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The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems

G >> Geoffrey Chaucer >> The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems




Between 1359, when the poet himself testifies that he was made
prisoner while bearing arms in France, and September 1366,
when Queen Philippa granted to her former maid of honour, by
the name of Philippa Chaucer, a yearly pension of ten marks, or
L6, 13s. 4d., we have no authentic mention of Chaucer, express
or indirect. It is plain from this grant that the poet's marriage
with Sir Payne Roet's daughter was not celebrated later than
1366; the probability is, that it closely followed his return from
the wars. In 1367, Edward III. settled upon Chaucer a life-
pension of twenty marks, "for the good service which our
beloved Valet -- 'dilectus Valettus noster' -- Geoffrey Chaucer
has rendered, and will render in time to come." Camden
explains 'Valettus hospitii' to signify a Gentleman of the Privy
Chamber; Selden says that the designation was bestowed "upon
young heirs designed to he knighted, or young gentlemen of
great descent and quality." Whatever the strict meaning of the
word, it is plain that the poet's position was honourable and
near to the King's person, and also that his worldly
circumstances were easy, if not affluent -- for it need not be said
that twenty marks in those days represented twelve or twenty
times the sum in these. It is believed that he found powerful
patronage, not merely from the Duke of Lancaster and his wife,
but from Margaret Countess of Pembroke, the King's daughter.
To her Chaucer is supposed to have addressed the "Goodly
Ballad", in which the lady is celebrated under the image of the
daisy; her he is by some understood to have represented under
the title of Queen Alcestis, in the "Court of Love" and the
Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women;" and in her praise
we may read his charming descriptions and eulogies of the daisy
-- French, "Marguerite," the name of his Royal patroness. To
this period of Chaucer's career we may probably attribute the
elegant and courtly, if somewhat conventional, poems of "The
Flower and the Leaf," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," &c.
"The Lady Margaret," says Urry, ". . . would frequently
compliment him upon his poems. But this is not to be meant of
his Canterbury Tales, they being written in the latter part of his
life, when the courtier and the fine gentleman gave way to solid
sense and plain descriptions. In his love-pieces he was obliged
to have the strictest regard to modesty and decency; the ladies
at that time insisting so much upon the nicest punctilios of
honour, that it was highly criminal to depreciate their sex, or do
anything that might offend virtue." Chaucer, in their estimation,
had sinned against the dignity and honour of womankind by his
translation of the French "Roman de la Rose," and by his
"Troilus and Cressida" -- assuming it to have been among his
less mature works; and to atone for those offences the Lady
Margaret (though other and older accounts say that it was the
first Queen of Richard II., Anne of Bohemia), prescribed to him
the task of writing "The Legend of Good Women" (see
introductory note to that poem). About this period, too, we
may place the composition of Chaucer's A. B. C., or The Prayer
of Our Lady, made at the request of the Duchess Blanche, a
lady of great devoutness in her private life. She died in 1369;
and Chaucer, as he had allegorised her wooing, celebrated her
marriage, and aided her devotions, now lamented her death, in a
poem entitled "The Book of the Duchess; or, the Death of
Blanche.<3>

In 1370, Chaucer was employed on the King's service abroad;
and in November 1372, by the title of "Scutifer noster" -- our
Esquire or Shield-bearer -- he was associated with "Jacobus
Pronan," and "Johannes de Mari civis Januensis," in a royal
commission, bestowing full powers to treat with the Duke of
Genoa, his Council, and State. The object of the embassy was
to negotiate upon the choice of an English port at which the
Genoese might form a commercial establishment; and Chaucer,
having quitted England in December, visited Genoa and
Florence, and returned to England before the end of November
1373 -- for on that day he drew his pension from the Exchequer
in person. The most interesting point connected with this Italian
mission is the question, whether Chaucer visited Petrarch at
Padua. That he did, is unhesitatingly affirmed by the old
biographers; but the authentic notices of Chaucer during the
years 1372-1373, as shown by the researches of Sir Harris
Nicolas, are confined to the facts already stated; and we are left
to answer the question by the probabilities of the case, and by
the aid of what faint light the poet himself affords. We can
scarcely fancy that Chaucer, visiting Italy for the first time, in a
capacity which opened for him easy access to the great and the
famous, did not embrace the chance of meeting a poet whose
works he evidently knew in their native tongue, and highly
esteemed. With Mr Wright, we are strongly disinclined to
believe "that Chaucer did not profit by the opportunity . . . of
improving his acquaintance with the poetry, if not the poets, of
the country he thus visited, whose influence was now being felt
on the literature of most countries of Western Europe." That
Chaucer was familiar with the Italian language appears not
merely from his repeated selection as Envoy to Italian States,
but by many passages in his poetry, from "The Assembly of
Fowls" to "The Canterbury Tales." In the opening of the first
poem there is a striking parallel to Dante's inscription on the
gate of Hell. The first Song of Troilus, in "Troilus and
Cressida", is a nearly literal translation of Petrarch's 88th
Sonnet. In the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women",
there is a reference to Dante which can hardly have reached the
poet at second- hand. And in Chaucer's great work -- as in The
Wife of Bath's Tale, and The Monk's Tale -- direct reference by
name is made to Dante, "the wise poet of Florence," "the great
poet of Italy," as the source whence the author has quoted.
When we consider the poet's high place in literature and at
Court, which could not fail to make him free of the hospitalities
of the brilliant little Lombard States; his familiarity with the
tongue and the works of Italy's greatest bards, dead and living;
the reverential regard which he paid to the memory of great
poets, of which we have examples in "The House of Fame," and
at the close of "Troilus and Cressida" <4>; along with his own
testimony in the Prologue to The Clerk's Tale, we cannot fail to
construe that testimony as a declaration that the Tale was
actually told to Chaucer by the lips of Petrarch, in 1373, the
very year in which Petrarch translated it into Latin, from
Boccaccio's "Decameron."<5> Mr Bell notes the objection to
this interpretation, that the words are put into the mouth, not of
the poet, but of the Clerk; and meets it by the counter-
objection, that the Clerk, being a purely imaginary personage,
could not have learned the story at Padua from Petrarch -- and
therefore that Chaucer must have departed from the dramatic
assumption maintained in the rest of the dialogue. Instances
could be adduced from Chaucer's writings to show that such a
sudden "departure from the dramatic assumption" would not be
unexampled: witness the "aside" in The Wife of Bath's
Prologue, where, after the jolly Dame has asserted that "half so
boldly there can no man swear and lie as a woman can", the
poet hastens to interpose, in his own person, these two lines:

"I say not this by wives that be wise,
But if it be when they them misadvise."

And again, in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women,"
from a description of the daisy --

"She is the clearness and the very light,
That in this darke world me guides and leads,"

the poet, in the very next lines, slides into an address to his lady:

"The heart within my sorrowful heart you dreads
And loves so sore, that ye be, verily,
The mistress of my wit, and nothing I," &c.

When, therefore, the Clerk of Oxford is made to say that he will
tell a tale --

"The which that I
Learn'd at Padova of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his werk.
He is now dead, and nailed in his chest,
I pray to God to give his soul good rest.
Francis Petrarc', the laureate poete,
Highte this clerk, whose rhetoric so sweet
Illumin'd all Itaile of poetry. . . .
But forth to tellen of this worthy man,
That taughte me this tale, as I began." . . .

we may without violent effort believe that Chaucer speaks in his
own person, though dramatically the words are on the Clerk's
lips. And the belief is not impaired by the sorrowful way in
which the Clerk lingers on Petrarch's death -- which would be
less intelligible if the fictitious narrator had only read the story
in the Latin translation, than if we suppose the news of
Petrarch's death at Arqua in July 1374 to have closely followed
Chaucer to England, and to have cruelly and irresistibly mingled
itself with our poet's personal recollections of his great Italian
contemporary. Nor must we regard as without significance the
manner in which the Clerk is made to distinguish between the
"body" of Petrarch's tale, and the fashion in which it was set
forth in writing, with a proem that seemed "a thing
impertinent", save that the poet had chosen in that way to
"convey his matter" -- told, or "taught," so much more directly
and simply by word of mouth. It is impossible to pronounce
positively on the subject; the question whether Chaucer saw
Petrarch in 1373 must remain a moot-point, so long as we have
only our present information; but fancy loves to dwell on the
thought of the two poets conversing under the vines at Arqua;
and we find in the history and the writings of Chaucer nothing
to contradict, a good deal to countenance, the belief that such a
meeting occurred.

Though we have no express record, we have indirect testimony,
that Chaucer's Genoese mission was discharged satisfactorily;
for on the 23d of April 1374, Edward III grants at Windsor to
the poet, by the title of "our beloved squire" -- dilecto Armigero
nostro -- unum pycher. vini, "one pitcher of wine" daily, to be
"perceived" in the port of London; a grant which, on the
analogy of more modern usage, might he held equivalent to
Chaucer's appointment as Poet Laureate. When we find that
soon afterwards the grant was commuted for a money payment
of twenty marks per annum, we need not conclude that
Chaucer's circumstances were poor; for it may be easily
supposed that the daily "perception" of such an article of
income was attended with considerable prosaic inconvenience.
A permanent provision for Chaucer was made on the 8th of
June 1374, when he was appointed Controller of the Customs in
the Port of London, for the lucrative imports of wools, skins or
"wool-fells," and tanned hides -- on condition that he should
fulfil the duties of that office in person and not by deputy, and
should write out the accounts with his own hand. We have
what seems evidence of Chaucer's compliance with these terms
in "The House of Fame", where, in the mouth of the eagle, the
poet describes himself, when he has finished his labour and
made his reckonings, as not seeking rest and news in social
intercourse, but going home to his own house, and there, "all so
dumb as any stone," sitting "at another book," until his look is
dazed; and again, in the record that in 1376 he received a grant
of L731, 4s. 6d., the amount of a fine levied on one John Kent,
whom Chaucer's vigilance had frustrated in the attempt to ship a
quantity of wool for Dordrecht without paying the duty. The
seemingly derogatory condition, that the Controller should
write out the accounts or rolls ("rotulos") of his office with his
own hand, appears to have been designed, or treated, as merely
formal; no records in Chaucer's handwriting are known to exist
-- which could hardly be the case if, for the twelve years of his
Controllership (1374-1386), he had duly complied with the
condition; and during that period he was more than once
employed abroad, so that the condition was evidently regarded
as a formality even by those who had imposed it. Also in 1374,
the Duke of Lancaster, whose ambitious views may well have
made him anxious to retain the adhesion of a man so capable
and accomplished as Chaucer, changed into a joint life-annuity
remaining to the survivor, and charged on the revenues of the
Savoy, a pension of L10 which two years before he settled on
the poet's wife -- whose sister was then the governess of the
Duke's two daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth, and the Duke's
own mistress. Another proof of Chaucer's personal reputation
and high Court favour at this time, is his selection (1375) as
ward to the son of Sir Edmond Staplegate of Bilsynton, in Kent;
a charge on the surrender of which the guardian received no
less a sum than L104.

We find Chaucer in 1376 again employed on a foreign mission.
In 1377, the last year of Edward III., he was sent to Flanders
with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, for the
purpose of obtaining a prolongation of the truce; and in January
13738, he was associated with Sir Guichard d'Angle and other
Commissioners, to pursue certain negotiations for a marriage
between Princess Mary of France and the young King Richard
II., which had been set on foot before the death of Edward III.
The negotiation, however, proved fruitless; and in May 1378,
Chaucer was selected to accompany Sir John Berkeley on a
mission to the Court of Bernardo Visconti, Duke of Milan, with
the view, it is supposed, of concerting military plans against the
outbreak of war with France. The new King, meantime, had
shown that he was not insensible to Chaucer's merit -- or to the
influence of his tutor and the poet's patron, the Duke of
Lancaster; for Richard II. confirmed to Chaucer his pension of
twenty marks, along with an equal annual sum, for which the
daily pitcher of wine granted in 1374 had been commuted.
Before his departure for Lombardy, Chaucer -- still holding his
post in the Customs -- selected two representatives or trustees,
to protect his estate against legal proceedings in his absence, or
to sue in his name defaulters and offenders against the imposts
which he was charged to enforce. One of these trustees was
called Richard Forrester; the other was John Gower, the poet,
the most famous English contemporary of Chaucer, with whom
he had for many years been on terms of admiring friendship --
although, from the strictures passed on certain productions of
Gower's in the Prologue to The Man of Law's Tale,<6> it has
been supposed that in the later years of Chaucer's life the
friendship suffered some diminution. To the "moral Gower" and
"the philosophical Strode," Chaucer "directed" or dedicated his
"Troilus and Cressida;" <7> while, in the "Confessio Amantis,"
Gower introduces a handsome compliment to his greater
contemporary, as the "disciple and the poet" of Venus, with
whose glad songs and ditties, made in her praise during the
flowers of his youth, the land was filled everywhere. Gower,
however -- a monk and a Conservative -- held to the party of
the Duke of Gloucester, the rival of the Wycliffite and
innovating Duke of Lancaster, who was Chaucer's patron, and
whose cause was not a little aided by Chaucer's strictures on the
clergy; and thus it is not impossible that political differences
may have weakened the old bonds of personal friendship and
poetic esteem. Returning from Lombardy early in 1379,
Chaucer seems to have been again sent abroad; for the records
exhibit no trace of him between May and December of that
year. Whether by proxy or in person, however, he received his
pensions regularly until 1382, when his income was increased
by his appointment to the post of Controller of Petty Customs
in the port of London. In November 1384, he obtained a
month's leave of absence on account of his private affairs, and a
deputy was appointed to fill his place; and in February of the
next year he was permitted to appoint a permanent deputy --
thus at length gaining relief from that close attention to business
which probably curtailed the poetic fruits of the poet's most
powerful years. <8>

Chaucer is next found occupying a post which has not often
been held by men gifted with his peculiar genius -- that of a
county member. The contest between the Dukes of Gloucester
and Lancaster, and their adherents, for the control of the
Government, was coming to a crisis; and when the recluse and
studious Chaucer was induced to offer himself to the electors of
Kent as one of the knights of their shire -- where presumably he
held property -- we may suppose that it was with the view of
supporting his patron's cause in the impending conflict. The
Parliament in which the poet sat assembled at Westminster on
the 1st of October, and was dissolved on the 1st of November,
1386. Lancaster was fighting and intriguing abroad, absorbed in
the affairs of his Castilian succession; Gloucester and his friends
at home had everything their own way; the Earl of Suffolk was
dismissed from the woolsack, and impeached by the Commons;
and although Richard at first stood out courageously for the
friends of his uncle Lancaster, he was constrained, by the refusal
of supplies, to consent to the proceedings of Gloucester. A
commission was wrung from him, under protest, appointing
Gloucester, Arundel, and twelve other Peers and prelates, a
permanent council to inquire into the condition of all the public
departments, the courts of law, and the royal household, with
absolute powers of redress and dismissal. We need not ascribe
to Chaucer's Parliamentary exertions in his patron's behalf, nor
to any malpractices in his official conduct, the fact that he was
among the earliest victims of the commission.<9> In December
1386, he was dismissed from both his offices in the port of
London; but he retained his pensions, and drew them regularly
twice a year at the Exchequer until 1388. In 1387, Chaucer's
political reverses were aggravated by a severe domestic
calamity: his wife died, and with her died the pension which had
been settled on her by Queen Philippa in 1366, and confirmed to
her at Richard's accession in 1377. The change made in
Chaucer's pecuniary position, by the loss of his offices and his
wife's pension, must have been very great. It would appear that
during his prosperous times he had lived in a style quite equal to
his income, and had no ample resources against a season of
reverse; for, on the 1st of May 1388, less than a year and a half
after being dismissed from the Customs, he was constrained to
assign his pensions, by surrender in Chancery, to one John
Scalby. In May 1389, Richard II., now of age, abruptly
resumed the reins of government, which, for more than two
years, had been ably but cruelly managed by Gloucester. The
friends of Lancaster were once more supreme in the royal
councils, and Chaucer speedily profited by the change. On the
12th of July he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works at the
Palace of Westminster, the Tower, the royal manors of
Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Sheen, Byfleet, Childern
Langley, and Feckenham, the castle of Berkhamstead, the royal
lodge of Hathenburgh in the New Forest, the lodges in the
parks of Clarendon, Childern Langley, and Feckenham, and the
mews for the King's falcons at Charing Cross; he received a
salary of two shillings per day, and was allowed to perform the
duties by deputy. For some reason unknown, Chaucer held this
lucrative office <10> little more than two years, quitting it
before the 16th of September 1391, at which date it had passed
into the hands of one John Gedney. The next two years and a
half are a blank, so far as authentic records are concerned;
Chaucer is supposed to have passed them in retirement,
probably devoting them principally to the composition of The
Canterbury Tales. In February 1394, the King conferred upon
him a grant of L20 a year for life; but he seems to have had no
other source of income, and to have become embarrassed by
debt, for frequent memoranda of small advances on his pension
show that his circumstances were, in comparison, greatly
reduced. Things appear to have grown worse and worse with
the poet; for in May 1398 he was compelled to obtain from the
King letters of protection against arrest, extending over a term
of two years. Not for the first time, it is true -- for similar
documents had been issued at the beginning of Richard's reign;
but at that time Chaucer's missions abroad, and his responsible
duties in the port of London, may have furnished reasons for
securing him against annoyance or frivolous prosecution, which
were wholly wanting at the later date. In 1398, fortune began
again to smile upon him; he received a royal grant of a tun of
wine annually, the value being about L4. Next year, Richard II
having been deposed by the son of John of Gaunt <11> --
Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster -- the new King, four
days after hits accession, bestowed on Chaucer a grant of forty
marks (L26, 13s. 4d.) per annum, in addition to the pension of
L20 conferred by Richard II. in 1394. But the poet, now
seventy-one years of age, and probably broken down by the
reverses of the past few years, was not destined long to enjoy
his renewed prosperity. On Christmas Eve of 1399, he entered
on the possession of a house in the garden of the Chapel of the
Blessed Mary of Westminster -- near to the present site of
Henry VII.'s Chapel -- having obtained a lease from Robert
Hermodesworth, a monk of the adjacent convent, for fifty-three
years, at the annual rent of four marks (L2, 13s. 4d.) Until the
1st of March 1400, Chaucer drew his pensions in person; then
they were received for him by another hand; and on the 25th of
October, in the same year, he died, at the age of seventy-two.
The only lights thrown by his poems on his closing days are
furnished in the little ballad called "Good Counsel of Chaucer,"
-- which, though said to have been written when "upon his
death-bed lying in his great anguish, "breathes the very spirit of
courage, resignation, and philosophic calm; and by the
"Retractation" at the end of The Canterbury Tales, which, if it
was not foisted in by monkish transcribers, may be supposed the
effect of Chaucer's regrets and self-reproaches on that solemn
review of his life-work which the close approach of death
compelled. The poet was buried in Westminster Abbey; <12>
and not many years after his death a slab was placed on a pillar
near his grave, bearing the lines, taken from an epitaph or
eulogy made by Stephanus Surigonus of Milan, at the request of
Caxton:

"Galfridus Chaucer, vates, et fama poesis
Maternae, hoc sacra sum tumulatus humo." <13>

About 1555, Mr Nicholas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford who
greatly admired the genius of Chaucer, erected the present
tomb, as near to the spot where the poet lay, "before the chapel
of St Benet," as was then possible by reason of the "cancelli,"
<14> which the Duke of Buckingham subsequently obtained
leave to remove, that room might be made for the tomb of
Dryden. On the structure of Mr Brigham, besides a full-length
representation of Chaucer, taken from a portrait drawn by his
"scholar" Thomas Occleve, was -- or is, though now almost
illegible -- the following inscription:--

M. S.
QUI FUIT ANGLORUM VATES TER MAXIMUS OLIM,
GALFRIDUS CHAUCER CONDITUR HOC TUMULO;
ANNUM SI QUAERAS DOMINI, SI TEMPORA VITAE,
ECCE NOTAE SUBSUNT, QUE TIBI CUNCTA NOTANT.
25 OCTOBRIS 1400.
AERUMNARUM REQUIES MORS.
N. BRIGHAM HOS FECIT MUSARUM NOMINE SUMPTUS
1556. <15>

Concerning his personal appearance and habits, Chaucer has not
been reticent in his poetry. Urry sums up the traits of his aspect
and character fairly thus: "He was of a middle stature, the latter
part of his life inclinable to be fat and corpulent, as appears by
the Host's bantering him in the journey to Canterbury, and
comparing shapes with him.<16> His face was fleshy, his
features just and regular, his complexion fair, and somewhat
pale, his hair of a dusky yellow, short and thin; the hair of his
beard in two forked tufts, of a wheat colour; his forehead broad
and smooth; his eyes inclining usually to the ground, which is
intimated by the Host's words; his whole face full of liveliness, a
calm, easy sweetness, and a studious Venerable aspect. . . . As
to his temper, he had a mixture of the gay, the modest, and the
grave. The sprightliness of his humour was more distinguished
by his writings than by his appearance; which gave occasion to
Margaret Countess of Pembroke often to rally him upon his
silent modesty in company, telling him, that his absence was
more agreeable to her than his conversation, since the first was
productive of agreeable pieces of wit in his writings, <17> but
the latter was filled with a modest deference, and a too distant
respect. We see nothing merry or jocose in his behaviour with
his pilgrims, but a silent attention to their mirth, rather than any
mixture of his own. . . When disengaged from public affairs, his
time was entirely spent in study and reading; so agreeable to
him was this exercise, that he says he preferred it to all other
sports and diversions.<18> He lived within himself, neither
desirous to hear nor busy to concern himself with the affairs of
his neighbours. His course of living was temperate and regular;
he went to rest with the sun, and rose before it; and by that
means enjoyed the pleasures of the better part of the day, his
morning walk and fresh contemplations. This gave him the
advantage of describing the morning in so lively a manner as he
does everywhere in his works. The springing sun glows warm in
his lines, and the fragrant air blows cool in his descriptions; we
smell the sweets of the bloomy haws, and hear the music of the
feathered choir, whenever we take a forest walk with him. The
hour of the day is not easier to be discovered from the reflection
of the sun in Titian's paintings, than in Chaucer's morning
landscapes. . . . His reading was deep and extensive, his
judgement sound and discerning. . . In one word, he was a great
scholar, a pleasant wit, a candid critic, a sociable companion, a
steadfast friend, a grave philosopher, a temperate economist,
and a pious Christian."

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