The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Chaucer had no comment, or at any rate none that has come down to us; but what he thought was no doubt what he had written years earlier to another friend, Sir Philip la Vache, when his fortune darkened:

  Flee fro the prees, and dwellë with sothfastnessë,

  Suffyce unto thy good, though it be smal;

  For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnessë, [instability]

  Prees hath envye, and welë blent overal; [weal blinded]

  Savour no more than thee bihovë shal;

  Reulë wel thyself, that other folk canst redë; [counsel]

  And trouthë thee shal delivere, it is no dredë.

  He bowed to the new king, son of his long-time friend and patron, now dead, and returned to his house, his retirement.

  Though we have spoken of Chaucer’s last years of writing, it remains for us to treat—briefly, of necessity, since not much is known—his whereabouts and everyday activities. As we’ve said, for two brief periods he was apparently the deputized virtual ruler of North Petherton Forest in Somerset. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Palmer of Fairfield Park, grandson-in-law of Sir Thomas Worth, of Petherton Park, wrote, apparently on the basis of Petherton Park roles he had himself examined, that the foresters of the family of Mortimer appointed substituting foresters; that in the fourteenth year of the reign of Richard II (1390-91), Richard Britte and Geoffrey Chaucer served as subforesters; and that Chaucer was again subforester, by appointment of “Alianor countess of March,” in the twenty-first year of Richard’s reign. Palmer’s historical notes contain minor inaccuracies, as we know by checking against other sources on one or two entries, but they may be treated as evidence—the only evidence we have—that Chaucer did hold some office or offices in connection with North Petherton. He may have been appointed the first time by Sir Peter Courtenay, who was then the “farmer” in actual possession of the bailiwick of the Somerset forests; he may have been appointed by the Mortimers themselves or at their suggestion; or he may have been appointed by someone close to the king himself, since the property was the king’s concern during the minority of the heir to it. Chaucer had dealings with both the family and Courtenay, who were at the time involved in what would turn out to be an eight-year court fight over whether Courtenay, as farmer, was in trespass. If Chaucer was appointed the second time by Eleanor, countess of March, it must have been after March 16, 1399, when the bailiwick was first assigned to her, and not, as Palmer’s notes say, in 1397-98.

  What Chaucer’s duties and rewards were, during those brief periods as subforester, no one knows. Essentially, no doubt, he was the man who judged and delegated responsibility for upkeep and repairs, ordered the arrest of offenders of all kinds, and in general did the work of a man part governor, part lawyer, part superintendent of custodians—work of a kind he’d been doing for the king for years. Though his job was in effect that of a deputy, which usually meant residence, it seems highly unlikely that he in fact moved to Petherton. In 1390 and 1391 he was still clerk of the king’s works. In 1398 he was probably traveling to various parts of England to win support for the king (protection papers were issued to him in May 1398 on grounds that he was “engaged upon the king’s business”)4 and though for some time he had been regularly receiving his annuity payments in person, usually in cash, the payment for June 4, 1398, was received by William Waxcombe, who was that year an agent of the king and probably forwarded the money to Chaucer.5 In 1399 he was living in London. During his first stint as subforester, then, Chaucer must have ridden back and forth from his house in Greenwich—a long, hard trip—and during his second he must have commuted from either Greenwich or London.

  The job had, no doubt, its rewards. It offered opportunities for financial gain even greater than the opportunities available to an unscrupulous JP. Chaucer, we may assume, was discreet in taking advantage of those opportunities—he can hardly have been like his own outrageous Reeve—but he probably did not treat the work as charity to the crown. At any rate, his position as subforester was one often sought by the bourgeois rich, not the least of whom, a short while later, would be the poet’s son (or whatever), Thomas Chaucer. Thomas was connected with Petherton Forest not in Chaucer’s capacity but in one more exalted, as keeper of the Somerset Forests and the park of Petherton during the minority of the heir, Edmund Mortimer, at a rent of £40 ($9,600). After Edmund Mortimer came of age, Thomas leased the property for £50 ($12,000) annually, apparently right up to the time of his death in 1434. Since Thomas paid rent and was himself the “farmer,” he had the right to collect rents and services, which together came to vastly more than £40 or, later, £50. Geoffrey, as a deputy, received only a stipend and whatever he saw fit to skim.

  He probably continued to live at least most of the time in Greenwich up until 1397 or even later. An Exchequer debt of 20s. ($240) was passed from the London and Middlesex sheriffs to the sheriff of Kent in 1391, implying that Chaucer was believed to be living there at the time. From 1393 to 1397 the Kent sheriff reported that he could find no goods to distrain and was unable to seize Chaucer, which means, almost certainly, that Chaucer was in Kent—quite prominently so—and the sheriff, since the debt was trifling and the debtor important, preferred not to notice. In 1397 the still uncollected debt was returned to the bailiwick of London and Middlesex, so Chaucer was probably back in London, though he was soon to be away again, traveling throughout England in 1398.

  Despite the joking complaint in his verse-letter to his poet friend Henry Scogan, that Scogan is “at the stremës hed” and Chaucer forgotten in the backwoods, Chaucer was never in fact far from London throughout most of the nineties, and never far from the bounty of his patrons or the applause of his audience. The annuity he’d surrendered to John Scalby during Gloucester’s accroachment was never taken away from Scalby, but a new and larger annuity (£20) was granted to Chaucer, “beloved esquire,” in February 1394, “because of our special grace and for good service,” and on October 13, 1398, Richard added the grant of a tun of wine yearly. Chaucer’s access to court and city life is shown by, among other things, the fact that he regularly collected his money in person from the London Exchequer (with only three exceptions). The city was not, after all, too far from his quiet house in Greenwich. His fortune did not change, unless for the better, when King Richard fell. Henry of Lancaster, on the day of his coronation, not only confirmed Richard’s £20 annuity but gave an additional 40 marks yearly ($6,400) to Chaucer for life (perhaps a replacement of the grant from John of Gaunt)—all this, by the way, not at Chaucer’s petition, apparently, but because it suited the new king’s pleasure, and not as routine business (like the privy-seal confirmation of the annuity of Thomas Chaucer, later that month), but by “exemplification” and “confirmation tested by the king,”6 which is to say, as a sign of extraordinary favor. A few days afterward, Henry confirmed Richard’s grant of an annual tun of wine.

  If Chaucer was out stirring up support for King Richard in 1398, it may at first seem odd that the poet should be so prized by Henry IV. Part of the explanation, no doubt, is that he was viewed as a typical public servant, loyal to “the crown,” not to some particular king; and part may be that Chaucer’s work for Richard was essentially symbolic, therefore harmless. He was a famous and widely respected reader, or “lecteur,” who in troubled times could make an audience forget its anger at injustices and laugh at rapscallions, or rise above politics to a broader, more philosophical perspective on lordship and vassalage, rights and obligations, secular power and the demands of God. If Chaucer’s entertainments could distract men’s minds from political evils, the usurper Henry IV had as much need of Chaucer’s talents as had Richard II. But probably Henry valued Chaucer anyway. He was a family familiar, a relative of sorts, husband to the sister of Henry’s father’s third wife. In 1395, when Richard was at the peak of his popularity and England was semi-euphoric with wealth after years of scraping by, Henry had provided Chaucer with fur for a floor-length scarlet gown—a gift as special and symbol
ic as the gift from Richard, a few years later, of a tun of wine.7 Henry’s gift was obviously a mark of respect—respect all the court was meant to notice and join in (the fur and the color made the robe like a king’s)—and so Geoffrey Chaucer and the court understood it. Whatever doubts Gaunt may have had about his heir, and whatever partisanship Chaucer may have felt for the children of Katherine Swynford, his nephews, Chaucer was neither Henry Bolingbroke’s political enemy nor his supporter, but a poet glad to serve if his talents, uncensored, undistorted, were of use. He accepted the young lord for what he was, focusing on his virtues—as we are told he accepted even the most execrable efforts of poets who came for help with their work, which he always read with interest and in which he always found some good. He was, whatever else, a man of peace, compassion, and understanding, a man who, in all important things, was a paragon of virtue, a “true poet” in Milton’s moralistic sense. He gave tone to whatever court he served, making that court seem worthy of trust and, indeed, helping to make it so. It was, in short, not for his politics but for the ambiance he gave politics by his eminence as a poet, and for his ability as a man and as a diplomat to keep poetic detachment without loss of empathy—his gift, like Shakespeare’s, for comprehending pain from a snail’s point of view, or the point of view of pagans dead centuries ago—that Chaucer was admired from Northumberland to Florence, and rewarded by kings and barons.

  He expected such rewards. When none came, fortunately for us, he wrote comic begging poems. Several of the last poems he wrote are of this kind, for instance the outrageous love poem to his empty purse:

  To yow, my purse, and to noon other wight

  Complayne I, for ye be my lady derë!

  I am so sory, now that ye been lyght;

  For certës, but ye makë me hevy cherë,

  Me were as leef be layd upon my berë; [bier]

  For which unto your mercy thus I cryë:

  Beth hevy ageyn, or ellës mot I dyë!

  Now voucheth sauf this day, or yt be nyght, [vouchsafe]

  That I of yow the blisful soun may herë,

  Or see your colour lyk the sonnë bryght,

  That of yelownesse hadde never perë. [peer]

  Ye be my lyf, ye be myn hertës sterë, [steering oar]

  Quene of comfort and of good companyë:

  Beth hevy ageyn, or ellës moote I dyë!

  Now pursë, that ben to me my lyvës lyght

  And saveour, as doun in this world herë,

  Out of this tounë helpë me thurgh your myght,

  Syn that ye wolë nat ben my tresorerë;

  For I am shave as nye as any frerë.

  But yet I pray unto your curtesyë:

  Beth hevy agen, or ellës moote I dyë.

  Envoy

  O conquerour of Brutës Albyon,

  Which that by lyne and free eleccion

  Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sendë;

  And ye, that mowen alle oure harmës amendë,

  Havë mynde upon by supplicacion!

  The poem is typical of Chaucer’s late witty style, with its punning and its delight in the outrageous. The idea in the first stanza is amusing though not startling: the lightness of the empty purse is compared to the lightness (fickleness) of a lady; but by the third stanza, all decorum has been abandoned: as a noble lady like Dante’s Beatrice may act as a kind of saviour to her lover, leading him out of “this tounë”—a common medieval expression for “the Old Jerusalem,” or the physical world8—into the New Jerusalem, Paradise, so, Chaucer claims, his beloved purse can save him. Since the poem is addressed to King Henry (“conquerour…/Which that by lyne and free eleccion / Been verray kyng”), we know that “old Grisel” was still clowning, right up to the end. His reference to “this tounë” probably means, on the literal level, not “town” in our modern sense (though that was one available sense in the fourteenth century) but “town” in the sense of “walled enclosure,” that is, a house or group of buildings surrounded by a wall. The reference is, then, to Chaucer’s house next to the Lady Chapel within the walled grounds of Westminster Abbey, where he’d sought sanctuary, presumably, from his creditors. Though King Henry was generous, he apparently never gave Chaucer enough to free him of the need for sanctuary.

  Chaucer moved into his smaller house, next to Westminster Abbey, in the garden of the now-long-gone Lady Chapel, or Chapel of Our Lady, December 24, 1399, and remained there until sometime in 1400. He leased the house, probably filling out the unexpired portion of an earlier lease, for fifty-three years, and some while after his death the lease went to Thomas Chaucer, who held it, as the poet had probably done, rent-free or, rather, by courtesy of the crown. Though it was not the royal manor at Greenwich, it was hardly a house to be ashamed of. It was thought fit, immediately after Chaucer’s death, for King Henry’s personal clerk and physician, Master Paul de la Monte, on whom Richard II, toward the end of his reign, had piled extravagant favors; a house fit, after de la Monte’s tenancy, for William Horscroft, chief skinner to the crown, from whom Richard had bought quantities of furs, cloaks, and hoods; and fit, as I’ve said, for Thomas Chaucer, distinguished member of John of Gaunt’s retinue, later chief butler (under Henry) to the crown, and financial equivalent of the modern multi-millionaire.

  Chaucer’s occupation of the house attached to Westminster Abbey—together with the portrait and numerous copies which show the poet, grown old, meekly holding his rosary—has sometimes been taken as evidence that he became, toward the end of his life, fanatically religious, losing all perspective on the necessities of man and the demands of God, much as his friend Sir Lewis Clifford did. Such a view finds support, in some people’s minds, in the “Retraction” at the end of the Canterbury Tales, and in the story told by Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor at Oxford in the middle of the fifteenth century. Talking about people who repented too late, Gascoigne mentions, among others, Judas Iscariot and the poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

  It is true that many men in the Age of Faith suffered violent pangs of remorse and fear as they felt death creeping in; but it is unlikely that Chaucer was one of them. He was religious not only in his palsied age but all his life: from his first long poem on he shows his deep and comfortable Christianity—his firm belief in God’s love and mercy, and his doubt (like Dante’s) that acquisitive real-life friars and Popes have much to do with a sinner’s reaching heaven. From the beginning to the end of his poetic career, Chaucer’s position is clear and unvarying. He defends one virtue, charity: the good man’s willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, to find some nobility in even the most wretched and deplorable of men; and though he treats many vices, there is only one that he attacks ferociously, again and again: self-righteousness. Chaucer’s specific interests change—from thoughtful exploration of sex and love, in the early poems, to the fascination he shows in his very latest work with parody and calculated ugliness—but the theme never changes: God is love, and so is man at his best, whether he proves it in bed or singing at the altar; and evil is non-love, the fear, pride, concupiscence, bigotry, or high doctrine that lead a man to think about no one but himself, forgetting the cornerstone of Christian faith.

  It is impossible to believe that after arguing all his life God’s goodness and mercy, and accommodating a conviction much like Gaunt’s and Wyclif’s that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter, Chaucer in the end reversed himself; impossible to believe that after long nurturing in his own character an ability to forgive, understand, and celebrate (a talent that in all men blessed by its possession extends ultimately to humble acceptance and forgiveness of oneself), Chaucer in the last fifteen minutes of his life changed his mind about God’s abundant mercy, cried out in abject terror, and wrote the Retraction.

  It may be, as some critics have argued, that the Retraction is an artistic device for closing the Canterbury Tales. That point of view seems more than reasonable in the light if Chaucer’s late experiments with unreliable art, his concern with nominalist claims t
hat all vision, even that of the great artist, is mere opinion and impossible to communicate. As the Manciple speaks to deny the value of speech, Chaucer spends a lifetime making art and in the end, half-joking, half-serious, retracts his life.

  But Chaucer’s Retraction speaks of all his work, not just the poems in the Canterbury Tales, and so the suspicion remains that it has more to do with real emotion in Chaucer’s life than with the structure of the Canterbury Tales. If so, how did this comfortable and secure Christian come to write the Retraction? We can only guess. Let me offer my own guess—my own fictional reconstruction.

  It’s true that Chaucer was religious, though never morbidly so. Most men were in some sense religious in his day, and Chaucer was helped toward reflection on heaven by the fact that his life, like the lives of most people in the fourteenth century, was not overly happy. He’d lost friends and relatives to war, plague, accident, old age, and the rough-jawed machinery of justice: his wife, fellow diplomats, and court entertainers, now lately John of Gaunt and King Richard. He was delighted to get his lease on the high-chimneyed, window-filled house beside the Abbey, but not merely because it had the church in view. It also had a view of gardens where sometimes young, middle-aged, or old lovers walked (which is what gardens are for) and where sometimes cats jumped careless birds and murderous toads sat motionless for hours, praying to the Virgin for a fly. “Yes, good,” said Chaucer, gazing out the window like the dreaming child he still was, in a way, like all of us; then the rhyme he’d been looking for suddenly came, from nowhere, as rhymes always come, transmuting the idea as a soldier is transformed by the sword that dubs him knight, and more words followed in a miraculous flood, so that his scrivener, Adam, whom he’d immortalized once in a fond, scolding poem, looked at all those words in dismay, shook his head, and sighed.