Chaucer and his times

In this chapter we are to get a glimpse of fourteenth century England through Chaucer's eyes. What Chaucer saw—or at least what he chose to record—is by no means all the story. Between the Conquest and Chaucer's time, Saxon and Norman had been gradually blending into one fairly homogeneous people. The kings of England had gradually become, not Norman, or French, but English kings. The people had come to look upon themselves, not as belonging primarily to this or that feudal lord, but as subjects, all together, of their English king. They had made the discovery that as a people they had rights of their own and by acting together could enforce them. In the thirteenth century they had wrested from King John the bill of rights called Magna Carta. In the early fourteenth century the elected representatives of the people, who constituted the "parliament," and who acted with the king in making laws, were strong enough to depose King Edward II. In the last year of Chaucer's life, parliament deposed King Richard II. The political strife of which such incidents are typical does not get into Chaucer's picture. Nor does the growing unrest of the lower classes concern him. Grinding poverty, oppressive taxation, the destitution wrought by war and by the great plague called the Black Death which swept over England in 1349, the great peasant rebellion headed by Wat Tyler in 1381, do not tempt Chaucer's pen. It is to Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman (1362) with its grimly realistic picture of the selfish luxury of the rich and the wretchedness of the poor, that you must turn for this darker side of the picture. Nor does the intense religious unrest of the time interest Chaucer. The central figure of that unrest was John Wyclif (1324?-1384), whose sermons and tracts roused the people to revolt against the luxury and oppressive authority of the church, and whose translation of the Bible (1380), made in order that the people might read and think for themselves, stands as the first great monument of English prose. The revolt of Wyclif and his followers caused great excitement in England and laid the foundation for the Reformation; but as far as Chaucer is concerned it is as if it had not been.

What did interest Chaucer was human nature and the pageant of life. His own career gave him opportunity to sample and to see. He was born about 1340 when Edward III was on the throne. He became a page in the household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second son of the king, and learned, like the Prioress of the Canterbury Tales, to countreifete cheere of court, and been estatlich of manere.

He followed King Edward to France, was captured in the campaign of 1359, and was duly ransomed. He returned to take a place at court and married Philippa, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. He was sent on a mission to Italy in 1372. A year after the accession of King Richard II in 1377, he went to Italy again. During the later years of his life he held the office of comptroller of the customs in the port of London. He saw Richard deposed in 1399. He died during the first year of the reign of Richard's successor, Henry IV. During this long and busy public life Chaucer found time to translate or paraphrase a French poem, the Romance of the Rose; to retell in English verse, with extraordinary vigor and vividness, the tale of Troilus and Criseyde, the material for which he borrowed from Boccaccio; to compose various other narrative and lyric poems; and at length, with his powers fully ripe, to write the Canterbury Tales which have made his name immortal. These purport to be tales told by a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. The host of the Tabard Inn (at which they assemble for the start) decides to accompany them and persuades them to beguile the journey with stories—each traveler to tell two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The twenty-nine or thirty, or possibly thirty-two pilgrims, would, under this first plan, provide for approximately one hundred and twenty tales; but this number was subsequently diminished to approximately sixty, and of these proposed tales only twenty were completed—just about enough, with the four left incomplete, to tide the pilgrims over the journey to the shrine. What they did there and how they entertained each other on the way back, Chaucer leaves untold. But the long "Prologue" describing the pilgrims, the twenty-four tales, and the little prologues in which Mine Host designates the story-teller and gets him going, are enough in themselves to make up a sizable library.

That indeed was a part of Chaucer's intention in writing the Canterbury Tales. Printing had not been invented—manuscripts were rare and precious. The medieval scholar who was fortunate enough to have access to a variety of them, tapped this rich mine, brought together stories from every quarter, and, weaving them into some plausible connection, made a compact library of them. It was what the great Italian scholar, Boccaccio, whom Chaucer admired and imitated, had done in the Decameron, gathering some of his material from actual life, much of it from old French fabliaux, and weaving it together in the form of stories, told in turn by a group of people who have retreated to a country house near Florence to escape the plague and wish to while away the tedium of the days. So Chaucer gathers stories from many old manuscripts, adds others of his own invention, and weaves them together on the thread of this pilgrimage to Canterbury, assigning each story to the pilgrim from whose lips it would most appropriately come.

But if the stories are to be appropriate, the pilgrims themselves must of course be real people, not mere pegs to hang a story on. It is in this characterization of the pilgrims, and in giving each story just the color and tone and turn that that very pilgrim and no other would give to it, that Chaucer shows his skill and takes his chief delight. And that, and the vivid picture of the life of the times which is thus created, is our chief delight in the Canterbury Tales. So vivid is the picture, so real are the people, that I think that we cannot do better than see them through Chaucer's eyes. Chaucer imagines himself as one of the pilgrims on that Canterbury journey. We, I think, may claim the same privilege, and as we proceed to join them may pick up a few general impressions on the way.

The first thing, certainly, that will strike us is that manifestations of the church, of the usages and practices of religion, are everywhere. Everywhere we shall see men and women clad in garments that mark them as belonging to some organized form of religious life. Monks, lady prioresses, nuns, priests, friars, pardoners, palmers, we shall hear them called. Even the military men, the knights clad in armour, are as likely as not to belong to some religious order, or to have just come back from a religious pilgrimage to Palestine. And when we find ourselves with a merry crowd of Chaucer's people traveling along an English highway, we shall discover that all of them—knights and merchants and millers and doctors and lawyers as well as monks and nuns and priests—are going on a religious pilgrimage. What does it mean, this religious life that is everywhere around us?