Chaucer and His England Part 2

His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had taken part in a second French campaign, he was "abroad in the King's service" during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and 1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the latter year, when he "was joined in a commission with James p.r.o.nam and John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where the Genoese might form a commercial establishment."[44] This journey lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or about 1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions that Chaucer's business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest of business doc.u.ments opens out a vista of things in themselves most romantic.

Of all that makes the traveller's joy in modern Italy, the greater part was already there for Chaucer to see, with much more that he saw and that we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of these things, and less inclined to find G.o.d's hand in the mountains or the sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of mountain scenery which comes out in the "Pearl" and in early Scottish poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance's sea-voyages, he expedites them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel pa.s.sage in the rough little boats of those days, "a perilous horse to ride,"

indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant elbow room--

"Bestow the boat, boatswain, anon, That our pilgrims may play thereon; For some are like to cough and groan ...

This meanewhile the pilgrims lie And have their bowles fast them by And cry after hot Malvoisie ...

Some laid their bookes on their knee, And read so long they might not see:-- 'Alas! mine head will cleave in three!'"[45]

Worse pa.s.sages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us how Herve de Leon "took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days, and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Herve of Leon was so sore troubled that he had never health after." King John of France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel,[46] and Edward III. had one pa.s.sage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the arts of "necromancers and wizards." Moreover, nearly all Chaucer's emba.s.sies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372, when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, "the most desolate, the most solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia."[47] But, after all these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches had been inhospitable:

"Il fait bien bon demeurer Au doux chateau de Pavie."[48]

We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least delightful pa.s.sages of Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ are those which describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish brought out of the sea.

For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer found there a living art and living literature, the n.o.blest in the then world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their decay, would at once strike a n.o.ble note of contrast to the familiar wooden dwellings built over Thames s.h.i.+ngle at home; everywhere he would find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their first freshness, with thousands more which have long since disappeared.

Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built, the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer must have pa.s.sed through Pisa and Florence like a new aeneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with each other in every department of human skill--

"Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura Exercet sub sole labor--"

Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet's business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy.

To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante's literary personality was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense individualism and the frankness with which he a.s.serted his own personal convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which Dante wielded the keys of heaven and h.e.l.l is the fundamental independence of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to h.e.l.l, he was only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent.

But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady whom he had loved on earth--in this choice, and in his corresponding independence of expression, he gave an impetus to free thought far beyond what he himself can have intended. Virgil's parting speech at the end of the "Purgatorio," "Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I make thee King and High Priest over thyself," conveyed a licence of which others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St.

Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked effectually upon a mind which "was going through an intense religious crisis."[49] Dante's mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the earliest extant from his pen. "Chaucer's A. B. C.," a rapturous hymn to the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach more perilously near to Mariolatry than this--"Almighty and all-merciable Queen"! Another poem of the same period is the "Life of St. Cecilia,"

with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante, and its fervent prayer for help against temptation--

Now help, thou meek and blissful faire maid Me flemed wretch in this desert of gall; [banished Think on the woman Canaanee, that said That whelpes eaten some of the crumbes all That from their lordes table been y-fall; And though that I, unworthy son of Eve Be sinful, yet accept now my believe....

And of thy light my soul in prison light, That troubled is by the contagion Of my body, and also by the weight Of earthly l.u.s.t, and false affection: O haven of refuge, O salvation Of them that be in sorrow and in distress Now help, for to my work I will me dress.[50]

But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the great Florentine's style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in Chaucer's later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him, and of none after him until the 16th century brought English men of letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.

Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey, of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of the "Clerk's Tale" would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the former; and most biographers have a.s.sumed that it is not only the fict.i.tious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he had just translated into Latin from the "Decameron" during the very year of Chaucer's visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English poet's fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready pa.s.sport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from Petrarch "at Padua," the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer's Italian journey at Arqua, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily a.s.sumed as a proof of Chaucer's ignorance, does in fact show that he possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch's whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal intercourse.[51] This is admirably ill.u.s.trated by the story of Chaucer's relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days, before Boccaccio's first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious difficulty. Great as are Chaucer's literary obligations to the author of the "Decameron," he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio's.[52] It is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and that Chaucer, while claiming the right of "conveying" from Boccaccio as much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked out with Boccaccio's true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer's character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the a.s.sumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see that in Dante's and Petrarch's cases he proclaims his debt with the most commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval ma.n.u.scripts were quite commonly written without anything like the modern t.i.tle-page; and, even when the author's name was recorded on the first page, the frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a t.i.tle after his own fancy.[53] Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the streets of Boccaccio's Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of Fiesole under which the lovers of the "Decameron" had sat, and missed by a few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated whole books of his without ever realizing their true authors.h.i.+p. In those days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the King's Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed, a.s.sure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore, that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.

It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of 1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This, however, was taken as disproved by the more recent a.s.sertion of Nicholas that Chaucer drew his pension in England "with his own hands" during all this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby's researches have reopened the possibility of the old tradition.[54] He ascertained, by a fresh examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to Milan, but the words _into his own hands_ are omitted from this particular entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght's a.s.sertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer's own silence on the subject may have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the Knight's mouth in protest against the Monk's fondness for tragedies--

... for little heaviness Is right enough to many folk, I guess.

I say for me it is a great dis-ease, Where as men have been in great wealth and ease, To hearen of their sudden fall, alas!

Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer's old master. The Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan on the bridegroom's arrival. But three months after the wedding "my lord Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for that the fas.h.i.+on of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan, and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one accord." This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55] Why should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters in his life--the Black Death, and Wat Tyler's revolt. It is still possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of Milan.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

"Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a ledger."--_Times_

The Italian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer's last emba.s.sy.

In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February of next year he was a.s.sociated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur's partner at the battle of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer, would have seen his old fellow-envoy's head grinning down from the spikes of London Bridge side by side with "a quarter of Sir Harry Percy."[56] In April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d'Angle and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no authority to treat. So the emba.s.sy ended only in a very brief extension of the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later, when Richard took to second wife Marie's niece Isabella, then only in her eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again a.s.sociated with Sir Guichard d'Angle and two others on a mission to negotiate for Richard's marriage with one of poor little Marie's sisters. Here also the discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir Edward Berkeley on a fresh emba.s.sy to Italy. This time it was to treat "of certain matters touching the King's war" with the great English _condottiere_ Sir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate afforded matter for one of the Monk's "tragedies" in the "Canterbury Tales"--

Of Milan greate Barnabo Viscount, G.o.d of delight and scourge of Lombardye.

During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this, so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.

It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant circ.u.mstances of these later emba.s.sies, important as they are for showing the high estimate put on Chaucer's business talents, and much as they must have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully matured at last in the poet of the "Canterbury Tales." But they show us that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate sister of Clarence's Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins.

These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he became no longer the mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a genius) of French and Italian cla.s.sics, but a cla.s.sic himself, master of a style that could express all the acc.u.mulated observations of half a century--Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English men and women, and no other man. The a.n.a.lysis and criticism of the works which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough, strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare has been to us ever since.

It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at court. On St. George's day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of wine daily for life, "to be received in the port of London from the hands of the King's butler." Such grants were common enough; but they take us back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition had come down. St. George's was a day of solemn feasting in the Round Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services rendered during the past year. But the grant was already in those days more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was commuted for a life-pension of about 200 modern value.

Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune.

Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however, are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household amounted to some 1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wards.h.i.+ps and a large share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer's financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another comptrollers.h.i.+p which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollers.h.i.+p also; and in this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the s.h.i.+re for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues.

Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years.

In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet "_de raptu meo_." _Raptus_ often means simply _abduction_, and it may well be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia as had been made upon his own father, who, as it will be remembered, had narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the gratification of other people's private interests. This is rendered all the more probable by two other doc.u.ments connected with the same matter which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57] It is, however, possible that the _raptus_ was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer's "little son Lowis" was just ten years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation, have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on Cecilia's part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pa.s.s a law exacting that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pa.s.s on to the next of kin.[58] But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into a case of _raptus_, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]

During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer occupied those lodgings over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary point of view. Here he studied with an a.s.siduity which would have been impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in his later years of want and sordid s.h.i.+fts. Here he translated Boethius, of whose philosophical "Consolations" he was so soon to stand in bitter need.

Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that "Troilus and Cressida" which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In 1382 he composed his "Parliament of Fowls" in honour of Richard II.'s marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the "House of Fame" and the "Legend of Good Women." These two poems, like most of Chaucer's work, are unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind ourselves that he was no professional _litterateur_, but a courtier, diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their grat.i.tude for what he told them, few in those days would have been inclined to complain of all that Chaucer "left half-told." So the poet freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness after all these centuries.

This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the s.h.i.+re for Kent. His contemporary, Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, "at the palace of Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, n.o.bles, and counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease.

And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports, and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin, French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days before in all that he should say." Chaucer's Parliament sat more probably in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly pa.s.sed off with less order and unanimity than Froissart's of 1337, though the main theme was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crecy and Poitiers and a dozen other victories in pitched battles, our s.h.i.+ps had been destroyed off La Roch.e.l.le in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60]

and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and his fellow-members a.s.sembled on October 1, "it had still seemed possible that any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of the Thames."[61] The militia of the southern counties was still a.s.sembled to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out any longer. As a contemporary puts it, "The King would not come to Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to attend."[62] The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed preparations.

Meanwhile, however, other _proteges_ of his had suffered besides the great men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted from Richard a commission for a month "to receive and dispose of all crown revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and set up others in their stead."[63] Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls of this Parliament that the commission was issued "for inquiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the Subsidies and Customs; and as the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed to that investigation." It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so, and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the poet's character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then, when Richard's patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer's other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile--at such a moment it was almost inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in December both his comptrollers.h.i.+ps were in other men's hands. Even in his best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse would very naturally drive him to desperate s.h.i.+fts. It is not surprising, therefore, that we soon find him a.s.signing his two pensions to one John Scalby (May 1, 1388).

But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV.[64] At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter's pension as usual, but not at Michaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet's already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he probably wrote the greater part of the "Canterbury Tales."

Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain attempt to rea.s.sert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the "Merciless Parliament"

of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer's old colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world, he struck his blow. In May, 1389, "he suddenly entered the privy council, took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, 'What age am I?' They answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. 'Then,' said he, 'I am of full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.'" He at once dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John's factious younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester.

With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was natural that Chaucer's luck should turn. Two months after this scene in Council he was appointed by Richard II. "Clerk of our Works at our Palace of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern Langley, and f.e.c.kenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages." Our poet had also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the King's prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back runaways, and "to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the injunctions given in our name." That these time-honoured clauses were no dead letter, is shown by the still surviving doc.u.ments in which Chaucer deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen and impounding materials, by the constant pet.i.tions of medieval Parliaments against this system of "Purveyance" for the King's necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short while by "pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of Windsor."[65]

We have a curious inventory of the "dead stock" which Chaucer took over from his predecessors in the Clerks.h.i.+p, and for which he made himself responsible; the list ranges from "one bronze image, two stone images unpainted, seven images in the likeness of Kings" for Westminster Palace, with considerable fittings for the lists and galleries of a tournament, and 100 stone cannon b.a.l.l.s for the Tower, down to "one broken cable ...

one dilapidated pitchfork ... three sieves, whereof two are crazy."[66]

For all this, which he was allowed to do by deputy, Chaucer received two s.h.i.+llings a day, or something like 450 a year of modern money.[67]

Further commissions of the same kind were granted to him: the supervision of the works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, which was "threatened with ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground;" and again of a great scaffold in Smithfield for the Royal party on the occasion of the tournament in May, 1390. Two months earlier in this same year he had been a.s.sociated with his old colleague Sir Richard Stury and others on a commission to repair the d.y.k.es and drains of Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich, which were "so broken and ruined that manifold and inestimable damages have happened in times past, and more are feared for the future."

A marginal note on a MS. of his "Envoy to Scogan," written some three years later, states that the poet was then living at Greenwich; and a casual remark in the "Canterbury Tales" very probably points in the same direction.[68] Either in 1390 or 1391 a Geoffrey Chaucer, who was probably the poet, was appointed Forester of North Petherton Park in Somerset.

But here again we find one single mischance breaking the even tenour of Chaucer's new-born prosperity. In September, 1390, while on his journeys as Clerk of the Works, he was the victim of at least two, and just possibly three, highway robberies (of which two were on one day) at Westminster, and near "The Foul Oak" at Hatcham. Two of the robbers were in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the moment by turning King's evidence. He was, however, accused of another robbery in Hertfords.h.i.+re, and attempted to save his life by charging Thomas Talbot's servant with complicity in the crime. This time the accused offered "wager of battle." Brerelay was vanquished in the duel, and strung up out of hand.

It is difficult to resist the conviction that Chaucer was by this time recognized as an unbusiness-like person; for the King deprived him of his Clerks.h.i.+p in the following June (1391), at a time when we can find nothing in the political situation to account for the dismissal.

CHAPTER VI

LAST DAYS