life must have felt when, for instance, events as banal as high winds and bad weather were thought to be a sign from God:
He proved that these pestilences were purely for sin,
And the south-west wind on Saturday at even
Was plainly for pure pride and for no point else.
Pear-trees and plum-trees were puffed to the earth
For example, ye men that ye should do better.
Beeches and broad oaks were blown to the ground,
Turned upwards their tails in token of dread
That deadly sin at doomsday shall undo them all.
This world is not our world, yet Piers Plowman keeps its wild vitality when Langland feels obliged to be explicit about the terrible behaviour he is condemning. It’s not all the corruption of the rich, but also the swinish behaviour of the ordinary Briton. Here for instance is Gluttony hard at the beer in his local pub, drinking away with ratcatchers, roadsweepers, fiddlers, horse dealers and needle sellers:
There was laughing and lowering and ‘Let go the cup!’
They sat so till evensong singing now and then,
Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.
His guts ’gan to grumble like two greedy sows;
He pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while;
And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end,
That all hearing that horn held their nose after
And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.
It’s perhaps only the fact that the amount of time taken to piss out so much beer is measured not in minutes but by how long it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer that reminds us that this beery scene comes from a very different England.
I hope by now I’ve convinced you that medieval poetry in English is a bigger and more exciting field than just Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet that portly, self-deprecating, white-bearded London civil servant is unavoidable, a mountain in our landscape – the man who transforms English poetry more than any other in the medieval period. His great contemporaries Gower and Lydgate have virtually disappeared from the common culture, but Chaucer is different, and always has been. He was published in Tudor times and appropriated, despite his Catholic world, by the new England of the Protestant reformers: Shakespeare certainly knew his work.
And indeed, we all know our Chaucer, don’t we – jokes about farts and fat women, the long-winded knights, parsons and the other pilgrims as they jolt and bicker their way towards Canterbury, this Chaucer who is the essence of unabashed celebratory Englishness, and the father of English poetry. These days when we say ‘Chaucerian’ we seem to mean simply lecherous and drunk. But a prolonged swim in the ocean of English verse this extraordinary man produced reminds us that his world was much more European than simply English, and that he saw himself as the inheritor and passer-on of Latin, French and Italian culture. Indeed, everything in Chaucer looks not just south to Canterbury, but south to the Continent too. If the Gawain poet stands for the wintry north, and Langland with his crowd of folk sprawls across the Midlands, Chaucer is emphatically the poet of London. His victory is also the victory of London over the rest of Britain.
London in Chaucer’s time, almost as much as London today, depended upon trade and intercourse with Europe. The courts of Chaucer’s three kings – the Plantagenets Edward III and Richard II, and the Lancastrian Henry IV – were all deeply intertwined with French affairs. The to and froing of clerics, official embassies, artisans, merchants and bankers made London feel different from (and superior to) anywhere else in Britain. Chaucer himself came from a family of merchant wine-sellers, and spent his life on the fringes of the court. He served in the army in France, and was ransomed; he was connected to John of Gaunt through marriage; he received money as the king’s valet and was sent abroad on royal commissions. He made repeated trips to France and Italy, where he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio; he worked as a civil servant, responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames, and received money from three different monarchs, neatly negotiating the complex and lethal politics of the medieval monarchy. Chaucer was, in short, what we would call a member of the London political establishment, as smoothly elite as Langland was rebelliously crude.
His early poetry owes a lot to the traditions of French courtly romance; later he would pick up the newly fashionable poetry of Florence and northern Italy; and only in later life, when he was well established, would he turn to the stories and idioms of the urban English. It’s an unfair and ungenerous thought, but perhaps, along with his duller contemporary John Gower, he was simply too successful for the greater good of British poetry, helping push out the language and the alliterative techniques used further north.
Chaucer’s earlier poetry, with strong French influences, isn’t much about the contemporary world of medieval England. These early poems are fun, and make light work of the heavy learning they are based on; but they’re not the Chaucer we know today. As he moves from French influence to Italian, with a longer, more flexible line, and steadily greater vocabulary, he comes more into focus. First in his almost novel-like poem of love betrayed, Troilus and Criseyde, and then in the Tales themselves, this small, sharp-eyed bureaucrat proves himself above all a brilliant observer – of everything from clothing to the twists and turns of how we fool ourselves.
But the more you read of Chaucer, the more you realise that his medieval characters are not much like us. They experience a complicated, religion-saturated existence. Saints are real, and Purgatory looms for sinners. Daily life is governed by the movement of the planets, and explained by a complex web of folklore. Living so close to animals, birdlife and flora, the Chaucerian English find allegory in everything. As Chaucer shows us in his ‘Parliament of Fowls’, every bird has its own stories and its own meaning:
The noble falcon, who with his feet will strain
At the king’s glove; sparrow-hawk sharp-beaked,
The quail’s foe; the merlin that will pain
Himself full oft the lark for to seek;
There was the dove with her eyes meek;
The jealous swan, that at his death does sing;
The owl too, that portent of death does bring;
The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound;
The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie;
The mocking jay; the heron there is found;
The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye;
The starling that betrays secrets on high;
The tame robin; and the cowardly kite;
The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light;
The sparrow, Venus’ son; the nightingale,
That calls forth all the fresh leaves new;
The swallow, murderer of the bees.*
And
