Chaucer and His England Part 5

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALDGATE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS AS RECONSt.i.tUTED IN W.

NEWTON'S "LONDON IN THE OLDEN TIME"

12. ST. MICHAEL'S, ALDGATE; 25. BLANCH APPLETON; 26. ST. CATHERINE, COLEMAN STREET; 27. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE; 28. PRIOR OF HORNCHURCH'S LODGING; 29. SARACEN'S HEAD]

London has never been a silent city, but Chaucer enjoyed at least one of the quietest spots in it. If (as we have every reason to suppose) the Ordinance of 1345 was far from putting an end to the nuisances which it indicates, then Chaucer must have heaved a sigh of relief when he had seen the Custom-House locked up, and turned his back on Spurrier Lane. The Spurriers were addicted to working after dark for nefarious ends of their own; "and further, many of the said trade are wandering about all day, without working at all at their trade; and then, when they have become drunk and frantic, they take to their work, to the annoyance of the sick and of all their neighbourhood, as well as by reason of the broils that arise between them and the strange folks who are dwelling among them. And then they blow up their fires so vigorously, that their forges begin all at once to blaze, to the great peril of themselves and of all the neighbourhood around. And then too, all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks, which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges."[116] We may trust that no such offensive handiwork was carried on round Aldgate, whither the poet would arrive about five o'clock in the evening, and sit down forthwith to supper, as the sun began to slant over the open fields. We may hope, at least, that he was wont to sup at home rather than at those alluring cook-shops which alternated with wine-taverns along the river bank; and that, as he "defyed the roast" with his Gascon wine, Philippa sat and sipped with him from one of time-honoured Lancaster's silver-gilt cups.

Even if we accept the most pessimistic theories of Chaucer's married life, we need scarcely doubt that the pair sat often together at their open window in the twilight--

Both of one mind, as married people use, Quietly, quietly the evening through.

The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out from Bow steeple.[117] Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in "Troilus and Criseyde," written during this very Aldgate time. The hero watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the evening shadows leave most to the imagination--

The day go'th fast, and after that com'th eve And yet came not to Troilus Criseyde.

He looketh forth by hedge, by tree, by greve, [grove And far his head over the wall he laid ...

"Have here my truth, I see her! Yond she is!

Have up thine eyen, man! May'st thou not see?"

Pandarus answered, "Nay, so mote I the!

All wrong, by G.o.d! What say'st thou, man? Where art?

That I see yond is but a fare-cart."

The warden of the gates gan to call The folk which that without the gates were, And bade them driven in their beastes all, Or all the night they musten bleven there; [remain And far within the night, with many a tear, This Troilus gan homeward for to ride, For well he seeth it helpeth nought t' abide.

And far within the night, while the "uncunning porters" sing over their liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the "Romance of the Rose." Does he not also, to poor Philippa's disgust, "laugh full fast" to himself sometimes over that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains "of wicked wives ... more legendes and lives than be of goode wives in the Bible"? It is difficult to escape from this conviction. His "Wife of Bath" cites the treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals.

Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the belly, like that of the Apocalypse. "Late to bed" suits ill with "early to rise," and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat unsympathetic "Awake, Geoffrey!" was often the first word he heard in the morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven--

At the last to me he spake In mannes voice, and said "Awake!

And be not so aghast, for shame!"

And called me then by my name And, for I should the better abraid [rouse Me dreamed, "Awake!" to me he said Right in the same voice and steven [tone That useth one I coulde neven; [name And with that voice, sooth for to say'n My minde came to me again; For it was goodly said to me, So it was never wont to be.

"House of Fame," ii., 47.

CHAPTER IX

TOWN AND COUNTRY

"For never to my mind was evening yet But was far beautifuller than its day."

BROWNING

"Wherefore is the sun red at even? For he goeth toward h.e.l.l."

("The Master of Oxford's Catechism" (XV. cent.); "Reliquiae Antiquae," i., 232.)

That which in Chaucer's day pa.s.sed for rank "sluggardy a-night" might yet be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he needed Philippa's shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, "that he had seen the sun rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together." It is indeed startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a lady will frankly a.s.sure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever seen; to her it spells la.s.situde and reaction after a long night's dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner's mood: "the sun, my dear, that's G.o.d!" In the days when a tallow candle cost four times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for G.o.d and His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his "Playground of Europe," has brought a wealth of ill.u.s.tration and penetrating comment to show how strictly men's ideas of the picturesque are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was a more insistent reality than G.o.d; and none doubted that the former had special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sulte, for instance, in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed G.o.dehard built his monastery beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, "who oft-times affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the air." The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so that "many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the Burgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quant.i.ty to a herring-barrel." What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or Tintern was not the beauty of "these steep woods and lofty cliffs," but their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks' own labours and those of their servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to listen how "the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of birds," then they felt their forefathers to have been right in "noting fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds."[118] After all, the earth was cursed for Adam's sake, and even its apparent beauty was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists--

"The world is fair to gaze on, white and green and red, But inly foul and black of hue, and dismal as the dead."

Ruskin's famous pa.s.sage on this subject ("M. P.," iii., 14, 15) is, on the whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two remarkable exceptions. The poet of "Pearl," who probably knew Wales well, describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas antic.i.p.ated Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also with apparent sympathy.[119] Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil's tomb.[120] The scenic splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and variety of the sunrises in the "Decameron" is equalled only by the bald brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer; Criseyde's "Ywis, it will be night as fast," is quite a characteristic epitaph for the dying day.

On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant conventional repet.i.tion; and here Chaucer is at his best. He may well have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard de Bury calls "a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk," yet no poet was ever farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature--

On bookes for to read I me delight, And to them give I faith and full credence, And in mine heart have them in reverence So heartily, that there is game none That from my bookes maketh me to go'n But it be seldom on the holyday; Save, certainly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I hear the fowles sing, And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring, Farewell my book and my devotion![121]

Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop's wood within a mile's walk of Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the "Great Shaft of Cornhill," the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122] These May-day festivities, which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we consider that even in castles and manor-houses men's lives differed from this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the monotony of woman's life under these conditions, doubly bound as she was to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame, with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Ma.s.s and gossip with a few neighbours--only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of last year's fruit--in that position, men watched the first green buds with the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval ideal. Fenelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called interests of religion.[123] It would be difficult to find a single great preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions snow, sawdust, and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124] These and other similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in the streets. "If any man speak to thee," writes the Good Wife for her Daughter, "swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way"; and again--

"Go not to the wrestling, nor to shooting at the c.o.c.k As it were a strumpet, or a giggelot, Stay at home, daughter."

"When thou goest into town or to church," says the author of the "Menagier de Paris" to his young wife, "walk with thine head high, thine eyelids lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards." Even Chaucer tells us of his Virginia--

She hath full oftentimes sick her feigned, For that she woulde flee the companye Where likely was to treaten of follye-- As is at feastes, revels, and at dances, That be occasions of dalliances.[125]

These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a series of Christmastide proclamations "that no one shall go in the streets of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of imprisonment." Similarly severe measures were threatened against football in the streets, against the game of "taking off the hoods of people, or laying hands on them," and against "hocking" or extorting violent contributions from pa.s.sers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter.

But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly "charging on the King's behalf and his City, that no man or person ...

during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen."[126] Much of this mumming was not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to suppress all natural enjoyment of life--even Madame Eglantyne's lapdogs were definitely contraband--but the girls were trammelled at every turn with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and unreal "other-worldliness" of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best explain certain of Chaucer's least edifying tales by referring, on the other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his "A. B. C."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MEDIEVAL MUMMERS. (From Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes")]

But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the elvish and retiring poet of the "Canterbury Tales" mentions the sports of the townsfolk only with gentle irony. "Merry Absolon," the parish clerk, who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well "after the school of Oxenford ... and with his legges casten to and fro,"

and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the 'prentice cla.s.s to which he essentially belonged--all these small perfections are enumerated only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought by woman's guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggelots, around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields--young men and maidens, old men and children--but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun--

Upon the smalle softe sweete gra.s.s, That was with flowres sweet embroidered all.

At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone with the birds--

A wind, so small it scarcely might be less, Made in the leaves green a noise soft, Accordant to the fowles' song aloft.

Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun--

Right as the freshe, redde rose new Against the Summer sunne coloured is!

But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh and blood--

... of all the flowers in the mead Then love I most these flowers white and red Such as men callen daisies in our town.

To them I have so great affectioun, As I said erst, when comen is the May, That in my bed there dawneth me no day But I am up and walking in the mead, To see this flower against the sunne spread; ...

As she that is of alle flowers flower, Fulfilled of all virtue and honour, And ever y-like fair and fresh of hue.

And I love it, and ever y-like new, And ever shall, till that mine hearte die....

I fell asleep; within an hour or two Me dreamed how I lay in the meadow tho [then To see this flower that I love so and dread; And from afar came walking in the mead The G.o.d of Love, and in his hand a Queen, And she was clad in royal habit green; A fret of gold she hadde next her hair, And upon that a white crown she bare With fleurons smalle, and I shall not lie, For all the world right as a dasye Y-crowned is with white leaves lite, So were the fleurons of her coroune white; For of one pearle, fine, oriental Her white coroune was y-maked all.

Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that Chaucer's sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises, than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, "Canterbury Tales," A., 1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and "Book of d.u.c.h.ess," 291, where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens, though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed inferiority. Chaucer's triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun's Priest's tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with Chanticleer--all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how glorious a part of G.o.d's creation is even a barn-door c.o.c.k?

His voice was merrier than the merry orgon On ma.s.se-days that in the churche go'n ...

His comb was redder than the fine coral, Embattled as it were a castle wall; His bill was black, and like the jet it shone, Like azure were his legges and his toen; His nailes whiter than the lily flower, And like the burnished gold was his colour!

Nothing but Chaucer's directness of observation and truth of colouring could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.

In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was already becoming in a manner c.o.c.kneyfied; although she already imported sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food, and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life.

Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded quarters, the ma.s.s of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul's was plainly set on a hill, and n.o.body could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn down the present Gray's Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued) Boadicea's chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames, though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only "in parts,"