Front Matter

Introduction

O UR great poets in Engtand have been brought forth by great stirs in the nation's life. The new spirit due to the incoming of Christianity in 634 gave us Cynewulf, to whom man's life was no longer like the bird's flight through the lighted and warm heathen beer-hall into the cold and darkness outside; the blending of the Kelt, Dane, Saxon, and Norman, the Black Death of 1348, bringing the workman to the front, and the French triumphs of Edward III., gave us Chaucer; and the New Learning of the Renaissance, the Reformation, which threw off the crushing burden of Papal Rome on mind and soul, the discovery of the New World, and the fight with Spain gave us Shakspere. Well does Macaulay say of Chaucer's century ("History of England," vol. i., pp. 18-20):

"Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of races was all but complete, and it was soon made manifest, by signs not to be mistaken, that a people inferior to none existing in the world had been formed by the mixture of these branches of the great Teutonic family with each other and with the aboriginal Britons. . . . Every yeoman from Kent to Northumberland valued himself as one of a race born for victory and dominion, and looked down with scorn on the nation before which his ancestors had trembled. . . . The most splendid victories recorded in the history of the Middle Ages were gained at this time, against great odds, by the English armies. Victories indeed they were of which a nation may be justly proud, for they are to be attributed to the moral superiority of the victors, a superiority which was most striking in the lowest ranks. The knights of England found worthy rivals in the knights of France. But France had no infantry that dared to face the English bows and bills. A French King was brought prisoner to London. An English King was crowned at Paris. The banner of Saint George was carried far beyond the Pyrenees and the Alps. On the south of the Ebro the English won a great battle, which for a time decided the fate of Leon and Castile.

"Nor were the arts of peace neglected by our fathers during that stirring period. Many of our noblest architectural monuments belong to that age. Then rose the fair chapels of New College and of Saint George, the nave of Winchester and the choir of York, the spire of Salisbury and the majestic towers of Lincoln. A copious and forcible language was now the common property of the aristocracy and of the people. Nor was it long before genius began to apply that admirable machine to worthy purposes. While English warriors, leaving behind them the devastated provinces of France, entered Valladolid in triumph, and spread terror to the gates of Florence, English poets depicted in vivid tints all the wide variety of human manners and fortunes, and English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe. The same age which produced the Black Prince and Derby, Chandos and Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe.

In so splendid and imperial a manner did the English people, properly so called, first take place among the nations of the world. . . ."

But it is not with the history of the nation that we have to deal here. We have to follow Chaucer—second to Dante only among the poets of the Middle Time—from his cradle to his grave, try to realize his life, give a short account of his works, and bring out some of his characteristics.

It was but a little London in which he was born about the yeas 1340, hardly a fiftieth of the size the city and its suburbs now are, bounded by the old walls whose outline is shown in Elizabethan maps, and whose gates remain in name only—Aldgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Ludgate—with the Tower in the east, a few houses along the Strand, the Palace and Abbey at Westminster, and a small Southwark and Lambeth on the south bank of the river, which was crossed by only one bridge, covered with houses, and standing on great piers that filled up nearly half the stream. The city had little drainage, was ill-paved and unlighted, and no one was allowed to be out of doors in it after nine at night. The house of Chaucer's father was a wine-shop or tavern, with a nine-foot pole sticking out from it into the street, and a bush at its end, in narrow Thames Street, just north of the river. It was no doubt built with a timber frame filled with clay, had no chimneys, but only holes in the wall to let out the smoke of the wood fires; and its site was bounded by Walbrook, the little stream—now a sewer—which ran from Moorfields to the Thames. The boy—like other folk then—had bread and meat with wine or beer for his breakfast-dinner, and the same, with soup, pudding of some kind, and cheese, for his supper; and on Fridays, fish instead of meat, all the people being Roman Catholics. He would feed himself with a spoon and his fingers, for forks were not then used, and he would clean his teeth and his shoes with a cloth. His plate would be a slice of crusty bread or wood, and his dress a cap, a blouse with a belt, and strong knitted hose or drawers for trousers. He probably went to the public school of St. Paul's Cathedral—not its Song-school for its choristers—as that was bigger than the other two schools then in London, St. Martin's-le-Grand and Bow Church, Cheapside. There he would learn grammar and Latin; French and Italian he perhaps picked up in his father's shop. He was a little elvish-looking fellow—as he says in his "Canterbury Tales"—as bright and quick as a boy could be, plucky and slippy at football, hockey, and other games. Cricket was not then known.

It is clear, from his poems, that Chaucer loved flowers and the country, caught birds, watched cats and dogs, and could ride well; and if any orchard-robbing or other mischief went on among his school-fellows, I doubt not that Chaucer, like Lydgate, did his share of it. But we may be sure that his brains kept him at the top of his class.

His father was in 1338 in attendance on Edward III. in Flanders, and in 1348 was deputy to the King's butler in the port of Southampton. Owing probably to this connection with the Court, we find the young poet in 1357 in the service of the wife of Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III., in Yorkshire and London, most likely as a page. The Princess bought him a short cloak and a pair of red and black breeches and shoes, for 7s., and gave him 2s. 6d. at Christmas. When boys of well-to-do folk were not sent to the Universities to be trained for a profession, they took service in noblemen's houses. Many early poems describe their duties. The "Bele Babees," or young pages, when they entered their lords' houses were to say first, "God speed you!" They were to attend to all who spoke to them, answer sensibly, and stand till they were told to sit down, not shuffling their hands or feet about, not scratching themselves, or leaning against a post. They were to bow to their lord when he drank, and not chatter or laugh, but be always ready to serve, to bring drink, hold lights, and do anything that was wanted. At noon, when their lord was ready for dinner—the first real meal after the snack at breakfast—his page was to fetch him clean water in a basin, with a towel, and not leave till he had sat down and grace was said. When told to sit, the page was to cut his meat and his bread with a sharp knife, have a clean trencher, use a spoon for his pottage, and not sup it out of the bowl, or dirty the cloth. He was not to drink with a full mouth, or pick his nose, teeth, or nails at table, or stuff his mouth so that he could not speak when spoken to. He was to wipe his lips before drinking out of the large cup passed round; he was not to dip his meat in the salt-cellar, or cut it like rough fieldmen did: "Sweet children, take delight in courtesy and gentleness!" Cheese was to be eaten on a clean trencher, and no nasty talk was to he heard. When the pages had finished their meal, they were to stand at their lord's table till grace was said, and then bring him water and a towel as before.

Another poem tells the page not to spit or wipe his nose on the tablecloth, or throw his bones on the floor.

In November. 1359, Chaucer must have gone in Edward III.'s expedition to France, with his master, Prince Lionel, as he was taken prisoner in some skirmish, and ransomed on March 1, 1360, the King giving £16 towards the sum paid—less than he gave another man for a horse. Soon after this, Chaucer must have become employed in the King's household, of which he was a "valectus" or yeoman in 1367, and an esquire in 1368.

It is generally supposed that Chaucer had, before 1366, married his wife, Philippa Chaucer, who is first named as his wife in 1374, when John of Gaunt granted him a pension of £10 a year for his own and his wife's services, and when he first received her earlier pension of £6 13s. 4d., with the arrears of it. This was also the year in which he left the King's household, and settled in the city of London as Controller of the Customs of Wools etc., and the Petty Custom of Wines, etc.

Chaucer's duty as a valet or yeoman of the King's chamber would be to make beds, tidy rooms, carry torches, set tables, go messages, and do what the Chamberlain told him. As Esquire of the Household, he, with his fellows, would attend on the King indoors and out, serve in the Chamber and Hall, see that dishes were not stolen, and, says Edward IV.'s Household Book:

"These Esquires of Household, of old be accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and in evenings, to draw to Lords' chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning (knowledge) in talking of Chronicles of Kings, and of other Policies, or in piping or harping, songings, or other acts martial, to help to occupy (interest) the Court, and accompany strangers, till the time require of departing" ("Life-Records of Chaucer," p. 70).

It was here that Chaucer's tale-telling faculty would be called forth and developed, and that (as I believe) he fell in love with the pitiless lady, La Belle Dame sans Merci, who refused him, and who made him say of Troilus in Book V., stanza 251:

In November, 1372, Chaucer was taken from his Customs work, and sent to Genoa to arrange about a market for Genoese goods on the English coast. He went to Florence, probably visited Petrarch at Padua, and was back in London on May 23, 1373. On May l0, 1374, he got a lease for life from the City of London of the rooms above Aldgate, which had before been used as a prison, and from there he would go to the little Custom House, rented at £3 a year, to oversee the receipts and payments of the Collectors of the Customs, as he had been appointed Comptroller of them on June 8, 1374. He had to write his rolls of account himself, and it is possible that part of his two rolls (or copies of them) now in the Record Office are in his handwriting.

The King, being guardian of all under-age fatherless children of tenants in capite,  on November 8, 1375, granted Chaucer the wardship of Edmund Staplegate of Bilsington, Kent, and on December 28, 1375, that of the heir of John de Solys of Newington, Kent. He also granted the poet in 1376 the price of some wool exported without license, and these three grants amounted to about £4,000 of our money (Kirk, p. xxvi).

Late in 1376 Chaucer was again sent abroad on the King's secret affairs. On February 17, 1377, he left London on a mission to Paris and Montreuil, and returned on March 25. Edward III. died on June 22. He had given Chaucer, on June 20, 1367, a pension of £13 6s. 8d. a year (which was paid to February, 1389), and on April 23, 1374, a daily pitcher of wine. In 1378 Chaucer was sent, with other commissioners, to France to negotiate for peace and for the marriage of Richard II. to the daughter of the French King; and in 1380 he was sent to Italy for four months about the war with France, just after he had been released by Cecilia Champaigne for his share in carrying her off: for what purpose we do not know. On June 19, 1381, he sold his father's house in Thames Street, and in that and other years had a special reward from the King for his diligence in his Customs work. On April 20, 1382, he was appointed Comptroller of the Petty Customs of Wool, in the Port of London, and was, on May 8, allowed to exercise his office by deputy. The Custom House in which he worked was on the Wool Wharf in the parish of All Saints, Barking; but, after personal attendance and writing his accounts with his own hand for ten years he was, in February, 1385, allowed to appoint a permanent deputy for his Customs work. On October 12, 1385, he was made a Justice of the Peace for Kent, and in August, 1386, he was elected one of the two Knights of the Shire, or Members of Parliament, for the same county, and no doubt had his half of the £24 9s. that was allowed them for their expenses in going to Parliament, staying, and returning.

In 1386 Chaucer must have given up his City rooms in Aldgate, as they were let to his friend Richard Forster or Forester on October 5. Ten days later he was "a witness in the well-known Scrope and Grosvenor controversy, about these gentlemen's right to certain heraldic arms, when he gave some particulars as to his early life in 1359." In December he lost his offices of Comptroller of the Customs and Petty Customs, probably in consequence of a Royal Commission having been appointed to inquire into the abuses of the Customs and subsidies while Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt, was absent in Spain. But on May 16, 1387, he was put on a Commission with a Sergeant-at-law, etc., "to inquire as to the abduction of Isabella atte Halle, an heiress, at Chislehurst in Kent." Between June 18 and September 29, 1387, Chaucer's wife Philippa died. On May 1, 1388, he surrendered his pension of forty marks, and at his petition it was granted to John Scalby of Lincolnshire. These losses must have brought Chaucer low in money matters, yet it was in the spring of 1388 that he is supposed to have made his Canterbury Pilgrimage, and been in the highest spirits. At any rate, when Richard II. got rid of the control of the Duke of Gloucester, he, on July 12, 1389, appointed Chaucer Clerk of the King's Works, to keep in repair the Tower of London, the Palace of Westminster, the Castle of Berkhampstead, the Manors of Kensington, Eltham, etc., and the mews for falcons next Charing Cross. The poet's wages were 2s. (now £2) a day. On March 12, 1390, Chaucer was also appointed, with Sir Richard Sturry and ethers, to see the walls, causeways, etc., of the Thames banks between Greenwich and Woolwich properly repaired. And in May and October, 1390, he had to get Smithfield levelled and gravelled, and to put up barriers, and erect scaffolds for the King and Queen to see the jousts there. He was also appointed, on July 12, to repair St. George's Chapel, close to Windsor Castle, which was then "threatened with ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground." In 1390 or 1391, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, Chief Forester of the Forest of North Petherton, Somerset, made Chaucer Sub-Forester of the same. In September, 1390, while riding about as Clerk of the King's Works, the poet was robbed at Hatcham in Surrey, just below New Cross, of a horse worth £10, goods worth £5, and £20 6s. 8d. in money. Of these the King forgave him the £20. On April 6, 1391, Chaucer must have been in funds, for he advanced £66 13s. 4d. to the Exchequer, and it was not repaid him till May 22, 1393.

Meantime, he lost his office of Clerk of the Works on June 17, 1391, and his post as Repairer of St. George's Chapel on July 8. He cleared up all his accounts—the details of which are of interest—and was given, in January, 1393, £10 for his good service, and on February 28, 1394, an annuity of £20. In 1395-1397 he obtained, from time to time, small loans from the Exchequer on account of his annuity, and in Easter Term, 1398, Isabella, widow and administratrix of Walter Buckholt, Esquire, sued him for a debt of 14£ 1s. 11d.. and an order was issued for his arrest, but he got Letters Patent of Protection from the King on May 4, 1398, and the grant of a butt of wine yearly on October 13. On September 29, 1399, Richard II. was deposed.

Chaucer at once wrote to Henry IV. his humorous "Complaint to his Empty Purse," and this son of the Duchess Blanche, whose beauty and too early death (September 12, 1369, at the age of twenty-nine) Chaucer had celebrated and mourned just thirty years before in his charming "Book of the Duchess," at once gave the poet a fresh annuity of £26 13s. 4d., and confirmed Richard II.'s grants of the £13 6s. 8d. pension and butt of wine (October 13, 18, 21), though there was delay in paying the cash. On December 24, 1399, Chaucer took a lease for fifty-three years, or his life if shorter, of a tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, part of the site of the present Henry VIL's Chapel, at the yearly rent of 53s. 4d., the tenant doing the repairs. Here he no doubt died on October 25, 1400, as the inscription on his tomb said. His last payment from the Exchequer is dated June 5, 1400, and no later payment of the arrears of his annuities is to be found. A theologian, Thomas Gascoigne, Doctor of Divinity, who was born in 1403, and died in 1458, when writing on the evil of too late repentances, cites the instances of Judas Iscariot and Chaucer, of whom the latter died, he says, exclaiming "Woe is me! Woe is me! because I shall not be able to recall or destroy those things which I evilly wrote on the evil and most shameful love of men for women, and which will still be continued from man to man. I wish (I could destroy them). I wish I'd never (written them)!" (Athenæum,  March 31, 1888, vol. III., p. 404). Voltaire was represented by the clerics of his day as saying much the same thing, I suppose that Gascoigne repeated the Westminster monks' exaggeration or invention. To many divines of old, women were evil things.

Gascoigne also states that Thomas Chaucer (later M.P. and Speaker of the House of Commons, etc.) was the poet's son, but there is no proof that he was so. No doubt he was a relative, as he used the poet's seal in 1409, and, after the lapse of some years, had the poet's Sub-Forestership of North Petherton, and his house at Westminster Abbey in 1413-1434. Of the little son Lewis, for whom Chaucer wrote his "Treatise on the Astrolabe," we know nothing.

We have thus had Chaucer as boy, as server in his father's wine-shop, page in a Prince's house, cavalryman and prisoner in France, valet and squire to the King, dressing his chamber, telling tales to his courtiers, living in his Court, then in the City Aldgate, settled down as a married man, inspecting ships' cargoes on the Thames and noting down the taxes and customs due on them, often sent abroad on the King's business, riding across France to Italy and back, entrusted with the guardianship of minors, Member of Parliament, Justice of the Peace, recipient of gifts and pensions, pilgrim to Canterbury, caretaker and repairer of all the King's dwellings and St. George's Chapel and the banks of the Thames, a buyer of building materials, engager of workmen, a forester, twice plundered by robbers, sued by a creditor, protected by the King, poor, and at last dying in his tenement at Westminster Abbey—a man who had mixed with all classes of society, was a scholar, a rider, a fighter, a man of affairs, one who met prosperity and adversity with equal mind, and did his work cheerily as long as he could.

For his writing, it was the best and brightest that England had then seen, and had the firmest grip of men's and women's minds and ways, and was soaked in all the learning of his time. He probably started in 1366-1367 with a clever Englishing in four-stress lines of part of the most popular French poem of his day, the "Romaunt of the Rose," the Rose being a girl's virginity. He then translated and condensed in five-stress lines a French A B C poem on the Virgin Mary, whose stanzas began with successive letters of the alphabet; and, on the death of the Duchess Blanche, John of Gaunt's first wife, in 1369, wrote the "Book of the Duchess," with a most charming description of her beauty and graciousness. These poems complete his first period, before there is any evidence of Italian influence on him. To his second period, the first of that Italian influence (November, 1373, to 1384), we must assign his second "Nun's Tale of St. Cecilia," his "Complaint to Pity" (representing his earlier rejection by his lady-love), his "Palamon and Arcite," (the first version of his "Knight's Tale,") his prose and verse Englishing of Boethius' "Consolations of Philosophy" (with its beautiful poem of the Former Age), and his poem of "Mars," written in 1379-1380, at the request of his patron, John of Gaunt, about the intrigue between Isabel, Duchess of York, daughter of the King of Spain, and the Earl of Huntingdon, afterwards Duke of Exeter. In this period I also incline to put his fine poem of "Troilus," his "Lines to Adam Scrivener," his "House of Fame" (1384) and his "Annelida and Arcitc."

To his third and greatest period I should assign his "Legend of Good Women" and his Canterbury Tales of Women's Suffering and Truth, the "Man of Law's Tale of the Cruelly-treated Constance," the "Clerk's Tale of Patient Grisild," and the "Prioress's Tale of the Little Martyr, Hugh of Lincoln, and his Sorrowing Mother." Also, and without doubt, his amusing and humorous Nun's Priest's Tale, and the Tales of Women's Naughtiness, told by the Miller, Reeve, Cook (prologue), Wife of Bath (preamble), and Merchant, with the Tales exposing ecclesiastical abuses—those of the Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner. The "Knight's Tale" and the broken-off Tale of "Sir Thopas" must also be included. But Chaucer's preachy Tales, "Melibe," the "Manciple's," the "Parson's," I put in his fourth period of decline, with his incomplete prose Englishing of the treatise on the "Astrolabe" (1390, his "Envoy to Skogan" (1393), and to Bukton on marriage (1396), his "Venus" (1394), his "Fortune" (1398?), and "Gentleness." His "Balade of Truth"(Flee from the press) may have been written when he lost his Customs appointments in 1386 ("Trial Forewords," p. 9), or when he was in money difficulties in 1398. I believe in 1386. His "Stedfastness" (a curiously poor poem) may date either in 1389, when, on May 3, Richard II. declared that, as he was twenty-one, he "would choose his own counsellors, and be a King indeed," or in 1397, "when the King had his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, seized and murdered, also seized the Earls of Warwick and Arundel, and got his Parliament to do all he wished" ("Trial Forewords," p. 8). As the poem is much too poor for 1389, I believe in the 1397 date, and that the King gave Chaucer his yearly butt or pipe of wine for his balade. Chaucer's last poem, his humorous "Complaint to his Purse," addressed to Henry IV., must be after September 30, 1399.

In Chaucer's works, we see him starting in the Middle Ages, and marching through them to modern times, showing the modern spirit, picturing contemporary life. But in his old age he drops back to medieval theology. As Professor W. P. Ker says in his capital little "Dark Ages," 1904, p. 28, "In the 'Romaunt of the Rose' are the Middle Ages and their fantasies and dreams; in the 'Kentish April' is daylight, clearness, the old humanities restored without superstition."

Chaucer began with translations and adaptations of foreign originals, and he ended with them. Like Shakspere, he did not invent his stories, he borrowed them. He found them baldly or badly told, and so he retold them in his own happy way, enriched with his own fancy and humour. As Tames Russell Lowell puts it:

"Whenever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it, and made the most of it.  It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new thing. The characteristic touch is his own" ("My Study Windows," p. 174). "Chaucer seems to me one of the most purely original of poets; as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante is in respect of that which is within us. There has been nothing like him before; there has been nothing like him since. He is original because he is always natural; because, if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh; because he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to certain people that it ought to appear" (Ibid.,  p. 210).

In Chaucer's earliest original poems, his "Complaint to Pity" and the "Death of Blanche," we find the keen appreciation of the beauty and grace of women, in body, mind, and spirit, which clung to him all his life. Both works are full of pathos and tenderness; and, as Lowell says of the "Blanche," "when Chaucer wrote this poem he must have been musing of his early love" ("Conversations on Old Poets," p. 98). In the "Blanche" we find, too, Chaucer's love of books, of birds, of hunting, horse and hound, of outdoor life, of flowers and trees; he was an open-air man as well as a student. But it was not till he wrote his Valentine's Day poem, the "Parliament of Fools," in 1382, that we get the real Chaucer with his humour and fun, clear of his early love-troubles, and with his love of nature much developed, for he had been to Italy, and had read Boccaccio and Dante. The "Parliament" was probably written just after the "Troilus"—founded on Boccaccio's "Filostrato"—which, though full of beauty, dwells too long on the course and miseries of thwarted love. Its most famous passage is that in Book III., lines 1230-1253, in which the lovers first embrace, and Criseyde, like the new abashed nightingale that stops her song when she hears a noise, and then outrings it clear, opens her heart, and tells her lover what she feels.

Chaucer's next considerable poem is the unfinished "House of Fame," 1384, though perhaps begun on December 10, 1383. It gives the picture of Chaucer in his rooms above Aldgate, sitting (after he has finished his reckonings at the Custom-House) as dumb as a stone, reading another book till he looks dazed, thus living like a hermit, though he takes care not to starve (Book II., lines 692, 693).

This unfinished poem was immediately followed by another, alike unfinished, "The Legende of Good Women." Of nineteen of them he under took to tell the stories, but he tired of them, and dropped them in the middle of the ninth legend. His Prologue is to us the most interesting part, for in it he tells us of his love for the daisy, how, when May is come, he bids farewell to his book and his devotion, and is out in the meadows to see the daisy open its leaves to the sun when it rises. "That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow." In it he also tells us of his sixty books of the "Lives of Women," etc. in the "Legende" are many effective bits like the sea-fight "Cleopatra," 635-651, Dido and her court ready for the hunt, and the storm after, 1191-1223.

Of his latest minor poems the "Envoy to Skogan" describes Chaucer (who was at Greenwich) as "dull as death" at the end of the stream of honour flowing from the King, while his "Envoy to Bukton" shows his dislike of marriage—his own had evidently been unhappy—and his fear that he might again fall into dotage and remarry.

As to Chaucer's position and characteristics as a poet, he is not in the first rank with Shakspere and Dante. He has not their imagination penetrative, their pregnancy or intensity. He cannot soar so high or dive so deep. But he heads the second rank, by virtue of his finished art, his power of characterization, of picturing men and women in a few happy words; by his delightfully sly humour, his tender pathos—his picture of Constance with her babe on the seashore has never been beaten in English literature;—by his admirable story-telling (he is still our best in that line); by his love and descriptions of nature; by his humanity, the way in which he makes himself one of us and comes home to us, as he did to the men and women of his own day; by his reverence for all that was noble and pure, his hatred of cruelty and wrong, his exposure of social evils, and his delightful quizzing of the little vanities and weaknesses of the folk around him in the second Richard's reign. The happiness of his nature is shown in all his work after his first love bother. Though he had his troubles, and now and then groaned over them, he carried his sunshine with him as he rode and walked about, observing with quick eye the varied life around him, and then reproducing it for us in words which enable us to re-create it, and to see the sun of his genius over the land we love, and the folk, our forefathers and mothers, who handed us down the England and the language which we possess, and which we have to put and keep in the forefront of the world.

F. J. FURNIVALL.