The Age of Chaucer

 From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).

1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links  all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury. 

The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet. 

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.

The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.

The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this: 

She was a worthy woman all her live:

Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...

Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks. 

In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.

Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.

The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence: 

I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...

Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'

For whither they ben full of jealousye,

Or masterful, or loven noveltye.    (novelty)

Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.

The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.

The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age. 

After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.

The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:

The state of man does change and vary

Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary     (sorry)

Now dansand merry, now like to die;

        Timor mortis conturbat me...

He takis the knichtis in to field 

Enarmit under helm and shield, 

Victor he is at all mellie         (battles)

        Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

 

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

 

—oOo—

 

 

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