated argument for blind submission to authority (to God, to king, to husband)—precisely what King Richard was demanding. The heroine’s meek response to her father’s order that she go marry a sultan far, far from home, is typical:

  “Allas! unto the Barbre nacioun [barbarian]

  I moste anoon, syn that it is youre willë;

  But Crist, that starf for our redempcioun [died]

  So yeve me grace his heestës to fulfillë!

  I, wrecchë woman, no fors though I spillë! [die]

  Wommen are born to thraldom and penancë,

  And to been under mannës governancë.”

  Even standing alone, this pious, carefully tongue-in-cheek tale—a work not comic but ironic—must have struck the knowing in Chaucer’s audience as tactful criticism of some of King Richard’s most cherished opinions. But to remove all doubts, Chaucer followed the Man of Law’s Tale with a new tale for the Wife of Bath (she had been, in his earlier draft, the teller of the Shipman’s Tale). Whereas formerly the Wife was simply the jovial revealer of women’s wiles, she now becomes a bold advocate of the rights of women, beginning her remarks with a frontal attack on the lawyer’s oppressive ideal, Constancy:

  “Experiencë, though noon auctoritee

  Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

  To speke of wo that is in mariagë!”

  Thus Chaucer’s tactfully indirect series on right and wrong government, that is, the “marriage group,” was born.

  He had never written more brilliantly. The colloquial lilt is as human as ever, the imagery as luminous, the plotting as economical and sure. And Chaucer’s development of his overall theme is equally brilliant. The Wife of Bath’s argument is essentially a noble and selfless one, that a wife (or subject) should be given control, whereupon she will inevitably relinquish government to her lord out of love. But the argument she offers has also its darker implications, for
she claims that if a wife is not freely granted control she will seize it and tyrannize her lord.

  That argument sets the medieval hierarchy on its head, and the Friar’s Tale, which follows, lightheartedly develops that absurdity. The tale begins:

  Whilom ther was dwellynge in my contree

  An erchedeken, a man of heigh degree, [archdeacon]

  That boldëly dide execucioun

  In punysshynge of fornicacioun,

  Of wicchëcraft, and eek of bawdëryë,

  Of diffamacioun, and avowtryë.… [adultery]

  For smalë tithes and for smal offryngë

  He madë the peple pitously to syngë.

  For er the bisshop caughte hem with his hook,

  They weren in the erchëdeknes book.…

  He hadde a somonour redy to his hond;

  A slyer boyë nas noon in Engëlond; [boy or devil]

  For subtilly he hadde his espiaillë [spy system]

  That taughte hym wel wher that hym myghte availlë.

  It is of course the bishop’s business to correct sinners (pull them back into the fold with his sheep crook), the archdeacon’s business to serve the bishop, and the summoner’s business to execute the orders of the archdeacon. In the Friar’s Tale the summoner is chief agent, not servant, striking before the archdeacon has given him the order, as the archdeacon strikes before hearing from the bishop. In such a universe, the tale proves, only the lowest creature in the cosmic hierarchy, the Devil, can put things right.