Chaucer

We come, at last, to Chaucer, the glory of the age and its epi­tome. Little in his time escaped him; he was familiar with almost every aspect of lay society touched on in this book. Born, prob­ably in 1343 or 1344, the son and grandson of London vintners, and from 1374-86 controller of the petty custom on wine and merchandise in the port of London, he knew the world of trade and business. His service as a page in the household of the duchess of Clarence in the fifties, and as valet and afterwards esquire Edward III in the sixties and seventies, his marriage to Philippa Roet, one of the queen's ladies and sister to Katharine Swynford, brought him into the innermost circles of courtly society. He saw active service in the campaign of 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner and ransomed, and in 1369, probably with Lancaster in Picardy. He was sent abroad on several diplomatic missions, to France in 1368,1377, and 1387, and to Italy in 1372-3, when he visited Genoa and Florence, and again in 1378, when he went to Lombardy. He was justice of the peace in the county of Kent and represented it in the momentous parliament of 1386. As clerk of the king's works from 1389-91, he carried a heavy burden of responsibility; and when he relinquished this appointment, it was to accept another as deputy-forester in the royal forest of North Petherton in Somerset. Both in Somerset and in Kent, where much of his time was spent, he lived the life of a country gentleman; but London was his chosen home. For many years he occupied a house above Aldgate; and only a few months before his death, on 25 October 1400, he had leased another, in the garden of Westminster Abbey. He never went to a university, but he understood the issues which the clerks were debating in the schools; and whether or not he had a formal legal training, he knew the language of the law. His activities would have sufficed to fill the life and absorb the whole attention of an ordinary man; but Chaucer, who was not ordinary, returned nightly to his books. The speech of the eagle in the House of Font allows us a precious glimpse of the poet as reader:

For when thy labour doon al ys,

And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,

In stede of reste and newe thynges,

Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon;

And, also domb as any stoon,

Thou sittest at another book

Tу1 fullу daswed is thy look,

And lyvest thus as an heremyte,

Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.

Elsewhere, Chaucer pays moving tribute to the books that have been his solace:

And уf that olde bokes were aweye,

Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.

Wel ought us thanne honouren and beleve

These bokes, there we han noon other preve.

And as for me, though that I konne but lyte,

On bokes for to rede I me delyte,

And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence,

And in myn herte have hem in reverence

So hertely, that ther is game noon

That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,

But yt be seldom on the holyday,

Save certeynly, whan that the month of May

Is comen...

The range of his reading is astonishing. He knew the Vulgate thoroughly and the hymns and services of the Church; he knew Virgil, Ovid, Statius, Claudian, and other classical authors; and he knew well such early medieval versions of the classical myths and histories as the Roman it Troie and Li Hystore de Julius Caesar. He knew Jerome and, of course, Boethius; and he was widely read in the multifarious Latin literature of the Middle Ages, in its poetry, its history, its philosophy, its science. The Treatise on the Astrolabe which he compiled for his young son, was accepted as the standard English textbook on the sub­ject.- It goes without saying that he knew the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and the work of his French contemporaries, Guillaume de Machaut, Eustace Deschamps, and Froissart. After his first visit to Italy he added the Italians to his store, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Though few of his works can be dated precisely, Chaucer scholarship has established the sequence of most of them. Of the major works, the Book of the Duchess, a lament for Blanche of Lancaster (‘goode faire White’), who died in 1369, belongs to the earliest period when Chaucer was writing mainly under French influence. Between 1372 and 1380, after his first visit to Italy, come the transitional works, partly in the French tradi­tion but showing the effects of his Italian reading—the House of Fame and, possibly, the Parliament of Fowls. Between 1380 and 1386 when the Italian influence had been fully assimilated there appeared Troilus and the Legend of Good Women. The Pro­logue, the earlier Canterbury Tales, and the Astrolabe were written between 1387 and 1392 and the later Tales between 1393 and 1400. The Canterbury Tales stand supreme in their own kind; but the reader who confines his attention to them misses some of the best in Chaucer—the delicate comedy of the dialogue between the poet and the eagle in the House of Fame, for example, the brilliance and vivacity of the Parliament of Fowls, above all, the matchless beauty of Troilus and Criseyde. Each is the work of a great artist, a man of poetic genius and of noble heart and mind. Chaucer did not invent his tales; but he told them as they had never been told before, and in his hands the puppets of the fabliaux become living men and women. Some of the humour is broad, but none of it is insensitive, 'for pitee renneth soone in gentil herte', and Chaucer's infinite compassion embraces all his creatures. He knew his way about the world and nothing that was human was beyond his understanding—neither bawdy, farce, nor wit; neither love nor passion; neither simple virtue nor high adventure; neither pain, nor fear, nor age, nor death; nor yet the immortal longings of the heart. His speech may sound strangely in our ears, as the speech of the ancient world sounded strangely in his own—

Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge

Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge

Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,

And spedde as wel in love as men now do;

—but his language is the language of all time; and, more than any other writer of his age, he opens the gate to comprehension of a vanished world. For with Chaucer, as with Shakespeare, whose universal quality he shares, genius is sufficient to persuade that the children of his imagination were of like passions with ourselves and were bred in a land we know.

(from THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 1307-1399 by May McKisack OUP, 1959)

Questions:

1. What were the achievements in the education in the 14c. England?

2. Describe the religious situation in the country at the time.

3. Characterise the origin and the first development of the English national literature.