Chaucer and His England Part 6

still ran at low tide over native s.h.i.+ngle and mud; the Southwark sh.o.r.e was green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country.

Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as two miles from the walls, "but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On all sides," he continues, "without the houses of the suburb, are the citizens' gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly, and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows, with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise.

Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear.

Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement's Well are most famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer evenings, when they walk forth to take the air." No doubt in Chaucer's time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop's Wood in Stepney parish and the fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the "Great Forest" of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley's "Memorials" contain frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, "a little herber[129] that I have," in which Chaucer laid the scene of his "Legend of Good Women." These gardens seem to have made a fairly continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer home, however, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street, Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln's twenty carefully-tilled acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages which cl.u.s.tered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence in which Becket's chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the city. "Many citizens," writes Fitzstephen, "do delight themselves in hawks and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middles.e.x, Hertfords.h.i.+re, all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray." The city huntsman was, in those days, a salaried official of some dignity.

So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a company of nature-poets unsurpa.s.sed in any language. May we not hope that his companions in the "little herber," or on his wider excursions, were sometimes "the moral Gower" or "the philosophical Strode?" And may we not picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer's friend was probably the Ralph Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability as the author of "Pearl" and other 14th-century poems second only to Chaucer's. However that may be, "the philosophical Strode" must unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his "Troilus," and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer's own reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter--

O younge freshe folkes, he or she, In which that love upgroweth with your age, Repair ye home from worldly vanitie, And of your heart upcast ye the visage To that same G.o.d that after His image You made; and think that all is but a fair, This world, that pa.s.seth soon as flowers fair.

But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the long day wanes at last; and now--

When that the sun out of the south 'gan west And that this flower 'gan close, and go to rest, For darkness of the night, the which she dread, Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped To go to rest, and early for to rise.

The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he must surely have read: "The only pests of London are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires."

CHAPTER X

THE LAWS OF LONDON

"Del un Marchant au jour present L'en parle molt communement, Il ad noun Triche plein de guile, Qe pour sercher del orient Jusques au fin del occident, N'y ad cite ne bonne vile U Triche son avoir ne pile.

Triche en Bourdeaux, Triche en Civile, Triche en Paris achat et vent; Triche ad ses niefs et sa famile, Et du richesce plus n.o.bile Triche ad disz foitz plus q'autre gent.

Triche a Florence et a Venise Ad son recet et sa franchise, Si ad a Brugges et a Gant; A son agard auci s'est mise La n.o.ble Cite sur Tamise, La quelle Brutus fuist fondant; Mais Triche la vait confondant."

GOWER, "Mirour," 25273 ff.

But the picturesque side of things was only the smaller half of Chaucer's life, as it is of ours. We must not be more royalist than the King, or claim more for Chaucer and his England than he himself would ever have dreamed of claiming. That which seems most beautiful and romantic to us was not necessarily so five hundred years ago. The literature of Chivalry, for instance, seems to have touched Chaucer comparatively little: he scarcely mentions it but in more or less open derision. Again, while Ruskin and William Morris seem at times almost tempted to wish themselves back to the 14th century for the sake of its Gothic architecture, Chaucer in his retrospective mood is not ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet uncorrupted by architects of any description whatever--

No trumpes for the warres folk ne knew, Nor towers high and walles round or square ...

Yet were no palace chambers, nor no halls; In caves and in woodes soft and sweet Slepten this blessed folk withouten walls.[131]

No doubt he would as little have chosen seriously to go back to hips and haws as Morris would seriously have wished to live in the Middle Ages. But his words may warn us against over-estimating the picturesque side of his age. The most important is commonly what goes on under the surface; and this was eminently true of Chaucer's native London. When we look closely into the social and political ideals of those motley figures which thronged the streets, we may see there our own modern liberties in the making, and note once more how slowly, yet how surely, the mills of G.o.d grind. It was once as hard for a community of a few thousand souls to govern itself as it is now for a nation; and parts of what seem to us the very foundations of civilized society were formerly as uncertain and tentative as Imperial Federation or the International Peace Congress.

The ordinary English town after the Conquest was originally simply part of a feudal estate: a rather denser aggregation than the ordinary village, and therefore rather more conscious of solidarity and power. The householders, by dint of holding more and more together, became increasingly capable of driving collective bargains, and of concentrating their numerical force upon any point at issue. They thus throve better than the isolated peasant; and their growing prosperity made them able to pay heavier dues to their feudal lords, who thus saw a prospect of immediate pecuniary gain in selling fresh liberties to the citizens. This process, which was still in its earlier stages in many towns during Chaucer's lifetime, was, however, already far advanced in London, which claimed over other cities a superiority symbolized by the legend of its origin: Brut, the son of aeneas, had founded it, and named it Troynovant, or New Troy. But the city had far more tangible claims to supremacy than this: it had obtained from Henry I.--earlier by nearly a century than any other--the right of electing its own sheriff and justiciar; and from a still earlier time than this it had been almost as important politically as it is now. Mr. Loftie, whose "London" in the "Historic Towns" series gives so clear a view of its political development, shows us the city holding out against Canute long after the rest of the kingdom had been conquered; and making, even after Hastings, such terms with the Conqueror as secured to the citizens their traditional liberties. Even thus early, the city fully exemplified the dignity and enduring power of commerce and industry in an age of undisguised physical force. Its foreign trade was considerable, and foreign settlers numerous. "Already there was trade with the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee; and Norman s.h.i.+ps, so far back as the days of aethelred and even of his father, had brought the wines of the south to London. The [German] emperor's men had already established their stafelhof, or steelyard, and traded under jealous rules and almost monastic discipline, but with such money that to this day 'sterling'

stands beside 'real' as an adjective, for the Royal credit was not better than that of the Easterling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong to the 'Gildhalda Theutonicorum,' as it was called in the 13th century, settled in the city beside the Normans of the Conquest, the Frenchmen mentioned in the charter, and the old English stock of law-worthy citizens."[132]

The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D., Fitzstephen boasted that London traded "with every nation under heaven"; and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing picture of English commerce; "Could the s.h.i.+ps of Thars.h.i.+sh" (he exclaims), "so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?" Our fortunate insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer's birth.

French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs, placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time even formally forbade "all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and Provence." All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; "robbed like a merchant" became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I., though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says, almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent Chaucer's father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer's grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King commanded on account of "certain outrages and despites" done to the Gascon merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have seen, were ma.s.sacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers, and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury--a hateful term, which, in the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of human nature. "He who taketh usury goeth to h.e.l.l, and he who taketh none, liveth on the verge of beggary"; so wrote an Italian contemporary of Chaucer's. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly accepted his chance of d.a.m.nation, and who would point to his big belly and fat cheeks with a scoffing "See how the priest's curses shrivel me up!"

Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been opened, he would have seen how "G.o.d had in fact fattened him for everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter"; but there remained many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. "Usurers'

bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred in front of the High Altar in churches"; so writes a great Franciscan preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady Meed in "Piers Plowman"--the incarnation of Illicit Gain--has scarcely come up to London when--

"Then came there a confessor, coped as a Friar ...

Then he absolved her soon, and sithen he said 'We have a window a-working, will cost us full high; Wouldst thou glaze that gable, and grave therein thy name, Sure should thy soul be heaven to have.'"[135]

In other words, the Canon Law practically compelled the taker of interest to become a villain, as the old penal laws encouraged the thief to commit murder. Gower, if we make a little obvious allowance for a satirist's rhetoric, will show us how ordinary citizens regarded the usurious Lombards.[136] "They claim to dwell in our land as freely, and with as warm a welcome, as if they had been born and bred amongst us.... But they meditate in their heart how to rob our silver and gold." They change (he says) their chaff for our corn; they sweep in our good sterling coin so that there is little left in the country. "To-day I see such Lombards come [to London] as menials in mean attire; and before a year is past, by dint of deceit and intrigue, they dress more n.o.bly than the burgesses of our city.... It is great shame that our Lords, who ought to keep our laws, should treat our merchants as serfs, and quietly free the hands of strange folk to rob us. But Covetise hath dominion over all things: for bribery makes friends and brings success: that is the custom in my country." Nor "in my country" only, but in other lands too; for the best-known firm of merchants now-a-days is Trick and Co. "Seek from East to the going out of the West, there is no city or good town where Trick does not rob to enrich himself. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and sells; Trick has his s.h.i.+ps and servants, and of the n.o.blest riches Trick has ten times more than other folk. At Florence and Venice, Trick has his fortress and freedom of trade; so he has at Bruges and Ghent; under his care too has the n.o.ble City on the Thames put herself, which Brutus founded, but which Trick is on the way to confound...." Why not, indeed, in an age in which all the bonds of society are loosed? "One [merchant]

told me the other day how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly who, being able to get the delights of this life, should pa.s.s them by: for after this life is over, no man knoweth for truth which way or by what path we go. Thus do the merchants of our present days dispute and say and answer for the most part."

Much of Gower's complaint about Trick might be equally truly applied to any age or community; but much was due also to the growth of large and complicated money transactions, involving considerable speculation on credit. Gower complains that merchants talked of "many thousands" where their fathers had talked of "scores" or "hundreds"; and he, like Chaucer, describes the dignified trader as affecting considerable outward show to disguise the insecurity of his financial position.[137] Edward III. set here a Royal example by failing for a million florins, or more than 4,000,000 of modern money, and thus ruining two of the greatest European banking firms, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence. Undeterred by similar risks, the de la Poles of Hull undertook to finance the King, and became the first family of great merchant-princes in England. Operations such as these opened a new world of possibilities for commerce--vast stakes on the table, and vast prizes to the winners. Moreover, city politics grew complicated in proportion with city finance. The ma.s.s of existing doc.u.ments shows a continual extension of the Londoner's civic authorities, until the townsfolk were trammeled by a network of byelaws not indeed so elaborate as those of a modern city, but incomparably more hampering and vexatious. On this subject, which is of capital importance for the comprehension of life in Chaucer's time, it would be difficult on the whole to put the facts more clearly than they have already been put by Riley on pp. cix. ff. of his introduction to the "Liber Albus." "Such is a sketch of some few of the leading features of social life within the walls of London in the 13th and 14th centuries. The good old times, whenever else they may have existed, a.s.suredly are not to be looked for in days like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated the lawmakers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these were times, the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws both national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately they created or protected comparatively few real valuable rights, gave birth to many and grievous wrongs. That the favoured and so-called _free_ citizen of London even--despite the extensive privileges in reference to trade which he enjoyed--was in possession of more than the faintest shadow of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance of the pages just submitted to the reader's notice, filled as they are with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive: laws, for example, which compelled each citizen,[138] whether he would or no, to be bail and surety for a neighbour's good behaviour, over whom perhaps it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for the King and the great lords of the land had stripped the stalls of all that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pa.s.s the city walls for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and artisans; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they permitted 'genteel dogs' to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the city officials on various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules, at what hours he was to walk in the streets, and incidentally, what he was to eat and what to drink. Viewed individually, laws and ordinances such as these may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but 'trifles make life,' the poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like these, must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man, and a burden hard to be borne. Every dark picture, however, has its reverse, and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too often treated little better than a slave; but, on the other hand, the price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour appear--at times, at least--to have been regulated on a very fair and liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be protected, in their dealings, against the artifices of adulteration, deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity, to some extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present day."

The words about the purity of the Thames need some modification in the light of such incidents as those recorded (for instance) in Mr. Sharpe's calendar of "Letter Book" G, pp. xxvii. ff.;[139] but the most serious gap in Riley's picture is the absence of any clear allusion to the almost incredible gulfs which are frequently to be found between 14th-century theory and practice. We have already seen how openly the city officials broke their own brand-new resolution about lodgings over the city gates; and the surviving records of all medieval cities tell the same tale, for which we might indeed be prepared by the wearisome iteration with which we find the same enactments re-enacted again and again, as if they had never been thought of before. As Dean Colet said, when the world of the Middle Ages was at its last gasp, it was not new laws that England needed, but a new spirit of justice in enforcing the old laws. Seldom, indeed, had these become an absolute dead letter--we find them invoked at times where we should least have expected it--but at the very best they were enforced with a barefaced partiality which cannot be paralleled in modern civilized countries even under the most unfavourable circ.u.mstances. From Norwich, one of the greatest towns in the kingdom, and certainly not one of the worst governed, we have fortunately surviving a series of Leet Court Rolls, which have been admirably edited by Mr. Hudson for the Selden Society, and commented on more briefly in his "Records of the City of Norwich."[140] He shows that, whereas the breach of certain civic regulations should nominally have been punished by a fine for the first offence, pillory for the second, and expulsion for the third, yet in fact there was no pretence, in an ordinary way, of taking the law literally.

"The price of ale was fixed according to the price of wheat. Almost every housewife of the leading families brewed ale and sold it to her neighbours, and invariably charged more than the fixed price. The authorities evidently expected and wished this course to be taken, for these ladies were regularly presented and amerced every year for the same offence, paid their amercements and went away to go through the same process in the future as in the past. Much the same course was pursued by other trades and occupations. Fishmongers, tanners, poulterers, cooks, etc., are fined wholesale year after year for breaking every by-law that concerned their business. In short, instead of a trader (as now) taking out a license to do his business on certain conditions which he is expected to keep, he was bound by conditions which he was expected to break and afterwards fined for the breach. The same financial result was attained or aimed at by a different method." Moreover, the fines themselves were collected with the strangest irregularity. "Some are excused by the Bailiffs without reason a.s.signed; some 'at the instance' of certain great people wis.h.i.+ng to do a good turn for a friend. Again, others make a bargain with the collector, thus expressed, as for instance, 'John de Swaffham is not in t.i.thing. Amercement 2_s._ He paid 6_d._, the rest is excused. He is quit.' Sometimes an entry is marked 'vad,' i.e. _vadiat_, or _vadiatur_, 'he gives a pledge,' or, 'it is pledged.' The Collector had seized a jug, or basin, or chair. But by far the larger number of entries are marked 'd,' i.e. _debet_, 'he owes it.' The Collector had got nothing.

At the end of each (great) Leet is a collector's account of moneys received and paid in to the Bailiffs or the City Chamberlain in three or four or more payments. By drawing out a balance sheet for the whole city in this year it appears that the total amount of all the amercements entered is 72 18_s._ 10_d._ This is equivalent to more than 1000 at the present value of money. But all that the Collectors can account for, even after Easter, is 17 0_s._ 2_d._ It is clear that however efficient the system was in preventing offences from pa.s.sing undetected, it did not do much to deter offenders from repeating them."

The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book; and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman, they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends.

Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences; yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe was "out at c.o.c.kcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Ma.s.s, so that by six o'clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town."[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer's sarcasm as to the unwholesome fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others.

Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a reduction in price "because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for these last seven years." "What!" replied the Cook, "for so long a time, and you are yet alive!" The author of "Piers Plowman" exhorts mayors to apply the pillory more strictly to--

"Brewsters and bakers, butchers and cooks; For these are men on this mould that most harm worken To the poor people that piece-meal buyen: For they poison the people privily and oft ..."

A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. "All the men of Sprowston sell sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human bodies."[143]

This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and partial as city justice still was in Chaucer's days, overstrained in theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real self-government and of real apprentices.h.i.+p to higher things in politics, not only civic but national. The const.i.tution of the city was frankly oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a const.i.tution of their own, which they often had to defend against encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or even at the risk of bloodshed--this in itself was the thin end of the democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed, domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of money, which (as 14th-century writers a.s.sert in even less qualified terms than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country squires,[144] successfully a.s.serted in Parliament the power of the purse, and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation's money, before they voted it for his use.

Moreover, it was due enormously to London and the great cities that our national liberties were safeguarded from the foreign invader. The considerable advance in national wealth between 1330 and 1430 was partly due to our success in war. While English cities multiplied, French cities had even in many cases to surrender into their King's hands those liberties for which they were now too poor to render the correspondent services. Yet, even before the first blow had been struck, those wars were already half-won by English commerce. "The secret of the battles of Crecy and Poitiers lies in the merchants' counting-houses of London, Bordeaux, and Bruges."[145] Apart from those habits and qualities which successful commerce implies, the amount of direct supplies in men and money contributed by the English towns during Edward's wars can only be fully realized by reading Dr. Sharpe's admirable prefaces to his "Calendars of Letter-Books." But a single instance is brief and striking enough to be quoted here.

Our crus.h.i.+ng defeat by the combined French and Spanish navies off La Roch.e.l.le in 1372 lost us the command of the sea until our victory at Cadzand in 1387; and Chaucer's Merchant rightly voiced the crying need of English commerce during that time--

He would the sea were kept, for any thing, Betwixte Middelburgh and Orewell.

During those fifteen years the ports of the south coast were constantly harried by privateers. The Isle of Wight was taken and plundered. The Prior of Lewes, heading a hastily raised force against the invaders, was taken prisoner at Rottingdean; and such efforts to clear the seas as were made on our part were not public, but merely civic, or even private. The men of Winchelsea and Rye burned a couple of Norman ports, after plundering the very churches; and the sailors of Portsmouth and Dartmouth collected a fleet which for a short while swept the Channel. This may be the reason why Chaucer, writing two years later, makes his bold s.h.i.+pman hail from Dartmouth. But, seven years before this raid, a single London merchant had done still more. A Scottish pirate named Mercer, reinforced by French and Spanish s.h.i.+ps, infested the North Sea until "G.o.d raised up against him one of the citizens of Troynovant." "John Philpot, citizen of London, a man of great wit, wealth and power, narrowly considering the default or treachery of the Duke of Lancaster and the other Lords who ought to have defended the realm, and pitying his oppressed countrymen, hired with his own money a thousand armed men.... And it came to pa.s.s that the Almighty, who ever helpeth pious vows, gave success to him and his, so that his men presently took the said Mercer, with all that he had taken by force from Scarborough, and fifteen more Spanish s.h.i.+ps laden with much riches. Whereat the whole people exulted ... and now John Philpot alone was praised in all men's mouths and held in admiration, while they spake opprobriously and with bitter blame of our princes and the host which had long ago been raised, as is the wont of the common herd in their changing moods."[146]

Walsingham's final moral here is, after all, that of Chaucer: "O stormy people, unsad and ever untrue, Aye indiscreet, and changing as a vane!"[147] English writers seem, indeed, to speak of their countrymen as especially fickle and inconstant; and there was no doubt more reason for the charge in those days, when men in general were far more swayed by impulse and less by reflexion--when indeed the fundamental insecurity of the social and political fabric was such as to thwart even the ripest reflexion at every turn. It is striking how short-lived were the London trading families until after Chaucer's time: no such succession as the Rothschilds and Barings was as yet possible. Moreover, in civic as in national politics, it was still possible to lose one's head for the crime of having shown too much zeal in a losing cause, as the career of Chaucer's colleague Brembre may testify.[148] Walsingham loses no opportunity of jeering at the inconstancy of the London citizens; he portrays their panic during the invasion scare of 1386, and during the King's suppression of their liberties in 1389-92, with all the superiority of a monk whose own skin was safe enough in the cloister of St. Alban's.

On this latter occasion the citizens had to pay Richard the enormous fine of 20,000--or, according to a Malmesbury monk, 40,000--for the restoration of their privileges; and even then they were glad to welcome him on his first gracious visit "as an angel of G.o.d."[149] But they bided their time, and Richard was to learn, like other sovereigns before and since, how heavy a sword the Londoners could throw into the political scale. Froissart noted that "they ever have been, are, and will be so long as the City stands, the most powerful of all England"; that what London thought was also what England thought; and that even a king might find he had gained but a Pyrrhic victory over them. "For where the men of London are at accord and fully agreed, no man dare gainsay them. They are of more weight than all the rest of England, nor dare any man drive them to bay, for they are most mighty in wealth and in men."[150]

However little Chaucer may have interested himself in his neighbours, here were things which no poet could help seeing. The real history of Medieval London is yet to be written; it will be a story of strange contrasts, gold and bra.s.s and iron and clay. But there was a greatness in the very disquiet and inconstancy of the city; some ideals were already fermenting there which, realized only after centuries of conflict, have made modern England what we are proud to see her; and other ideals of which we, like our forefathers, can only say that we trust in their future realization.

CHAPTER XI

"CANTERBURY TALES"--THE _DRAMATIS PERSONae_

"Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together To seek St. James, and saints in Rome.

They went forth in their way with many wise tales, And had leave to lie all their life after ...

Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves, Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after; Great lubbers and long, that loth were to labour, Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other, And shaped themselves as hermits, their ease to have."

"Piers Plowman," B., Prol. 46

During those twelve years in Aldgate Tower, Chaucer's genius fought its way through the literary conventions of his time to the full a.s.sertion of its native originality. He had begun with allegory and moralization, after the model of the "Roman de la Rose"; shreds of these conventions clung to him even to the end of the Aldgate period; but they were already outworn.

In "Troilus and Cressida" we have real men and women under all the cla.s.sical machinery: they think and act as men thought and acted in Chaucer's time; and Pandarus especially is so lifelike and individual that Shakespeare will transfer him almost bodily to his own canvas. In the "House of Fame" and the "Legend of Good Women" the form indeed is again allegorical, but the poet's individuality breaks through this narrow mask; his self-revelations are franker and more direct than at any previous time; and in each case he wearied of the poem and broke off long before the end. With the humility of a true artist, he had practised his hand for years to draw carefully after the old acknowledged models; but these now satisfied him less and less. His mind was stored with images which could not be forced into the narrow framework of a dream; he must find a canvas broad enough for all the life of his time; for the cream of all that he had seen and heard in Flanders and France and Italy, in the streets of London and on the open highways of a dozen English counties. Boccaccio, for a similar scheme, had brought together a company of young Florentines of the upper cla.s.s, and of both s.e.xes, in a villa-garden. Chaucer's plan of a pilgrim cavalcade gave him a variety of character as much greater as the company in a third-cla.s.s carriage is more various than that in a West-end club.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HOSTELRY AT NIGHT

(From a 15th-century MS. of "Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles" in the Hunterian Library at Glasgow)]