his arse ere he escape.
And he raised the window hastily,
And put his arse outside covertly,
Beyond the buttock, to the haunch-bone.
And then spoke up the clerk, Absalon:
‘Speak, sweet bird; I know not where you art.’
Then Nicholas at once let fly a fart,
As great as if it were a thunder-clap,
The clerk was nearly blinded with the blast;
Yet he was ready with his iron hot,
And Nicholas right in the arse he smote.
Off went the skin a hand’s breadth round and some;
The coulter had so burnt him on his bum,
That for the pain he thought he would die.
Could there be anything further from the bloodthirsty heroics of the alliterative poem about Arthur and his knights than this sordid tale of lower-class shenanigans? But there is an obvious connection which tells us another important truth about our forebears. It’s really rather cruel. The miller, and presumably his listeners, took great delight in the branding of Nicholas, who suffered huge pain, albeit on the backside. Just as the reality of medieval warfare was extremely brutal, and there must have been many hideously deformed and maimed ex-soldiers wandering London, so too ordinary civilian life was cruel. Children tormented animals; old women were publicly burned to death as witches; the decomposing bodies of executed criminals were left hanging in the streets. Despite the intense religiosity, despite hundreds of thousands of priests and monks, despite the noble promises of the chivalric cult, despite assumptions about the afterlife and eternal punishment for sin, this was simply a less civilised country than it is today.
It may seem that I’m making far too much out of what was meant to be simply a coarse, funny poem, but there’s so little in medieval poetry that directly describes life at the time. To the medieval mind, poetry had many purposes. It existed to educate and amuse on long winter nights; to pass on beliefs about religion and courtly, educated behaviour; to build a bridge back to the world of the ancients. But the assumption that poetry should directly reflect the dirty, often cruel and dangerous state of daily life is something that most poets would reject. Their world, apart from relative rarities such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is an idealised and allegorical one: poets are forever falling into dreams in which they meet the Platonic representatives of honour, love, duty or whatever it might be.
This dream world would remain hugely popular long after Chaucer died. English poetry directly after Chaucer goes into a bit of a lull. The greatest group of his followers were writing at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s in Scotland, and not surprisingly, the poetry of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians is full of dream and allegory, and translations from the classics. But Scotland, independent politically for almost two centuries, was becoming a distinctively different country: its court poets might ape and admire the culture of London, but the country itself was both rougher and more democratic. Scotland had its own chroniclers, and just like their English equivalents they tried to tie its history back to ancient days in the Mediterranean – we have already met Andrew of Wyntoun – but its epic poets emphasise something we don’t hear much of from English poets at this time – freedom.
Since the wars of independence conducted by William Wallace and then Robert the Bruce against the English, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Scotland had been free. It had adopted a different notion of kingship to England. In 1320 the Scots had sent a letter to the Pope expressing their view that independence from London meant a kind of freedom rare in medieval Europe. The so-called ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ asserted that ‘for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ This is the spirit of the most famous Scottish medieval poem, written by John Barbour, an Aberdonian priest who studied in Oxford and Paris. His huge epic The Brus was completed at the Scottish court in the 1370s, on a commission from the great king’s grandson, Robert II. In the tale of the independence wars, essentially an adventure story, the most famous lines are a reflection on the importance of political freedom:
A! Fredome is a noble thing
Fredome mays man to haiff lyking
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He levys at es that freely levys.
A noble hart may haiff nane es
Na ellys nocht that may him ples
Gif fredome failyhe, for fre liking
Is yharnyt [desired] our all other thing.
Na he that ay has levyt fre
May nocht knaw weill the propyrte
The angyr na wrechyt dome [condition]
That is couplyt to foule thryldome,
But gif he had assayit it.
But if he did say, or try, it, he
Suld think fredome mar to prys
Than all the gold in warld that is.
This feels as if it was passionately written, and there are no equivalent passages in medieval poetry south of the border.
After the wars of independence, Scotland suffered a long period of terrible bad luck with its kings. That bad luck, however, gives us a rare example of poetry by a king which isn’t half bad. In March 1406 the heir to the Scottish throne, the future King James I, set off by sea to avoid his enemies at home and escape to France. But when his vessel passed close to the English coast he was captured by pirates and handed over to Henry IV of England, beginning an eighteen-year captivity under different English kings. Clearly influenced by Chaucer, James wrote an autobiographical poem now known as The King’s Quair (The King’s Book). He falls asleep – as all poets do – and dreams of the philosopher Boethius – again, almost mandatory – before describing what actually happens to him. Here is his account of boarding ship and then being captured:
Purvait of all that was us necessarye,
With wynd at will, up airly by the morowe,
Streight unto schip, no longer wold we tarye,
The way we tuke, the tyme I tald to forowe.
With mony ‘fare wele’ and ‘Sanct Johne to borowe’
Of falowe and frende, and thus with one assent
We pullit up saile and furth oure wayis went.
Upon the wawis weltering to and fro,
So infortunate was us that fremyt day
That maugré, playnly, quhethir we wold or no,
With strong hand, by forse, schortly to say,
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