Kenneth Joseph Mortimer
Geoffrey Chaucer by K.J. Mortimer
Geoffrey Chaucer is a poet I feel to be really modern, somebody
whose company I could sit down and enjoy. He was born shortly
after 1340 and died in 1400. He had a sly, dry sense of humour,
he was deeply religious but mocked superstition and credulity,
he had travelled much, learnt foreign languages, had wide experience,
was at ease with people of every social class, was the friend
of royalty and nobility, and had studied science. All this appears
in the most famous of his works, The Canterbury Tales, with its
brilliant Prologue.
In all literature there is nothing that touches
or resembles the Prologue. It is the concise portrait of an entire
nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and
clerical, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and
sea, town and country, but without extremes. Apart from the stunning
clarity, touched with nuance, of the characters presented, the
most noticeable thing about them is their normality. They are
the perennial progeny of men and women. Neville Coghill
Chaucer does not actually describe the pilgrims
who are on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket
in Canterbury. We know them by the way they speak and act. Chaucer
seems to lose himself in his characters. The stories they tell
to pass the time on the road are elevated, affectedly refined
or coarse and bawdy according to the people who tell them. Here
is his description of the prioress, superior of a convent of nuns,
obviously of common stock but now putting on airs of refinement,
thanks to the great social mobility that was possible in the Church.
There was also a Nun, a Prioress,
That of her smiling was full simple and coy;
Her greatest oath was but by Saint Loy;
And she was clepéd Madame Eglantine.
Full well she sang the servicé divine,
Entunéd in her nose full seemely;
And French she spake full fair and fetisly,
After the school of Stratford atté Bow,
For French of Paris was to her unknow,
At meaté well y-taught was she withal;
She let no morsel from her lippés fall,
Ne wet her fingers in her saucé deep.
Well could she carry a morsel, and well keep,
That no dropé ne fell upon her breast.
In courtesy was set full much her lest.
Her over lippé wipéd she so clean,
That in her cuppé was no ferthing seen
Of greasé, when she drunken had her draught.
Note that words often do not have exactly the same
meaning as in modern English; for example meat means food in general
and very means true, authentic, adverb verily.
The brazen self-assurance of the hypocritical mendicant
friar in the Summoner’s Tale appears when he enters the
house of a peasant:
And from the bench he drove away the cat,
And laying down his pointed staff and hat,
His scrip as well, he settled softly down.
(The quotations in modern English are taken from
Neville Coghill.)
He plays upon the credulity of the peasant’s
wife when she tells him that their baby boy has died:
‘I know, I saw his death by revelation,’
Replied the friar, ‘in our dormitory,
I saw the little fellow borne to glory...
Our sexton and our infirmarian,
They saw it too, both friars boy and man
These fifty years, thank God. ...
I rose at once, in fact the entire place
Rose, and the tears were trickling down my face.
There was no noise, no clattering bells were rung,
But a Te Deum – nothing else – was sung.
The friar goes on in a way to suggest that such
supernatural phenomena are normal occurrences in the friary he
is begging for, thanks to the sanctity of its community and their
powers of intercession with the Divine. The humour that follows
is far less subtle, of a kind that the prioress no doubt pretended
not to hear, but also shows that Chaucer knew something of the
science of physics. Exasperated by the friar’s begging,
the peasant, who is ill in bed, says that he has something for
the friary hidden under his back, which however must be divided
equally between all twelve members of the community. The friar
puts down his hand, expecting to find a packet of coins, but receives
instead a noisy blast.
Furious, he hies himself off to the castle of the
local baron to complain of the disgusting behaviour of the lord’s
serf, adding that to add insult to injury the man had said his
donation should be divided equally among the twelve friars, which
was impossible since “a fart or any other sound is only
air reverberating round.” While the lord and his lady struggle
to keep a straight face, an attendant page suggests a hilarious
solution, one however not at all to the liking of the mendicant
priest.
The Miller’s Tale contains humour that is
far more bawdy, yet not merely obscene thanks to the wit and the
skill in telling. One wanders what sort of scenes there were when
Chaucer was reading these stories aloud to the royal court. The
queen and her ladies must have been hysterical with laughter.
As far as women are concerned, in all literature
and science of psychology, only one author stands comparison with
Chaucer for understanding of a woman’s mind and that is
Shakespeare. The introduction to the story told by the wife of
Bath, where the boisterous good lady tells how she treated her
husbands, is a masterpiece.
Like Shakespeare, we see that Chaucer was neither
a tormented, lonely soul whose works were the result of inner
brooding, nor one given to theories, schools of art and the egotistic
satisfaction of standing on a lonely pedestal. Both enjoyed the
real world and real people. How did Chaucer come to be such a
happy extrovert?
He was born in a London small by modern standards
but international, full of life and in a small space abounding
with people of every description and following every kind of activity.
He received an education in Latin in a school under the shadow
of the 450ft high towers of St. Paul’s Cathedral (destroyed
in the Great Fire of London and replaced at the end of the seventeenth
century by the present monument of Sir Christopher Wren.). Then
he mingled with merchants, clergy, lawyers and royal officials
who thronged the shops, churches, law courts and taverns, and
with the travellers from all over Europe alighting from the ships
borne up the river Thames by the rising tide. He could cross the
broad stream by London Bridge and gaze upon the mighty walls of
the frowning Tower of London.
Records show that in 1357 Chaucer became page in
the court of Lionel Duke of Clarence, second son of the reigning
King Edward III, taking part in royal pageantry and learning polite
manners and etiquette in the course of his duties. In 1360 he
was made prisoner during the siege of Rheims in France and then
released for a ransom paid in part by King Edward himself. He
must have already been held in considerable esteem and in the
same year was entrusted with letters from Calais for Duke Lionel.
Less is known about the next few years of Geoffrey
Chaucer’s life, but apparently he prepared in the Inner
Temple for his future career as an official by studying law, Bible,
history, singing, dancing and such sports as were considered suitable
in court circles. In 1366 he married Philippa, daughter of Sir
Payne Roet, lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa of Hainault, and
future sister-in-law of no less a person than John of Gaunt himself.
In 1369 he saw more military service and subsequently visited
Florence and Genoa, learning Italian and reading Dante, Petrarch
and Boccaccio. He received more favours at home, where two sons
were born to him. For twelve years Chaucer was Controller of Customs.
He was confirmed in his post when Richard II became king in 1377
and was sent on missions to France and Italy. Other honours followed,
the most important of which was becoming Clerk of the King’s
Works, 1389-1391.
With all these heavy responsibilities, Chaucer became
nonetheless the Father of English Poetry. Perhaps these duties
and the contacts they involved explain an outstanding feature
of Chaucer’s work; while strongly supporting orthodox faith
and morals and all the virtues that make up a noble character,
he showed kindly and amused tolerance of human failings and was
never cruel or contemptuous. In short, his Christian conviction
made him look on his fellow human beings with LOVE!
Appearing in NDU Spirit #43, revue of Notre
Dame University, Lebanon.
