Chaucer and the City (Chaucer Studies)

CHAUCER STUDIES XXXVII

CHAUCER AND THE CITY

Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume seeks to enhance our understanding of Chaucer's iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by historians on medieval London, as well as modern urban theory, the essays address the centrality of the city in Chaucer's work, and of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city. Contributors explore the spatial extent of the city, imaginatively and geographically; the diverse and sometimes violent relationships between communities, and the use of language to identify and speak for communities; the worlds of commerce, the aristocracy, law, and public order. A final section considers the longer history and memory of the medieval city beyond the devastations of the Great Fire and into the Victorian period.

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261–9822

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

CHAUCER AND THE CITY

Edited by ARDIS BUTTERFIELD

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2006 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 073 1 ISSN 0261–9822

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Disclaimer: Printed Some images in the printed version of in thisGreat bookBritain are notby available for inclusion in the eBook. Cromwell Press,refer Trowbridge, Wiltshire To view these images please to the printed version of this book.

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

xi

List of Contributors

xii

Abbreviations

xiii

Map

xiv INTRODUCTION

1

Chaucer and the Detritus of the City Ardis Butterfield

3

LOCATIONS 2

Greater London Marion Turner

25

3

The Production of Space in Chaucer’s London Ruth Evans

41

4

Chaucer’s Poetics of Dwelling in Troilus and Criseyde Barbara Nolan

57

COMMUNITIES 5

Chaucer and the Language of London Christopher Cannon

79

6

The Canterbury Tales and London Club Culture Derek Pearsall

95

7

London and Southwark Poetic Companies: ‘Si tost c’amis’ and the Canterbury Tales Appendix: An Edition and Translation of Renaud de Hoiland, ‘Si tost c’amis’ Helen Cooper

109 117

INSTITUTIONS 8

Literary Contests and London Records in the Canterbury Tales C. David Benson

129

9

The Great Household in the City: The Shipman’s Tale Elliot Kendall

145

10

London and Money: Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse John Scattergood

162

AFTERLIVES 11

After the Fire: Chaucer and Urban Poetics, 1666–1743 Paul Davis

177

12

Chaucer and the Nineteenth-Century City Helen Phillips

193

Bibliography

211

Index

225

Illustrations Fig. 1 Map of Chaucer’s London Fig. 2 (a) ‘Si tost c’amis’, reproduced by permission of The National Archives (PRO), ref. E 163/22/1/2 (b) ‘Si tost c’amis’, music transcribed and edited by Helen Deeming

xiv 118 119

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

For David Wallace passammo tra i martìri e li alti spaldi

‘The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls’ (from ‘Cities & Memory 3’). Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (1972)

Preface This collection of essays has at least two sources of inspiration. The initial impetus was the First London Chaucer Conference, organised by Alcuin Blamires and myself in April 2002, on the topic of ‘Cities, Courts, Provinces’. Seven of the contributors spoke at this conference; of this number, five have revised and developed their papers to address the more particular title chosen for this volume, two have written new essays, and a further five essays were specially commissioned. In a sense, though, the topic of this book had deeper roots in the popular undergraduate course on London in Literature, co-taught in the Department of English, UCL. The experience of lecturing since 1997 on a course that crossed all periods and media from medieval to contemporary London was central to my sense that an approach to Chaucer was needed that spoke to his importance both for our understanding of fourteenth-century London and for our present apprehension of the city. The vivid interest in this course taken by students and the unstoppably original work they have produced have been a constant source of energy and illumination. My thanks also go to the contributors for their enthusiasm and support, to Derek Brewer and Caroline Palmer for their encouragement to publish, to Kathleen Goodwin for her calm and heroically efficient help at the eleventh hour in preparing the manuscript for publication, to Jennifer Fellows for expert advice, to Brian Cummings for conversation and much else, including taking me to revisit Rome, and to Thomas and Daniel Cummings, both true Londoners, for their help respectively with computer queries and for their company on walks up the Monument and around many corners of this great city. My final thanks to David Wallace, for being a present absence in so much of our thinking in this volume about Chaucer and the City, and for his friendship across many towns and cities. Bloomsbury 7 and 21 July 2005

Contributors C. David Benson Ardis Butterfield Christopher Cannon Helen Cooper Paul Davis Ruth Evans Elliot Kendall Barbara Nolan Derek Pearsall Helen Phillips John Scattergood Marion Turner

University of Connecticut UCL University of Cambridge University of Cambridge UCL University of Stirling University of Exeter University of Virginia Harvard University Cardiff University Trinity College, Dublin King’s College London

Abbreviations Barron, London

Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004) BoLE A Book of London English 1384–1425, ed. R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt (Oxford, 1931) Calendar of PMR Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls (1323–1364), ed. (1323–1364) A. H. Thomas (Cambridge, 1927) Calendar of PMR Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls (1364–1381), ed. (1364–1381) A. H. Thomas (Cambridge, 1929) EETS, ES/OS Early English Text Society, Extra Series/Original Series ELH English Literary History Letter-Books Calendar of Letter-Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, 11 vols, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London, 1899–1912) MED The Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1954– ) NML New Medieval Literatures, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton and Wendy Scase PRO Public Record Office (now The National Archives) Riley, Memorials Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, ed. and trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London, 1868) SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Fig. 1. Chaucer’s London

INTRODUCTION

Int roduction Ardis Butt erf ield

Chaucer and the Detritus of the City ARDIS BUTTERFIELD

As I write, Bruce Nauman’s exhibit Raw Materials is just closing at the Tate Modern on Bankside directly across the river from St Paul’s.1 He has used the vast echoing space of this former industrial turbine hall to create an aural sculpture in which fragments of twenty-two of his earlier works are uttered in great swirling, billowing mutterings over and between the heads of the gallery’s visitors. The work recalls the interlocking, repetitive patterns of the music of Steve Reich, particularly City Life (1995).2 Three of the sections of City Life are built around samples of language, including short snatches of the live communication between firemen on duty when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993.3 Mixed with these abrupt commands and exclamations are a cacophony of other New York city sounds: alarms, street vendors, car horns, pile drivers, slamming doors, boat horns and buoys. Nauman mixes in city life slightly differently in Raw Materials by allowing the sound sculpture to absorb the live voices of the visitors. The continually flowing incantations of old texts are augmented and distorted by the spontaneous talk of people passing through the hall; no one hears the same sequence, volume or pitch of sounds because they change according to the auditor’s position as well as the unpredictable numbers and noise levels of visitors at any one moment on any one day. Both works use texts, but not merely for their own sake. The aural space of the Turbine Hall takes over the textual ‘raw materials’ provided by Nauman and subdues them to the larger demands of experiencing sound through space. A peculiarity of a sound sculpture that uses texts rather than non-verbal sounds is that it invites us to respond in some way as readers as well as listeners. However, I would like to thank Marion Turner for her invitation to speak at a symposium on Chaucer’s London in November 2004 at King’s College, London, and to David Wallace, Caroline Barron, Christopher Cannon and the audience for the stimulating discussion on that occasion. A version of this essay was also given at a conference at York on ‘Literature, Landscapes and Ideologies in the Later Middle Ages’ in June 2005, organised by Michael R. Jones. 1 The exhibition ran from 12 October 2004 to 28 March 2005. 2 Steve Reich, Proverb, Nagoya Marimbas, City Life, The Steve Reich Ensemble, Theatre of Voices, Nonesuch Records 1996: CD 7559–79430–2. 3 ‘Check it out’; ‘It’s been a honeymoon – Can’t take no mo’’; ‘Heavy smoke’.

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Raw Materials is not thereby merely legible: as Henri Lefebvre has remarked, ‘spaces made (produced) to be read are the most deceptive and tricked-up imaginable’.4 Nauman keeps faith with the character of this former power station, itself the life blood of a city, as above all a social space, so that even now as a gallery, its space is not ‘produced in order to be read and grasped, but rather in order to be lived by people with bodies and lives in their own particular urban context’.5 Reich’s music, similarly, makes human language just one kind of sound in the complex samplings of urban noise, and not necessarily the sound which organises or makes comprehensible that larger sound-world. For each artist, working creatively with the contemporary city involves taking account of a central incoherence. But this is not a negative and certainly not a static condition. The experience of standing in the Turbine Hall and listening to the sculpture is one of being constantly on the edge of comprehension: the sounds move between intelligible words and phrases (‘They’ll talk, you’ll listen’ . . . ‘no, no, no, no’ . . . ‘Tell us a story, Jack’), meaningless babble, and a huge skein of noise that the listener is helping to create and by virtue of that effort, understand. It is also, by definition, about being there. 6 Further into Tate Modern one encounters another installation: a permanent exhibit by Mark Dion entitled Tate Thames Dig 1999. This, too, is a social production, one that mimics the very activity of social production. With Robert Williams, Dion co-ordinated a team of volunteers, residents of Southwark and Pimlico, to gather at will objects thrown up by the Thames along the shores of Millbank and Bankside. Having amassed a large assortment of ‘rejectamenta’, the team roughly sorted and grouped them; the collection was then mounted and displayed in a double-sided nineteenth-century style cabinet de curiosités.7 Recalling yet also parodying scientific methods of archaeological retrieval and categorisation, Dion’s installation is a powerful examination of the strange blend of contingency and control in historical observation. These random unlabelled artefacts include plastic toys and ancient clay fragments; the display thus blurs the distinction between detritus and scientific evidence, between the crude, forgotten remains of human life and the privileged, selected and fashioned materials of art. If with Nauman we encounter the ever changing now of contemporary urban art, with Dion we ponder how present apprehensions of art are shaped by history. Historical meaning, when we look at Tate Thames Dig 1999, seems peculiarly invented by us yet also determined by the way the artefacts of past lives insistently and randomly fill our present space. Both perspectives – aural and linguistic, and material and historic – are central to an investigation of Chaucer and the city. A poet who was born, and 4 5 6 7

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), first published as La production de l’espace (Paris, 1974), p. 143. LeFebvre, The Production of Space, p. 143 (his emphasis). The Tate website http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/nauman/ plays sound samples from the installation. For transcripts of the texts, see Bruce Nauman – Raw Materials (London, 2004). Mark Dion: Tate Thames Dig, 26 October 1999 – 27 February 2000, exhibition catalogue (London, 1999).

Introduction

5

who lived, worked and died in the city and Westminster, his name, mentioned as it is on numerous London tourist websites, conjures a vivid and still significant image of medieval city life. An academic event at the millennium to celebrate his work (and the six-hundredth anniversary of his death) attracted more than a thousand urban visitors into Westminster Abbey.8 Chaucer, in short, functions as a major point of entry into the history of the city and not as a forgotten and obscure relic of the city’s past. More broadly, he is a metonym for the history of the city: think of Chaucer and our present sense of London as a city in time is brought into view. By taking us back across six hundred years, Chaucer makes the city more than a single present moment, however fluid; he gives us a vista, perhaps one should say illusion, of an overarching temporal continuity between present and past. Like the objets trouvés in Dion’s Dig, medieval remains still litter the streets and the shores of the Thames; we can walk on some of the same pathways, walk into some of the same buildings, touch the same bricks and stone arches. These are not necessarily acts of memorial piety, but new negotiations of our current urban environment: much of the time we may have no idea that our walks are carried out along six-hundred-year-old routes or that we have looked down ancient river courses. This volume does not, then, seek to recover Chaucer through the medieval city, nor even to use Chaucer to recover the medieval city: rather, it argues that any consideration of city life is already recovering the past even as it engages with the present. In the case of London, unlike say New York, this past is specifically characterised as medieval, or even older, in its reach. Pressing onto or into London’s present is a great weight of historical time. Chaucer’s particular contribution to our grasp of the city is not, however, merely material. Like the newly raw, old texts of Nauman’s sculpture, Chaucer’s writings give us the much older linguistic remains of the medieval city. His texts, the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, if we could only learn to hear them, are echoes of meanings from the past, interlocking with our re-utterings and re-interpretations of the ‘same’ words and phrases. The parallel with current urban art confronts us with the incoherence of this process. For although Chaucer’s texts are not as broken up as Nauman’s, they remain – at least on the face of it – as opaque to historical analysis as Dion’s pottery pieces and plastic trash. Any piece of ancient language is caught somewhere between the aural and the material, the tangible (parchment) and the ephemeral (sound), the read and the lived. Historicising the linguistic traces of the past remains a complex matter. By way of introduction to the collection of essays to come, I want therefore to consider the character of this opacity in a direction guided first by Walter Benjamin and second by Michel de Certeau. They have come to mind because each has struggled with and pondered at length a sense for one that the city cannot be represented, and for the other that the practice of writing the history of the everyday life of the ordinary man is a matter of confronting the fragmen8

An event organised by The New Chaucer Society for its 12th Biennial Congress, Senate House, University of London, 14–17 July 2000.

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tary and intractable character of language. Clearly in this short space I can do little more than outline what their approaches might suggest for a reading of the city in Chaucer.

I The City in History Benjamin’s vast project, Passagenarbeit, inspired by the Parisian shopping arcades first constructed in the 1830s, has a devastating and contrary approach to history.9 Avoiding the methods of an arching master narrative, Benjamin concentrates on what he called the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century, something to be found not through traditional historiography but rather ‘the “refuse” and “detritus” of history, the half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of “the collective” ’.10 His methods were more like those of a nineteenth-century collector of antiquities handling ‘the items in his showcase’11 than those of the twentieth-century historian. His model image – in French ‘les passages’ – was of a freeflowing thoroughfare: the 1935 Exposé cites the Illustrated Guide to Paris: ‘the passage is a city, a world in miniature’,12 somewhere for the shopper to watch as well as participate, to parade, to exhibit him or herself. To present this experience, Benjamin created a huge, unfinished and unfinishable edifice of citation on display: mimicking the uncontrollable intensity of impression received by the urban f lâneur he produced masses of notes and fragments for his own dream city. He worked, loosely and provisionally, with his favoured technique of montage, enabling silent, ironic juxtapositions, a criss-crossing of references and free flow of associations, together with abrupt and often contradictory transitions. Benjamin’s methods and the amorphous mass of material he collected have created some puzzlement, not to say criticism. It is deeply idiosyncratic; it forgoes analysis. In this sense it is a kind of anti-historical project, one that seemed (and was) doomed to failure or at least, incompletion. Yet it is interesting in the present context because of his insistence that cities resist description, and comprehension. He seems to view the city as only recoverable as a collection of debris: that is, any material aspect of the city is so layered with the accretions and distortions of human activity over time that it becomes impossible to decipher. We see this most clearly perhaps in Rome where antique columns prop up Renaissance church naves, or modern traffic lights perch between marble

9

My references are taken from Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans., The Arcades Project: Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), prepared from the German edition by Rolf Tiedemann, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt, 1982), vol. V of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, 7 vols (Frankfurt, 1972–89), hereafter The Arcades Project. The title Passagenarbeit (or simply Passagen) was the one Benjamin himself usually used. 10 The Arcades Project, ‘Translators’ Foreword’, p. ix. 11 The Arcades Project, ‘H [The Collector]’, p. 207. 12 The Arcades Project, p. 3.

Introduction

7

boulders and capitals left lying on the pavement from nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations. It is no less true of an apparently perfectly preserved medieval city like Bruges or Carcassonne, where the observer soon discovers (as often with medieval monuments across Europe) that the sharply outlined medieval crenellations have been shaped by nineteenth-century restorers. The London Guildhall, the only vestige of the secular City that survived the Great Fire, is likewise a complex mosaic of historical remnants compiled from nearly every century since the thirteenth.13 Cities confuse the operation of historical perspectives. The imposition of narrative order on the city can only be achieved by ignoring the mass of debris: in Benjamin’s view this narrative order would end up describing a city which never really existed. What is distinctive about The Arcades Project is that it tries to account for debris by doing nothing except accumulate a pile of leftover citations. Benjamin works so many quotations into the montage that they eventually far outnumber the snippets of commentary. This mass of unsifted literary detritus is valuable precisely because it resists teleological argument. His method has significant repercussions for the form of his work and the reading process it provokes since it takes apart the assumption of a continuous and homogeneous temporality that is the basis for traditional historiography. Citation and commentary interlock, setting up repetitions and resonances across different periods of history that fracture and disorder a natural chronology. And all this convolution unravels by means of interruption, an absence of narrative or explanatory logic presented through the further discontinuity of two languages. In short, the history comes from the points of fissure, the gaps, the forgotten debris of an uncountable flow of ‘raw materials’.14 I have not yet mentioned Freud, but of course Freud’s work on the trivial and its subterranean significance in the processes of the mind is crucial to Benjamin. As Rolf Tiedemann, Benjamin’s German editor, has commented, Benjamin’s later phase of work on the Passagenarbeit turned directly to the Surrealist theory of dreams (although dreams were also part of his earliest thinking on the project).15 This turn on Freud (‘the return of the repressed’) has itself become a familiar turn, or return in much post-modern writing, especially in feminist and post-colonialist thinking such as that of Butler and Spivak.16 The move involves recuperating a perspective that is either marginal or simply forgotten: it might even be true to say that the ghost (in French the ‘revenant’) has returned so often that he has become a permanent house guest. For our under13 Caroline M. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London, 1974). 14 The Arcades Project, ‘J [Baudelaire]’, p. 290. 15 The Arcades Project, First Sketches. Paris Arcades I: ‘the commodity intermingles and interbreeds as

promiscuously as images in the most tangled of dreams’, p. 827. For Tiedemann’s comment, see The Arcades Project, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk’, p. 933. 16 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990). There is a convenient collection of Spivak’s writings in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York, 1996); see also her essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in Postcolonial Criticism, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley (London, 1997), pp. 145–65.

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standing of the medieval city, I am proposing not a psychoanalytic approach per se but a recognition, through Benjamin, that thinking about the city can be a process of making visible the elements of historical observation that usually lurk, unseen and ignored, in the recesses of scholarly practice. The reflections on history by Michel de Certeau have particular relevance to this turn. De Certeau argues that the writing of history (L’écriture de l’histoire) is a fundamentally rhetorical process. In order to write, in order to present an intelligible view of the past, the historian (historiographer) has to select and hence discard or forget: But whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant – shards created by the selection of materials, remainders left aside by an explication – comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies: ‘resistances’, ‘survivals’, or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of ‘progress’ or a system of interpretation. These are lapses in the syntax constructed by the law of a place. Therein they symbolize a return of the repressed, that is, a return of what, at a given moment, has

become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable.17 This attention to the shards or lapses of writing takes on a powerful role in de Certeau’s essays on, respectively, the sixteenth-century voyager to Brazil, Jean de Léry, and Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’.18 Briefly, both instances of sixteenth-century writing fascinate de Certeau because they raise the issue of language and the historical representation of foreignness. Jean de Léry travelled to the Bay of Rio in 1556 and spent two years in and around the island of Coligny, meeting and observing the Tupinamba people before returning to France via Geneva. His account, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil was published twenty years later in 1578. The lacuna that de Certeau sees as being at the heart of the historical enterprise, the things that cannot be said but that therefore make it possible for the historian to say what he does say, here take the form, quite precisely, of the language spoken by the Brazilian people whom Jean de Léry meets, or by Montaigne’s ‘cannibal’. This language is unintelligible to modern observers: it vividly marks the speakers as ‘other’, as ‘alien’, and the sixteenth-century observer as a kind of desperate ventriloquist, representing in writing a language that has no written form and that therefore resists this attempt at controlled utterance. What captures Jean’s imagination, and is vividly rendered through his narrative, is his sense of the rapturous power of the Tupi songs. He cannot understand them, although he tries to give a written version of what he heard:

17 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), p. 4; L’Écriture de

l’histoire (Paris, 1975), p. 10. 18 ‘Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry’, The Writing of History, pp. 209–43;

‘Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”: The Savage “I” ’, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London, 1986), pp. 67–79.

Introduction

9

Such a joy it was . . . hearing the beautifully measured rhythms of such a multitude – and especially the cadence and refrain of the ballad, all of them together raising their voices to each couplet, saying: heu, heuaüre, heüra,

heüraüre, heüra, heüra, oueh – that I remain completely ravished. But moreover, every time the memory comes back to me, my heart throbs, and it seems as if their music still rings in my ears.19 This account is remarkable for the variety of ways it turns and returns the event. The sounds gain a rhetorically recognisable literary form and shape: a ‘ballad’ with couplets and refrains. Aurally the singing is also patterned by ‘beautifully measured rhythms’. It is only when Jean tries to reproduce the words that their incoherence (to him) is revealed in what he renders as a succession of non-consonantal syllables, repeating with slightly varying combinations of sound. As Brian Cummings has well remarked of another early modern European response to the Tupi (in this case to their physical appearance): ‘It is an exemplary instance of how even the most alien aspects of the encounter with the American are already inscribed in the culture and the language of the European.’20 In the case of this oral and linguistic moment, it is when he tries to re-utter the Tupi songs and not simply to describe the performance that Jean exposes (and expresses) the degree of cultural distance between his perception of language and theirs. It shows (at least) three kinds of transformation. The first is cultural: he finds a European genre (the ballad) in which to (re)cast the song. Second, the writing registers more than foreignness since it also involves time and history. His words betray a temporal as well as cultural distance from the event which we see in the implied gap between what he is writing and the (indescribable) memory that throbs in his heart and resounds in his ears. Third, the meaning of the Tupinamba’s performance goes beyond the verbal. De Certeau mentions the red ink, extracted from Brazilian trees, with which de Léry says he wrote his first memoirs. Yet this ‘raw material’ is used to record not just words but sounds, not just a silent narrative capable of repetition but also an evanescent heard music. The insight de Léry offers is that we lose the sound of meaning, as well as the epistemological act, in history, and so our effort must be predicated on that experience of aural as well as semantic loss. The connection I am pondering here between Benjamin and de Certeau is that between the city and language. For in the way that Benjamin sees the city as full of discarded and misunderstood traces of its past, so de Certeau reminds us that these traces are present, if invisible, in the rhetorical manoeuvres of the historian. My further point, moving on from both (under the influence of Chaucer) is that language, too, is full of debris from the past. The text of Chaucer, like the Guildhall, is a bricolage of medieval raw material and the smoothed out spaces and crenellations of nineteenth-century and later editions. The city of the text 19 Cited in de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 213. 20 Brian Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early

Modern Europe and the New World’, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke and New York, 1999), pp. 26–50 (p. 46).

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contains at any one time many chronicles of the past, verbal survivals from an earlier age that have gained new layers of meaning, some of which obscure or distort the old meanings beyond recognition, others of which are still in circulation, though somewhat revived, and others again which are relative newcomers, or strangers, more, or less, assimilated within the freef lowing linguistic arcade.

II The City and Chaucer In the second part of this introduction I want to talk further, by means of some Chaucerian examples, about the silence or gap in the language of the city that preoccupied both Benjamin and de Certeau. In part, it is a matter of recognising that the traces of the past in language are as powerfully invisible, or perhaps better inaudible, as the Brazilian Tupi language was to de Léry. De Certeau’s test case is set in a place unknown and foreign to the sixteenth-century Frenchman; yet as any modern Londoner can testify both the city and one’s ‘own’ language are just as possessed by strangeness. There is no need to go searching for strangeness in far-off shores; the experience of any big city-dweller and of any so-called ‘native’ speaker is that of having to confront the unintelligible, the unknowable, and the inaudible at home, and in one’s own tongue. One of the most vivid examples of the representation of city language in Chaucer is in the House of Fame. Not usually described as a London poem, since it is mostly conducted in the claws of an eagle high up in the stratosphere, it nonetheless brilliantly renders the noisy chatter of urban life, the simultaneous, competitive and plural voices of public, crowded arenas. Its topic, too, is quintessentially metropolitan: Fame is the classic city value, always chased, always in danger of melting into oblivion: . . . of the lettres oon or two Was molte away of every name, So unfamous was woxe hir fame (III, 1144–46)

If we glance in more detail at one of the more exuberant passages describing linguistic noise, we find Chaucer representing it as a vast collection of peoples: I herde a noyse aprochen blyve, That ferde as been don in an hive Ayen her tyme of out-f leynge; Ryght such a maner murmurynge, For al the world, hyt semed me. Tho gan I loke aboute and see That ther come entryng into the halle A ryght gret companye withalle, And that of sondry regiouns, Of alleskynnes condiciouns That dwelle in erthe under the mone, Pore and ryche. (III, 1521–32)

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Crowd after crowd approaches Fame to ask for favour: Chaucer, like de Léry, is the tourist/anthropologist/historian voyaging through strange scenes in far off locations, seeking to make intelligible what he sees and hears. On the face of it, these seething crowds are hardly inaudible; yet the joke against Geffrey is that he has been brought to hear this confusion of tongues precisely because, in his city life, he hears nothing: . . . noght oonly fro fer contree That ther no tydynge cometh to thee, But of thy verray neyghebores, That duellen almost at thy dores, Thou herist neyther that ne this; For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, In stede of reste and newe thynges Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look; And lyvest thus as an heremyte (II, 644–60)

Dwelling in the city, with neighbours pressing in on him almost to his door, Geffrey lives an improbably solitary, silent life. Chaucer represents the aporia of the city: the paradox of aphasia in the midst of the gossipy excesses of verbal ‘murmurynge’. My other example comes from Book II of Troilus and Criseyde: Chaucer’s longest city poem. The Proem is a classic and highly subtle meditation on several themes I have been drawing together: the strangeness of language and the instability of its survival through time. One of many perspectives Chaucer causes us to ponder is that of the historian against the translator: he presents himself as both, but each as an excuse to explain away the inadequacies of the forthcoming story. Narrative is not the answer to the problem of how to represent this history of love: it creates a false teleology and an account that distorts, ignores or simply doesn’t see (‘a blynd man kan nat juggen wel in hewis’, II, 21). I will just give one instance. Pandarus is trying to tell Criseyde, as subtly as he can, that Troilus has fallen for her. He thus spends this whole city visit preparing and avoiding the subject. Criseyde, after a few hints, begins to realise he has some news for her, but her desire to know fights with her equally strong desire to keep that hidden. She then makes an accusation that goes to the heart of the issue: ‘As ye ben he that I love moost and triste Lat be to me youre fremde manere speche’ (II, 247–48)

Pandarus, her trusted uncle, is speaking unfamiliarly: his speech is ‘fremde’ (distant, strange) and unintelligible. This signals one of the most prolonged

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lacunas yet: Criseyde casts her eyes down again, Pandarus begins to cough, and explain in a roundabout sort of way why he needs to get direct to the point, and then comes a long, awkward silence while they simply eye each other (II, 253–75). The collapse of narrative at this point marks a moment of severe strain in the poem. Pandarus’s revelation is a profound betrayal of trust: as soon as it is uttered the pressure on her increases intolerably and she becomes locked into a story that ruins her. And yet it remains a moment of utter inscrutability: however hard Chaucer tries to catch the trivial glance or gesture that would make their communication intelligible, he ruthlessly suppresses any means of knowing what it truly signifies. The more detail we are given, the more material sifting we are encouraged to make in the recesses of Criseyde’s eyes, the more we are sent back to uncertainty. To quote de Certeau once more, these ‘lapses in the syntax . . . symbolise a return of what, at a given moment, has become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable’.21 Pandarus stands menacingly exposed as the familiar stranger, the neighbour at the door whose very proximity guarantees his unknowability. The reason Troilus is so centrally a city poem is that Chaucer locates this strangeness at the heart of the poem not only in human relationships, but also in history and language. The homely language of Troilus makes constant negotiations with foreign tongues, both from the present and the ancient past.22 Ranging across five sources (Dares, Dictys, Benoit, Guido, Boccaccio) in as many languages (Latin and Greek, French, Italian and English) its narrator constantly seeks in the implied cultural tussle between them to speak ‘in the space of the other’. The city is indeed spectral in Chaucer. Living in the city, as the House of Fame eagle so memorably puts it, is to be intensely aware of oneself among a vast ‘companye’ of people and yet to feel isolated and silent. The experience of the city lies in those unattainable historical and linguistic gaps that litter the longue durée of cultural memory. Casting himself as a desperate ventriloquist, Chaucer creates a poem in which the detritus of language becomes a means of evading the story as much as of telling it, a way of refusing to locate its present absence. In this he is the quint essential city dweller.

III Chaucer and the City The aural and linguistic, and the material and historic are central topics in the structure of the present volume – locations, communities, institutions and afterlives. This is a collection of essays from within the field of literature rather than history; we are not aiming to provide a history of medieval London or even of Chaucer’s life in London, but rather to offer fresh ways of understanding the meaning of London as a context for Chaucer’s writings. Some essays draw 21 See n. 17 above. 22 For further discussion, see Ardis Butterfield, ‘Nationhood’, in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve

Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 50–65 (pp. 61–2).

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directly on the rich resources of London records – written and built – increasingly made available in new work over the past three decades by archaeologists and historians of government, kingship, economy, law and ecclesiastical institutions.23 Others turn to modern theoretical thinking about cities. All are grounded on a sense, powerfully articulated by David Wallace, that Chaucer’s writings offer a conundrum.24 Chaucer may be a city icon but London does not emerge as clearly or directly from his poetry as that might suggest. Trying to understand the city in Chaucer involves confronting this strangeness: Chaucer’s poetry rebuffs as much as invites our efforts to grasp its urban character. One of the first questions to be asked concerns the spatial extent of the city. The term is confusing: not only does it include as now the ‘City’ (or financial heart of London) as well as the city, the wider urban conglomeration, but also, in the medieval period, the separate suburban town and royal capital of Westminster.25 In some ways, the existence of a city wall gives apparent clarity to a notion of London: three miles long, and punctuated by six ancient (probably Roman) gates (Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate, and Ludgate26), with a ditch eighty-foot wide beyond, the wall was strengthened in the thirteenth century and carefully maintained through the fourteenth, and in the late fifteenth.27 Yet this massive stone and brick boundary did not necessarily circumscribe ‘London’: as Marion Turner argues, conceptions of London ‘spilled over’ the city walls and poured out into the surrounding countryside as well as into the areas of Southwark, just south of the river, and the built up spaces leading to Westminster. The latter included Inns of Court, Inns of Chancery and large numbers of taverns, as well as great aristocratic urban dwellings such as John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in the Strand. The boundaries of this book thus turn out to be, as in Dion’s Thames Dig, in the imaginative space between

23 These include P. Garside, Capital Histories: A Bibliographical Study of London (Aldershot, 1998); M.

24

25

26 27

D. Lobel, ed., The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c.1520, The British Atlas of Historic Towns, iii (Oxford, 1989); H. Deadman and E. Scudder, An Introductory Guide to the Corporation of London Records Office (London, 1994); John Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London, 1984) and Medieval London Houses (London, 1994); Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989); Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London 1000–1485 (New Haven and London, 1995); Barron, London (with further bibliography), as well as her survey ‘London 1300–1540’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 1: 600–1540, ed. D. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 17, pp. 395–440. My discussion of the medieval city below is much indebted to Barron’s studies and to the still useful and vivid account by D. W. Robertson, Chaucer’s London (New York and London, 1968). David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), ch. 6: ‘Absent City’, pp. 156–81. See also Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284–309. See the discussions of ‘What is a Town?’ in Rosser, Medieval Westminster, pp. 226–9, and in Martha Carlin, ‘Southwark and Westminster: Defining a Town’, Medieval Southwark (London, 1996), pp. 255–6. Moorgate was added in the fifteenth century (Barron, London, p. 246); there were some other smaller postern gates, including one near the Tower. Barron, London, pp. 242–52.

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and around Millbank (in Chaucer’s terms, Westminster stairs) and Bankside (St Mary Overy’s, where Gower is buried).28 Through such late-fourteenth century writings as Richard Maidstone’s Concordia, the Latin poem The Stores of the Cities, and Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, London is shown by Turner to be a complexly varied location geographically and conceptually. We can also learn this from following in the steps of John Stow, antiquarian and editor of Chaucer, in his Survey of London (first published in 1598) who began by taking a closer look at the edges of the city, life on or near the wall, and at the waterways, bridges and gates.29 Here at the supposedly fixed perimeter of London, flux, activity and border crossing was rife. Situated on a major river, and at the heart of a road system developed by the Romans, London was at the centre of riverways and roadways from Devon and Norwich to York and beyond. Maintaining the Thames waterway for navigation was vital: a vast ebb and flow of continental and insular trade needed to move easily and freely along the river. London Bridge, famous in later mythologies of the city, and the only bridge over the Thames before Kingston until a wooden bridge was built at Putney in 1729,30 was the key route to and from the south of England, and seemed, in Stow’s words ‘rather a continuall streete then a Bridge’.31 From the quayside and along the Bridge great quantities of foodstuffs, goods and raw materials passed in and out of the city. London merchants conducted business up and down the country: vintners and woolmongers were trading in Colchester, Bristol, and Cambridge and as far as Durham and Newcastle. Internationally, traders travelled intensively to and from the Low Countries, France and Italy and also much further afield to Bavaria, the Baltic ports, Constantinople and beyond. In short, medieval London was not a self-enclosed space but rather the dynamic and open centre of an increasingly dispersed set of trade routes.32 It is worth remembering that not only was Chaucer’s father in the wine trade, but he himself spent a good proportion of his working life at the Custom House, the clearing house for the sale and purchase of wool and later cloth (the major English exports throughout most of the century), and that he had a lease during the same period from 1374 to 1386 (with use of a cellar) on the rooms over Aldgate. Much of his life, in other words, was spent quite literally on the edges of the city, on the wharf overhanging the Thames and over the gate itself, looking out onto rural countryside. We should not assume, however, that the latter view was a complete contrast to the one over the city: not only were there plenty of livestock, particularly pigs, roaming the London streets and numerous gardens, orchards and green spaces, but the daily passage of farmers and rural 28 See Rosamund S. Allen, ‘John Gower and Southwark: The Paradox of the Social Self’, in London and

Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London, 1995), pp. 111–47. 29 A Survey of London by John Stow, reprinted from the text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford,

1908). 30 Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South (Harmondsworth,

1983), pp. 707 and 715. 31 Stow, A Survey of London, p. 26. 32 Barron, London, pp. 45–52, 76–83 and 84–101.

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labourers bringing supplies to the city populace and seeking work created a continuous link and mutual dependency between urban and country life. Whole social groups made their living on the edges of the city: the poor (lepers and fugitives), service industries (innkeepers, cooks, prostitutes), those practising the more noisy, smelly and toxic crafts (butchers and slaughterers, tanners and whitetawyers), and not least, religious houses such as Whitefriars and the Minoresses by Aldgate. The sheer press of people against the outer walls of London manifests itself most vividly in the crime records, as well as in the constant effort of civic authorities to regulate and demarcate their existence.33 Yet, as Ruth Evans shows, space inside the city was a far from settled entity. Her investigation of how medieval urban space was produced and imagined juxtaposes two remarkable instances of living in the shadows: the Chief Justice Sir Robert Tresilian turned fugitive by the bitter factional politics of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388, and the ‘transvestite sex-worker and part-time needlewoman’ John Rykener, also known as Eleanor. Both fell foul of the law, though Tresilian, unlike the successfully slippery Rykener/Eleanor, was dragged out (from under a tablecloth in a private house) and paraded publicly through the streets before being executed at Tyburn. By means of the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben on social space and the city, Evans discusses the ‘potentially dangerous libidinal freedom’ that is explored in the textual representations of both these acts of transgression. This sheds light on the understanding of urban space in Chaucer’s writings: how fully the Canterbury Tales participated in an awareness of the transforming power of seemingly vulnerable human bodies to challenge political order and test the boundaries of civic and sovereign tolerance. The elaborate public displays of civic punishment, such as that meted out to Tresilian, show with what fantastic and often gruesome panache the streets and open squares of medieval London functioned as ‘representational spaces’, to use Lefebvre’s term.34 Great crowds would gather to watch a criminal, his or her body dressed up, often with ludicrous appropriateness to the crime committed, and then physically used to transform the streets into theatrical routes of shame. One William Campion, a Fleet Street brewer, discovered to have illegally drawn his domestic water supply from the main public conduit, was punished by being made to ride on a horse: with a vessel like unto a conduit full of water upon his head, the same water running by small pipes out of the same vessel, and that when the water is wasted, new water to be put in the said vessel again.35 33 Barron, London, pp. 276–7; see also Stow’s discussion of the ditch, A Survey of London, pp. 19–20.

On the city curfew, see Robertson, Chaucer’s London, p. 29 n. 36 and p. 104. 34 The Production of Space, p. 33. 35 Barron, London, pp. 257–8. This incident has a strange inverted similarity to the contemporary

London ‘performance artist’ who is being threatened with legal action by Thames Water for wanting to leave a tap running for a year in a Camberwell Gallery ‘to highlight the waste caused by water companies’ leakages’ (The Times, 5 July 2005, p. 26).

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Walking, riding or going by boat through the city always had the potential to change abruptly an anonymous, sometimes shadowy activity to one rawly exposed to public view. We can see further evidence of this within a more thoroughly fictional textual environment in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. As Barbara Nolan relates, Troilus is a brilliant account of the intrigues and machinations that lurk in the darker corners of urban space. She concentrates on his construction, not so much of a streetwalker’s view of the city, as of the poetics of dwelling inside, in the thick and often obscure and pressurised circumstances of daily domestic living. She sees ‘the built spaces the poet causes his characters to inhabit and transform’ to be ‘as insistently important to his fiction of Trojan daily life as are the characters themselves’. Many readers have seen resonances of his contemporary London in Chaucer’s description of Troy: Chaucer’s subtle exploration of physical location in Troilus, viewed against the architectural backdrop of the medieval London cityscape, gains particular richness. The struggle for privacy and control of access, central to changing practices in medieval architecture, enters into Chaucer’s narrative vocabulary. Nolan is particularly interested in his creation of the fictional city by means of architectural mnemonic locations drawn from Boccaccio. The character of specific sites such as Criseyde’s house, the ‘borrowed, small, warm bedroom in the house of Deiphebus’, the seduction site itself in the secret space within Pandarus’s house and eventually Diomede’s tent, becomes a crucial way of understanding how Chaucer crafts the love affair. Dwelling in a city is shown by Chaucer to be a complex and certainly not always successful act of personal transformation. He must have found this to be the case in his own domestic arrangements. A third city view, foregrounding Nolan’s sense of Troilus, and crucial also to the wider, fractured sense of London investigated by Turner, looked westward towards the royal household in Westminster. As a middle-ranking member of that household, who nonetheless was heavily involved professionally with the civic mercantile community, Chaucer was typical of many Londoners who spent their lives negotiating with Westminster. Trying to grasp the meaning of London involves reckoning with its relationship with royal power. Caroline Barron has pointed to the ultimately disadvantaged position of the city. The wealth and apparent autonomy of the city never truly diminished the Crown’s authority over it, notwithstanding many periods of contention.36 One conclusion to be drawn is that London had always a larger significance than the city alone. London and Westminster together made up a structure of power that was more than the sum of its parts, hierarchical but also fractious and shifting. The intersections and tensions between their communities, and more generally between the mercantile and aristocratic, concern many of the subsequent essays in this volume. A consideration of location cannot take place in isolation from the communities that compete for urban space. The next group of essays seeks to develop an understanding of how city communities are created through language, and con36 Barron, London, p. 10.

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versely how poetry is produced and received among city communities. The way particular uses of language relate to particular locations in the world is a way of understanding how kinds of consensus develop. Words are indicative of human habit and custom – they are moral in the root sense of the word – (mos/ mores). The poet participates in the creation of ‘usages’, or the long accumulated forms of meaning that are part of a word’s inheritance.37 By following through Chaucer’s ‘usages’, and observing their embeddedness within city life, we may come closer to understanding some of the common criteria of meaning in his writing. Christopher Cannon finds the language of the city in Chaucer’s uncanny ability to render the subtly varied linguistic distinctions between one kind of craft community and another. City language is precisely a matter of recording difference rather than of claiming homogeneity: for Cannon this is a positive recognition by Chaucer that urban life does not have to involve irreparable disintegration and discord but is founded on a willingness to form new communities as quickly as one excludes or feels excluded from preexisting ones. Through the work of Paul Strohm in particular, the people who formed Chaucer’s social circle are reasonably well identified.38 New evidence has also recently been presented about the identity of Chaucer’s scribe, Adam.39 Yet questions about the kinds of community in London that fostered the production of poetry have been harder to answer. It remains surprisingly difficult to find evidence for specific occasions at which poetry, including Chaucer’s poetry, might have been performed.40 Derek Pearsall takes up the enquiry by re-considering the implied audience of Chaucer’s poetry and what it might tell us about his actual audience, about the coteries and colloquies within London medieval society who might have heard Chaucer’s poetry in performance, or read it in draft. Who made up these groups, and just how ‘courtly’ were they? In a closely complementary study, Helen Cooper re-visits the records of the late thirteenth-century London Puy and asks what comparisons and contrasts can be drawn between this part-secular, part-devotional organisation whose male merchant members met annually to judge poetry, and the fictional framework of the late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. Cooper’s new edition and translation of the one surviving song that has been linked with the London Puy is an important reminder of the linguistic diversity of medieval London. Its survival is another example of the contingency of lin37 The meaning Chaucer gives to ‘usages’ (Troilus and Criseyde, II, 28) and ‘usage’ (I, 150) is closely

tied to Ovid’s ‘usus’ in the Ars amatoria and Horace’s ‘usus’ in his Ars poetica as Barbara Nolan shows in a forthcoming article, ‘ “Usage” in Troilus and Criseyde: A Literary Lineage’. 38 Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989). See also Carol Meale, ‘The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and Mercantile Literary Culture in Late-Medieval London’, in London and Europe, ed. Boffey and King, pp. 181–227. 39 Linne Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe: New Evidence of the Identification of the Scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’, Speculum (forthcoming Jan. 2006); paper first presented at the 14th Biennial Congress of The New Chaucer Society, University of Glasgow, 17 July 2004. 40 For a recent discussion of London reading communities in relation to Langland’s Piers Plowman, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427’, NML, 1 (1997), 59–83.

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guistic history: a piece of arbitrarily conserved literary detritus that leaves a tantalisingly precious written trace of the musical as well as verbal sound of the city. Several essays in this volume draw attention to the sound of language in the city, the street cries, drunken shouting, gossip and rumour, as well as the more refined sounds of this art song in performance.41 Chaucer’s own poetry conveys a great range of such sounds: but we should not forget that though ostensibly monolingual, the textual environment in which he wrote (poetic, bureaucratic, mercantile or legal) was overwhelmingly polyglot and multilingual. The street cry cited by Cannon from the Prologue to Langland’s Piers Plowman is a case in point: ‘Dieu save Dame Emme!’42 From the humblest daily talk to the highest echelons of learned composition, the language of medieval London was a constantly changing mixture of tongues, drawn not only from varieties of English, but also (to differing degrees) from varieties of continental and Anglo-French, Gascon, varieties of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, German, Flemish, Czech, Latin and even some languages from further East. We need to learn to hear this babble of sounds surrounding, and sometimes infiltrating linguistic samples from the medieval city. If London had many shifting populations and loosely associated groups, it also had some relatively stable institutions (though fewer than in many continental university cities such as Paris or Bologna): the several Courts of law and civic administration, the civic offices of the Mayor, sheriffs and aldermen, the Companies and lesser craft guilds, religious fraternities, parish churches, monasteries and convents, hospitals and others. Three aspects of institutional life are selected here for discussion as a context for a work by Chaucer: David Benson looks more closely at the world hinted at in the unfinished Cook’s Tale of guilds and citizenship and the disputes between masters and apprentices found in the Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls; Elliot Kendall concentrates on the great household in his new reading of the Shipman’s Tale; and finally, John Scattergood offers both a re-dating and re-reading of The Complaint to His Purse by considering various aspects of the London money economy. Benson takes up Cooper’s thread by finding further parallels to the structure of literary contest in the Canterbury Tales. Yet where her attention falls on the recreational activities of the aspiring and wealthy mercantile community, Benson’s is drawn rather by the more sordid world of lowlife and petty crime revealed through the municipal court case records. It may seem ironic that Chaucer’s poetry should have affinities with two such different kinds of literary rivalry – the annual lyric contest of the Puy, and the competing tale-telling narratives of the court records – yet it is characteristic of city life that the high and low run in parallel. Kendall is also concerned with intersecting urban cultures: both of which, he argues, operate in complexly overlapping ways in the great aristocratic household. He investigates the subtlety with which Chaucer repre41 Cf. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago and London, 1999). 42 On medieval street cries, see the nineteenth-century excavations of Charles Hindley, A History of the

Cries of London. Ancient and Modern, 2nd edn (London, 1884) and A. Franklin, Les rues et les cris de Paris au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1874).

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sents through this merchant’s tale non-commercial aspects of mercantile culture clashing against the surprisingly blatant commercial instincts of an aristocratic community determined to keep its footing in a rapidly changing economy. Scattergood supports this picture by looking at the flow of money in and out of the city, and the ways it affected minor civil servants like Chaucer, dependent for his personal financial solvency partly on the circulation of trade (centred in the Customs House) but ultimately on the whims of royal favour through irregularly paid annuities and grants. Scattergood finishes with Chaucer at the end of his life, about to be given ‘protected accommodation’ in Westminster, a location that, at the last, took him once more out of the walled city. Yet even as Chaucer leaves the city, the city does not leave Chaucer. The city is not a single moment in history preserved in aspic. It is a continuous present, or set of presences, which live at the same time and in the same place, like the revenant in Benjamin’s arcades. Freud in Civilization and its Discontents compared the mind to an ancient city – most symptomatically of all, Rome – a place where beneath the surface lie many layers of occupation and settlement.43 Some of these layers can be brought back to a life of kinds by excavation or restoration. In the remarkable legend recounted in the late fourteenth-century poem St Erkenwald, an uncorrupted pagan corpse, discovered in the foundations of St Paul’s during its Saxon rebuilding, dissolves to dust when the bishop’s tear falls on the body.44 As the poem implies, not all these layers are visible or can even be made visible; they no longer exist in any literal sense or may disappear forever at any time. They exist instead in memory and the imagination. The life of a city at any one moment is not only the physical surface but this collection of memories and hauntings. Anyone who lives in London has a particularly physical sense of the irretrievability of the city’s past after the Great Fire of 1666 which destroyed nearly all the built edifices of medieval London. Beneath the modern city, beneath the Monument in Pudding Lane, lie the burnt remains of a subterranean city, Chaucer’s city. Recuperating the city in Chaucer is part of the desire lurking in the contemporary city to apprehend the city in time. The final two essays in the volume therefore take head on the issue of Chaucer, not as a figure from a single moment in the past, but as a poet in time, in history. Paul Davis and Helen Phillips take up this story of Chaucer and the City after the fire. The aim here is not to provide a comprehensive sense of Chaucer’s reputation after his death (this can be found elsewhere)45 but to choose two moments where Chaucer’s relationship with the city has a particularly resonant meaning for later London writers and readers. In both periods in question, the long eighteenth century and the nineteenth, Chaucer’s writings are a figure for 43 ‘Civilisation and its Discontents (I)’, in Civilisation, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, The

Pelican Freud Library, 12 (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 256–9. 44 See D. Vance Smith, ‘Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable’, NML, 5

(2002), 59–85. On the poem’s relation to contemporary London politics, see Frank Grady, ‘St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament’, SAC, 22 (2000), 179–211. 45 Most recently, Ellis, ed., Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, Part IV: Afterlife.

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ideas of and about urbanness. In keeping with the recurring theme of this volume, each essay itself figures as an act of retrieval: a sifting through the ashes or the debris of citation to recover the image of a poet who has long gone yet still, through various processes of (at the time) only partially articulated historicism, surfaces to speak for that period’s sense of its own modernity. It is striking, then, how in both periods Chaucer is reinvented as a rural poet (although this is only part of the story for Dryden and Pope, who as Davis explains, are also reinventing a notion of urbanness to which Chaucer is subsequently reattached). We can understand this, through Raymond Williams, as a symptom of the way in which the opposition between city and country has been repeatedly expressed in literature and society from the earliest times. Each is a powerful term, and yet each is defined by the other: the opposition between the two is fundamental to the meaning of either. Williams observes how every generation of writers locates its idea of the ‘country’ or the ‘truly rural’ in a period just past, creating a seemingly endless process of historical regression. Thus for later twentieth-century writers, the First World War is a watershed, but for Thomas Hardy writing his novels in 1871–96, the rural England of the 1830s was the unsullied time; Cobbett writing in the 1830s looked back to the England of the 1770s and 1780s with longing, and so on. Williams insists that the perspective constantly changes since rural virtues mean different things at different times and quite distinct values are brought into question. In his careful phrase, we need ‘precise analysis of each kind of retrospect’.46 We find, through the discussions of Davis and Phillips, that Chaucer’s medievalness adds an extra level of nostalgic retrospect. If, as many have observed, the medieval functions as the defining period of pre-modern nostalgia, it becomes less surprising to find Chaucer re-configured as a rural writer. More accurately, perhaps, Chaucer is being caught up in a pastoral perspective. For by a further pastoral trope, Chaucer’s urbanness itself is transferred from the site of its own modernity to a radical reinterpretation as the imaginary other of the archaeological past. The city of the past becomes a pastoral inversion through which the present city is constructed. Twenty-first century readers continue to use this pastoral perspective of Chaucer as a way of constructing the contemporary city. We can see this in two of the most haunting images of the medieval city, one from its own time, the other from the time of Pepys and Dryden. Both are images of conflict and destruction: the 1381 Rising and the Great fire. Both are moments of pastoral inversion, one connected to medieval historians and poets, the other to our current perceptions of London as a city in time. In the first week of June in 1381, a massive crowd led by Wat Tyler and a radical priest-preacher John Ball entered London to ransack, pillage and carry out mob massacres and targeted beheadings. The rebels, having gathered in Southwark and released prisoners held there, crossed London Bridge unopposed, and a large number also entered through Aldgate. One chronicler says that the commons of 46 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1985; 1st publ. 1973), pp. 9–12 (p. 12).

Introduction

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Southwark forced the keepers of the bridge to lower the barrier and let the rebels in; another that they were welcomed inside the walls by the poor of London who refused to allow the gates to be shut against them; further sources claim that the alderman William Tonge opened Aldgate, defying the mayor’s order to keep it locked.47 Already, in these details, we have an association between rural rebels and urban oppressed: London is not simply presented as an urban enclave ripe for picking by a country mob, but a conflicted location, the crowds within holding its gates open to like-minded crowds without. Inside, Gaunt’s Savoy Palace was sacked and burnt and the Tower occupied while advisors close to the king such as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the royal Treasurer were beheaded. The picture of these actions presented by historians such as Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham is remarkable for its pastoral language, linking rural (and biblical) images to the scenes of violent social disorder. Knighton remarks that the Archbishop and the Treasurer ‘went like lambs to the shearer’;48 the rebels went in and out of the Tower ‘like lords’ and ‘swineherds set themselves above soldiers’, writes Walsingham, adding of the killing of the Archbishop, that ‘words could not be heard among their horrible shrieks but rather their throats sounded with the bleating of sheep.49 After Wat Tyler was killed in Smithfield on the Saturday, ‘the wretched band of rebels in the field, now like deserted sheep without their shepherd’50 were left at the mercy of the soldiers: ‘They immediately surrounded the entire band of rustics with armed men, just as sheep are enclosed within a fold until it pleases the labourer to choose which he wants to send out to pasture and which he wants to kill.’51 That night, their power dissipated, none of the rebels were admitted into the city, but had to spend the night under the st ars. Rounded up like sheep, according to these supercilious clerics the rebels even sounded like sheep. This is no innocent, pretty pastoral scene, but nonetheless functions as true pastoral: that is, one incorporating extreme social tension, violence and the inversion of usual social rules in a situation where both sides have been displaced – the king in a f ield and the rebels in the Tower. Fire, likewise, is an image of erasure in which people are displaced and brought low, yet through that reversal find the impetus for civic renewal. Fire is the great metaphor of time and change in the city from Virgil to Augustine, and from Chaucer to Pope (see Turner’s essay, p. 35 and Davis, pp. 188–90). Through the devastations of fire, modernity is repeatedly re-figured against a past that is correspondingly cast in a Golden Age glow. Finishing with the twin images of the city in revolt and in flames may seem unduly negative, but I would argue, on the contrary, that they bring us closer to the profoundly contin47 R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970), pp. 156, 188, 212–26 (on Tonge,

48 49 50 51

pp. 220, 225). See further R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, eds, The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984); Caroline Barron, Revolt in London: 11th to 15th June 1381 (London, 1981). Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt, p. 183. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt, p. 173. Knighton, in Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt, p. 187. Knighton, in Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt, p. 179.

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gent procedures of interpreting the remains of the past. After the Great Fire of 1666 Chaucer’s city survives physically for us only as detritus, as reconstructed buildings, fragments of walls, and piles of domestic objects cast up by the shores of the Thames. The written records are more extensive in some respects, but they too survive patchily and in ways which leave us searching in the gaps. Like pieces of truncated epigraphy from Roman crypts and buried streets, they record sounds as well as ideas, living attempts to fix language and song in public memory. In the latest practices of urban archaeology, such as the excavation in Rome of the Crypta Balbi (a vast courtyard adjacent to a theatre built for Augustus at the end of the first century BC), complex stratigraphic procedures have been developed to investigate and reveal all the layers of urban transformation that have changed a site through the centuries. The result is a brilliant exploration of the city in history, in which no one period is privileged over another but the modern observer is taken down through each layer of time, each visible from and connected to the twenty-first century street.52 Like stratigraphers, we too must uncover the layers of change and historical distortion in what we read, while recognising that we are adding our own irreparable restorations. To observe, recollect, listen, and read in the city is to be reminded tangibly and aurally that modernity is always changing, and has always been there.

52 Museo Nazionale Romano: Crypta Balbi, English Edition (Rome, 2000), p. 43.

LOCATIONS

Great er London Marion Tur ner

Greater London MARION TURNER

Late Fourteenth-Century London Chaucer’s imagination was steeped in London life and London language. His writings are infused with urban discourses such as curial prose and the legal complaint, and some of his earliest readers were Londoners (most famously Thomas Usk).1 Chaucer often refers to London geography in a throwaway manner2 and his poetry sometimes invokes the city in detail of breath-taking vibrancy.3 His life was, of course, profoundly bound up with London through his family background, his jobs, and his home above the walls.4 This essay is concerned with investigating what ‘London’ might mean and suggest – both geographically and culturally – in a late fourteenth-century textual environment. In particular, my interest is in the fractured and porous nature of London in the 1380s and 1390s. I suggest that in order to understand Chaucer’s intimate involvement with the city we recognise the flexibility of the idea of London at this time. London, for Chaucer and his contemporaries, was not a contained, culturally unified city. Instead, it was a more complicated and expansive location, encompassing court and suburbs as well as the City itself, a place of fluctuating, unfixed boundaries. This geographical diversity was paralleled by cultural diversity. The London that is refracted through late fourteenth-century texts, including those by Chaucer, is a place of cultural conflict, jostling rivalries, and incompatible interests. The city, then, cannot be found in Chaucer’s poetry if one seeks a coherent space; rather it emerges as a profoundly split and antagonistic location. The geographical boundaries of London had always been difficult to establish, and were not co-determinate with the city walls. As Caroline Barron 1

2 3 4

See J. D. Burnley, ‘Curial Prose in England’, Speculum, 61 (1986), 593–614; Mary Flowers Braswell, Chaucer’s ‘Legal Fiction’: Reading the Records (London, 2001); Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles’, NML, 1 (1997), 59–83. For example: ‘the white wyn of Lepe/ That is to selle in Fysshestrete or in Chepe’ (Pardoner’s Tale, VI, 563–4). This is particularly the case in Troilus and Criseyde, the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. See Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin Crow and Clair Olson (Oxford, 1966).

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writes, ‘there had always been Londoners who did not live within the walls’.5 The density of legal institutions and social establishments in the area between London and Westminster, and the recognition of this area as a ward in its own right in 1394, testifies to the way that the city spilled over its walls.6 Moreover, there was a blurred boundary between the interests of Londoners and non-Londoners. Derek Pearsall comments that: A distinction between agricultural and urban workers cannot be strictly maintained since the city of London was a small smoky town of 50,000 inhabitants at most, many of whom had business outside the walls, and an hour’s walk in almost any direction would take one into the country.7

The participation of Londoners in the revolt of 1381 makes clear the common interests of city dwellers and their non-urban contemporaries.8 London had always been dependent on the countryside and on the suburbs, but the establishment of two new city offices in the last quarter of the fourteenth century makes the expansive concerns of London in these decades particularly manifest. These offices were the Waterbailiff and the Common Hunt.9 The former had responsibilities extending well beyond the city walls, and even beyond the city’s jurisdiction, as he was in charge of the river from Staines to the Medway. The duties of the Common Hunt similarly penetrated deep into the area surrounding the city, as London claimed hunting rights throughout Middlesex. The invention of these positions suggests that Londoners had a strong sense of their domain spreading beyond the City, beyond even the suburbs, and into the surrounding counties. Many texts produced in the late fourteenth century suggest that London, Westminster, and Southwark formed an urban mass with many shared interests, despite the idiosyncrasies of each area.10 Indeed, a reference to one of these areas could imply another. In a throwaway comment, for example, Adam of Usk describes ‘Parliementum tentum London, apud Westm’ ’ (the parliament held in London, at Westminster), implying that Westminster was a part of London.11 In 5

Caroline Barron, ‘London 1300–1540’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 1: 600–1540, ed. D. M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 395–440 (p. 397). 6 See Barron, ‘London 1300–1540’, p. 397. 7 Derek Pearsall, ‘Langland’s London’, in Written Work, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 185–207 (pp. 86–7). For further discussion of London’s population, and a more cautious estimate, see Baron, London, pp. 238–41, cited in John Scattergood’s chapter, p. 168. 8 See Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284–309 (p. 284). 9 See Barron, London, pp. 191–3. 10 For a discussion of Londoners’ attitudes to its special identity, see Barbara Hanawalt, ‘The Power of Word and Symbol: Conflict Resolution in Late Medieval London’, in ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1998), pp. 35–52 (pp. 36–7). On Southwark, see Martha Carlin, Medieval Southwark (London, 1996). See also Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989). 11 The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997), pp. 20–1. An earlier medieval description of London that includes Westminster appears in William Fitzstephen, Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson, Rolls Series, 67 (London, 1877), III, 1–154, pp. 2–13.

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27

Richard Maidstone’s Concordia, a poem which deals with the City’s quarrel with Richard II, there is also a sense of a ‘greater London’ identity.12 The king approaches London from Sheen, meets city officials outside the walls and processes through Southwark, before continuing through the City itself and ending up in Westminster. All of these locations are described in the poem, and the symbolic reconciliations of the day take place in the suburbs as well as in the City. Thus Richard is in Southwark when he pardons a murderer in a pre-figuration of his pardoning of the City (lines 183–90). The actual pardon, of course, occurs in Westminster, perhaps serving to stress the fact that London remains dependent on the king.13 Yet, while Richard associates himself with Westminster, it had also been, in many ways, the object of his attack as much as was London. His removal of the law courts from Westminster to York in 1392, the ‘first salvo in Richard’s attack upon the city’, a gesture which deprived London of ‘the trade which the concourse of people to Westminster inevitably produced’,14 also, of course, deprived Westminster of much of its income. On this occasion, the two areas were essentially undifferentiated (in a way that inhabitants of Westminster must have regretted). David Wallace’s claim that Chaucer ‘refuses’ to write urban narrative, and that London is ‘absent’ in Chaucer’s writings is predicated on a conception of London as a unified, coherent entity.15 Wallace understands the conceptual ‘meaning’ of London to be the walled city. Discussing Troilus and Criseyde, for example, he asserts that Troy ‘plainly differs from Chaucer’s London’ as it places the court and the city within the same walled space in a way that is not compatible with contemporary London and Westminster (p. 156). Just as he sees the inclusion of the court in Troy as marking Troy’s difference from London, so he asserts that the choice of Southwark as a place to begin the Canterbury pilgrimage marks that pilgrimage as beginning away from London. He argues that Southwark was a place that challenged London and defined itself in opposition to the City, suggesting that the cross of St Paul would represent Chaucer’s London more appropriately than an insalubrious Southwark tavern (p. 157). Wallace’s belief in the ‘absent city’ is built upon an understanding of Westminster and Southwark as entities that are separate from London. Furthermore, Wallace suggests that the city should be coherent, in order to be properly urban. Discussing the Cook’s Tale, he writes: Chaucer’s London Tale comes to suggest suspicion of associational forms rather than celebration of them. How does Chaucer’s city come to be so evasive, so difficult to imagine, when the Chaucerian countryside is so powerful? (pp. 156–7) 12 Richard Maidstone, Concordia inter regem Ric II et civitatem London, ed. T. Wright, Camden Old

Series, 3 (London, 1838). 13 See Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Quarrel of Richard II with London 1392–7’, in The Reign of Richard II:

Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 173–201 (pp. 191–2). 14 Barron, ‘Quarrel’, pp. 181, 182. 15 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), pp. 156, 157.

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Here, Wallace observes that the London Chaucer depicts does not conform to a model of the ideal city-state and does not celebrate associational form. He suggests that it follows that the Chaucerian city is therefore ‘evasive’ and ‘difficult to imagine’. Yet this is not necessarily true, if we shift our paradigms to imagine a city that is fundamentally fragmented and diverse. Wallace goes on to conclude that it is ‘fitting’ for the Cook’s Tale to dissolve into silence, as ‘the absence or absenting of the city in Chaucer is not so much evasive as it is mimetic’ (p. 181). It is certainly true that there is an absence in Chaucer’s texts, and in the contemporary imagination, of an image of London as a unified, demarcated entity. But an understanding of the incoherence and diversity of contemporary London at once enables us to recognise the presence – even prevalence – of the city in Chaucer’s writings. Literary and historical scholars have recently emphasised the fact that medieval London was not ‘a self-contained cultural entity’, that it could not ‘speak with a single voice’.16 Although the city had always been a place of competing interests, where immigrants rubbed shoulders with noblemen and aldermen with apprentices, the late fourteenth century was a period of especial discord.17 Faction-fighting and trade wars between the aldermen reached unprecedented levels in the 1380s, as mayoral elections were won by force and murders were openly committed and flagrantly denied.18 Chaucer’s London was the London of Nicholas Brembre and John Northampton, whose conflicting modes of government incited the turbulence in the city that culminated in Brembre’s execution. The London Chaucer knew was the city that opened its gates first to the rebels of 1381 and then to the Lords Appellant, a site that was finally taken into the king’s hand in 1392. London was as politically fragmented as it was geographically incoherent: the permeability of the city walls reflects the nature of the city as a site of conflict. This is the London that can be found in the writings of Chaucer and of his contemporaries. Contemporary poems offer perceptions of London as a geographical and cultural mosaic, a city with unfixed limits, whose identity is constituted by competition and rivalry. In particular, an evocative depiction of urban life is given in a poem probably written between 1375 and 1400 and entitled ‘The Stores of the Cities’.19 This short piece, written in dog Latin, appears in a fifteenth-century commonplace book from Glastonbury (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 0.9.38, fol. 16v). It describes the properties of seven English cities, beginning with London, and ending with Canterbury (having gone through York, Lincoln, Norwich, Coventry, and Bristol). The opening lines on London are as follows (including A. G. Rigg’s translation): 16 Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 284; Barron, London, p. 10. 17 See Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949). 18 See also Paul Strohm, ‘Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial’, in his Theory and the

Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 112–31. 19 See A. G. Rigg, ‘An Edition of a Fifteenth-Century Commonplace Book (Trinity College, Cambridge,

MS 0.9.38)’, 2 vols, D.Phil. dissertation (Oxford, 1965), I, pp. 15–16; and ‘The Stores of the Cities’, Anglia, 85 (1967), 127–37. Rigg explains that the poem was ‘certainly written before 1401 when, according to Stow, the “Tunne” . . . ceased to be a prison’ (pp. 127–8).

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Hec sunt Londonis: pira, pomusque, regia, thronus, Chepp, stupha, Coklana, dolium, leo verbaque vana, Lancea cum scutis – hec sunt staura ciuitatis. These are London’s: pear and apple (sceptre and orb), palace, throne, Cheapside, the Stews, Cock Lane, the ‘Tunne’, the ‘Lion’ and empty words, lance and shields – these are the stores of the city.

The poet here uses ‘London’ to refer not to the walled City of London, but to ‘Greater London’. The ‘pira, pomusque’, taken by Rigg to mean ‘sceptre and orb’, and the ‘regia’ and ‘thronus’, all suggest a reference to the king and hence to Westminster. The ‘stupha’ – the Stews of Southwark, an area not under the city’s control – are also explicitly included, as is Cock Lane, which was located in Smithfield (a suburb outside the walls which was under the jurisdiction of London). Cheapside, and the ‘Tunne’ (a prison in Cornhill) are certainly within the walled city, and the lion – a reference to the lions in the Tower, or to another prison, or to an inn – may refer to a location within the walls. As the lion is a symbol of England (three appear on the royal arms of England), this reference also calls to mind both the king/Westminster and the country as a whole. The other attributes – ‘verbaque vana, lancea cum scutis’ – are not place-specific. London is not depicted as a contained, enclosed entity; moreover, in this verse, the characterisation of London is not even dominated by the City itself. Westminster and the suburbs are as important and are allotted as much space. Socially, the city’s attributes tend to be disreputable: London is associated with a prison (‘dolium’), gossip (‘verbaque vana’), weaponry (‘lancea cum scutis’), prostitution (‘Stupha’), and (possibly) pubs (‘leo’) – an impressive and vivid selection for such a short verse. The emphatic references at the beginning of lines 2 and 3 to ‘Chepp’ and then to ‘Lancea cum scutis’ might remind us of the clash of mercantile and military interests in the contemporary city, as well as of the fact that trade disputes could spin out of control to become fatal conflicts. This fascinating poem evokes a place that I call ‘Greater London’ – a geographically and culturally diverse site. The London that can be discerned in Chaucer’s writings is remarkably similar to the city depicted in this neglected little urban satire.

The Place of the City Many of Chaucer’s texts imagine the city as a space that includes the environs of the City itself. The blurred boundaries between city and suburbs are explored in the Canterbury Tales. Wallace argues that the choice of Southwark as origin-point for the Canterbury pilgrimage is ‘arrestingly eccentric’, and that this choice distances the fellowship from London and points up the absence of the city.20 The evidence of the ‘Stores’, however, suggests that the decision to 20 See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 157, 158.

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begin the pilgrimage in Southwark does associate the pilgrims with London. Southwark and its stews were a symbol of an important part of the city – indeed were seen as one of the characteristic aspects, or ‘stores’ of London life in this poem. Further, the concept of a diverse group of people coming together in a tavern setting is inherently urban, and emphasises the fact that Southwark was intimately bound up with the City. A fellowship like the Canterbury group could only be formed in an urban location, taking advantage of the ‘greater flexibility in the sociability of the city than the country’.21 In the city, many people depended ‘wholly or in part on the service provided by inns and taverns’ and, as a result, a diverse range of people could come together in a public space in a way that would be unthinkable in a rural area.22 This flexibility and fluidity is shared by places within and outside of the city walls, and characterises the London area as a whole. The relationships between pilgrims also suggest that pilgrims from London and the suburbs see themselves as sharing a common area and therefore a common market. Rivalries exist between Londoners such as the Cook and the Manciple (Manciple’s Prologue), but an equally vicious exchange takes place between the London Cook and the suburban Host (Cook’s Prologue). Their aggressive swapping of insults is firmly placed in trade: the Cook mocks hostellers, and the Host casts aspersions on the Cook’s pies and hygiene.23 Their barbed words show that they see each other as trade rivals, and that the geographical separation between Southwark and London lessens neither their intimate knowledge of each other’s reputations, nor their sense of competition (they are both in the same service industry). The focus on trade, and the language used – in particular the Cook’s deployment of a Flemish proverb – emphasises the fact that these are Londoners who use the same discourse and see each other as competitors for business. The casual movement between suburbs and the City is also suggested by the Canon’s Yeoman. This late arrival declares that he and his master live in the suburbs (Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, VIII, 657), and goes on to tell a tale about a very similar canon plying his trade in London itself. Again, there is no sense of division between suburban and urban locations. One can live in one location and work in another, and the term ‘London’ here might cover a much broader area than the walled city. Other poems by Chaucer probe the intimate connections and tensions between city and court. In particular, Troilus and Criseyde vividly evokes the mutual dependence of London and Westminster, reflecting ‘the increasingly divided, yet mutually embedded and mutually dependent aristocratic and urban cultures of later medieval England’.24 Despite Troy’s identity as a walled city,25 21 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), p. 86. 22 Heal, Hospitality, p. 85. 23 See Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington, 1987), p.

117. 24 Christopher Baswell, ‘Aeneas in 1381’, NML, 5 (2002), 7–58 (p. 17). 25 On mythical connections made between Troy and London see, for example, Lee Patterson, Negotiat-

ing the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, 1987), pp. 203, 135–51; Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2003); and

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the prominence of royal characters and the importance of the parliament scene in the poem suggest not contemporary London but contemporary Westminster, site of the king’s residence and the centre of government. For some readers, the emphasis given to courtly scenes, and the inclusion of the court within the walls of the city, decisively separates the city of Troilus and Criseyde from contemporary London26 (although the evidence of the ‘Stores’ reveals that the king and his court, represented by ‘regia, thronus’ were indeed seen as part of London at this time). Fifteenth-century readers of the poem also emphasised its courtliness, as exemplified by the ‘Troilus frontispiece’.27 Modern critics have often discussed Troilus and Criseyde as a court production that appealed to an aristocratic elite, and have pointed to the aristocratic/courtly resonances of the idea of New Troy to support this view. D. W. Robertson, for instance, comments that Chaucer’s ‘aim was undoubtedly an appeal to the chivalry of New Troy’ and adds that the characters represent a ‘feudal aristocracy’ with ‘aristocratic polite manners’.28 Derek Pearsall notes that: The brilliance and joyousness of Books II and III of the poem may have to do with a time when Richard and Anne’s court was, in the early 1380s, specially a place of youth and festival, and the old idea of London as ‘the New Troy’ could have a momentary flourishing.29

New Troy is here imagined as an idea that came from and was favoured by a courtly environment. In the late fourteenth century, however, the matter of Troy was manipulated and exploited by more than one social group, and was not exclusively courtly/aristocratic. Christopher Baswell discusses the traditional deployment of Troy to bolster aristocratic positions and ambitions, and adds: The linking of London and Troy also suggests ways in which new and fractious urban agents might seek to imagine and consolidate communal identities under the aegis of ancient epic story.30

He suggests that in the late fourteenth century, mercantile magnates were enthusiastically appropriating ‘originally aristocratic symbolism and ritual’ and discusses annotations on Aeneid manuscripts that reflect the engagement of an ‘urban culture’ with epic (pp. 15, 39). A friar’s explanation of the positioning of Troy and Tenedos as a reflection of the trade relationship between Norwich and

26 27

28 29 30

Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), p. 220. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 156. See James H. McGregor, ‘The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principium and in the Troilus Frontispiece’, Chaucer Review, 11 (1977), 338–50; Derek Pearsall, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’, Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977), 68–74; M. B. Parkes and Elizabeth Salter, Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 61 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 15–23. D. W. Robertson, Chaucer’s London (New York and London, 1968), pp. 221, 123, 124. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 177. Baswell, ‘Aeneas in 1381’, p. 17.

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Flanders, for example, reveals how bourgeois the matter of Troy could become in the 1380s (pp. 33–4). I suggest that Troilus and Criseyde is a bourgeois, urban poem as well as an aristocratic, courtly production. The poem deals with the negotiation between city and court and depicts a place in which urban and courtly interests jostle for precedence, just as they did in the London area. Indeed, the inclusion of the court within the city walls emphasises the mutual dependence of the city and Westminster in a way entirely commensurate with the blurred imaginative boundaries between the two places. Troilus’s entry into the city and procession through the streets, for example, is a very ‘London’ scene, evoking royal entries that staged the relationship between court and City. The description, ‘Ascry aros at scarmuch al withoute,/ And men criden in the strete’ (II, 611–12), initially imagines the outcry organically emerging from an undifferentiated crowd, while the next line concretises the description of the men shouting in the street. The jostling group is joined by Criseyde’s servants, and the crowd thronging around the triumphant prince is termed the ‘peple’ (II, 643, 646), Chaucer’s favourite shorthand for the mob. The ‘peple’ shout in unison (II, 643–4), dazzled by the ‘knyghtly sighte’ (II, 628) passing through the streets. Here, the town is memorably rendered through its interaction with the prince. Another scene later in the poem also images the connections between city and court, temptingly evoking the layout of Westminster/the aristocratic palaces on the Strand, and London. Shortly after his return to his own palace from Sarpedoun’s house, Troilus wants to go to Criseyde’s palace. At this point ‘his meyne for to blende,/ A cause he fond in towne for to go’ (V, 526–7). These words suggest the royal palaces are somehow separate from the ‘towne’: Troilus has to traverse some space between the royal palace and the hub of the city but courtly and civic locales exist within the same cultural idea of urban space. The situating of parliament within the city stresses the power of townsmen in government. Competing urban and courtly interests come to the fore in this scene, when the words of each ‘burgeys’ (IV, 345) carry the day. In Troilus and Criseyde, as in the English Commons, the burgesses are representatives of the town, of civic, mercantile interests, as opposed to noble, lordly concerns. The pairing of lord and burgess – ‘Pandare, which that in the parlement/ Hadde herd what every lord and burgeys seyde’ (IV, 344–5) – suggests that the two groups are equally important. The debate in the parliament reflects the contrasting values of magnates and merchants.31 In fact the boundaries between these groups were somewhat fluid,32 but here Chaucer depicts a stereotypical view of their interests. Hector, ideal example of royal, noble concerns, is motivated by ideas of chivalry which demand that he should protect the woman he has promised to shield. The commons, on the other hand, are interested in commerce – in trading what appears to be of less worth for a better commodity. They are prag31 Throughout Chaucerian Polity, Wallace discusses the conflict between ‘magnate militarism and mer-

chant exchange’ (p. 9). 32 See Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Chicago, 1948; repr. Ann

Arbor, MI, 1962), pp. 234–87.

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matic politicians and economists and ultimately, they prove to hold the balance of power. In this poem, the king wields little authority, and subdues his will to that of the city. The ‘peple’ (IV, 183) argue against Hector and then address the king: ‘O kyng Priam,’ quod they, ‘thus sygge we, That al oure vois is to forgon Criseyde.’ (IV, 194–95)

This nominal address to the king seems to be symbolic only, as they continue to debate and the proclamation is made by the ‘president’ (IV, 213) of the parliament and cannot be withstood because the ‘substaunce [majority] of the parlement it wolde’ (IV, 217). The democracy of the parliament is explicitly stated, and Priam has no say, while his son is ignored. Although the courtliness of the poem is often stressed, regal power is muted in Troilus and Criseyde. The aristocrats and princes are bound up with and dependent upon the common people. Indeed, the putative reference to the Peasants’ Revolt in this scene implies that it is the lesser people in the city who control its fate.33 The different interests and discourses operating within late fourteenth-century London are also represented by the counterpoint between the absolutist language of courtly love and the pragmatic, mercantile language of exchange within the poem. Troilus and Criseyde ultimately suggests that these different discourses mask their fundamental similarities – Troilus attempts to disguise the seediness of his exchange of women by using the high-flown language of chivalrous love.34 Towards the end of the poem, Troilus imagines he can see Criseyde approaching the city and Pandarus explains to him that it is merely a ‘ “fare-carte” ’ (V, 1162), a wagon for hauling goods. The reference to the cart not only reminds us that Troy is a fully-functioning city, a place of marketplaces and bourgeois interests as well as the site of court, love, and war, but also explicitly connects Criseyde with mercantile wares. The idea of the courtly lady has dissolved, as the reader can see that she is an object passed between men in the nexus of trade and exchange that sustains civic and courtly society. Chaucer’s city, then, contains different kinds of spaces. Like greater London, the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde is a space for royalty, for aristocrats, for burgesses, even for agricultural workers.35 It represents, in Henri LeFebvre’s terms, that late medieval urban space which served as ‘the theatre of a compromise between the declining feudal system, the commercial bourgeoisie, oligarchies, and communities of craftsmen’.36

33 ‘The noyse of peple up stirte thanne at ones,/ As breme as blase of strawe iset on-fire’ (IV, 183–4) has

been read as an allusion to Jack Straw and the revolt of 1381. See John M. Ganim, ‘Chaucer and the Noise of the People’, Exemplaria, 2 (1990), 71–88 (p. 74). 34 See Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia, 1994), p. 126. 35 See V, 1177–80. 36 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), p. 269.

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The Atmosphere of the City Chaucer’s city was culturally as well as geographically diverse and fragmented. His poetry consistently reflects the conflict – both verbal and physical – raging within London, and his poetry can better be understood by probing contemporary London contexts. For instance, just as the ‘Stores’ specifies ‘verba vana’ as a defining characteristic of late fourteenth-century London, so Troilus and Criseyde and the House of Fame evoke the stifling atmosphere of the contemporary city through their concern with slander, gossip, conversation, and reputation.37 These poems depict places where no one can be trusted, where language is out of control. In Book II of Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde tells herself: ‘How bisy, if I love, ek most I be To plesen hem that jangle of love, and dremen, And coye hem, that they seye noon harm of me! For though ther be no cause, yet hem semen Al be for harm that folk hire frendes quemen; And who may stoppen every wikked tonge, Or sown of belles whil that thei ben ronge?’ (II, 799–805)

The murmuring of gossip has crescendoed into an uncontrollable pealing of bells. Her anxieties about oppressive, destructive gossip are played upon by Pandarus, who manipulates her, as well as Deiphebus and Helen, by pretending he has heard gossip about Poliphete’s malicious intentions towards Criseyde. Pandarus often makes up gossip for his own purposes, pretending, for example, that he has ‘ “tydynges” ’ (II, 1113) from a ‘ “Greek espie” ’ (II, 1112) to report to his niece, when really he wants to talk to her about Troilus. He is well aware both of the nature of ‘verba vana’ and of Criseyde’s fear of it. In a powerfully colloquial piece of rhetoric he says: ‘In titerynge, and pursuyte, and delayes, The folk devyne at waggyng of a stree; And though ye wolde han after mirye dayes, Than dar ye naught. And whi? For she, and she Spak swych a word; thus loked he, and he!’ (II, 1744–8)

The tone of the last line and a half, with its short phrases, rhetorical question, lack of substance and repetition of individual words (‘he’, ‘she’) and of syntax (‘she, and she’; ‘he, and he’) mimics the sound of gossip itself. Throughout the poem, the characters are afraid of the words of their friends and neighbours who live in close, urban proximity to them, and this anxiety often determines the 37 For discussions of the court/city aspects of the two locations in the House of Fame see J. A. W.

Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of ‘The House of Fame’ (Oxford, 1968), pp. 171–2; Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1986), p. 22 and George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1915), p. 106.

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plot of the poem. Fear of what people might say necessitates the elaborate ruses that unite Troilus and Criseyde, first in conversation at Deiphoebus’s house, and then in bed in Pandarus’s house. It is also fear of gossip that, ostensibly, prevents Troilus speaking out in the parliament. An anxiety about becoming a subject of ‘verba vana’ overshadows the lovers’ relationship – a relationship taking place in a city bristling with the ‘discursive turbulence’ that characterised Chaucer’s town.38 Gossip is, of course, even more fundamental to the House of Fame, a poem that takes unauthorised, morphing ‘tidings’ as its subject. Both Troilus and Criseyde and the House of Fame use the image of fire spreading through a city to depict gossip. In the House of Fame, tidings are amplified and altered as they pass from ‘mouth to mouth’ and are compared to fire spreading until ‘al a citee brent up is’ (2075–80). In Troilus and Criseyde, words race through urban space as quickly as a ‘blase of strawe’ (IV, 184). This powerful image of unstoppable flames suggests the very real danger inherent in gossiping in late fourteenthcentury London, a danger also suggested by Geffrey’s desperate desire that no-one should have his “name in honde” (House of Fame, 1877). This anxiety makes sense in the context of contemporary London, a place where legislation against gossip and slander was reaching draconian proportions, and accusations of mis-saying could have the most serious consequences. The statute concerning Scandalum Magnatum, passed in 1275, which legislated against insults to high status members of society was twice revised (and made more detailed) in the late fourteenth century, in 1378 and 1388.39 Slander was evidently a particular concern of those at the highest levels of society, a concern especially focused on London. A proclamation prohibiting discussion of the king or his associates was issued in London in 1387, specifically addressed to the people of ‘þe Cite of london and þe suburbes’.40 Slander was also a persistent worry for trades-people and merchants in London: Carl Lindahl has discussed the Canterbury Tales in the context of angry urban speech, commenting that in fourteenth-century London, slander was seen as a ‘crime against society’ for which the ‘group as a whole’ had to be compensated.41 Towards the end of the fourteenth century, proclamations, statutes and petitions all contribute to the cacophony of pleas for silence. Anxieties about slander and gossip inform London documents from Brembre’s proclamation about alien fishmongers42 to 38 See Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 288. 39 See Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols, ed. A. Luders (London, 1810–28), ii, p. 9 and ii, p. 59. See also

Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 244. 40 ‘Proclamacio ne quis male loquatur de Rege, Regina, nec aliis dominis’, printed in BoLE, pp. 92–3 (p. 92). This document was cited in the trial of Brembre in 1388; The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), p. 265. 41 Lindahl, Earnest Games, pp. 76, 75, emphasis Lindahl’s. See also Robertson, Chaucer’s London, pp. 101, 107. 42 This document, recorded in Letter Book H (1383–84) begins, ‘For as moche as rumour and spekyngge is amonges some men of the Citee . . .’, ‘Alia proclamacio de extraneis vitallariis ueniendi & uendendis absque impedimento pisces suos’, printed in BoLE, pp. 32–3, p. 32.

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Richard’s revision of the statute of treason.43 The claustrophobic spaces of Chaucer’s Trojan poems are particularly vivid and resonant if we read them in relation to their contemporary London environment, a conflicted location where language was heavily regulated and ‘verba vana’ were feared and suppressed. Indeed, the House of Rumour with its insubstantial, hole-filled boundaries and its deafening chatter, soon to be regulated by oppressive Fame, could serve as a representation of slander-filled, open-ended London, maintaining its noise despite legislation from the king and the mayoralty.44

Chaucer’s Tale of the City Indeed, Chaucer’s sense of London is often most evocatively and suggestively expressed through atmosphere and tone rather than through explicit references. In the Canterbury Tales, divided interests within the contemporary city are perhaps most strongly reflected in the tale told by Chaucer’s own persona, a tale in which civic conflict becomes bloody indeed. Without ever explicitly mentioning London in the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer nonetheless depicts a space that reflects the split interests and antagonism that dominated his city in the late fourteenth century, and the tale can productively be interpreted through contemporary London contexts. The Tale of Melibee suggests that violence is always threatening to emerge in urban space. It emphasises the criminal (‘dolium’) aspects of the city and the clash between mercantile (‘Chepp’) and military/aristocratic (‘lancea cum scutis’) interests in the city.45 It is a profoundly urban tale, detailing the conflict that takes place when people live in close quarters and try to set up violent power bases within cities: we might think of Brembre’s election ‘with stronge honde’46 or the murder of Janus Imperial in contemporary London.47 Melibee’s plan to ‘ “warnestoore myn hous with toures, swiche as han castelles and othere manere edifices, and armure, and artelries,/ by whiche thynges I may my persone and myn hous so kepen and defenden that myne enemys shul been in drede myn hous for to approche” ’ (VII, 1333–4) conjures up a claustrophobic atmosphere in which town-dwellers live in perpetual bloody conflict with their neighbours. The construction of an urban fortress also points to the clash of cultures in the contemporary city: Melibee’s solution is inappropriately aristocratic. Such edifices would be incongruous in a city, as they were designed to control expanses of countryside, and

43 Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et petitiones et placita in Parliamento tempore Ricardi II, ed. Rev. John

Strachey (London, 1767–77), iii, 408. 44 Knight comments that the range of the House of Rumour, ‘sixty myle of length’ (House of Fame,

1979), was ‘the ganglion of London’s economic range’. See Chaucer, p. 22. 45 There was, of course, a certain amount of fluidity in class demarcation: see Thrupp, Merchant Class,

pp. 234–87. 46 ‘A Petition of the Folk of Mercerye’, printed in BoLE, pp. 33–7 (p. 34). 47 See Strohm, ‘Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial’.

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needed many retainers for their defence – which Melibee does not have.48 The original context for Albertano’s story was thirteenth-century Italy. The writer was trying to promote the survival of the city-state, which was threatened by warlike knights, who brought feudal-style, summary justice from the countryside.49 When transposed into English, and into the Canterbury Tales the tale gains new meanings.50 This tale focuses on Prudence’s attempt to restrain Melibee’s will for revenge and violence, by deploying arguments about moneymaking and the advantages of peace. The tale evokes the atmosphere of late fourteenth-century London, where merchants were struggling to oppose the aristocratic impulse for war and for the worshipe to be gained through war.51 By the 1380s and 90s, war and economic prosperity came to be seen as incompatible, and affinities with ‘Chepp’ overcame pride in ‘lancea cum scutis’.52 In the early decades of the Hundred Years’ War, some London merchants had made vast profits,53 but, by the last two decades of the century, the merchants were thoroughly jaded: their ships had been requisitioned, their goods taxed, their trading opportunities reduced. In 1381, three of the four parliaments refused to make any grants for the war; in 1382, the merchants refused to finance a loan for the war; in 1387, William Beauchamp (possibly accompanied by Chaucer) was negotiating with the Flemish to resume trading agreements which had been disrupted by the war.54 At the same time, aggression within the city itself was at an all-time high, as aristocrats made alliances with different merchants/mayoral parties,55 and elections took place with bloodshed and even death. Melibee has both acquisitive/mercantile and militaristic/aristocratic desires, and he is centrally involved in a bloody city conflict that must have seemed particularly resonant to a London audience of the 1380s and 1390s. Melibee’s leisured play in the fields (VII, 968), his concern for ‘ “myn honour [and] my worshipe” ’ (VII, 1681), his desire to fight, and the final scene of submission in which he plays the role of autocratic lord, suggest that he is associated with 48 Prudence points out that such building would be pointless as it would not be ‘ “defended by trewe

freendes that been olde and wise” ’ (1336). 49 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 217. 50 Notable alterations to the source include Chaucer’s replacement of the viper with ‘wesele’ and the

51 52 53 54 55

addition of the ‘hert’ in line 1325, his omission of the criticism of child kings, and his naming of Sophie. In ‘Inverse Counsel: Contexts for the Melibee’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), 137–55, Lynn Staley discusses the weasel and the hert, comparing them to Robert de Vere and Richard II (p. 149); Scattergood argues that the suppression of the child king passage suggests Chaucer’s awareness of the political relevance of the tale (V. J. Scattergood, ‘Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee’, in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress on the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool, 1981), pp. 287–96 (p. 292). Maurice Keen, for example, discusses the fact that ‘ambitious young men of good family’ could gain ‘social cachet’ through fighting: Chivalry (New Haven and London, 1984), p. 227. Keen compares war’s negative social and economic effects to those of plague. Keen, Chivalry, p. 228. See Eileen Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History, being the Ford Lectures for 1939 (Oxford, 1941), especially pp. 83–5, 90, 97, 107, 114. See also Thrupp, Merchant Class, p. 53. See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1997), p. 206; Power, Wool Trade, p. 119; Scattergood, ‘Chaucer and the French War’, p. 294. The Westminster Chronicler suggests that Richard’s moves for peace were a principal cause of the lords’ rising in 1388 (Hector and Harvey, pp. 204–5).

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knightly values. We are, however, aware that he is merely playing a role in this final scene, and are told he ‘ “mighte nat putten it to execucioun” ’ (VII, 1853) – suggesting he does not really have the resources required of a feudal lord.56 The fact that Melibee has no close male relatives (‘ “ye ne han bretheren, ne cosyns germayns, ne noon oother neigh kynrede” ’, VII, 1368) reveals that he is ‘nouveau riche’, and hence lacks the kinship network so crucial to the aristocracy.57 Lefebvre discusses the contrast between spending money on ‘wars waged for mere show or mere prestige’, and accumulation/investment,58 and Prudence’s emphasis on investment and profit marks her as solidly bourgeois.59 She consistently opposes knightly ideas of gaining honour and worship through feats of arms, and is instead utterly single-minded in her interest in money. She straightforwardly tells Melibee, ‘ “ye sholde alwey doon youre bisynesse to gete yow richesses” ’ (VII, 1632). In keeping with the general mercantile attitude of the time, she encourages a little bit of charity – ‘ “to hem that han greet nede” ’ (VII, 1622) – but is quick to warn against being too open-handed: ‘ “thy goodes shullen nat been so opene to been every mannes goodes” ’ (VII, 1623). Prudence is profoundly unchristian in her obsession with money and in many of the arguments she deploys,60 and her words are also anathema to aristocratic ideas of largesse. In Felicity Heal’s words, good lordship and largesse were ‘the most material forms of that quality of magnanimity that the Aristotelian tradition placed at the heart of true aristocracy’.61 Prudence’s views are determinedly mercantile and ‘urban’, and she closes her eyes to aristocratic ideas of social capital. The plot of the Tale of Melibee starkly demonstrates the divisions within the city. The tale depicts the city as a place of vicious competition and aggression, and suggests that this aggression cannot be finally channelled or tamed (similarly, that most unfortunate contemporary Londoner, Thomas Usk, wearily declared: ‘ “every age of man rather enclyneth to wickednesse than any goodnesse to avaunce” ’).62 The late eruption of Melibee’s aggression in its most unreconstructed form – ‘ “Certes” quod he, “I thynke and purpose me fully/ to desherite hem of al that evere they han and for to putte hem in exil for evere” ’ (VII, 1834–5) – starkly reveals his inability to repress or divert his instincts. His subsequent submission, following the pattern of his earlier submissions to his wife throughout the tale, does not hold the promise of permanence.63 It is also 56 In Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), Paul Strohm discusses Melibee’s dual role as a member of

the ‘upper bourgeoisie’ and as a ‘feudal lord’ (p. 162). See Melibee, 1367–8 and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 217. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 262. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 241. See David Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee: Whose Virtues?’ in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 69–81. 61 Felicity Heal, ‘Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household’, in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 179–98 (p. 180). 62 Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), p. 84. 63 For a different view, see Lynn Staley, ‘Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity’, ch. 5 in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 179–259. 57 58 59 60

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clear that the enemies have not been reformed, and that their willingness to submit to Melibee is perceived as politic, rather than sincere, even by Prudence. She explains that if he imposes too harsh a penalty, he ‘ “mighte nat putten it to execucioun” ’ (VII, 1853), and goes on to tell Melibee that if he wants men to do “obeisance” (VII, 1855) to him, he must give them “moore esy sentences and juggementz” (VII, 1856). This cynicism makes a mockery of Prudence’s and Melibee’s final speeches on God and mercy, as ‘forgiveness’ is revealed as a materialistic and calculated act. Both parties know that it is in their best interests to make peace, but the enemies’ declaration that they will submit to Melibee is false: they will only submit if the penalties suit them. There is no guarantee of their future behaviour or of Sophie’s future safety. Prudence has effected a short-term solution, which has prevented Melibee from losing life or money, but we have no promise that peace and profit will persist. An uneasy truce papers over the divisions fundamental to city life. Similarly, peace in London never lasted long in these decades, as the city lurched from revolt to electoral disputes to quarrelling with the king. The unruliness of urban antagonism is further emphasised by one of Chaucer’s additions to the tale, namely, the Host’s ‘reading’ of it in the subsequent Prologue of the Monk’s Tale. He reads it as a tale for women, with the moral of encouraging women to be patient, and contrasts his aggressive wife with Prudence. But the reader cannot avoid seeing similarities between these two dominating women, and between the two angry men (Melibee and Harry).64 Both of these men live in urban households ruled by women, households that are vividly imagined and dominated by violence. Both men have violent fantasies – Melibee dreams of war, the Host of sadistically attacking a member of his compaignye (the Pardoner). They are also both associated with city values: Melibee seems to be a merchant, and is certainly occupied with moneymaking, and the narrator says of the Host that ‘A fairer burgeys was ther noon in Chepe’ (General Prologue, I, 754). For the reader, Harry’s relationship with Goodlief, like Melibee’s with Prudence, is an urban, combative marriage between aggressive trades-people. Yet Harry refuses to read the tale as applicable to him, as relating at all to his own aggression. The hard-nosed acquisitiveness that Prudence advocates and the violent tendencies exemplified by Melibee are characteristics both of contemporary London and of the Southwark pilgrim fellows, who compete against each other for success in the contest, and who fight with each other in the breaks between tales. The city depicted in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee (like the city depicted in tales such as the Cook’s and Canon’s Yeoman’s) is a place of competition, suspicion, and fragmentation – defining characteristics of Chaucer’s London. 64 For discussions of the Host’s misreading see Lee Patterson, ‘ “What Man Artow?”: Authorial

Self-Definition in The Tale of Thopas and The Tale of Melibee’, SAC, 11 (1989), 117–75 (p. 156) and Celia R. Daileader, ‘The Thopas-Melibee sequence and the Defeat of Antifeminism’, Chaucer Review, 29 (1994), 26–39 (p. 37). Many critics have commented on Prudence’s aggression. Wallace, for example, compares her to the Wife of Bath (Chaucerian Polity, p. 216), as does Daileader (‘The Thopas-Melibee Sequence’, pp. 26–7).

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Hec sunt staura civitatis . . . In order to grasp something of the debt that Chaucer owed to London life and London texts, we have to revise our notions of what medieval London was. London, for writers such as the author of ‘The Stores of the Cities’, is a place of diverse, competing interests. The poet’s irreverent depiction of the city evokes a site of mercantile concerns, suburban dissolution, careless chatter, criminality, drinking, and fighting, with the shadow of royal power presiding over the whole. Similarly, the strength of Chaucer’s depiction of London resides in the fractured, antagonistic character of the city, portrayed as a place of competing power structures and multiple agendas. This turbulent city is an entity that stretches beyond the walls, and includes the City’s environs, a location that is incoherent in culture and in topography. It everywhere informs the atmosphere of Chaucer’s writings, from dream visions to prose tracts. Perhaps recognising how fundamental and pervasive the influence of the city is in Chaucer’s texts might help us to understand the paucity of specific references to ‘London’ in his corpus: if London mattered less to Chaucer’s poetry, it might be mentioned more.

Production of Space in Chaucer ’s London Ruth Evans

The Production of Space in Chaucer’s London RUTH EVANS

London Lives Wordsworth’s 1807 sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ imagines London as a colossal human being, slumbering at dawn and wearing the beauty of the morning ‘like a garment’, its ‘mighty heart . . . lying still’.1 In Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41), Charles Dickens, one of the greatest recorders of nineteenth-century London, addresses that very heart: Heart of London, there is a moral in thy every stroke! as I look on at thy indomitable working, which neither death, nor press of life, nor grief, nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot, I seem to hear a voice within thee which sinks into my heart, bidding me, as I elbow my way among the crowd, to have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with scorn and pride from none that wears the human shape.2

For Dickens, London is a hybrid form, both human and mechanical: impervious as a machine to the vagaries of nature, yet urging the author, man to man, to feel sympathy for its inhabitants. And the 1999 Granta anthology London: The Lives of the City, as its ambiguous title suggests, celebrates not only the lives of those who live in the city but also the lives that the city leads, as if London were a person.3 The blurb on Peter Ackroyd’s 2001 work London: The Biography is perhaps the most extreme example of this Romantic tendency to anthropomorphise the city: Whether we consider London as a young man refreshed, and risen from sleep, . . . or whether we lament its condition as a deformed giant, we must regard it

I thank Valerie Allen, Ardis Butterfield, Andrew Galloway, David Imrie and Clementine Oliver for generous advice and comments. 1 William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford, 2000). 2 Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock, ed. Peter Mudford (London, 1997), ch. 6, p. 67. 3 London: The Lives of the City, ed. Ian Jack, Special Issue, Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, 65 (1999).

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Ruth Evans as a human shape with its own laws of life and growth. Here, then is its biography.4

Ackroyd is doubtless thinking of Wordsworth’s sonnet, but with a nod also towards the mythic giants Gog and Magog, the traditional guardians of the City of London (brought to life in Master Humphrey’s Clock): twin embodiments of a city that can be both majestically beautiful and hideously misshapen. We declare our cities to be alive because the human body, in our post-Freudian, post-Romantic society, has become a rich source of affective identification. But Chaucer’s most obviously London work, The Canterbury Tales, never treats London as a subject (human or otherwise) in its own right.5 According to Henri Lefebvre, ‘[o]nly in the sixteenth century . . . did the town emerge as a unified entity – and as a subject’ (emphasis in original).6 This statement appears to endorse an all-too-familiar binary: unlike the unified modern city (and modern citizen), medieval London lacks a coherent sense of self. But if Chaucer’s London does not embrace the civic ideology of Renaissance Florence – unitas civium – that does not make it a more primitive entity than its Renaissance counterpart, as David Wallace implies.7 Moreover, in their chronicles two of Chaucer’s contemporaries, John Gower and Richard Maidstone, do figure London as a person: ‘a sexually misbehaving woman’.8 The unruly woman in the middle ages is often of course a version of the incoherent self, but for whatever reasons Chaucer avoids this kind of identification. Yet medieval London is a corps morcelé, a body in parts: what Diane Shaw describes as an ‘urban confusion of human activity and spatial complexity’.9 To acknowledge this is not to condemn Chaucer’s city for failing to be present or unified. Such a view, like Romantic anthropomorphism, is itself structured by a desire for unified wholeness that involves a fundamental misrecognition: a méconnaissance of London’s – or the Renaissance city’s – corporeal unity. In this essay I will read Chaucer’s London in relation to a set of three co-ordinates that overlap like the circles in a Venn diagram: social space, Plato’s order 4

5

6 7 8 9

Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London, 2001). This was dramatised as a BBC2 television series, London (broadcasting began 7 May 2004), narrated by Peter Ackroyd. Coincidentally, Ackroyd’s The Clerkenwell Tales (London, 2003) is a fictional rewriting of the Canterbury Tales in a self-consciously name-checked London setting. But contra the truism that London is absent in Chaucer’s poetry, see Derek Pearsall: ‘The Canterbury Tales will be the fullest record of London life, in its specific historical circumstances and conditions, in the 1380s and 1390s’: The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 151; and C. David Benson: ‘even though [Chaucer] provides nothing like a full description of contemporary London, aspects of the city seem to have shaped his poetry in less obvious and more literary ways’: ‘London’, in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 66–80 (p. 70). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), p. 271. David Wallace, ‘Absent City’, in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), pp. 156–81 (p. 179). Sylvia Federico, ‘Introduction: Troy and the Later Middle Ages’, in New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London, 2003), p. xxii. Diane Shaw, ‘The Construction of the Private in Medieval London’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26 (1996), 448. On London’s lack of ‘internal cohesiveness’, see Federico, ‘Late-Fourteenth-Century London as the New Troy’, in New Troy, pp. 1–28 (p. 5).

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of the city, and the political tie between sovereign and subject. My choice of these co-ordinates is not arbitrary. It is dictated by two considerations. Lefebvre argues that a ‘new space’ emerged in the middle ages, concentrated on the medieval town: a space of commerce and exchange, and of ‘a secular life, freed from politico-religious space, from the space of signs of death and of non-body’.10 Yet few studies of medieval urban culture have taken up Lefebvre’s insights or their implications for Chaucer.11 Secondly, I want to extend Lefebvre’s rather brief anatomy of the medieval town by relating the production of space to the order of the polis – an order composed of workers and artisans – and to the tie between sovereign and subjects. Although these categories are not specific to London, they are only played out within – are only made possible by – urban and civic space. For Chaucer, that space was London. I begin with two reports of late fourteenth-century London life: the little known Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, a seditious political pamphlet about the events of the Merciless Parliament of 1388, written by one Thomas Favent, ‘Clerk’; and the well known, anonymous 1395 legal deposition concerning the transvestite sex-worker and part-time needlewoman, John Rykener, a.k.a. Eleanor.12 Two reports that are, in different ways, scandalous and extraordinary. 10 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 256. On Lefebvre’s concept of space as a hybrid of empirical and

psychical aspects, see Victor Burgin, ‘Introduction’, in In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley and London, 1996), pp. 1–38 (pp. 26–8). David Nicholas uses the work of Max Weber to account for a range of phenomena associated with the rise of medieval towns: Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003). On medieval space, see Robert Grinnell, ‘The Theoretical Attitude towards Space in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 21 (1946), 141–57. 11 But see Paul Strohm, ‘Three London Itineraries: Aesthetic Purity and the Composing Process’, in his Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp. 3–19 (pp. 3, 6, 7); Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, eds, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis and London, 2000), p. ix; Michael Camille, ‘Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris’, in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Hanawalt and Kobialka, pp. 1–36 (p. 28); and Ruth Evans, ‘Signs of the Body: Gender, Sexuality, and Space in York and the York Cycle’, in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (New York, 2005), pp. 23–46. 12 The sole extant Latin text of the Historia, in MS Oxford, Bodleian Miscellany 2963 (not a holograph), is edited by May McKisack, Historia sive Narracio de Modo et Forma Mirabilis Parliamento apud Westminsterium anno Domini Millesimo CCCLXXXV . . . per Thomam Favent Clericum Indictata, Camden Miscellany, 14 (London, 1926). I use Andrew Galloway’s translation, with page references in brackets in the text: ‘Appendix: History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386, in the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Richard the Second after the Conquest, Declared by Thomas Favent, Clerk’, in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca and London, 2002), pp. 231–52. For discussion, see Andrew Galloway, ‘The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis’, in ibid., pp. 67–104. For an excellent analysis of Favent’s political sympathies, see Clementine Oliver, ‘A Political Pamphleteer in Late Medieval England: Thomas Fovent, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and the Merciless Parliament of 1388’, NML, 6 (2003), 167–98. At least two editions of an English translation of the Historia were printed in 1641 and 1643, during the Long Parliament of 1640–53, but were attributed to a ‘Thomas Fannant’ (Oliver, ‘A Political Pamphleteer’, p. 197, n. 68). I refer to the tract’s author as ‘Favent’ (the standard bibliographical listing), although it appears in fourteenth-century administrative records as ‘Fovent’ (Oliver, ‘A Political Pamphleteer’, p. 168, n. 3). For John/Eleanor Rykener’s case, see Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd, ‘ “Ut cum muliere”: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London, 1996), pp. 99–116: I use their translation, pp. 111–12, with page references in

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One deals with London factional politics of the 1380s; the other with the arraignment of a cross-dressed male prostitute. Different as they are, I want them to jostle side-by-side, because their city narratives reverberate off each other in surprising and revelatory ways. I read them symptomatically, but not for positivist information about the legal governance, social arrangements or urban geography of Chaucer’s London. Rather, I draw on the theoretical work of Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben to evoke and analyse some of the social spaces, orders and topologies of the medieval city.13 Lefebvre invites us to consider the production of space as an imbrication of mental (psychical) and physical spatial categories; Rancière looks at the political implications of Plato’s admonition that workers in his republic should do just one task; and Agamben redefines the political tie between sovereign and citizen as that of the medieval ‘ban’: a topological model of inclusion and exclusion that is still present, he claims, in the political relations and public spaces of modern cities. Chaucer’s poetry is profoundly concerned with all these spatially realised meanings. In this sense it is poetry not about, but of, the city.

The Lawyer’s Tale The Palace of Westminster, the ‘Merciless Parliament’, February 1388. In a startling breach of parliamentary protocol, the ‘Appellants’ – a group of barons headed by Richard II’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester – condemn for high treason five of Richard’s closest supporters: Archbishop Neville; Robert de Vere, the Duke of Ireland; Michael de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk; the Chief Justice Sir Robert Tresilian and Sir Nicholas Brembre, merchant and one-time mayor of London.14 Chaucer knows all these men. Sitting as knight of the shire for Kent in the Wonderful Parliament of 1386, he had witnessed the impeachment of the chancellor, Michael de la Pole, for financial irregularities and abuses of his office. Shortly afterwards, for reasons that are unclear but which meant he kept his head, Chaucer had resigned from his post as controller of wool customs and subsidy at the port of London (a royal appointment). On 11 February 1388, the marshal of the court, John Devereux, demands that four of the accused (Brembre is in prison in Gloucester) ‘be drawn from the Tower of London through the city to Tyburn, then without delay hanged on the brackets in the text. Karras and Boyd give a transcription of the original Latin document in ‘The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1995), 459–65 (pp. 461–2). 13 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Order of the City’, in The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker, ed. and with an introduction by Andrew Parker (Durham, NC and London, 2004), pp. 3–29; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998). All quotations from these editions appear with page references in brackets in the text. 14 The shock was that an ‘ “Appeal”, that is, a personal and written accusation rather than a simple oral deposition, . . . required the accused to be present’ (Galloway, ‘Literature of 1388’, p. 70): most of them were not.

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gallows and all their goods confiscated such that later successors might not rejoice in them’ (244). Tresilian, however, is not in the Tower but is skulking ‘above the gutter of a certain house annexed to the wall of the palace, hiding among the roofs for the sake of watching the lords coming and going from parliament’ (245). Entering the house, soldiers find Tresilian hiding ignominiously ‘under a certain round table which was covered for deception with a tablecloth’ (246). The fugitive lawyer is up to his old scam, disguised ‘as usual’ in a tunic of ‘old russet, extending down to mid-shin, as if he were an old man’. He has ‘a wiry and thick beard’, and is wearing ‘red boots with the soles of Joseph, looking more like a pilgrim or beggar than a king’s justice’ (246). The disguise, the reversal of masculine social status, the mask of ageing, and the theme of banishment from the polis are tropes straight out of Sir Orfeo, a poem that is copied into the London anthology known as the Auchinleck manuscript (dated 1331–40).15 Both Chaucer and Thomas Favent might have known Sir Orfeo, a poem much preoccupied with themes of good governance, deception and exclusion from the city. But Favent’s narrative does not so much imitate Sir Orfeo as declare itself part of the dynamic urban space that Lefebvre defines as ‘a space of exchange and communications, and therefore of networks’ (266). These are networks not only of trade and travel but also of ideas and writing: London in the 1380s is a nodal point for the production and dissemination of numerous texts that are beginning to create a public discourse about political events: poems, plays, letters, broadsides, bills, pamphlets, chronicles, satires and polemical writings.16 The discovery of Tresilian is quickly conveyed to the ears of the Lords Appellant, who leave the parliament and seize him at the palace gate. Dragged back into the court, Tresilian refuses to ‘confess to the things committed’ (246) and is forcibly led off to the Tower of London. There his wife and daughters, weeping uncontrollably, cover him with kisses, and – a calculated detail of pathos – his wife faints. Favent’s version of Tresilian’s death bears comparison with the striking account of the 1757 execution in Paris of the regicide Damiens which opens Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, although Damiens’ torture is 15 National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1: the copy of Sir Orfeo, one of three extant ver-

sions, is on fols 300r–303r. The standard edition is A. J. Bliss, ed., Sir Orfeo, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1966). A transcription of the Auchinleck version, by David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, is available at http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/mss/orfeo.html (original online publication date, 5 July 2003). 16 On medieval London’s literary networks, see Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284–309. On the commonness of broadsides after 1377, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England and 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), p. 77, and on bills, see Wendy Scase, ‘ “Strange and Wonderful Bills”: Bill-Casting and Political Discourse in Late Medieval England’, NML, 2 (1998), 225–47. Oliver argues that Favent’s pamphlet is ‘an impassioned appeal to public opinion’, and as such participates in an emergent ‘public sphere’, as defined by Jürgen Habermas: ‘A Political Pamphleteer’, p. 176. Carol Symes is currently at work on a book, A Medieval Theatre: Plays and the Public Sphere of Thirteenth-Century Arras, that will use the example of drama in Arras to argue for a similar Habermasian understanding of a medieval public sphere. On literary responses to the factional disputes of the 1370s and 1380s, see Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, pp. 287–93, and Frank Grady, ‘St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament’, SAC, 22 (2000), 179–211.

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described far more graphically.17 Favent reserves his grand guignol moment for the description of the drawing of the loathed Thomas Usk and his accomplice John Blake, their spattered flesh ‘drenching the neighborhoods . . . in the manner usual for traitors’ (248). But I am not concerned, as Foucault is, with defining or redefining epochs of punishment or the way that sovereign power operates directly on the body of the condemned. Rather, I will consider how medieval urban space is imagined and produced. This is Favent’s account of the former chief justice’s ignoble end: Tresilian was bound hand and foot to a hurdle, and along with a vast multitude of lords and commoners, horsemen and pedestrians, he was dragged from the back of horses through the city squares, resting at intervals of about the length of a furlong out of considerations of charity, to see if he wanted to repent anything. But alas, he did not publicly confess, and indeed it is not known what he would say to his friar confessor, nor has it been ours to discover: the friars well treated Tresilian, preserving him from his transgression. And when he had come to the place of Calvary [Tyburn] that he might be made defunct, he did not want to climb the stairs but goaded by sticks and whips that he might ascend, he said, ‘While I carry a certain something around me, I am not able to die.’ Immediately they stripped him and found particular instructions with particular signs depicted in them, in the manner of astronomical characters; and one depicted a demon’s head, many others were inscribed with demons’ names. With these taken away, he was hanged nude, and for greater certainty of his death his throat was cut . . . And he was left hanging until the next day. (246–7)

This egregious piece of street theatre presents Tresilian’s execution as a parody of the Crucifixion, complete with Stations of the Cross and a scourging with whips. The diabolic talismans adorning his person are a carnivalesque inversion of the familiar trope of Christ’s body as a legal charter granting pardon to sinners. Andrew Galloway sees this as a ‘mocking of religious imagery and language’, as in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’.18 But the mocking is aimed at the perverse Tresilian rather than at religion per se. The Historia symbolizes his death as a performance, like the grand performances of the urban Biblical drama, in which symbolic place-names (the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, Calvary) are temporarily superimposed – as in medieval York – on existing, presignified urban sectors. Tresilian becomes a participant in the cosmic drama of sin and redemption, his death a sacrificial purging of the community’s shared guilt. The social space that he produces is made up of the intersection of what Lefebvre calls ‘spatial practice’ (‘which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation’: that is, the material expression of social relations in space) and ‘representational spaces’ (those ‘embodying complex symbolisms, 17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London,

1979). 18 Galloway, ‘Literature of 1388’, p. 84.

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sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art’: namely imaginative space, or the overlaying of physical space with the way that space is imagined).19 On the one hand, as an aristocratic husband, piteous father, disguised lawyer and confessing Christian he occupies and produces specific topographies of the hiding-place, prison and confessional; on the other hand, he produces and is produced by the symbolic codes of the street spaces that he traverses and by the way that the text imagines his charmed, but vulnerable, body within city space. His earlier disguise includes shoes with ‘the soles of Joseph’20 that mark ironically the distance between a treacherous public figure and a poor, pious husband. But the deliberate biblical reference is part of the Historia’s larger symbolization of space, producing Tresilian as a tragic representative of fallen humanity: a type of Christ or Adam, not a secular Chief Justice gone bad. This figuring of tragedy typologically is also Chaucer’s mode in the Monk’s Tale. Like Adam in the Monk’s second tragedy, Tresilian is a man who ‘for mysgovernaunce/ Was dryven out of hys hye prosperitee/ To labour, and to helle, and to meschaunce’ (VII, 2012–14). Tracing a tragic arc from ‘hye prosperitee’ to ‘meschaunce’, the former Chief Justice falls from affluent places of leisure to hell and damnation. Tresilian turns up again, of course, in the early sixteenth-century Mirror for Magistrates (which, like the Monk’s Tale and Lydgate’s 1431 Fall of Princes, is loosely based on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) but in the later work his subjectivity is produced very differently. He speaks in the first person, abjectly describing himself as ‘poore Tresilian’ and openly confessing his sins: he is now a subject that has taken possession of himself, so to speak. 21 The political symbolism of Favent’s description also figures Tresilian as an outlaw. The cryptic writings secreted about his person are a parody of the king’s letters patent, the means whereby the medieval outlaw is legally pardoned and morally reintegrated into the polis.22 But Tresilian is banned for ever, incapable of being pardoned by the sovereign. For Richard is also a fugitive from the law, fleeing with the accused ‘in the hush of night’ (240) along the Thames from Westminster to the Tower of London, an incongruous greenwood just outside the city walls. Much is made in the Historia of the opposition between the openness of Favent’s public document and the furtiveness of Richard and his followers, lurking in the shadows. At the time of the appeal of treason in November 1387 the five accused are hidden in the palace of Westminster, ‘having betaken

19 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 33. 20 The Latin phrase, caligisque indutus rubeis cum sotularibus Josephi, is obscure. 21 Tragedy 1, ‘Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of England’, in The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B.

Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 73–80. 22 See W. M. Ormrod, ‘Robin Hood and Public Record: The Authority of Writing in the Medieval

Outlaw Tradition’, in Medieval Cultural Studies: A Volume of Essays to Celebrate the Work of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton and David Matthews (Cardiff, forthcoming 2006). On the reading aloud of letters patent in public places, see James Masschaele, ‘The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England’, Speculum, 77 (2002), 383–421.

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themselves into obscure strong rooms and shady dens there, just as Adam and Eve anciently did from God’ (239). The secret practices of the confessional are part and parcel of the Historia’s linking of secrecy with the burden of ancient sin and the condition of banishment: the despised friars will not tell on Tresilian. Favent’s pamphlet, on the other hand, declares itself to be open and truth-exposing: ‘I will not therefore allow it to remain delighting in the secret den of silence, how a monstrous sin of this sort, starting from certain people who were smothered in the embers of avarice and burdened by the weight of crimes, thereafter raced through England’ (231). The metaphors leap into action, fervidly intent on flushing sin from its hiding places. The tainted and illicit topoi of treachery – strong rooms, shady dens, gutters above houses, even the Tower of London – are opposed to the truth-telling spaces of political pamphlets and the embryonic public sphere. Richard and the accused can only act out their fates. But Favent’s pamphlet is available to be read, to be listened to, distributed, discussed, interpreted. It has its own libidinal force. According to Lefebvre, within the urban landscape of the medieval town the libido defiantly asserts its freedom from Augustinian theology: it becomes ‘libido sciendi, dominandi, sentiendi: curiosity, ambition, sensuality’ (264). The Historia knows this curiosity, ambition and even sensuality, both in what it condemns and what it satisfies, on the part of both its author and his audience. Chaucer’s Pardoner is perhaps the foremost representative on the Canterbury pilgrimage of this emergent model of desire. A keen self-publicist, he shares the Historia’s fascination with ambition, delighting in the quick movements of his ‘handes’ and his ‘tonge’ (VI, 398) and openly declaring that the point of his preaching ‘is nat but for to wynne’ (VI, 403). Stridently, he advertises his sensuality: ‘I wol drynke licour of the vyne/ And have a joly wenche in every toun’ (VI, 452–3). The point here is not so much that we are asked to assign him to a particular sexual subject position but that he revels in this newfound, potentially dangerous libidinal freedom – the more so because his commerce depends on the very exploitation of the Augustinian principle of caritas that this freedom displaces.

The Embroiderer’s Tale Libidinal freedom of a more directly sexual sort also stalks the highways of London one Sunday evening in December 1394. John Britby from Yorkshire makes his way along Cheapside, looking for sex. Spotting a likely trick, he asks her if she’s interested. She agrees and off they go, appropriately enough, to a stall in nearby Soper’s Lane (‘sopers’ are shopkeepers). Sex is of course one of the significant commodities within the urban space of accumulation and exchange. They are rudely interrupted by officials who take them both off to prison. It seems that they are having anal sex: the document calls it ‘that detestable, unmentionable, and ignominious vice’; ‘libidinous and unspeakable act’; and ‘abominable vice’, language often connected with the legal crime of

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sodomy.23 But the utter confusion of the terms might equally refer (as Ruth Karras and David Boyd argue) to a perceived transgression of gender roles. For Britby’s trick turns out not to be a woman at all but what we would call a transvestite: one John Rykener, dressed as a woman and going by the name of Eleanor. It’s not clear if Britby knew she was a man: the deposition claims that when he accosted her, he thought ‘he was a woman’ and asked him ‘as he would a woman if he could commit a libidinous act with her’. But Rykener’s dressing up succeeds where Tresilian’s does not. Hauled up before the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London and still dressed in women’s clothing, Rykener claims that he’s learnt to have sex as a woman from a prostitute called Anna and to pass as a woman from Elizabeth Brouderer, who (from her symbolic name) is making a living as an embroiderer as well as pimping both her daughter Alice and ‘Eleanor’. Rykener is what the philosopher Jacques Rancière would call ‘an imitator’. As Rancière notes, Plato’s Republic establishes the old adage that workers should concern themselves with their proper work: ‘one cannot be a shoemaker and a weaver at the same time’ (8). This is the first order of the city. In late medieval English cities, it is the function of the crafts guilds to maintain Plato’s principle that trades belong to specialists: only goldsmiths do goldsmithing and only masons build houses. Rykener, however, does not stick to his job (ironically, his sex act with Britby is referred to in the document as ‘labor’). But he also has other jobs: he works for a while in Oxford as an embroiderer and in Burford, Oxfordshire, as a tapster. He embodies the ‘absolute evil’ that Plato’s healthy city cannot tolerate: ‘that two things be in one, two functions in the same place, two qualities in one and the same being’ (8). Rykener’s scandal is not just the transgression of gender norms. It lies in this offence against the maxim that artisans should do ‘nothing else’ than their own work. In this sense he is aligned with that category of people who belong not to the order of the city but to ‘the order of the simulacrum’ (17): the imitators. These are the artists, musicians and writers: people who produce not necessities or luxuries, but ‘immoderation’ (10). With their stories of violence and deceit, they invite the imitation of bad actions. Rykener is not of course an artist. He does not make falsely what the artisan makes in truth. But he makes of his own body an imitation. He counterfeits the work of God, confounding the distinction between art and nature. Like the disguised Tresilian and like Chaucer’s Pardoner, he embodies the principle of evil that lies behind imitation: ‘the power of the double, of representing anything 23 See Karras and Boyd, ‘ “Ut cum muliere” ’, p. 105. For the case’s relation to normative categories of

sexuality, see Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Good Vibrations: John/Eleanor, Dame Alys, the Pardoner and Foucault’, in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC and London, 1999), pp. 100–42. On sodomy as a medieval criminal category and as a cultural category that overlaps with Lollardy, see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 59–79. On medieval sodomy, see Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997); and Sarah Salih, ‘Sexual Identities: A Medieval Perspective’, in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tom Betteridge (Manchester, 2002), pp. 112–30.

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whatsoever or being anyone whosoever’ (10). The legal deposition that records his behaviour knows this shocking doubleness at the level of its confusion of gendered pronouns. And Rykener excludes himself from the order of the city by passing himself off as something other than an embroiderer, or a tapster – or a man. He calls in question (like Rancière in his critique of those leftist thinkers who give too much credit to the notion of a singular working class identity) the simplicity of workers. Rykener’s ‘imitation’ of a woman harbours what Andrew Parker calls ‘a politically explosive potential’: insofar as he is a worker doing someone else’s work, he represents a disorder of culture. 24 This disorder is not just a matter of having time (or leisure), as Plato and Rancière have it. It is produced spatially. Rykener’s busy London perambulations take in not only the Cheapside area, but also Elizabeth Brouderer’s house just outside Bishopsgate (the next city-gate to Aldgate, in an anticlockwise direction), and ‘the lanes behind St. Katherine’s Church by the Tower of London’ (112). He has had sex with a rector, three aristocratic scholars, two English Franciscans and two foreign ones, a Carmelite friar and ‘six foreign men’ (presumably aliens, suggesting a certain kinship between them and his alter ego ‘Eleanor’ – an alias that puns on his own ‘alienness’ or otherness),25 with nuns, several married and unmarried women, at least three chaplains, and priests (he prefers priests because they are more generous), sometimes for money, sometimes not, sometimes as a woman and sometimes not. He is as indiscriminate in his sexual object-choices as he is in the work he does, but this only emphasises that London is a place of unrivalled sexual and economic opportunities. As Mark Ormrod argues, London was unique amongst English cities in its trade regulations. A statue passed at York in 1335 ‘allowed all merchants, native and foreign, to trade freely throughout England’.26 But London had always been allowed to regulate alien trade, and in fact Edward III exempted London from the statue in 1337. However, the Statute of York was reaffirmed in 1351. For a while London conformed, but after 1376 it was once again allowed to regulate alien trade.27 In symbolically advertising his own alienness and in trading sex with aliens, Rykener not only affirms the medieval city as Lefebvre’s ‘space of accumulation’ (263) but also flouts London’s trade laws. The peculiarity of medieval space, claims Paul Strohm, ‘involves the extent to which it is already symbolically organized by the meaning-making activities of the many generations that have traversed it’: what he calls its set of ‘presignifications’.28 Street spaces are storehouses of memory, preserving God’s time and human time. But this does not mean that their meanings are not 24 Andrew Parker, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Mimesis and the Divison of Labor’, in Rancière, The Philoso-

pher and his Poor, pp. ix–xx (p. xi). 25 Dinshaw, ‘Good Vibrations’, p. 103. 26 W. M. Ormrod, ‘Urban Society and the Merchants’, in The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political

Society in England 1327–1377 (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 171–92 (p. 173). 27 Ormrod, ‘Urban Society’, p. 174. 28 Strohm, ‘Three London Itineraries’, p. 4.

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negotiable. Although Britby and Rykener pursue their sexual itineraries through presignified terrains (commercial zones; parish spaces; the city boundaries), they also shift their symbolic meanings, resignifying them as ‘heterotopias’: those ‘other places’ that are, in Foucault’s words, ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.29 In a sense, these ‘other places’ are carnivalesque, but they do not occupy the time of carnival: they are its spatial representation. Within the medieval city, space is presignified but, as Lefebvre argues, medieval society built upon existing space, using it as a prop for its symbols and making it, as Rykener and the Pardoner and the wife in the Shipman’s Tale so boldly do, a ‘take-off point for capital accumulation’ (53). Nor are spaces in the Historia and in the deposition of 1395 used straightforwardly for what Strohm calls the ‘redefinition of social status’.30 Rykener and the traitors of 1386–8 have no desire to renegotiate their places in society, but they do renegotiate the meanings of the spaces they traverse. When in 1387 Richard and the remaining followers escape ‘in the hush of night’ along the Thames from Westminster to the Tower of London ‘for better safekeeping’ (240), they turn the Tower – a place of imprisonment and execution – into a temporary refuge, just as Tresilian’s fainting wife and weeping daughters transform it into a gynotopia: a space of female ‘pitee’, not an androtopia of male punishment.

Signs of the Body The middle ages does not know abstract space.31 As Lefebvre argues, ‘every society produces . . . its own space’ (53): what the middle ages produces is the space of towns, shaped by the liberating forces of markets and commodities. This argument is not a naïve celebration of pre-industrial society or a denial of alienated wage labour but a recognition of historical contingency. What is produced – goods, the town itself – has not yet taken on Marx’s sense of ‘the baleful character of the commodity’ (264). Within this emergent urban space, ‘[r]eligious space did not disappear with the advent of commercial space; it was still . . . the space of speech and knowledge’ (266). But the newly and partially desacralized space of the western European middle ages is a space in which libido is freed, a space ‘deconsecrated, at once spiritual and material, intellectual and sensory, and populated by signs of the body’ (264). ‘Signs of the body’ might suggest that bodies like Tresilian’s or Rykener’s constitute mere empty surfaces, or what Jean Baudrillard describes as the ‘hyperreal’: the substitution of ‘the signs of the real for the real’.32 But Lefebvre is working with a different 29 30 31 32

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22–7 (p. 24). Strohm, ‘Three London Itineraries’, p. 10. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 267. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, 1994), p. 2.

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binary: not depth/surface, but absence/presence. Religious space is ‘the space of signs of death and of non-body’ (256; emphasis mine) – a body that is absent or denied. Within the space of the medieval town, however, the body is energetic, sensual and defiant: it takes up space. But bodies also transform spaces, just as spaces transform them. This reciprocal effect is crucial. One thinks of what Tresilian has secreted on his body: ‘particular instructions with particular signs depicted in them, in the manner of astronomical characters; and one depicted a demon’s head, many others were inscribed with demons’ names’ (246–7). These protective, blasphemous signs are like the ‘bulles’ that Chaucer’s Pardoner shows on his ‘patente’, ‘my body to warente,/ That no man be so boold, ne preest ne clerk,/ Me to destourbe of Cristes holy werke’ (VI, 338–40). Like Tresilian, the Pardoner understands the magical power of the sign in which sacred and profane intentions are indistinguishable. Writing cuts both ways. For Favent, the profane signifiers underline the disgraced Chief Justice’s evil nature. But they also testify to the power of writing itself (as the Pardoner knows), in a culture that has only recently moved from memory to written record. They are what Steven Justice calls ‘acts of assertive literacy’, like the rebel letters of 1381, or the practice of medieval physicians, who would hang scrolls with charms around the necks of their patients.33 For a moment, Tresilian’s body with its queer signs transforms the public space of Tyburn – place of Christian repentance and legal execution, symbol of Calvary – into one of Lefebvre’s ‘heterotopical’ places of ‘sorcery and madness, places inhabited by demonic forces – places which were fascinating if tabooed’ (263). The stripping of his body and the cutting of his throat are humiliating rituals of exposure, a parody of the martyrdom of both male and female saints (in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale the tyrant Almachius slashes Saint Cecilia’s throat three times and leaves her lying ‘with hir nekke ycorven there’ [VIII, 533]). In his discussion of the nude body of the martyred male saint, Robert Mills argues: The masculine nude denotes exile from a world of laws and authority, a site of rupture and disorder. The abandonment of clothing corresponds to the loss of social marks of identity . . . Nudity not only involves a phase of rupture with collective life – it also signals the intervention of the gaze of others, with all the potential objectification and de-virilization that that implies.34

But Tresilian’s body, dangling nude at Tyburn with his throat cut, is not a sacrificial body. Mute (unlike Saint Cecilia, who continues to preach with her throat cut), it defiantly returns the gaze of the other, refusing to be anything other than itself. As Jean-Luc Nancy says, ‘A naked body gives no sign and reveals

Camille’s discussion of Lefebvre’s understanding of the ‘sign’ in modernity rather misleadingly suggests that Lefebvre has a universally negative view of the sign: ‘Signs of the City’, pp. 28–9. 33 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 24; Wallace, ‘Absent City’, p. 159. 34 Robert Mills, ‘ “Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me!”: Masculinity, Masochism and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 13 (2001), 1–37 (pp. 12–13).

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nothing, nothing other than this: that there is nothing to reveal, that everything is there, exposed, the texture of the skin, which says no more than the texture of a voice.’35 Despite Favent’s attempts to render the execution a parody of Christian martyrdom, Tresilian’s naked body is a politicized body. He is homo sacer, the man who may be killed with impunity but not sacrificed: a representative of the ‘bare life’ of the citizen who dwells in the city only by virtue of being excluded from it.

The Polis and the Ban The terms homo sacer and ‘bare life’ are charged here with meanings developed by Giorgio Agamben.36 For Agamben, the originary political tie is not that between friend and foe but between the sovereign and ‘bare life’, that is, simple biological existence rather than a particular way of life. Since the time of classical Greece, the political – that which has been proper to the city as political community – is founded on the sovereign’s capacity to wield power over the bare life of the citizen: what Foucault describes as ‘biopower’, ‘a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death’.37 Agamben follows Carl Schmitt in seeing sovereign power as a state of exception.38 But he argues that this state actively constitutes itself through excluding ‘bare life’: by banning or banishing it. The structure of the ban, however, is not straightforwardly one of exclusion. ‘He who has been banned’, says Agamben, ‘is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (28; emphasis in original). ‘Abandoned’ is one of those words ‘the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite’.39 To be abandoned is not just to be turned out into the cold but to be retained within another’s power, like the medieval lover held in his lady’s ‘baundon’.40 Sovereign and outlaw are reciprocally related: both are states of exception. The embodiment of this inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order is homo sacer. As the object of decisions of sovereign power, homo sacer 35 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’, trans. Claudette Sartilliot, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes

and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, 1993), pp. 189–207 (pp. 204–5). 36 Agamben’s Homo Sacer is the first of a projected four–volume series. The second is State of Excep-

37 38 39 40

tion, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, 2005), and the third Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999, rpt. 2002). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 147. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA, 1985). Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (1919), in Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, The Pelican Freud Library, 14 (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 339–76 (p. 347). ‘The origin of “abandonment” is a putting at bandon. Bandon . . . is an order, a prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal’: Nancy, ‘Abandoned Being’, trans. Brian Holmes, Birth to Presence, pp. 36–47 (pp. 43–4).

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– the life that no longer counts – is situated both inside and outside the juridical order. His significance as a figure ‘beyond penal law and sacrifice’ is that he represents ‘the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted’ (83). From this perspective, the Canterbury Tales is nothing less than an exploration of the political dimension of the City: how sovereign power and bare life produce each other as the very condition of the political, in all its guises – social, sexual, familial. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, for example, the two knights Palamon and Arcite, are homines sacri, ‘dampned to prisoun/ Perpetuelly’ (I, 1175–6). Theseus affirms his sovereign power by showing ‘pitee’ towards the ‘wrecched wommen’ of Thebes – by including the previously excluded – and by producing Palamon and Arcite as bare life: abandoning them to a kind of living death. Freed from prison by Duke Perotheus, Arcite is banned from the city, becoming the medieval ‘wolf’s head’ (outlaw or bandit), who by Theseus’s decree may be killed with impunity but not sacrificed: if so were that Arcite were yfounde Evere in his lif, by day or nyght, oo stounde In any contree of this Theseus And he were caught, it was acorded thus, That with a swerd he sholde lese his heed. (I, 1211–5)

To be banned, as the rhyming couplets and rigidly endstopped lines reinforce, is to be subject to the law, even as the rhyme-breaking effect of line 1215 points to the liminal status of the bandit as both inside and outside the law. Palamon is therefore wrong when he laments his incarceration, contrasting it with Arcite’s apparent freedom: ‘ “thou art at thy large, of prisoun free” ’ (I, 1290). Both men are homines sacri, held within the sovereign power not just of Theseus but also of Emelye, with whom they are in love. The courtly love sub-plot reinforces the idea that Palamon and Arcite are inclusively excluded from the political order as the objects of sovereign decision: in Palamon’s words, ‘ “but I have hir mercy and hir grace,/ That I may seen hire atte leeste weye,/ I nam but deed; ther nis namoore to seye” ’ (I, 1120–22). Only the lady’s mercy can save him from death. Indeed, the tale’s narrator recognises the structural similarity of Palamon and Arcite’s fates when he poses the question to lovers: Who hath the worse, Arcite, or Palamoun? That oon may seen his lady day by day, But in prison he moot dwelle alway; That oother wher hym list may ride or go, But seen his lady shal he never mo. (I, 1348–52)

Both the political sovereign and the sovereign lady represent the force of law without significance. Palamon’s speech on the arbitrary power of the ‘crueel goddes’ to reduce man to beastliness – ‘For slayn is man right as another beest,/ And dwelleth eek in prison and arreest’ (I, 130–10) – is a meditation on the

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anguish of inhabiting the threshold state between human and animal: of being captured within the sovereign’s sphere of influence. Theseus’s famous endorsement of benign conquest and cosmic ‘order’ is a political myth. The true nature of the political tie in the poem is not that between rival nations but between sovereign power and bare life. The Clerk’s Tale explores the social and sexual politics of this tie in especially compelling terms. Griselda is a figure for homo sacer because she pays for her participation in the marriage (where the husband-wife relationship is read in medieval terms as analogous to the juridico-political relationship between ruler and subject) by her unconditional agreement to Walter’s tyrannical and inhuman violence. She appears to accept her status as bare life. But only up to a point. When Walter demands that she return without ‘grucchyng’ to her father’s house, she agrees, but refuses to be treated as completely lowly: ‘Lat me nat lyk a worm go by the weye’ (IV, 880). It is hard to know how to interpret Griselda’s protest. Her expulsion from the community puts her outside the law, but by appealing to Walter’s mercy she reveals that she is still subject to his power. So the protest affirms her inclusive exclusion and her status as bare life. While the narrator problematically suggests that Griselda is unusual because she puts up with so much, we can read her extraordinary obedience as a sign of her exceptional quality. The tale realises the intimate connection between sovereign power and bare life by making both Walter and Griselda exceptions to the law: inside and outside, excluded and included. In this respect, Griselda is produced as a political subject. In fact, the so-called ‘marriage group’ as a whole invites the reader to recognise the many analogies between domestic, religious and political spheres, and the politicisation of the relationship in each – which is always (as in the complex debate over ‘maistrie’ in the Canterbury Tales) a politicization of the body. These analogous relationships demonstrate the medieval ‘order of things’ as a play of correspondences, similitudes, likenesses.41 But they are also a recognition of the ban, which articulates, and is articulated by, a complex structure in which the one who has been banned (Agamben’s words) ‘is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (28). The Physician’s Tale offers yet another take on the ban. When Virginia’s virgin status has been compromised by the judge Apius’s desire for her, her father Virginius offers her two choices – ‘outher deeth or shame’ (VI, 214). He treats her as ‘bare life’, subjecting her to his ban. He abandons her, but keeps her within his power: he defines her as a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed. Unlike St Cecilia in the Second Nun’s Tale, she is not produced as a virgin martyr. Virginia asks leave to lament her death, but otherwise accepts it, giving thanks to God that she will ‘dye a mayde’ (VI, 248). What the tale

41 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. not given

(London, 1970).

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isolates is neither the natural order (what father would kill his daughter?) nor the ‘regular juridical order’ (84), but the political. Virginia’s virginity is crucial here. To the extent that her father exercises his power over her body and sexuality, the tale is deeply biopolitical.

Chaucer’s London: Méconnaissance of the City? It is time to refuse the critical game of hunt-the-London and to acknowledge that in Chaucer’s poetry the medieval city is a powerful virtual presence. The poetry is permeated by an awareness of the possibilities generated by the commercial and libidinal space of the medieval town, of the challenges to the order of the city, and of the city as a political community structured by the ban. Chaucer’s London does not rise from the pages as a living, unified body but the city’s spatial productions, energies and political concerns are omnipresent in his texts.

Chaucer ’s Poetics of Dwelling Barbara Nolan

Chaucer’s Poetics of Dwelling in Troilus and Criseyde1 BARBARA NOLAN

Whether London is absent from the Canterbury Tales or not, in this essay I ask how and why parts of Troy are so insistently present in Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer does not give us, except obliquely, what most writers of Troy-books do, namely long, visually rich descriptions of Priam’s imperial Troy being built up and then burnt to the ground.2 Nor does he limit himself as Boccaccio had, mainly to a single subjectively rendered love story. Instead, he interweaves two sharply juxtaposed experiences of Troy, one focused on the practice of everyday life in ancient Troy, the other, on the well-known history of Troy’s fall. The first three books of Troilus give vibrant energy to specific architectural places within an imagined Trojan cityscape. Here the poet houses the formulaic stages in an Ovidian love affair,3 locating one stage after another ex ordine within closely grouped palaces and houses in Troy’s best neighbourhood. 4 By contrast, through the last two books of Troilus, the text occludes the domestic spaces of neighbourhood life in Troy. Two of the dwellings crucial to the unfolding of the plot in Books II and III – those belonging to Deiphebus and Pandarus – fade from sight. At the same time, what remains of the other two palaces is only what Chaucer had found in Boccaccio. In particular, Criseyde’s darkened

1 2

3 4

My warm thanks go to Ardis Butterfield, A. C. Spearing, James Simpson, Sanda Iliescu, Farzaneh Milani, and John Thomas for their valuable comments on several drafts of this essay. See, for example, Benoît de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie, lines 2977–3186 and 25945–26240. All references to the Roman de Troie are to Léopold Constans’ edition of the Roman de Troie (Paris, 1904). The formulaic five-step love plot is outlined by Lionel Friedman, ‘Gradus Amoris’, Romance Philology, 19 (1965), 167–77. For Chaucer’s uses of setting in Troilus, see Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1992; repr. 2002), pp. 191–7. On the critical history regarding Chaucer’s Troy, see C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (London, 1990), pp. 60–83. For studies focused on the city in Troilus, see Mark Lambert, ‘Troilus, Books I–III, A Criseydan Reading’, in Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Woodbridge, l979), 105–25; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI and London, 1991), ch. 2; Sylvia Federico, ‘Chaucer’s Utopian Troy Book: Alternatives to Historiography in Troilus and Criseyde’, Exemplaria, 11 (1999), 79–106.

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bedroom in her own palace becomes the principal locus within which the two lovers anxiously question how and where to dwell and love in the face of Criseyde’s brutally changed, war-determined circumstances. The text’s stark turn away from domestic spaces in a single neighbourhood to confront the ongoing atrocities of the war encapsulates Chaucer’s large argument concerning the tragi-comic truth about Trojan (and typically human) daily practices within all mortal cities. Indeed, Guido delle Colonne’s ironic comment on life in Troy just after Paris ‘marries’ Helen might serve as a head-note for Chaucer’s double-faced construction of life, love, dwelling, and war in ancient Troy: ‘So here in the Trojan city things were proceeding happily – [but] actually unhappily because of hidden traps.’5 From the beginning of Troilus, acts of deception and entrapment slip into the text. Yet the ancient Trojans, comfortably ensconced in their neighbourhood, realise the dark truth about king Priam’s concept-city and about themselves within it too late.6 Near the end of Troilus Book I, Chaucer invokes a metaphor linking Pandarus’s (and his own) rhetorical art of finding places for a courtship to the line architects would use in designing houses.7 There is, however, another sense in which the architect’s measuring line resonates in Troilus not as metaphor but as a literal reference to a crucial, yet not often enough examined aspect of Chaucer’s Trojan cityscape. Far more than an anachronistically verisimilar backdrop, the built spaces the poet causes his characters to inhabit and transform are as insistently important to his fiction of Trojan daily life as are the characters themselves. With help from Pandarus, the poet invents houses, gardens, a public street, and pedestrian paths in his Trojan neighbourhood. Within these material spaces, Chaucer’s characters, like human beings generally, make their habitations over metaphorically (and often awkwardly) to function not just materially, but also politically, socially, and, above all, poetically for the sake of promoting their personal stories-in-progress. In this way, Chaucer’s Troy provides an ongoing model for readers of the various, gendered ways in which men and women subjectively seek to ‘dwell’ within the material spaces of an unstable world. The English poet draws materials and techniques from Boccaccio’s Filostrato on one hand and from the ‘historical’ Troy-book tradition on the other. But he adds to these his own phenomenological vision of human dwelling, locating that vision within the best Trojan neighbourhood and within the Greek camp. To borrow Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms, material spaces in Troy and just outside it are opened up to us only through the medium of subjects who ‘trace out’ and ‘sustain’ them. In Chaucer’s argument ‘dwelling’ involves finite acts of metaphoric transforma5 6 7

Historia destructionis Troiae [1285], ed. N. E. Griffin (Cambridge, MA, 1936; Kraus repr. 1970), VIII, p. 80: ‘. . . hec itaque in vrbe Troyana feliciter (ymo cecis insidiis infeliciter) gereruntur’. The term ‘concept-city’ comes from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 94–5. To gloss Pandarus’s meditation, Chaucer re-frames the opening lines of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova: ‘For everi wight that hath an hous to founde/ . . . wol bide a stounde,/ And sende his hertes line out fro withinne/ Aldirfirst his purpose forto wynne’ (Troilus, I, 1065; 1067–9).

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tion worked within domestic spaces even under the worst political circumstances. To structure his phenomenology of Trojan dwelling, Chaucer draws upon an ‘architectural mnemonic’ prominent in the rhetorical handbooks most used in the medieval schools.8 As the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, explaining the art of memory, puts the theory, rhetors may use vivid loci et imagines (places and visual images) to recall in order the arguments for an oration seriatim, or to make the order of crucial plot-events in a story memorable to an audience. Here, according to the Ad Herennium, the term ‘loci’ means ‘such [architectural] scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory’. The examples the Ad Herennium gives of locationary sites that might be used are simple: ‘a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like’.9 A close look at what the young Boccaccio does with architectural backgrounds in the Filostrato (c. 1335) shows his astonishing debt to the classical theories of memory. In his poem, he builds up key parts of Criseida’s casa – its loggia, its bedchamber, its windows, its ‘particella’ or secret, hidden part – to form a closely-knit series of ‘readily recoverable background locations’ in Mary Carruthers’ terms.10 Through them, Boccaccio links carefully selected material spaces together to stand mnemonically, metaphorically, and erotically for Troiolo’s step-by-step progress from outside the walls of Criseida’s house and body to the innermost chambers of that same house and body. Chaucer, I will show, draws from the same ancient mnemotechnical rules Boccaccio had used to build up his domestic architecture, but he does so with larger political, social, and poetic ambitions than his predecessor.11 The English poet not only expands the number and character of the locationary sites for the love-story; he also pervasively incorporates within his newly constructed loci fragmented visual images drawn from a classical locus communis – that of the urbs capta or city besieged – prominent in the mainstream Troy-Book tradition.12 8

See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 71–9 and passim. On visual imagery in Chaucer, see V. A. Kolve’s Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, 1984), especially pp. 1–84. 9 Cicero, M. Tullius, Rhetorica Ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1939), III, xvii, pp. 208–9. 10 ‘The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 881–904 (pp. 881–2). 11 Over the last three decades a few scholars have linked Chaucer’s poetry to theories of artificial memory, though no one, as far as I know, has studied the domestic spaces of Troilus as locationary sites housing a seduction plot, nor, a priori, Boccaccio’s use of them in the Filostrato. See Beryl Rowland, ‘The Artificial Memory, Chaucer, and Modern Scholars’, Poetica, 37 (1993), 1–14; and ‘Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame’, in R. H. Robbins, ed., Chaucer at Albany (New York, 1975), pp. 41–62; Susan Shibanoff, ‘Prudence and Artificial Memory in Chaucer’s Troilus’, ELH, 42 (1975), 507–17. 12 For a description of the topos of the urbs capta, see Quintilian M. Fabius, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1922), VIII, 3. 67–9. See also Andreola Rossi, Contexts of War: Manipulations of Genre in Virgilian Battle Epic (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), ch. I, pp. 17–53.

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II Even a brief sketch of Boccaccio’s architectural mnemonic in the Filostrato shows that the settings he uses in his Filostrato are not, contrary to what most scholars have believed, ‘spatially unconnected’. Instead, the poet links them intimately together as materially connected locationary sites designed to house the stages of his seduction plot.13 As his first, highly gendered site in the Filostrato, Boccaccio chooses the temple devoted to Pallas. Here, Troiolo, and all the other giovinetti (young men) who cross its threshold, are free to occupy the whole of the gran tempio, leisurely strolling to and fro. By contrast, Criseida, a woman and a widow, stands near the door of the temple, tentatively poised at the intersection between outside and inside. Troiolo takes the necessary first step in the seduction process – his first sight or visus of Criseida – precisely at the moment Criseida moves her veil away from her face and makes more physical space for herself to be seen. Here Boccaccio uses Criseida’s slight bodily shifts of position within the temple to begin articulating a conventional anti-feminist view of women in the Filostrato. His heroine moves gradually but typically towards frank lustfulness, at first tempered, but then unleashed as, through Pandaro, she will invite Troiolo to visit the inner sanctum of her house. To establish a ‘small-scale’, ‘conspicuous’ locationary site for the second stage in the seduction process – the alloquium or love dialogue – the poet chooses a common feature of early fourteenth-century Tuscan domestic architecture: a loggia, open to the air, usually through arcaded columns, joined to an outer wall of the house, leading through a door to the interior. The loggia attached to Criseida’s house, functioning as a zone of transition between outside and inside, not only provides a site for the alloquium; it also signals metaphorically the lady’s own liminal position vis à vis sexual love. A widow outwardly living a decorous life at home, Criseida, like all women, is both Ovid and Boccaccio suggest, ever poised to open her house and body to a new lover. To render the visus Boccaccio has Criseida share with Troiolo in Filostrato Part II (an elaboration of Troiolo’s initiatory visus of Filostrato Part I), the poet places her at her bedroom window, looking outside, ‘as if, perhaps, she expected someone’ (II, 82. 1–2). At just this moment, Pandaro as strategist for the seduction plot brings Troiolo to gaze at her from outside the same window. Only the windowpane separates Troiolo outside from Criseida safely inside, protecting her honour, but still giving hope: ‘onestamente verso lui mirava’ (II, 82. 6: ‘chastely she gazed at him’; my emphasis). With his usual attention to architec-

13 Most scholars have concurred with Sanford Meech’s early judgment concerning Chaucerian Troy in

relation to the city background of the Filostrato. The Filostrato’s ‘terse’, ‘highly selective’ settings, limited to ‘very few locales’, Meech suggested, are ‘spatially unconnected’, Design in Chaucer’s Troilus (Syracuse, 1959), p. 191. All references to Il Filostrato are taken from Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vol. 2, Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan, 1964). Translations are my own.

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tural images, Boccaccio specifies that Criseida’s head, elegantly framed by the window as in an early Renaissance painting, is slightly turned: she gives Troiolo only a partial view of her face, gazing out toward him over her right shoulder. Yet Troiolo (rightly) interprets his lady’s ambiguous, but not unfriendly look, her first visus of him, as marking progress toward seduction. The proxy alloquium in the loggia, coupled with the reciprocal visus through Criseida’s chamber window, ends exactly as Boccaccio and Pandaro have orchestrated it. Together they have undermined Criseida’s onestà for the sake of a now fully shared passion. She acknowledges her desire, knows that sex itself (the factum) is at stake, and gives her promise of ‘more’ to come. At the start of Filostrato Part III we move into the brilliantly calibrated locationary site at the centre of Boccaccio’s memory game. Not only does Boccaccio have Criseida herself choose a closely grouped cluster of spaces in her own house to frame the three last, tactile stages in love’s progress; he also makes the most private parts of Criseida’s house stand metaphorically for male penetration into the most erotically enticing parts of her body. Specifically, the poet prays that the lady of his invocation will show him that particella (III, 1. 6) within which he will experience ‘il ben del dolce regno/d’Amor’ (‘the [ultimate] good of Love’s sweet kingdom’). This secret small section of Criseida’s house includes not just her upstairs bedchamber, but also the flight of stairs linking her bedroom to a small antechamber on the ground floor. It is this cramped vestibule in her house to which Criseida (through Pandaro) will invite Troiolo on the appointed night. There he will hide until she descends the stairs, torch in hand, in order to talk with him, touch him, kiss him, and lead him up to bed to experience her own bodily particella.

III Strikingly unlike Boccaccio’s heroine, Chaucer’s Criseyde does not invite Troilus into her palace to enact any of the face-to-face, tactile stages in the gradus amoris leading to her seduction. Nor does the English poet use Criseyde’s palace for the all-important love-tryst that occupies his poem’s centre. Instead, within the interior spaces of two other newly invented houses, one ‘ther biside’ Criseyde’s palace, the other within walking distance of it, Chaucer has Pandarus, not Criseyde, select and manage all the spaces that will bring the seduction process to its culmination. Within a borrowed, small, warm bedroom in the house of Deiphebus, Pandarus locates and watches the lovers’ first direct dialogue (alloquium), their first physical contact (tactus), and their first kiss (osculum). Then, for the actual consummation (factum), Pandarus reserves a bedroom in his own house, furnished not just with a bed but also with a fireplace and a surprising trap-door. When, in Troilus Books II and III, we enter into several of the rooms within three typical ‘Trojan’ upper-class dwellings, it may seem at first that the houses simply provide, as Hamilton Smyser once suggested, a realistic domestic back-

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ground based on fourteenth-century mansions for the love story.14 Through Chaucer’s characters, however, we watch as these ‘familiar’ architectural spaces assume improvised, ad hoc mnemonic functions in relation to the gradus amoris, not as background but as an insistently material foreground open to metaphoric troping. With the narrative of Troilus Book I, Chaucer sets the historically readable city of Troy against an entirely different experience of that city, centred on ‘home’ and ‘dwelling’ in an unfinished present. To examine Chaucer’s drama of daily life in Troy, I want to look at his rewriting, or better, over-writing of the cityscapes he had inherited both from Boccaccio and from the Troy-Book tradition.15 As we shall see, the verb ‘dwellen’, used to signify progressive, spatially complex action, is fundamental to the poet’s double vision of Troy. Drawing us into the space of Troy by way of Calkas, Chaucer tells us that the old prophet ‘was/ dwellynge’ in the ‘town’ (I, 64–5; my emphasis). Here, as nearly always in Troilus, the English poet uses the verb ‘to dwell’ in Troilus, not in its usual modern English stative sense, but rather as a subtly dynamic verb, embracing its Old English senses of seducing, wandering, erring, deluding. Calkas will, as the end-rhyme ‘was’ suggests, refuse to dwell (erroneously) any longer in Troy, knowing it is a town about to fall. The verb ‘to dwell’, used in various forms, appears no fewer than forty-five times across the whole of Troilus and Criseyde, often within a context that also includes the spatial adverbs ‘hom’ and ‘homeward’ as well as the noun ‘hows’. Characters in Troilus dwell (or decide not to dwell) within the city as a political entity, or within a neighbourhood, or a private house, or even a tent. They also dwell (linger erroneously) within specific states of mind or spirit (opinions, fears, temporary ‘bliss’). In addition, the poet and some of his characters dwell or decide not to dwell on the textual matter at hand in order to keep their audiences from dwelling over-long on irrelevant matters. Whether in relation to lingering in domestic architectural spaces in Troy or the Greek camp, or within the spaces of the manuscript book, or the inner spaces of the psyche, or the other-worldly spaces inhabited by the pagan deities and good pagan souls, the condition of ‘dwelling’ in Troilus implicates important hints of errance, even when they go unperceived by the poem’s actors and/or readers. Chaucer’s first use of ‘dwelling’ sharply attends to its connections with deception, as if to set a standard. For Calkas to ‘dwell’ any longer in Troy, given his prophetic vision, would be to tarry in a place of false comfort and false myths of invincibility. For him, Troy as a city of social spaces, a community of dwellers and homes, must be abandoned, reduced to an object of strategy for himself as also for the

14 Hamilton M. Smyser, ‘The Domestic Background of Troilus and Criseyde’, Speculum, 31 (1956),

263–96. 15 See Windeatt, ed., Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (London and New

York, 1984), p. 93, lines 138–40; p. 95, lines 155–6; lines 157–8; and his ‘The “Paynted Proces”: Italian to English in Chaucer’s Troilus’, English Miscellany, 26–7 (1977–8), 79–103 (p. 80 and passim).

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Greeks outside the city walls. His leave-taking, together with the first narrative unit (thirteen stanzas) of the poem, initiates a gap, one that will not close for Calkas until Book IV. Once the prophet of doom has slipped away from Troy, however, the city springs to poetic life in what I will provisionally call the text’s phenomenological turn. In precisely the same language of dwelling and home, applied in Calkas’s case to a dangerous lingering in a doomed space, king Priam’s eldest son, Hector, invites Criseyde to ‘dwell’ in Troy as long as she likes under the protection of the Trojan royal family: ‘Ye yourself in joie/ Dwelleth with us, whil yow good list, in Troie’ (I, 118–19; my emphasis). Criseyde gratefully accepts this princely offer, takes her leave, and ‘hom, and held hir stille’: And in hire hous she abood with swich meyne

As til hire honour need was to holde; And while she was dwellynge in that cite Kepte hir estat. (I, 126–30; my emphasis) Fourteen lines later, in a four-stanza sequence elaborated from two in Boccaccio, Chaucer slips the verb ‘dwellen’ into yet a third context. Once again the cityscape of Troy as an encircled town, tightly bound to its destruction as a typical urbs capta, is the apparent subject. Mentioned only fleetingly, however, as the parchment-thin ‘matere’ of books by ancient historians, that long-past subject is marginalized as a ‘digression/ Fro my matere and yow to long to dwelle’ (I, 143–4; my emphasis). In this way, the poet frees himself to invent as the centre of his own book several ancient Trojans’ unfinished, private, changing experiences of specific neighbourhood places in Troy. Although the Greeks encircle ‘the cite’, the Trojans, we learn, are continuing to practise their ‘olde usage’ (I, 148–50). As they do so, they express again the juxtaposition of the two ways of telling history we have already examined in the Calkas/Criseyde sequence. The panoptic Troy Chaucer implicates through Calkas’s departure, as well as the ancient historians to whom he alludes, participate in an ‘objective’ art of writing down in black or brown ink on vellum a monolithic view of things, fixed in time and judged from on high. On the other hand, the Troy Chaucer constructs pre-eminently through Pandarus and Criseyde is, to use Michel de Certeau’s terms, a ‘migrational, or metaphorical, city’, transformed into what Mark Lambert has called ‘supremely the city of friendship’.16 The poet privileges this metaphorical city of comfortable homes, familiar paths, and social life in lieu of what he does not represent, namely ‘the clear text of the planned and readable city’.17 As Chaucer blocks out a cozily nestled cluster of houses in his Trojan neighbourhood to enclose his plot(s), he enjoins our attention to the

16 Mark Lambert, ‘Troilus, Books I–III: A Criseydan Reading’, p. 110. 17 De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 93.

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telling of history as a ‘practical science of the singular’.18 Or, as Merleau-Ponty theorizes the same point in his Phenomenology of Perception: The fact is that . . . my experience always comes into being within the framework of a certain setting in relation to the world, [a setting] which my body defines . . . [A]ny perception of a thing, a shape or a size as real, any perceptual constancy refers back to the positing of a world and of a system of experience in which my body is inescapably linked with phenomena . . . I am not the spectator, I am involved . . .19

Yet, from beginning to end of his fiction, Chaucer hints that Troy, like all cities, harbours great dangers for those who inhabit it, especially the unwary and the vulnerable. Like Pandarus, Criseyde is a character for whom circumstantial moments are of the essence for the decisions she makes about where and when to dwell and love. Unlike the men in the poem, she has little or no mobility or power of her own. Yet Chaucer makes Criseyde, rather than Troilus or Pandarus, the luminous epicentre of the metaphoric lyricism in his fiction. Through her feminine light, as the ‘other’ in a dark patriarchal world, several domestic spaces in Troy (and in the Greek camp) temporarily become ‘home’ for her. Through her, each one is, for a time, privileged to shimmer with the poetry of joy, pleasure, grace, adventure, and sexual pleasure.20

IV We move into the performative world of Trojan high society at the start of Troilus Book II, through Pandarus’s master-bedroom. Here Chaucer gives us only a metonymic glimpse of this house. We do not see more of it until we return to it in Book III for the culmination of Pandarus’s vicarious seduction of Criseyde. Yet already Chaucer insinuates two semiotic markers concerning the special character of the house. The first of these is the interstitial metaphoric allusion to Tereus’s brutal entrapment and rape of Philomena as the swallow ‘Proigne’ sings her ‘sorowful lay’ outside Pandarus’s window (II, 64–69). The second marker particularizing Pandarus’s house pertains to its material location in relation to Criseyde’s palace. It is ‘ther biside’, as the text explicitly tells us (II, 76). The physical closeness of the two city-houses not only initiates a drama of neighbourly intimacy in Chaucer’s Troy, at once friendly and coloured by sinister undertones of entrapment; it also intimates Chaucer’s spatial conception of his entire poetic composition. Largely by means of Pandarus’s perambulations from house to house, as a character moving ‘in between’ one house and another 18 See de Certeau, Practice, vol. 2, p. 251. 19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962; repr.

2000), pp. 302–3. 20 See Carolyn Dinshaw’s excellent study of Criseyde’s subjectivity as framed by the ideology of a patri-

archal society (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), ch. 1). See also C. David Benson, ‘The Opaque Text of Chaucer’s Criseyde’, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Binghamton, NY, 1992), pp. 17–28.

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through Books II and III, the English poet blocks out domestic loci to contain seriatim all the usual stages of the gradus amoris. But he also adds to Boccaccio’s study of Ovidian love for young men, a new series of domestic spaces within which to dramatize a very different private, feminine experience of falling into love. In doing so, he develops a spatially differentiated argument concerning the plight of, women and men, as they seek to dwell in mortal cities generally. When Pandarus leaves his place and walks to his niece’s palace next door, we move familiarly with him ‘forth in’ on Criseyde ‘withinne’ her paved parlour (literally a place for conversing). For the length of a stanza (II, 78–84), Chaucer gives us a domestic tableau, figured as if it were a sectional drawing of a three-dimensional space, ‘a wonderfully evocative image of feminine enclosure and stability’, as Derek Pearsall has well described it.21 There we see Criseyde in her house for the first time as she and two other ladies listen to a maiden reading from a book the story of the fall of Thebes. Brief as this scene in the parlour is, it projects the ideal space for ladies. Criseyde dwells in a stative sense, at home in the company of other women. As long as she stays still, Chaucer suggests, the space she occupies – as fixed as a still-life – will simply and always frame her life as tableau. Pandarus’s arrival, however, exposes this tableau to dialectical questioning as four virtual scenarios for female lives, including both habit and habitat, displace it.22 Pandarus first playfully urges his niece to cast aside her widowly habit in order to transform her decorous domestic spaces into an unwidowly place for dancing. For the first block of Book II (78 stanzas; lines 50–595), we remain within Criseyde’s palace as Pandarus undertakes to transform it into a site for the second phase of the gradus amoris, the alloquium or love-dialogue leading to seduction. For the sake of the debate, Chaucer here uses Criseyde to epitomize the three legitimate lives open to medieval women, together with their appropriate habitats: the quiet life at home for widows; the life of holy women dwelling in caves, devoting themselves to prayer and spiritual reading; the lives of ‘maydens’ and ‘yonge wyves’ dancing in palaces like Criseyde’s: It satte me wel bet ay in a cave To bidde and rede on holy seyntes lyves; Lat maydens gon to daunce and yonge wyves.

(II, 117–19)

By contrast, Pandarus proposes an estate for Criseyde (and, in the event, ‘housing’ for it) forbidden to gentlewomen: a fabliau-life of free love for any woman willing, with persuasion, to enter into the ‘olde daunce’ of furtive Ovidian affairs. This initial scene of debate concerning women’s lives and corresponding habitats near the beginning of Book II provocatively frames Criseyde’s gradual 21 ‘Criseyde’s Choices’, SAC, 4 (1986), 17–29 (p. 18). 22 On the subject of women and architectural space, see Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives,

Steadfast Widows (Westport, CT and London, 1993), ch. 7.

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decision to re-fashion herself. But Chaucer’s heroine does not fit the stereotype of the sexually driven Ovidian woman embraced, as we have seen, by Boccaccio. Instead, Chaucer refuses to diminish either the enduring charm his Criseyde radiates or the poetry she, as a woman, inspires and creates. In the end, it is Criseyde herself who displaces Pandarus as a maker of metaphorically transformed spaces. In the second sequence of Troilus Book II (a block of 48 stanzas; lines 596–931) Criseyde, still at home after Pandarus’s departure, muses, debates, and dreams her way into love. Alone in her bedroom, she first reflects on what her uncle has laid out before her, including his blazon-like description of Troilus as the Trojans’ ‘sheld’ against the Greeks (II, 191–200). Then, responding to noise on the street, Criseyde goes to her window and watches Troilus, fresh from battle, dressed in armour, as he rides with his troops along the public street outside. Spontaneously, Criseyde expresses a reaction that parallels Troilus’s intense, sudden visus in Book I. But there is a difference. Whereas Troilus had been captivated by the visual image of Criseyde’s body, she herself falls into an equally intense, imaginative, poetic desire for Troilus as knightly protector. ‘Who yaf me drynke?’ she asks herself in a rare moment of simple, lyrical wonder. Still alone in her chamber after her singular visus, stunned by what she has beheld and felt, Criseyde debates the pros and cons of entering into an as-yet ambiguously defined love relationship with Troilus. Reaching no conclusion, famously torn ‘bitwixen tweye [views]’, she breaks her reverie, gets up, and goes ‘forto pleye’ with her female entourage in her landscaped garden. Here, at the very centre of Troilus Book II, Chaucer has the garden function as a space entirely devoted to women walking, talking, singing. Like the parlour-scene in Criseyde’s palace before Pandarus interrupts it, like the heroine’s first fateful visus of Troilus on horseback before Pandarus re-stages it, the palace garden provides an apparently safe haven for women. Within it, as in the two earlier scenes inside Criseyde’s palace, Chaucer invites his heroine to interpret a key text. The text Chaucer nests within the garden-tableau is oral, composed by one woman, sung by another. Like the masculine visual image of Troilus in armour in the previous sequence, the heard lyrics of the feminine song are aesthetic, appealing directly to the senses. Ironically, though, while the song supports Criseyde’s dream of a true lover, it does not, as lyric, reinforce her concomitant dream of secure dwelling. At no point in the song is there any indication as to what domestic space(s) the two lovers might inhabit in Troy, a point the lyric makes explicit: ‘Iwis, I love hym best, so doth he me; Now good thrift have he, wherso that he be!’ (II, 846–47; my emphasis). Despite this important lacuna in the song, Criseyde, for the moment dwelling in her own garden, under idyllically feminine spatial and sensuous circumstances, is so charmed by the lyric that she reads it poetically as if it could provide a mirror for her own developing dream. Chaucer closes the scene within the garden space with the reminder of diurnal time: ‘for lakke of light and sterres for taper’, the landscape fades and virtually disappears. Nonetheless, the stroll and the song in the garden, as well as Criseyde and Antigone’s interpretation of it,

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have profoundly ‘prent[ed]’ themselves on Criseyde’s heart, and she now finds herself ‘somwhat able to converte’ (II, 903). In Criseyde’s personal mode of ‘fyndyng’ love, Chaucer subtly, spatially distinguishes the female from the male experience of the gradus amoris. As his heroine dwells within the interior space of her imagination, dramatic action on the street, gendered masculine, merges with inner debate in a closet within her palace, then with an improvised afternoon-idyll and song in her garden gendered feminine, and finally with a dream, gendered dangerously masculine, as she sleeps in her chamber. Polyphonically intertwined, the several different spatial, sensuous, and imaginative forces at play in the sequence mysteriously catalyze Criseyde’s inclination to love Troilus.

V When Chaucer arrives at the point in the seduction plot where the lovers must actually meet, touch, and kiss for the first time, he undertakes a striking transformation of his source. Departing from Boccaccio’s Filostrato, he takes Criseyde away from the safety of her own palace. The house Chaucer constructs specifically for his lovers’ first meeting in the last 51 stanzas of Book II shares its floor plan with other palaces in the neighbourhood. Just before the poet begins to represent the contours of Deiphebus’s dwelling, moreover, he has Pandarus echo the same architectural language used at the end of Book I. To Troilus he declares, ‘yet shal I shape it so, That thow shalt come into a certeyn place, There as thow mayst thiself hire preye of grace.’ (II, 1363–65; my emphasis)

Like every other domestic space in his fiction, Chaucer uses Deiphebus’s house as a material structure, found in a seemingly impromptu, ad hoc way. It will then be awkwardly transformed, to locate a new phase in the love plot. Simultaneously, however, the poet also weaves into the spaces of Deiphebus’s house and garden the disturbing behaviours and histories of several key Trojans who attend the prince’s dinner party. To place Deiphebus’s house comfortably within his Trojan neighbourhood, Chaucer has Pandarus, walking or running, measure the distances between his newly invented palace and the dwellings we already know in the neighbourhood. First, he goes to visit Deiphebus at his house. He then runs ‘to his neces hous as streyght as lyne’ (II, 1461) to issue the dinner invitation, warning her at the same time of the ‘advocacies newe’ a certain Poliphete is planning to bring against her. Leaving Criseyde, he walks to visit Troilus to let him know how he has duped his royal brother and how he must behave to win his lady’s grace. Safe and comfortable as the party sequence seems to be, Criseyde, we learn before she does, can never actually count on being shielded from the harm she

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fears. Instead, somewhat inadvertently, she is caught into the web of male rapacity, treachery, and strategic ambition habitual to the king, the royal brothers, and their chief advisor. In such terms, Pandarus, privately describing Criseyde’s actual plight to Troilus before the party begins, tropes the bedroom in Deiphebus’s house where the prince will lie into a ‘triste’, a hunting station, towards which he means to drive the ‘deer’ Criseyde to be cornered. As soon as Deiphebus has assembled his guests in his great chamber, Chaucer cuts to the presumptive, but fabricated point of the party, namely to offer Criseyde protection in the face of legal harassment: ‘lat us faste go/ Right to the effect, withouten tales mo’ (II, 1565–6). The poet here implies that getting to the heart of ‘why al this folk assembled in this place’ (II, 1567) is kindly and simple. Yet, as usual, his text in fact imbricates several alternative ‘tales’ that severely challenge the simplicity of the ‘why’. These other tales, as historical ‘threads’ subtly layered into the text of the party, recall the causes of the Trojan War still alive in the daily practices of the most powerful Trojans. Troilus lies to and tricks his dearest brother for the sake of the seduction plot; the king’s advisor, Pandarus, tricks his niece into being seduced and also outrageously fools members of the royal family for the sake of the same sexual seduction; ‘quene’ Helen, the wife of the Greek king, abducted by another Trojan royal brother, Paris, with Deiphebus’s approval, lives in ‘homly’ harmony with her ‘husband’, his brothers, and his brothers’ friends. Even the walls of Deiphebus’s palace, like those of the other houses in the neighbourhood, silently recall Priam’s initial building of Troy. All the domestic buildings in the neighbourhood, after all, must be counted among the ‘infinita palatia et . . . infinite domus civium’ ordered by the king to form his magnificent, ‘impenetrable’ concept-city.23 If Chaucer uses the last quarter of Book II for the party scene, he devotes the first quarter of Book III (53 stanzas) to advance the seduction-plot in the small bedroom adjacent to Deiphebus’s great chamber. Here we come to the raison d’être of the party-sequence, its hidden fabliau-core. Three face-to-face, tactile events in the courtship-plot occur in Deiphebus’s bedroom. When Criseyde enters Troilus’s sick-room, puts her hands on Troilus for the first time (tactus), talks with him (face-to-face alloquium), and kisses him (osculum), we cannot help but smile at the utter incongruity between the little borrowed bedroom and the pseudo-sacral event of ‘betrothal’ it contains. At the level of literal detail, few venues could be less appropriate to a solemn exchange of love-vows. Neither Pandarus nor the lovers, however, notice the incongruity. Indeed, at the end of the scene, all Troy seems metaphorically to acknowledge the ‘sacred’ event as Pandarus imagines for the two lovers’ benefit that he hears ‘in the towne . . . ech belle’ sounding to honour what has just transpired (III, 183–9).

23 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, V, p. 47.

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VI Chaucer now begins to develop the material spaces of Pandarus’s house as the site for the sexual culmination of the gradus amoris. This house had been briefly introduced, we remember, at the start of Book II. When the poet returns to it in Book III, we learn for the first time that this ‘hows’ will enclose the climactic factum: here Criseyde will be trapped and ravished. During the brief transitional interlude of spaceless joy between the drama at Deiphebus’s palace and the one to come at Pandarus’s house, Criseyde, we are told, delights in her idealized image of Troilus as knightly protector, regarding her lover as ‘a wal/ Of stiel and sheld from every displeasaunce’ (III, 479–80). Ironically, while Criseyde poetically transforms Troilus into a steel wall and a shield, Chaucer’s Pandarus swiftly moves to bring her inside the material walls of the ‘hows’ that will enclose the sexual consummation. To underscore the importance of his building project as the dynamic backbone for his fiction of neighbourhood life in Troy, the poet once again brings the language of architectural construction to bear. ‘[I]t bifel . . .’ Chaucer declares, That Pandarus . . . evere dide his myght Right for the fyn that I shal speke of here, As for to bryngen to his hows som nyght His faire nece and Troilus yfere . . ., This tymbur is al redy up to frame (III, 511–15; 530; my emphasis)

Seizing upon the immediate prospect of a moonless, rainy night, Pandarus co-opts it for his seduction-plan. ‘Streght o morwe’ he hastens ‘unto his nece’ to invite her for supper at his house. The usual banter between the two does not fail to reveal Criseyde’s resistance to the invitation nor Pandarus’s firm insistence, from which she finds no escape. ‘This moot be don! Ye shal be ther anon’, he peremptorily declares. Once more Criseyde is delicately but firmly caught: ‘with hym to go/ She graunted hym . . ./ And as his nece obeyed as hire oughte’ (III, 579–80; 581). Whether Troilus will be at Pandarus’s house neither Criseyde nor we are allowed to know for sure. But our suspicions are confirmed well before hers are. Criseyde walks with her protective entourage of women and men to Pandarus’s house. Simultaneously, Troilus, we are told, stood and might it se Thorughout a litel wyndow in a stewe, There he bishet syn mydnyght was in mewe.

(III, 600–602)

Not only Pandarus, but also Troilus, already hidden inside Pandarus’s house, awaits his half-unwary prey. The trap has been set, we now know, to bring Criseyde to bed. On that same dark, stormy evening, Criseyde arrives, as ordered, for supper and entertainment at Pandarus’s house. When she prepares to return home,

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however, Pandarus presses her, because of the rain, to remain overnight instead at his house: ‘But goode nece,/ . . . prey ich yow . . ./ As for to dwelle here al this nyght with me’. He then adds an ominously ambiguous clincher for his argument: ‘For whi this is youre owen hous, parde’ (III, 631–35). Does Pandarus here playfully translate his own house into a metaphoric dwelling specifically made over for Criseyde’s seduction? Does Criseyde grasp her uncle’s meaning? Whatever the case, after hesitating briefly, Criseyde replies using the same language of dwelling: ‘I am right glad with yow to dwelle/ I seyde but a game I wolde go’ (III, 645–8). And Pandarus seals the agreement: ‘Were it game or no, soth forto telle,/ Now am I glad, syn that yow list to dwelle’ (III, 650–51). What transpires in this conversation gives a newly sinister, explicitly non-static sense to the verb ‘dwellen’. Indeed, that very night Criseyde, taken by surprise, will be literally trapped into making love to Troilus in her uncle’s bed. In the event, using what is surely the oddest door in the whole poem, Pandarus undoes ‘a trappe’ and, all unbeknownst to Criseyde, leads Troilus in by ‘the lappe’ (III, 741–2). Once in the room, Pandarus’s first act, moreover, is to go ‘to the [main] dore’ in the bedroom to shut it, thereby making it virtually impossible for Criseyde’s entourage to hear her, should she call for help. What the ‘trappe’ looks like and where it is located have been much studied.24 As a surprising second door in the bedchamber, the trappe jars against conventional expectations for a single door in a room to be used for love-making. Furthermore, no matter how Pandarus’s trap-door may be configured, no matter where it may be located, it functions as a homonym for a literal trap with two doors, used to trick and capture prey. As we witness Criseyde’s surprise at her lover’s ‘sodeyn’ coming, we cannot help but wonder how many other female victims Pandarus may already have trapped by means of the second, secret door to his bedroom. In this regard, we also watch as Pandarus convinces Criseyde that she has no choices. She must follow her uncle’s order: ‘liggeth stille, and taketh hym right here’ (III, 948). Once more Chaucer stretches the distance between the comic, fabliau-materiality of Pandarus’s bedroom with its trap door and the metaphoric transformation the space undergoes in the two lovers’ experience of it. ‘Lat hem’, Chaucer declares of the love-making, ‘in this [seemingly spaceless] hevene blisse dwelle,/ That is so heigh that al ne kan I telle’ (III, 1322–3). Both the lovers confirm their sense of experiencing the place they now occupy as other-worldly, sacred: ‘O deere herte, may it be’, Troilus asks,’ that ye ben in this place?’ to which Criseyde responds, ‘Yee, herte myn, god thank I of his grace’ (III, 1347–8). In this spirit of metaphoric transcendence, Book III leaves the two lovers ‘in lust and in quiete’ as if this love had been translated to heaven.

24 On the ‘trappe’, see Smyser, ‘Domestic Background’; Saul Brody, ‘Making a Play for Criseyde: The

Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 115–40. See also James Simpson’s acute analysis of the habitual male rapacity towards women in the Troy Book tradition, ‘The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 397–423 (pp. 410–16).

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VII As Troilus Book IV begins, a dramatic shift of scale and focus removes us abruptly from the ‘quiete’ and the sociable intimacy within the houses of Troy’s best neighbourhood. The small community of friends, couples, and lovers fades out, harshly displaced by sweeping images of the urbs soon to be capta: the battlefield outside the city walls; the streets of Troy, where rumours of a truce fly ‘everywhere’ (IV, 62); the noisy voices of the ‘peple’ clamouring for the exchange of prisoners: Antenor for Criseyde. No longer at home in Trojan high society, no longer absorbed by impromptu parties and an amorous intrigue, we are made to enter first into the public spaces of the Greek council, then into the Trojan parliament. Yet Criseyde, who has been the key subject/object of the house-visits, dinners, and suppers, as well as the love-intrigue, is also unwittingly caught at the centre of political debate within both the all-male Greek consistory and the Trojan parliament. Addressing the Greek counselors, Calkas paints an image of Criseyde as the ‘doughter’, the ‘child’, he has ‘lefte . . ./ Slepynge at hom whan out of Troie I sterte’ (IV, 92–3). It is this poignant, homely portrait (totally unfamiliar to us as readers) that persuades the Greeks to ask for Criseyde in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. Within the Trojan parliament, debating the same issue, only Hector, who has promised Criseyde joy as long as she dwells in Troy, argues forcefully to keep Criseyde at home. In the end, though, the Trojan ‘peple’ unanimously chide Hector for shielding a mere woman when the city needs one of its best men. And so the decision is made: Antenor ‘shal com hom to towne/ And [Criseyde] shal out’ (IV, 209–10). Criseyde, here literally marginalized, is to be brutally cast outside the boundaries of the city where she was born. When, at Pandarus’s urging, the two lovers meet once more for a nocturnal tryst, they do so in Criseyde’s palace-bedchamber, reverting, as if by default, to Boccaccio’s text and his much simpler domestic architecture for the affair.25 Here, lying in bed with Troilus, Criseyde proposes ‘an heep of weyes [to] shewe’ how they might ‘shape’ and ‘fynde’ a way to handle their separation. Above all, she imagines for Troilus how she will return within ten days to Troy ‘so as we shal togideres evere dwelle,/ That al this world ne myghte oure blisse telle’ (IV, 1322–3). She also imagines for him how unpleasant life would be for her if she were to remain in the Greek camp: ‘Or how, meschaunce, sholde I dwelle there

Among tho men of armes evere in feere?’ (IV, 1362–3) Troilus, by contrast, argues to prevent Criseyde’s departure. His first advice is that she remain in Troy: ‘Dwelle rather here, myn owen swete herte’ (IV, 1449),

25 Here Chaucer seems to be simply translating Boccaccio: ‘Criseida, quando ora e tempo fue,/ com’era

usata, con un torchio acceso sen venne a lui . . .’ (Fil. IV, 114.1–3; my emphasis)

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he begs, as he paints a picture of the patriarchal rhetoric Calkas will use to ‘ravish’ his daughter. He also proposes in considerable detail how the two lovers might steal away together to dwell ‘in honour and plesaunce’ (IV, 1515) among kin and friends elsewhere (though the exact place goes unidentified). There, he assures Criseyde, supported by gold enough and ‘gere’, they would be ‘honoured while [they] dwelten there’ (IV, 1524). The existential nervousness surrounding the verb ‘dwell’ as it dominates the whole of Troilus Book IV brings us once again face-to-face with the progressive rather than the stative sense of the verb. The book ends with Troilus’s desperation: For when he saugh that [Criseyde] ne myghte dwelle, ... Withouten more out of the chaumbre he wente. (IV, 1699–1701)

VIII . . . Criseyde moste out of the town, And Troilus shal dwellen forth in pyne Til Lachesis his thred no lenger twyne.

(V, 5–7)

Thus at the start of Book V, the text starkly sums up the fates of the two lovers in relation to Troy. Even now, however, our perception of what it means to dwell in Troy continues to change, as it also does for Chaucer’s hero and heroine. Troilus asks Pandarus to go with him once more to Criseyde’s palace. As if he were composing a memory theatre to revive his now-past love ‘storie’ place by place, he rides first to Criseyde’s palace, darkened, barred, shuttered; then past the temple where he had first seen her; then past ‘that yonder place’ where Criseyde ‘first me took unto hire grace’ (Deiphebus’s house); then to the city gates from whence his ‘blisse’ and ‘solas’, Criseyde, has ridden out of Troy toward the Greek camp. At last, in the evening darkness, the forlorn lover returns ‘home’. There, Troilus tells us, he will ‘dwelle outcast from alle joie’ (V, 615; my emphasis). Since, as we know, Troilus will never see Criseyde again, there will be no alteration for his grief. Only after his death, from the distance of the eighth sphere, will he finally laugh ironically at ‘this litel spot of erthe that with the se/ Embraced is’ (V, 1815–16). His transcendent perspective removes him not just from his own neighbourhood in Troy and from the city as a whole, but also from the entire mortal world bounded by the ‘se’. Here Chaucer gives us his most extreme rescaling of the Troy we have so intimately experienced in his fiction. Putatively settled in ‘pleyn felicite’, Troilus now inhabits the otherworldly space where ‘Mercurie [has] sorted him to dwelle’. There, where Chaucer’s ‘dwelle’ may (but only may) at last seem to imply a permanence impossible to find on earth, Troilus gazes down on an image of the whole world very like that of a medieval mappa mundi (V, 1807–27; my emphasis).26 26 For images of the so-called OT mappa mundi, see Evelyn Edson’s study, Mapping Time and Space:

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IX What, though, happens to Criseyde, ravished from her homeland, transported unwillingly to the Greek camp? Troilus, as a would-be platonizing philosopher drawn to death and perfection, experiences an other-worldly apotheosis of an abstract, storyless kind. By contrast, Criseyde, yearning both for ‘home’ as a protected material dwelling and for the adventure of earthly love, feels her way toward a pleasurable, poetic, earthly alternative to her now-past dream of Troilus and Troy. Miserable at first in the Greek camp, she mourns her separation from Troilus and determines to return: ‘To Troie I wole, as for conclusion’ (V, 765). Yet, once again, a man out ‘hunting’ aims to ravish her. The Greek Diomede begins to consider ‘how he may best . . ./ Into his net Criseydes herte brynge’, and so ‘[t]o fisshen hire he leyde out hook and lyne’ (V, 774–5l). Diomede’s resolve, in fact, instigates a new, brief romance, placed as if it were a commentary on the much more ‘courtly’, dilatory romance Pandarus had previously constructed, with its elaborate series of co-opted domestic spaces and crucial go-between. This freshly conceived ‘storie’ begins, as if ab ovo, with prologal portraits: first, of Diomede as bold, strong, free of speech; then, of fair Criseyde as heroine; then of Troilus ‘trewe as stiel in ech condicioun’ (V, 831) (though actually incapable of protecting his lady from being ravished out of Troy). The narrative action of the new romance, following immediately upon the portraits, begins with a single locus. For this romance, there is only one dwelling place within which the love affair will proceed: a tent signalling a nomadic life. Chaucer would have found Calkas’s tent fully developed, not in Boccaccio but in Benoît de Sainte Maure. In his Roman de Troie, Benoît gives an elaborate description of it as a ‘pavillion’ once owned by the pharaoh who drowned in the Red Sea (Troie, 13818–45). Unlike his French predecessor, Chaucer at first presents this tent as just a tent. Surprisingly, however, at this moment, the text of Troilus takes another phenomenological turn. Criseyde begins to transform the tent into a poetically tempered dwelling place for a fresh iteration of the gradus amoris. Diomede arrives at Calkas’s tent feigning business with Calkas, but it is Criseyde who receives him and makes him comfortable: ‘. . . he was ethe ynough to maken dwelle’ (V, 799–847; 850; my emphasis). Once spices and wine are brought, the two converse (alloquium) in the tent ‘as frendes don’ (V, 854). Diomede begins his suit, explaining his high estate, the dire fate of Troy, and his own experience of love at first sight (visus) on the day he had led her away from Troy. At the end of the love-dialogue, Diomede asks whether he can return to the tent the next day to continue their dialogue. Criseyde grants his request, only stipulating (for the sake of briefly affecting daunger) that he must speak no more of love. That very night, in bed, Criseyde remembers all that Diomede has said about How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London, 1997). For Troy on a late twelfth-century map made in England, see Edson, fig. 6.3.

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himself. And she recalls once more her own fear as a woman alone, needful of friends’ help. She also mulls over what Diomede has told her about the impending fall of Troy. Still, as always, a disenfranchised tactician in a patriarchal world, Criseyde once again transforms her material place of habitation for the sake of loving and safe dwelling. By virtue of her presence, her father’s tent becomes metaphorically a ‘faire brighte tente’ as Chaucer transfers adjectives describing Criseyde herself to the tent she now inhabits. It is within this newly troped place that Chaucer’s heroine begins to ‘brede’ (conceive, create) a plan to continue lighting up the tent as she takes ‘fully purpos forto dwelle’ in the Greek camp (V, 1020–9; my emphasis). From the very start of Troilus and Criseyde, we are made to experience Criseyde as ‘the other’, first praying to Hector for protected dwelling in Troy; then ‘at home’ as a widow living quietly for a brief time, in her father’s palace with her entourage; then at Deiphebus’s palace, ‘protected’ by Pandarus and the Trojan royal brothers; then at Pandarus’s house, where she will be trapped into sexual intercourse with Troilus; finally in her father’s tent in the Greek camp, entertaining her lover-to-be, Diomede. Moving from house to house in a world dangerous to all humankind, but especially to a woman alone, Chaucer’s Criseyde, unlike Boccaccio’s Criseida, functions, in de Certeau’s terms, as a fearful but pragmatically poetic tactician: Without leaving the place where [she] has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for [her], [she] establishes within it a degree of plurality and

creativity. By an art of being in between, [she] draws unexpected results from [her] situation.27 Criseyde is, in this regard, not unlike her translator, Chaucer the poet. Like her, he prefers to go on ‘breding’ a kind of poetry that shows humans as subjects habitually troping whatever mortal spaces they inhabit for the sake of comfortable dwelling and love. The tactical, contingent poetry Chaucer, like his heroine, conceives simultaneously covers over and reveals the fragility of the places themselves as well as the fiction-making by which men and women make their (always temporary) dwellings seem permanent.28 Indeed, Chaucer creates a Troy that models in remarkable detail subjective city-making, as human beings everywhere and in all times try to evade their own and all worldly mortality, whether in ancient Troy or in late fourteenth century London or anywhere else at any time on earth.29 Troilus as a man and a knightly hero earns death and a disembodied

27 ‘ “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics’, in Practice, p.30. For the purposes of my essay, I have replaced

masculine pronouns with the feminine form in this passage to apply, not as de Certeau has it, to a North African male living in Parisian public housing, but to Criseyde. 28 On this subject, see also my chapter on Troilus in Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge, 1992), especially pp. 203–9; 242–3. 29 On the subject of London as another Troy, see Lee Patterson’s rich essay in Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 155–64.

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vision of Troy. Criseyde, on the other hand, will make do with a tent in the Greek camp. Once more, she will bring the light of her desire, ever informed by her fear, to the project of spinning her own fictions of love and dwelling as acts of subversive poetic transformation.

COMMUNITIES

Chaucer and the Language of London Christopher Cannon

Chaucer and the Language of London CHRISTOPHER CANNON

As the dreamer in Piers Plowman looks down into the ‘deep dale’ beneath the ‘tour’, what at first appears to be ‘alle manere of men . . . werchynge’ soon thickens into an urban press, the bustle of daily labour along the streets of what is eventually identified as ‘London’.1 As Langland represents it, this city is less a place than a mass of people, a vast ‘assemblee’ of barons and burghers, bakers and brewers, weavers and tailors, tinkers, and miners, each differentiated from one another by their defining ‘craft’ (Prologue, 217–22). When these people are individualized, moreover, they do not cut particular figures or perform specific tasks; they say typical things. Langland’s ‘London’ is not so much seen as heard: As dykers and delueres that doth here dedes ille, And dryveth forth the longe day with ‘Dieu save Dame Emme!’ Cokes and hire knaves cryden ‘Hote pies, hote! Goode gees and grys! Go we dyne, go we!’ Taverners until hem tolden the same: ‘Whit wyn of Oseye and wyn of Gascoigne, about Of the Ryn and of the Rochel, the roost to def ie!’ (Prologue, 223–30)

Opening a window onto the texture of social life in this way is, of course, much more characteristic of Chaucer than Langland, but I begin with another London poet to make clear just how deeply the noise of London could impress anyone who wrote there. We also need to begin elsewhere when we try to connect Chaucer and London because his very affinity for sounds tended to make the crowded city overly loud to him; when he tried to give us something like Langland’s broad social scene he simultaneously recoiled from the kind of cacophony he found it necessary to reproduce:

1

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London, 1987), Prologue 18–19 (‘alle manere’) and 85 (‘London’). Except where indicated by a note, quotations from Piers Plowman will be taken from this edition of the B text and cited by passus and line number in the text.

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Christopher Cannon So hydous was the noyse – a, benedicitee! – Certes, he Jakke straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, As thilke day was maad upon the fox. (VII, 3393–7)

The displacement of London life into a farmyard in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is just as typical of Chaucer’s approach to the city as the sense he gives that its activities are destructive. As a result, it sometimes seems that Chaucer can only represent the city by refusing to do so: merely to mention ‘oure citee’ (I, 4365), as the Cook does at the beginning of his tale, seems enough to ensure that Chaucer will break that tale off after fifty-seven lines. It may well be that this was because Chaucer had a ‘sharp sense of the limits of cities’, that he was, pre-eminently, a poet of the suburbs, in the most modern sense of that phrase.2 But it may also be, as David Wallace has more recently suggested, that Chaucer did not see limits so much as an ‘absence’ where London ought to be.3 In this sense, the din Langland conjures up is different only in so far as it represents this lack in the medium of sound: speech acts both so urgent and simultaneous will necessarily cancel each other out. A city whose very absence can exist in such noise must also seem absent from the writing of a poet like Chaucer who so readily absorbed particular speech habits to his style, for such noise will necessarily spread throughout such a poet’s writing, in that way stripped, by its very pervasiveness, of all localizing markings. In this sense, the Nun’s Priest’s portrait of an urban scene full of ‘shoutes’ is atypical for being so precisely placed in London (as a version of the insurgency in 1381 of ‘Jakke straw and his meynee’). More usually, Chaucer hears London’s characteristic sound in the way people talk to one another when they are as much as fifty miles from the city (at ‘Bobbe-up-and-doun’ or Harbledown) but still shouting: ‘Fy, stynkyng swyn! Fy, foule moote thee falle! A, taketh heede, sires, of this lusty man. Now, sweete sire, wol ye justen atte fan? Therto me thynketh ye been wel yshape! I trowe that ye drunken han wyn ape, And that is whan men pleyen with a straw.’ (IX, 40–5)

The Manciple’s words to the Cook here could be described as a product of London, even if they are not uttered there, because the hostility behind them clearly emerges from the kinds of friction common between a servant of one of the Inns of Court (‘a gentil Maunciple . . . of a temple’, I, 567) and the kind of victualler he tried to best (‘this Manciple sette hir aller cappe’, I, 586). But the 2 3

John Scattergood, ‘Chaucer in the Suburbs’, in Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honor of Basil Cottle, ed. Myra Stokes and T. L. Burton (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 145–62 (p. 145). David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), p. 180.

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real urbanity of the exchange between Manciple and Cook in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale lies in the extent to which it notes how the ‘rancour and disese’ (IX, 97) native to a city may be generally absorbed by its inhabitants’ speech. As the Miller observes of his own speech elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, shouting (‘in Pilates voys he gan to crie’, I, 3124) rooted in hostility (‘I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale’, I, 3127) is an identifiable ‘sound’ (‘I knowe it by my soun’, I, 3138), and even if the Miller roots such sound in the ‘ale of Southwerk’ (I, 3140), for Chaucer, the city of London was itself the most important source of this speaking style. In this sense – and even though most of the pilgrim company hails from somewhere other than London – the monologues and colloquies of the Canterbury Tales generally extend London’s cacophony out along the Canterbury road because their speech is everywhere founded on rivalry (‘And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle . . . Shal have a soper at oure aller cost’, I, 796, 799).4 The most common source of rivalry between the Canterbury pilgrims was also one of the more common sources of personal conflict in London, as in the particular case of the Manciple and Cook, the habituated differences of craft. Such differences always seemed aversive rather than inevitable (noisy rather than conversational) because they were so disappointing – they had the character of a broken dream – since those who governed medieval cities tended to look to crafts for their community-forming power: ‘as a seed bed of fraternity as political belief ’ craft associations ‘formed part of the political aspirations of large sectors of the European population’.5 This is certainly a dream that Langland fostered, and against the noise of London in the Prologue of Piers Plowman, passus 19 sets a vision in which ‘love’ is a ‘craft’ (XX, 207–8) capable of founding a community of brothers: ‘Thynketh that alle craftes’ quod Grace, ‘cometh of my yifte; Loketh that noon lakke oother, but loveth alle as bretheren. And who that moost maistries kan, be myldest of berynge; And crouneth Conscience kyng, and maketh Craft youre stiward, And after Craftes conseil clotheth yow and fede’. (XIX, 255–9)

As James Simpson has observed, however, Langland never knew any such polity, since the London in which he wrote was much more generally shaped by ‘intense craft rivalry’.6 In fact, craft rivalries can be held largely responsible for 4

5 6

I am grateful to David Wallace for demonstrating just how few of the Canterbury pilgrims could have been from London in a paper given at the symposium on ‘Chaucer’s London’ in King’s College, London (November 2004). I offered an early version of this paper at this symposium and I am also grateful for the helpful responses I received on this occasion from David as well as other panellists (Ardis Butterfield and Caroline Barron), Marion Turner (who kindly invited me to participate in this discussion), and members of the audience. Wallace’s point is also made by C. David Benson in this volume (p. 131) and ‘London’, Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 66–80. Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London, 1984), p. 31. James Simpson, ‘ “After Craftes Conseil Clotheth Yow and Fede”: Langland and London City Politics’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford, 1993), pp. 109–27 (p. 127).

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most of ‘the bitter struggles of the 1370s and 1380s’ in London governance.7 And, as structures, crafts were, at the very least, divisive: they parcelled up London into as many as 180 social kinds (this is the number of different crafts named at various times in the records of medieval London) and as many as 51 self-defined communities (this is the number of craft associations of sufficient coherence to be granted the right to elect to the common council in 1377). 8 Because London life was so thoroughly shaped by craft concerns in this way, a poet such as Chaucer could think most searchingly about London and its characteristics when he thought hard about craft. Since, as I have already suggested, London was most vividly present for Chaucer in its noise, Chaucer’s writing is most deeply and productively engaged with city life where the crafts are themselves heard rather than seen, where trade functions and habits become co-extensive with a particular kind of speech. I shall try to explain in the first part of this essay why the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale is, on these grounds, Chaucer’s London tale par excellence (a fact helpfully marked out by, but hardly confined to, the London setting Chaucer gives the tale’s secunda pars). In the second half of the essay, I shall try to explain more fully why London should still seem absent from Chaucer’s writing when the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale so vividly reproduces the sounds characteristic of this city. What I shall generally claim is that Chaucer’s views of London were so subtle because he saw the city as a kind of pretence – the nurturing of an ideal that never remotely prevailed – with the result that urbanity, for him, was to be found in evocations of what the city was not.

Craft Sounds From his youth in a tenement on Thames Street in the Vintry Ward of London, to his career in the civil service dwelling above Aldgate, the language Chaucer would have heard is usually called ‘London English’ to designate the accidence and morphology typical of the South-East Midlands; but this English was also marked by powerful internal divisions that this simple designation ignores. As Langland’s use of a West Midlands dialect to place himself squarely on Cornhill shows, some immigrants to London continued to speak an English native to other regions.9 Craft communities subdivided London English even further by means of the smaller, ‘identificatory’ vocabularies of the kind that Anne Hudson has identified in the analogous case of the Lollards.10 The content of 7 8

Barron, London, p. 231. E. M. Veale, ‘Craftsmen and the Economy of London in the Fourteenth Century’, in The Medieval Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1200–1540, ed. Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser (London, 1990), pp. 120–40 (pp. 126–7). 9 For the placement see William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (London, 1978), Passus V, 2. 10 Anne Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’ in So Many People Longages and Tongues: Philological Essays in Scots and Medieval English presented to Angus MacIntosh, ed. Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 15–30 (p. 18).

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such vocabularies is well illustrated by the provisions for charity made in a document of 1389 describing the ‘brotherede of Carpenteres of London’: Also is ordained þat uche brother & soster of þis fraternite schal paie to þe helping & susteynyng of seke men, whiche þat falle in dissese, as by falling doun of an hous, or hurtyng of an ax, or oþer diuerse sekenesses, twelfepenyes by þe
er.11

This document is one of forty-two similar descriptions of craft procedure created in 1389 in response to a parliamentary demand, and such provisions for charity are themselves completely standard in such returns.12 On the other hand, the words ‘house’ and ‘ax’ firmly identify this document as a production ‘of Carpenteres’ even if there were there no other such indications in this text; it is true that every Londoner would have known these words, but in the context of so much legal boilerplate, the words picking out those objects that would have particularly jeopardized carpenters, simultaneously identify a unique social position. Raymond Williams would later dub such terms ‘keywords’ because, as a very consequence of their wide availability, such specialized uses of common words will bind ‘together certain ways of seeing culture and society’.13 Such words do not constitute a ‘language’ in the conventional sense, but the particularity of their usage is enough to set the boundaries of a small and self-conscious community. As Anne Hudson has also observed in the case of the Lollards, even the simplest terms (‘true men’, ‘known men’), when sufficiently ‘recurrent’, were enough to define an ‘enclav[e] in a hostile world’.14 Crafts also gathered themselves even more neatly into such enclaves because they defined themselves as linguistic communities, programmatically marking their boundaries by means of speech acts. In the returns of 1389, for example, the craft of the ‘powchemakers’ describes a process of examination whereby men are sorted into those ‘worthy’ of the brotherhood and those ‘not’, with the result certified by the swearing of an oath: Also
if any man desire to come in to our bretherhede to ben a brother þanne schul þe foure Wardeynes, & he þat is chose men for þe commune of þe breþerhede, þey schul come to-gyder & enquere by examinement of þe breþeren of his condicions . . . & he to make an oþ with his gode wil to fulfille þe poyntes in þe paper. (BoLE, 54)

In as much as the vetting of new members involved speaking – the ‘coming together’ of craft members to ask questions or ‘inquire’ – the very labour that 11 BoLE, p. 42. 12 ‘As a result of a Parliamentary petition, in 1388 the Crown instigated an inquiry into the activities of

all religious and craft guilds, which were required to send into Chancery details about their purposes, organization, and property-holding. Over 500 guild certificates, constructed in response to this inquiry, now remain and of these forty-two come from London’, Barron, London, p. 208. For the six such returns which survive in English see BoLE, 40–60. 13 Raymond Williams, Keywords (London, 1976), p. 15. 14 Hudson, ‘Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’, pp. 18–19.

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constituted ‘craft’ was itself often a series of speech acts. In fact, this is exactly the purpose envisioned for craft associations in the return of the ‘gild of garlickhithe’: Also þe maistres & bretheren to-fore said euery
er schul foure tymes come to-geder at some certein place to speke touchyng þe profit and ruyl of þe forsaid bretherhede. (BoLE, 45)

‘Garlickhite’ was not the name of a particular sort of work of course, but of a parish on Thames Street (just east of Queenhithe), and, thus, in 1389 this guild remained the kind of parish fraternity which had been the basis of every craft association (the craft of carpenters, for instance, was founded ‘in þe chirche of seint Thomas of Acon be-syde þe Conduyt of London & in þe chirche of seint John Baptist of Haliwelle by-syde London’, BoLE, 41). The evolution occurred because ‘men following the same craft tended to live in the same area’, and the residual geographical concentrations further aligned language and craft communities, giving identificatory vocabularies, if not the full extent, then the geographical specificity of a dialect or language. 15 In each case, these vocabularies could be called a craft sound and, taken together, the variety of such sounds constituted the sound of London. This was the more true because craftsman not only formed a substantial proportion of the London population, but, crafts were such an important part of city life that craft governance had substantially merged with London governance. In 1319 a charter gave the crafts control over admission to the franchise, and, after 1376, constitutional changes gave craft associations control over elections to the Common Council.16 This merging is particularly vivid in a proclamation of 1383–4 in which to be outside a craft (selling fish without being a ‘victualler’) and to be from somewhere other than the ‘citee of London’ turn out to be one and the same thing, a condition the document calls ‘foreign’: For as moche as rumour and spekyngge is amonges some men of the Citee that vitaillers foreins, bringyngge fisshe to the Citee of london to selle, shulde be restrained and ylet of hire comyngge to the citee wyth hir forsaid fish to selle it freliche. (BoLE, 32)

This document bears witness to a much more general state, since, from 1377 to 1383 sixty-four of London’s aldermen were victuallers, and from 1383 until 1386, Nicholas Brembre, a grocer, was the city’s mayor.17 It also begins to delineate the contours of craft sounds – the particular sorts of meanings craft usage produced – for it is clear that a craft’s fundamental interest in marking bound15 Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation

Society: Essays in Honor of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 13–37 (p. 14). 16 Pamela Nightingale, ‘Capitalists, Crafts, and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 124 (1989), 3–35 (pp. 4–5). See also Barron, London, p. 205. 17 Nightingale, ‘Capitalists, Crafts, and Constitutional Change’, pp. 22 and 29–32.

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aries (of creating an enclave in a hostile world) recruits words to that particular function. Thus, in the first sentence here, ‘freliche’, which normally connotes something like ‘at liberty’ or ‘generously’, comes to characterize a privilege from which many are excluded (‘with the status of a free man’).18 Even the term ‘spekyngge’ as it is used in this document marks a boundary, for while its basic meaning is neutral – something like ‘talking’ or ‘that which is spoken’ – placed in apposition to ‘rumor’, as here, it refers to that kind of talk which identifies an ‘us’ against an invading ‘them’.19 When Chaucer writes directly about London it is also clear that he evoked the place in part by attending carefully to such craft sounds, choosing words that had a distinctive colouring because they had been confined to craft use up until that point. But Chaucer’s attention to craft sounds in the Cook’s Tale also makes clear how such sounds became distinctive, not only through an exclusivity of use, but as words absorbed the kinds of rancour such exclusivity bred between groups, as craft rivalry darkened a word’s particular or possible meanings much as Perkyn’s riot quickly darkens this narrative. The tendency can be seen with particular clarity in the ways that the wife of Perkyns ‘compeer’, who ‘heeld for contenance/ a shoppe’ (I, 4421–2), resembles one ‘Maude Sheppyster’ as she appears in a record of the Grocer’s Company: Mawde Sheppyster holt opyn Shopp and retaylith, and ys no Frewoman; also she ys a strumpet to moo þen to oon, and also therto a bawde. (BoLE, 131)

The phrase holden a shoppe seems to have had a certain professional exclusivity (it only turns up in administrative documents before Chaucer uses it), and, in that restricted arena, it also seems to have been a euphemism for the practice of an unsavoury trade.20 Chaucer also heard such a sound in the word minstralcie, which normally refers to ‘musical entertainment’ or ‘merriment’, but, in the Cook’s Tale, signals trouble rather than pleasure: For sikerly a prentys revelour That haunteth dys, riot, or paramour, His maister shal it in his shoppe abye, Al have he no part of the mynstralcye.

(I, 4391–4)

A similar sort of pejoration can also be found in a London document in which minstralcie becomes the punishment inflicted upon ‘Alica Boston’ for selling a ‘damsell’ in the ‘apprintishoode’ of her ‘craft’ into ‘bawdry’:21

18 MED, s.v. ‘freli adv.’, 1b (‘at liberty’) and 2a (‘generously’). The more specialized legal sense of this

word generally appears with reference to the city itself (3b, ‘with the status of a free city’) or to a statutory obligation (3c, ‘without having paid toll in a normal manner’). 19 MED, s.v. ‘spekinge ger.’, a (‘the act of talking’) and b (‘that which is spoken, speech, talk’). 20 MED, s.v. ‘holden v.’, 15b a. For the citation from the documents of the Grocer’s Company (1418) see Facsimile of First Volume of MS Archives of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London, A.D. 1345–1463, ed. J. A. Kingdon (London, 1886), p. 117. 21 MED, s.v. ‘minstralsie n.’, 1a. The MED fails to register the more negative sense of revelry I describe,

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Christopher Cannon þe Mair & Aldermen haue ordained and awardyd þat she shuld thre market dayes, with pypys or oþer opyn Minstralsy, be led fro þe prison, þat she is in, un-to þys place, and here to stonde eche day be an houre, with þe cause why proclamed. (BoLE, 103)

In both uses of this term, as generally, craft hostility is powerful enough to transform a word into something like its own antonym. These sorts of craft sound are also sampled in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale. The Canon’s Yeoman uses a verb such as communen in the more exclusive sense it has in a document such as ‘the ordenaunce and the Articles of the phisicions withinne þe Cite of London’ (BoLE, 108), where it refers to ‘conferring’ or ‘consulting’ within a group rather than to ‘associating’ in general (its more usual meaning):22 Also please it you to ordeyne þat no Phisician withinne þe Fraunchise of London resceive no Cure upon hym, desperate or dedly, bot he shewe it . . . to þe Rectour of Medicyns . . . þat it may . . . be communed with alle þe Comminalte of Phisicians (BoLE, 111)

When he uses communen with this narrower meaning, the narrative context in which the Canon’s Yeoman places it shows how it is the very bad faith – or hostility – of a craft toward outsiders which tended to transform gestures of inclusion (any ostensible act of association) into a process of exclusion (in this case, a refusal to ‘confer’ with a ‘wight’ because he is not already part of the craft association): For in his termes he wol hym so wynde, And speke his workes in so sly a kynde, Whanne he commune shal with any wight, That he wol make hym doten anonright. (VIII, 980–3)

Generally, however, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale offers a detailed analysis of how words acquire distinctive craft meanings through particularizing use, as their broader semantic contours are necessarily changed when the word is continually pressed into service to describe a craft’s defining work. This point is made best by the word werking, which broadly meant ‘acting’ or ‘functioning’, but, when used by the Canon’s Yeoman, acquires the sense it had in craft documents, the ‘plying of a skilled trade’ (e.g. ‘wirkyng in þe Crafte of Cirurgy’, BoLE, 112):23 grouping all illustrative instances with citations in which minstrelsy is joyous. See also C. David Benson’s essay in this volume (p. 136). 22 For the term see MED s.v. ‘communen v.’, 1a (‘to distribute’), 3a (‘to associate or have dealings with’), 6a (‘to discuss’), and 6b (‘to confer or consult’). The term is used in these last two senses by Gower (Confessio Amantis, VI, 606) and on several occasions by Margery Kempe, but citations are also taken from a proportionately large number of administrative documents (parliamentary rolls in particular). 23 See MED, s.v. ‘werkinge ger1.’, 1 (‘acting’), 2 (‘functioning’), and 6 (‘plying of a skilled trade’). The MED takes the use of ‘werking’ in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale that I have cited in the more specific

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Mowe in oure werkyng no thing us availle, For lost is al oure labour and travaille. (VIII, 780–1)

The same point is made by the use of the word instrument in the secunda pars of the Tale (VIII, 1119) where it refers not only to some ‘tool’ or ‘implement’ (as the word generally meant in the fourteenth century), but to the ‘sotell instrumentes þat longen to [a] craft’ (as it goes in administrative documents [BoLE, 94]).24 But these general processes are best illustrated where they are actually recapitulated in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale by the word ‘crosselet’ (VIII, 1117), an ‘instrument’ used in the priest’s craft labours in the tale’s secunda pars that occurs nowhere else in the record of Middle English.25 Although it occurs earlier in Anglo-Norman, as a sound newly minted in English crosselet is a perfect version of a craft sound: its rarity ensures that the language of this narrative is itself an enclave in the larger verbal world. The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale is usually thought to be about something other than language, ‘matter as matter’ say (as Muscatine put it), or ‘a mystification of work’ (as Britton Harwood put it).26 But the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale is also about matter and work to the extent that it projects every thing and activity it describes into a particularly rich set of ‘termes’ (VIII, 752) and ‘names’ (VIII, 758). In fact, the Canon’s Yeoman’s principal method for simultaneously describing and mystifying what the Canon does is to reel off long lists of obscure words: There is also ful many another thing That is unto oure craft apertenyng. ... As boole armonyak, verdegrees, boras, And sondry vessels maad of erthe and glas, Oure urynales and oure descensories, Violes, crosletz, and sublymatories, Cucurbites and alambikes eek, And othere swiche, deere ynough a leek – Nat nedeth it for to reherce hem alle – Watres rubifiying, and boles galle, Arsenyk, sal armonyak, and brymstoon. (VIII, 784–5; 790–8)

In this way, Chaucer has the Canon’s Yeoman absorb the exclusivity of his craft to the impenetrability of a language (as the Canon’s Yeoman says, his ‘termes’

sense of ‘plying a trade’ under meaning 7 (‘the practice of an art or discipline’), although the usage is only lightly attested, and, in my view, only to be differentiated from meaning 6 if alchemy is thought to be an ‘art’ as distinct from a ‘craft’. 24 See also MED. s.v. ‘instrument n.’, 1a. 25 MED, s.v. ‘crosselet n2.’. For the uses of this term in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale see VIII, 793, 1117, 1147, 1153, 1191, 1198, 1276, 1282, 1308. 26 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, 1957), p. 219 and Britton Harwood, ‘Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, PMLA, 102 (1987), 338–50 (p. 342).

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are ‘clergial’ and ‘queynte’, VIII, 752); and, he may even be thought to absorb the exclusivity of all crafts to this language, since he never uses the word ‘alchemy’ (or any other) to specify the Canon’s trade, although he does call it a ‘craft’ on fourteen occasions.27 It is therefore of great importance to what the tale has to say about this craft that so very many of the tale’s words are exceedingly rare: one hundred and five words of them appear nowhere else in Chaucer’s writing, and thirty-eight of them are exactly like crosselet, recorded in English for the first time in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale. ‘Descensorie’, ‘rubifying’, ‘crosselet’, ‘cucurbite’, and ‘sublimatori’, in the passage I have just quoted, fall into the latter category, and along with the other thirty-three words like them, they ensure that this tale not only attends to but makes a craft sound all its own (the other thirty-three words are ‘ablucioun n.’, ‘albificacioun n.’, ‘amalgaming ger.’, ‘annueller n.’, ‘calcining ger.’, ‘chiteren v.’, ‘cimenting ger.’, ‘ciren v’, ‘citrinacioun n.’, ‘coagulat ppl.’, ‘corrosif adj.’, ‘crosselet n2.’, ‘crude adj.’, ‘cucurbite n.’, ‘descensorie n.’, ‘egremoine n.’, ‘embiben v.’, ‘encorporing ger.’, ‘enluting ger.’, ‘fermentacioun n.’, ‘fusible adj.’, ‘induracioun n.’, ‘ingot n.’, ‘introduccioun n.’, ‘limaille n.’, ‘magnesia n.’, ‘malliable adj.’, ‘porphirie n.’, ‘prollen v.’, ‘rammish adj.’, ‘rubifien v.’, ‘sublimatori n.’, ‘subliminge ger.’, ‘teine n.’, ‘temps n.’, ‘teste n1.’, ‘titanos n.’, ‘unslekked adj.’, ‘valerian n.’, ‘vitriol n.’, ‘water–vessel n.’, ‘whil-er adv.’).28 The use of new and nonce words was basic to Chaucer’s linguistic practice, and this makes it tempting to characterize the craft sounds of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale as a stylistic achievement, less a sound overheard and reproduced than something uniquely attributable to Chaucer’s genius. Certainly the capacity to capture differences in social kinds in language is there as early as the Parliament of Fowls, where, in that poem’s representational vocabulary, to be as different as a goose as is from a duck is ‘to quack’ (e.g. 589–95). And, where Chaucer is most explicit about how a person’s language might be affected by his trade, as in the case of the Parson in the General Prologue, he describes it as a textual rather than a social phenomenon (‘Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte’, I, 498). In fact, the word Chaucer himself used for identificatory vocabularies was termes, in this way also associating them, not with activities, but the discourses of ‘lawe’ (II, 1189), ‘astrologye’ (V, 1266), ‘phisik’ (Troilus and Criseyde, II, 1038), or ‘philosophye’ (House of Fame, 857).29 And yet, what the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale suggests is that precisely because processes of mystification define a craft those same processes govern its language (indeed, in a way both brilliant and unique the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale manages to reveal this very fact without seeming to have admitted anything). However Chaucer may have represented the relationship between the 27 For other uses of craft in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale see VIII, 619, 621, 751, 785, 830,

838, 866, 882, 952, 1247, 1320, 1349, 1369, 1395. 28 I cite these words in the form of MED headwords. For their use in Chaucer see Larry D. Benson, A

Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer, 2 vols (New York, 1993). 29 On termes in Chaucer, see especially David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (Norman,

Oklahoma, 1983), pp. 156–7.

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idiolects he made and the craft sounds he heard, in other words, nothing he wrote can change the simple fact of priority: the language of London came first, and Chaucer’s versions of that language are, perforce, imitations. Chaucer seems to offer implicit acknowledgment of this broader fact in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales when he individualizes persons by means of the distinctive vocabulary of their crafts. Chaucer’s whole oeuvre can be said to offer the broadest possible acknowledgement of this priority too in as much as every one of Chaucer’s poems has a distinctive vocabulary, as if, for Chaucer, the very act of using language was equivalent to creating an idiolect – as if language consisted of idiolects on the whole. Just as in the case of craft sounds, moreover, this vocabulary is identificatory, providing the names for the most significant objects and events in a given poem.30 The record shows that many of these nonce words were Chaucer’s invention, but it also shows that the majority were not, that, in this sense too, distinctive vocabularies were found rather than made. It was of course a species of genius to be able to capture craft sounds so fully and so well, but in that sense such sounds are the part of Chaucer’s language that was most fully in touch with London and its English, the distinctly urban attribute of an extraordinary style.

An Idea of the City We might expect Chaucer’s language to have revealed his ideas about London in a more straightforward way, for he certainly used the word citee often enough (eighty-seven times in all). But if citee is a keyword in any sense, what it collects to itself is not the rancour of London life, but the procedures of mystification that allowed Langland to think that ‘love’ could be a craft and Chaucer never to say where the sounds he so extensively employed came from.31 In fact, Chaucer almost never uses citee to refer to a place someone might actually live in, and makes of it, instead, something ‘visible and tangible’ but wholly ‘abstract’, not a place of human habitation, but an idea about such living – in a word, an ideal.32 Thus, in the Canterbury Tales cities are either ‘noble’ (I, 1066) or ‘fair’ (VII, 2314), ‘great’ (VII, 488, VII, 1516) or ‘strong’ (VII, 2565); they are the province of some ‘greet kyng’ (X, 589), or, accordingly, the forum in which powerful lordship finds untroubled expression: Duc Theseus, with al his compaignye, Is comen hoom to Atthenes his cite, With alle blisse and greet solempnitee.

(I, 2700–2)

30 For a discussion of this aspect of Chaucer’s language and a variety of examples see Christopher

Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 126–35. I give individual words in the form of MED headwords. 31 See Benson, Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer, s.v. ‘cite n.’ 32 Sylvia Thrupp, ‘The City as the Idea of Social Order’, in Society and History: Essays by Sylvia Thrupp, ed. Raymond Grew and Nicholas H. Steneck (Ann Arbor, 1977), pp. 80–100 (p. 90).

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In Troilus and Criseyde the city is equally ‘strong’ (V, 1486), while in the Legend of Good Women it is both ‘stronge and grete’ (1895) and, in this case, the proud possession of a ‘fresshe lady’ or ‘queene’ (1035). Where the citee in Chaucer is compromised or threatened, its representation remains idealizing since, in such cases, the city’s fragility is itself a way of marking the loss of an extraordinary good. It is only as a coefficient to all the other sorts of loss that Troilus and Criseyde describes, for example, that Troy is a ‘cite biseged al aboute’ (I, 149) at both the poem’s beginning and its end (V, 1496). If in the Canterbury Tales one must ‘make a were . . . sharp’ (I, 1287) on cities, it is because only a significant ‘force or strength’ can injure them (VII, 1516); they may be ‘brente’ but only by a God armed with ‘thonder-leyt’ sufficient to the enormous task (X, 839). We might expect this idealization to thicken with lived complexity when Chaucer specifies some real city either near or known to him, for the name of a real place ought to have conjured up an extant society as well as a particular political history. The pressure seems to have run almost entirely in the opposite direction, however, and for Chaucer to call a place a citee was in fact to denude it of its contingency, to render it an ideal. Even a city as near as Paris might be used as a synonym for excellence (‘Tho had I sich lust and envie,/ That for Parys ne for Pavie/ Nolde I have left to goon and see’ [Romaunt of the Rose, 1653–5]). In other cases, a city’s name could specify the form of excellence for which that city was most well known: thus, Venice was equivalent to material wealth (‘As fyn as ducat in Venyse’ [House of Fame, 1348]), while Arras, Ypres, and Ghent were equivalent to perfection in the production of textiles (‘a sukkenye . . . So fair was noon in all Arras’, Romaunt of the Rose 1232–4; ‘Of clooth-makyng . . . She passed him of Ypres and of Gaunt’, I, 447–8). Where a particular city had more negative associations, the equivalence was still idealizing in the opposite direction. Troy is again the prime example here, not only as it comes to mean (rather than provide the site for) tragedy in Troilus and Criseyde, but as it was also synonymous with ‘destruccioun’ in the Boece (IV, m7.4) and ‘sorwe’ in the Canterbury Tales (VII, 3229). Because this system of reference allowed even those places one might visit to float above specifics, a particular city can also mean a variety of fixed things in Chaucer’s lexicon. Thus, ‘Jerusalem’ is, by turns, the most distant point on a compass (Romaunt of the Rose, 554), a commodity to be ‘won’ in war (VII, 2147), or the highest aspiration of all human living, the destination of ‘thilke parfit glorious pylgrimage’ that is life itself (X, 50). One way to describe the general displacement governing the representation of London in Chaucer and his language, therefore, is to say that it is not a city within Chaucer’s system of reference; as Wallace puts this point slightly differently, there were simply overwhelming ‘mimetic’ pressures showing Chaucer on a daily basis that London was far from ideal. This is also what Chaucer seems to say when he depicts London in the Cook’s Tale, not only as progressive descent into social darkness, but as the blighting of an ideal. Although it is rarely noticed, and although the tale exuberantly describes several kinds of urban dis-

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order, for the space of a couplet Chaucer allows the Cook’s Tale to insist that a citee is equivalent to stable social relations (that it contains associations one can call ‘crafts’ which people may be ‘of’): A prentys whilom dwelled in oure citee, And of a craft of vitaillers was hee. (I, 4365–6)

When ‘thefte and riot’ (I, 4395) so quickly follow this vision of a stable craft the tale can also be said to follow the trajectory of the 1389 return of the ‘gild of garlickhite’ (BoLE, 44), where members are said to have been drawn together ‘to noriche more loue bytwene þe bretheren and sustren of þe bretherhede’ (BoLE, 45), but where the figure of the ‘riotour, oþer contekour’ (BoLE, 46) quickly emerges to threaten this harmonious whole. In both cases there is an intrusion of realities onto a more hopeful social vision, and that intrusion is not internal, but equivalent, to London. Similarly, when Perkyn Revelour finds an associate ‘out of his prentishood’ (I, 4400) he may appear to have moved beyond the pale of craft (‘out of the shoppe’) and into some criminal demimonde, but, since he has a ‘compeer’ (I, 4419) who defines a whole social grouping (‘his owene sort’, I, 4419), he could also be said to move from one craft structure into another, perhaps even into one of the many ‘associations of discontented yeomen, journeymen and day laborers’ in fourteenth-century London that were questioning the ‘repressive regulations of the craft masters’.33 Viewed from a perspective that takes in both the ‘shoppe’ in which Perkyn begins and the rival ‘shoppe’ where he ends, what the Cook’s Tale shows generally is that London crafts simply did not provide the ‘brotherhood’ they promised either to their members or to the society of which they were a part. Though we may miss this observation because it is embodied in the whole of a narrative, it is, in fact, a surprisingly unflinching and vivid view of the city – an idea of London life as far from ideal as the rot of Perkyn’s riot is from his master’s plans. Chaucer’s longer meditation on London life in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale also suggests why practitioners of craft would have wanted to share this idea, for it couches it in neither darkness nor pessimism, but presents it, rather, as the wisdom about human communities that craft life teaches. The breadth and importance of this synthesis is signalled in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue by a startling expansion whereby the instantaneous disintegration of the association binding the Yeoman and his Canon produces a much more subtle threat to the community of Canterbury pilgrims. This result is achieved in stages, the first of which is the demonstration, in the initial exchange between the Canon’s Yeoman and the Host, that the pilgrims are themselves a kind of craft, a ‘compaignye’ for which the qualifying (and constituting) labour is to ‘telle a myrie tale or tweye’ (VIII, 597). When the Canon’s Yeoman then throws over his master just as Perkyn Revelour does in the Cook’s Tale (‘Syn he is 33 Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, pp. 20–1.

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goon, the foule feend hym quelle!’, VIII, 705), it is made abundantly clear in this case that the cause of this riot is not rot but association, for the Canon is thrown over in order for the Canon Yeoman to join the Canterbury pilgrims. This connection serves to make clear that, by virtue of the labour that defines it, anyone joining the Canterbury brotherhood must betray the craft of which he or she has been a part; you only are a pilgrim (in the sense given that job by the Canterbury Tales) in so far as you are willing to demystify the craft mysteries you know. Thus, the Canon’s name for the Yeoman’s ‘merry tale’ is, rightly enough, ‘slander’ (VIII, 695), an equivalence that is underlined when the Canon’s Yeoman accepts betrayal as his brief (‘Syn that my lord is goon, I wol nat spare;/ Swich thyng as that I knowe, I wol declare’, VIII, 718–19). Thus, inherent in Canon Yeoman’s exuberant declaration of independence is the much sadder knowledge that any process of inclusion – or ‘coming together’ as the craft returns call it – is necessarily equivalent to a social dissolution, that in order for ‘diverse men’ to come together to say their ‘diverse things’ (as the point is often put in the Tales) the unities from which each of these different men and women come must be disjoined.34 A different version of this wisdom is lodged in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale proper, where inclusion in the craft of the false canon is expressly based on an act of exclusion (‘ “Sire preest”, he seyde, “I kepe han no loos/ Of my craft, for I wolde it kept were cloos” ’, VIII, 1368–9). The process is the more marked here in so far as the ‘craft’ to which the priest is admitted has been shown to have no inside: its constituting labour is not only fruitless, as the Canon’s Yeoman admits from the start (‘ “We blondren evere and pouren in the fir,/And for al that we faille of oure desir,/ For evere we lakken oure conclusioun” ’, VIII, 670–2) but its activities are no more than trickery (‘A mannes myrthe it wol turne unto grame,/ And empten also grete and hevye purses’, VIII, 1403–4). Because the ‘craft’ described in the whole of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale has nothing at its core, this tale also proposes that a craft – or any social structure based upon craft association – is the principle and practice of exclusion, and nothing more. In extending such an analysis, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale also provides an idea of craft, and, therefore, of the city of London, that is much less pessimistic, for it also argues that exclusion is not only an unfortunate by-product of sociality, but a necessary part of it. Of importance here is the extent to which even the Canon’s Yeoman is excluded from the craft knowledge he proposes to de-mystify (‘With this Chanoun I dwelt have seven yeer,/ And of his science am I never the neer’, VIII, 720–1). Of even greater importance is the extent to which Harry Bailey’s customary curiosity serves to link the mysteries of craft to the customs necessary for living with others. As he peppers the Canon’s Yeoman with questions about the status and habits of his master, Harry not only entices the Canon’s Yeoman into revelations that lead him right out of the social group of which he had been a part, but he makes abundantly clear that 34 Variations of the description of ‘diverse’ people speaking ‘diversely’ occur in the Reeve’s Prologue (I,

3857), the Man of Law’s Tale (II, 211), the Merchant’s Tale (IV, 1469), and the Squire’s Tale (V, 202).

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to be part of any company – even one as generous as the grouping Harry has convened – is to be outside some other: ‘Wel’, quod oure Hoost, ‘I pray thee, tel me than, Is he a clerk, or noon? Telle what he is.’ (VIII, 615–16) ‘Why is thy lord so sluttissh . . . If that his dede accorde with thy speche? Telle me that, and that I thee biseche.’ (VIII, 636; 638–9) ‘Where dwelle ye, if it to telle be?’

(VIII, 656)

This is a point made by the Host all through the frame-narrative, whenever he introduces a tale by quizzing its prospective teller. This is also a point made implicitly by that frame, in as much as its very existence rests on the narrator’s announced capacity to reach across social divisions to ‘set folk in hir degree’ (I, 744) by remembering and reproducing their distinctive – and distinguishing – language (‘hir wordes’, I, 729). In this way the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale carefully specifies what the Canterbury Tales knows generally about social grouping as such: as one modern political philosopher has put the point, ‘our most genuine experiences of equality, of intimacy, and of fraternity occur . . . in an excluding group of like-minded people’, and so, no matter where or how we live, each one of us has ‘some occasion for inclusion and exclusion’.35 It could also be said that Chaucer formulates this idea best in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale because he finds a way to state it positively, to present it, not just as some failed aspiration, but as a vision of human life so broad and generous that it is probably right to call it liberal. The key moment here is appropriately early – as if it provides the very premise upon which all that follows – when the Canon and his Yeoman first arrive among the Canterbury pilgrims; the narrator immediately signals his awareness of the difference erupting before his pilgrim company by adopting a strange set of termes to describe what the Canon, in particular, looked like: A clote-leef he hadde under his hood For swoot and for to keep his heed from heete. His forheed dropped as a stillatorie Were ful of plantayne and of paritorie. (VIII, 577–81)

Such termes hardly stand out in the larger context because this Prologue is so generally thick with such language, and yet what we may also miss if we do not notice them, is the prescience by which the narrator hears craft sounds before they have ever been made: long before the Canon’s Yeoman has begun to reel off his long lists of termes, long before he has begun to say what his ‘craft’ is, the narrator of this tale knows the occulted names of a distilling vessel (‘stillatorie’), the kind of herb that might be placed in it (‘plantayne’) and an obscure, medicinal plant (‘peritorie’). Marking the penetration of the narrator’s 35 Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 135–6.

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description once more too is a broader rarity, for these words are only rarely recorded in English outside of craft contexts, and one of them (‘stillatorie’) has never been recorded in English before its use here.36 Such ventriloquism cannot be attributed to the narrator’s powers of retrospection, since he insists that he does not understand what he sees at precisely this point (‘I demed hym som chanoun for to be’, VIII, 573) Thus, the narrator’s language makes the large point that, however intractable, social divisions are bridgeable, that a member of one group may understand a member of another even when he is so thoroughly excluded from that other group that he is not quite sure what its terms (or termes) are. As a version of the idea of the city Chaucer identified with London, in other words, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale insists that even if membership in any social grouping necessarily involves exclusion from some or all other such groups, simply to be aware of that exclusion – to have that idea in your head – is to exist in the constant promise of the new collectivities and communities that disunity and exclusion themselves produce.

36 The only important precedent here is Gower’s use of planteine in the Confessio Amantis (VII, 1391).

See MED, s.vv. ‘peritorie n.’, ‘planteine n.’, ‘stillatorie n.’

The Cant erbury Tales and London Club Culture Derek Pearsall

The Canterbury Tales and London Club Culture DEREK PEARSALL

Investigations into the historical reality of a writer’s audience often end before they have begun, with acquiescence in the proposition, argued by W. J. Ong in an influential essay of thirty years ago, that ‘The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction’.1 This proposition is always to some extent true, is more or less taken for granted by the private silent reader, and is an attractive alternative to the frustrations that commonly attend efforts to establish a historical audience on the basis of evidence that is necessarily patchy and inadequate. Such frustrations often find release in the speculative re-creation of historical audiences simply as a means of providing a spuriously historical warrant for interpretations that the reader has arrived at by the usual process of making them up. A further attraction of the idea of the ‘fictional’ audience is that it falls in so happily with reception theory, in giving imagined later audiences equal rights with an imagined earlier one. As Wolfgang Iser says, in his elaboration of a phenomenology of reading (the interaction between the text and the reader as part of a theory of literary communication), there are great difficulties in reconstructing the historical readership from internal sources.2 We cannot know whether it is ‘the real reader of the time’ which is meant or ‘the role which the author intended the reader to assume’, and in such a case the latter is bound to be preferable in a text-based theory. The idea of the ‘fictional’ audience also answers to the insistence of much modern non-historicist critical theory on the overwhelming importance of the modern reader’s act of reading, not as a work of historical recovery but as a work of construction, or deconstruction. In both forms of theory, silent reading by a private reader is, unconsciously or not, privileged over oral address by a writer to an audience. Discussion of Chaucer’s audience has subsided over recent years, as modern readers have come to the conclusion that the postulation of ‘audiences’ is no more than a way of articulat-

1

2

Walter J. Ong, ‘The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction’, PMLA, 90 (1975), 9–21. Ong’s ideas were developed later in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), and ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary History, 16 (1984), 1–12. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London, 1978), p. 28.

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ing our responses to what we read. When that has been done, the ‘audience’ has served its purpose, and can be discarded. Ong’s proposition is open to objection on a number of counts. His own argument is weakened by his tendency, in his textual demonstration (from the Canterbury Tales), to treat the reader as an invisible pilgrim and thus to confuse the ‘fictional’ internal audience of the Canterbury Tales (the pilgrims) with the ‘implied’ external audience (the audience whom Chaucer addresses and appeals to from time to time). As Paul Strohm says, Ong accepts that Chaucer simply tells his readers how they are to fictionalise themselves: ‘He starts by telling them there is a group of pilgrims . . . The reader is to imagine himself in their company and join the fun.’3 A further weakness of Ong’s position, as Joyce Coleman makes clear in her valuable study, is his failure to make the necessary distinction between aurality (reading aloud to listeners from an already written text) and orality (oral performance by a bard or minstrel).4 The consequence of this is that the broad characterisation of ‘oral’ literature, familiar from the long tradition of orality/literacy studies,5 is forced upon literary texts which are, despite the presence of oral ‘residues’, quite different in character, and where the relation of text and reader is far more capable of subtlety and complexity, especially when the author is present and the audience is small.6 In the face of such texts, orality theory can only counter by insisting on the improbably early presence of silent reading as a dominant form of text-communication, or by adopting the circular argument of ‘fictive orality’, that is, the creating of the illusion that we are members of a listening audience. 7 It seems to me that we have reached a point where it is possible to say something more about Chaucer’s audience, and specifically about the audience of the Canterbury Tales, which has not in the past been sufficiently differentiated from the audience of the earlier poems. I approach the subject, pincer-like, both from internal evidence of ‘implied’ audience, that is, what the text seems to suggest about the composition of its audience (and not merely what is explicitly said about ‘reading’ and ‘hearing’), and from external evidence. It is between these two positions that those who have written best on Chaucer’s audience negotiate.8 The possibility of making progress is the stronger since we are not dealing 3

4 5

6 7 8

Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual’, Chaucer Review, 18 (1983–4), 137–45. Strohm’s essay is part of ‘Chaucer’s Audience: A Symposium’, Chaucer Review, 18 (1983–4), 137–81, with essays also by Richard Firth Green and Patricia J. Eberle which will be referred to later. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996), p. 28. Coleman summarises Ong’s checklist of what defines oral as: ‘additive rather than subordinative; aggregative; redundant or “copious”; conservative or traditionalist; close to the human lifeworld; agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory; homeostatic; and situational’ (Public Reading, p. 4). Coleman, Public Reading, pp. 28–32. Coleman, Public Reading, p. 59. See Dieter Mehl, ‘The Audience of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland (London, 1974), pp. 173–89, and ‘Chaucer’s Audience’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 10 (1978), 58–73; Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Audience(s)’, and Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 47–84. Anne Middleton, writing about

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here with the infinite complexities of the imagined audiences of private readers but with historically verifiable practices in which poems were read aloud to a listening audience by their author.9 Such poems could, of course, always have been read privately, as they are now, but that is a different matter. There is good reason to make the attempt in a volume on ‘Chaucer and the City’, since the Canterbury Tales, whatever the subject-matter and settings of its tales, is pre-eminently a London poem with a London audience. The audience for the Canterbury Tales that I shall attempt, rather boldly, to argue for is, to adopt Strohm’s categories, at once Chaucer’s immediately ‘intended’ audience, his ‘implied’ audience, and his ‘actual’ audience. The only thing it is not is his ‘fictional’ audience. To begin with, one has to make a distinction between Chaucer’s two audiences, between the audience of all the poems up to the Canterbury Tales and the audience of the Canterbury Tales themselves. There was clearly a break in the continuity of Chaucer’s poetic career between 1386 and 1389.10 During that time he resigned his job at the Customs, left his house at Aldgate, and gave up his annuities, all of them actions that he took in anticipation of moves on the part of the opposition to purge the king’s household and withdraw privileges from those who had enjoyed his personal patronage. There was no ‘king’s party’ in the strict sense of the word, since all who were in government were the recipients of royal patronage in some measure. But insofar as there was one, Chaucer was a member of it, and he now began to draw himself away and distance himself from the court-faction. He reassumed royal office in 1389, as Clerk of the King’s Works, but he kept the job for only two years before being obliged to resign in rather embarrassing circumstances. Chaucer had never been a court-poet – he had never acknowledged a court-patron (the Book of the Duchess may have involved permission but it did not involve patronage), never received a commission from a patron, and the suggestion in the poem that the Legend of Good Women might be sent to Queen Anne is no more than that. Troilus and Criseyde, such a truly ‘courtly’ poem, if not a poem ‘of the court’, is dedicated, we remember, to Gower and Strode and not to any court-personage. The strongest suggestion of the court-poet is in the frontispiece to the manuscript of Troilus in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College

‘The Audience and Public of “Piers Plowman” ’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David A. Lawton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 101–23 (pp. 101–2), makes a slightly different distinction, between the ‘public’, ‘the readership imagined and posited by the composer as a necessary postulate in the practical progress of bringing the work into being’, and the ‘audience’, ‘the readership actually achieved by the work’. 9 Coleman gives a range of citations from literary texts, in France, Burgundy and England, to demonstrate the widespread practice of what she calls ‘prelection’, that is, the reading aloud, by the author or not, to a group or someone else, from already written texts (Public Reading, pp. 81–8, 149–68 [Chaucer], 180–220 [other medieval English writers]). She also offers references to such practice in historical sources, mostly in court and aristocratic circles (pp. 110–40). 10 The information in this paragraph is from my own biography of Chaucer, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), pp. 202–9. The substance of it is broadly agreed.

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Library MS 61, but this, as Elizabeth Salter argued, is not so much the record of an authentic historical moment as the figuring of an importantly imagined reality and the commemoration of an early fifteenth-century sense of the poet’s relationship to courtly society.11 It is an ‘imagined’ but not an ‘imaginary’ scene. That sense of relationship may have been true in its essence, if not in that particular form: the audience to which Chaucer addresses himself, in nearly all his poetry up till 1387 – the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus, the Legend of Good Women, and a number of shorter poems – is a court audience.12 It would often have included women, or consisted of women.13 And the subject-matter or ostensible subject-matter of all this poetry (again with the partial exception of the House of Fame) was the idealised narrative of sexual love that was the material of the whole European courtly tradition, from Chrétien de Troyes and Gottfried von Strassburg through the Roman de la Rose to the Italian and French poets of the fourteenth century. It was the subject, sometimes combined with chivalrous feats of arms done in the service of love, that was deemed singularly appropriate for such an audience. Whatever Chaucer’s relationship with court-society had been, and whatever this had had to do with his choice of subject-matter, there was a change after 1387. The idealised narrative of sexual love, which even in the Legend of Good Women had been the sustaining myth – what the good women had done and the bad men hadn’t was to be faithful to this narrative – is no longer the subject of Chaucer’s poetry. In fact the Canterbury Tales, his only substantial writing project after 1387, are remarkable for the absence of such sentiments, even in tales where they might have been expected, such as the Knight’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, and there is much bluff laughter at the very idea of sexual adoration, longing, frustration. It is always difficult and dangerous to relate certain kinds of poetry to certain kinds of audience – making fine distinctions between particular kinds of medieval audience of which we know very little anyway is rather like distinguishing between the literary tastes of majors and lieutenant-colonels – but the likeliest account of these changes would figure that 11 Elizabeth Salter, Introduction (with M. B. Parkes) to Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus

Christi College Cambridge MS 61 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 15–23, and (with Derek Pearsall), ‘Pictorial Illustration of Late Medieval Poetic Texts: The Role of the Frontispiece or Prefatory Picture’, in Medieval Iconography and Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Flemming G. Andersen, Esther Nyholm, Marianne Powell and Flemming Talbo Stubkjaer (Odense, 1980), pp. 100–23. For further discussion and reference, see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’, Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977), 68–74. 12 The exception is The House of Fame, which is an exception to most generalisations. The old and unprovable hypothesis that it was written for an occasion at the Inns of Court has always been tempting. See R. J. Schoeck, ‘A Legal Reading of Chaucer’s Hous of Fame’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 23 (1953), 185–92. 13 Richard Firth Green, ‘Women in Chaucer’s Audience’, Chaucer Review, 18 (1983–4), 146–54, draws on documentary records to show that women were rarely present at court occasions; he suggests that internal references to the audience in Troilus are most appropriate to male listeners. But the records refer only to formal occasions, and the point about Troilus is arguable. He acknowledges furthermore that women were becoming increasingly prominent in audiences in the later fourteenth century. Also, Green makes no differentiation of audience, so that his arguments, in so far as they use the Canterbury Tales, fall in with the argument here.

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women were not important members of Chaucer’s post-1387 audience. On the contrary, there seems to be a recurrent appeal to a ‘clubby’ kind of male coterie audience. Examples of scepticism about the high idealism and sighs and languors of love, of wearily cynical understanding of the thinness of that veneer of idealism, are not hard to find. Examples press in upon me from all sides, as is the customary experience of one in the grip of an idée fixe. The tone of voice of the Franklin’s Tale, the tone of impatience with all that is high-flown in feeling or its expression, has often encouraged readers to think of it as an idiosyncrasy of the narrator, but it is of a piece with the narratorial style of the Canterbury Tales as a whole. The poem begins with the love of Arveragus and Dorigen, done with and consummated in marriage in a briskly practical eight lines, so that the narrative can get on with the main business, which is not yearning hopeless passionate love but the patience that husbands and wives must have with each other. When a genuine lover appears in the person of Aurelius, he is scornfully dismissed as a wheedling exploiter and poseur. He was despeyred; no thyng dorste he seye, Save in his songes somwhat wolde he wreye His wo, as in a general compleynyng; He seyde he lovede and was biloved no thyng, Of swich matere made he manye layes, Songes, compleintes, roundels, virelayes, How that he dorste nat his sorwe telle, But langwissheth as a furye dooth in helle. (V, 943–50)

There is something ridiculous about the quantity of Aurelius’s output in a variety of fixed verse-forms in relation to his being struck dumb by love. Even Dorigen’s own tendency to indulge in extravagant displays of feeling for her husband is made fun of: For his absence wepeth she and siketh, As doon thise noble wyves whan hem liketh. She moorneth, waketh, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth.

(V, 817–19)

The string of synonyms hints at exasperation. Only residual politeness restrains the exclamation, ‘Women!’ This is not the way in which the courtly lady of romance is usually treated, nor her would-be lover. Indeed, Aurelius is made to seem almost as contemptible as Damien, in the Merchant’s Tale, a poem in a supposedly completely different genre. But the chief interest of the Merchant’s Tale for the argument here is the manner in which the language of the code of idealised sexual love is introduced in a deliberately tainted form in relation to January, not so much in relation to the lecherousness of his marriage plans, where he is still so to speak in his right mind, as when he becomes blinded and starts to have ideas about love which are simply foolish. His address to his wife in the language of the Song of Songs, as they enter the garden, is beautiful in itself but grotesque in its context,

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and the narrator retorts, ‘Swiche olde lewed wordes used he’ (IV, 2149). Who said that? The usual response is that it is the Merchant, another idiosyncratic narrator of the kind that is commonly pressed into service on such occasions, but the voice, as I hope I am beginning to show, is one that we keep hearing in the Canterbury Tales. This particular trick, of introducing the language of idealised sexual love in ridiculously or grotesquely inappropriate circumstances, is used also in the Miller’s Tale, where Nicholas’s first accosting of Alysoun is accompanied by all the right words – and the wrong actions: And prively he caughte hire by the queynte, And seyde, ‘Ywis, but if ich have my wille, For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.’ And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones, And seyde, ‘Lemman, love me al atones, Or I wol dyen, also God me save!’ And she sproong as a colt dooth in the trave, And with hir heed she wryed faste awey, And seyde, ‘I wol nat kisse thee, by my fey! Why, lat be!’ quod she. ‘Lat be, Nicholas, Or I wol crie “out, harrow” and “allas”! Do wey youre handes, for youre curteisye!’ (I, 3276–87)

(The invocation of ‘courtesy’ is exquisite.) The comedy reaches further than it should.14 The sexual desire that drives fabliau is not usually supposed to be in itself a subject of mirth and ridicule, any more than the higher flown sentiment of love of which it is the distorted reflection. Nor is the husband supposed to attract any sympathetic attention, as John the carpenter does, nor to turn out to be such a reasonable fellow, as he does in the Shipman’s Tale. In the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer removes all the passionately charged encounters of Arcite and Emilia that make the Teseida into a love-tragedy. Palamon’s falling in love with Emily is not much more than the reaction of a puppet being twitched on a string: He cast his eye upon Emelya, And therwithal he bleynte and cride, ‘A!’

(I, 1077–8)

Arcite’s sophistries in the exchange that follows are made to seem ridiculously self-serving. Theseus himself, confronted with the lovers fighting to the death for someone they have never actually spoken to, allows himself a moment of half-humorous reminiscence of the days when he too was a lover and did stupid things:

14 Models for this comic irony of love are to be found in the French poetry that Chaucer knew: see Ardis

Butterfield, ‘Chaucer’s French Inheritance’, The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 20–35.

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But all moot ben assayed, hoot and coold; A man moot ben a fool, or yong or oold – I woot it by myself ful yore agon, For in my tyme a servant was I oon. (I, 1811–14)

This tolerant paternalistic view of the idiocies of love is exactly, we might think, what the story does not require at this point, nor what Hippolita might wish to hear. One can understand in one’s imagined staging of the scene the hard look she might have given her husband as he indulged in this middle-aged male display of been-there-had-that worldly wisdom. The Knight’s Tale is full of these off-key asides, as if Chaucer were throwing titbits to the groundlings, as when Emily, seeing that Arcite has won the tournament, casts upon him a friendly eye: For wommen, as to speken in comune, Thei folwen alle the favour of Fortune.

(I, 2681–2)

I have never found any good explanation of the presence of these lines – apart from the one I am offering now. The fact that the couplet is not in some of the best manuscripts, including the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, does not make explanation of it any easier.15 Were the lines inserted by scribes because they wanted more of that easy-tempered misogyny (‘Women!’) or did the scribes of those very good manuscripts leave them out because they thought Chaucer had overstepped the bounds of decorum? Most likely the latter. There is something similar in a strange passage in the Man of Law’s Tale where the narrator intrudes with some oddly out-of-place remarks about Constance’s marriage-night with King Alla: They goon to bedde, as it was skile and right; For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, They moste take in pacience at nyght Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges To folk that han ywedded hem with rynges. (II, 708–12)

What is the point of that remark? If it is not a more-than-bizarre demonstration of Constance’s saintly patience, or intended to mark some further dire incompetence in a narrator already (and quite pointlessly) deemed to be inadequate, it is hard to see its relevance. The lines seem rather to be intended to be understood as another gibe at sex and women and marriage. The same is true of the passage in the Clerk’s Tale, again wholly out of place, where the narrator makes obviously tongue-in-cheek remarks about the patience of wives:

15 The Riverside Chaucer (p. 1124) reports the couplet missing in British Library MS Add. 35286 and

Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.4.27, both manuscripts of high authority, as well as in Hengwrt and Ellesmere, agreed by all to be the two best manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.

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(IV, 622–3)

Often the pilgrim-narrators of the individual tales have been held responsible for these off-colour remarks, but that seems a desperate attempt to restore a dramatic integrity of a modern kind to the Chaucerian narrative. It sounds more like that voice, I hope now beginning to sound more familiar, designed according to stereotype as if to annoy and bait the Wife of Bath and to act as a focus for familiar male prejudices against women, so easily fallen into. The voice is there again in the Physician’s Tale (VI, 70–1), apropos of nothing. I recognise that I have moved on from talking about satirical and mocking accounts of idealised sexual love to talking about more conventional off-the-cuff anti-feminist remarks, but they are obviously connected. It must also be acknowledged in passing that the Knight’s Tale was most probably written before Chaucer underwent the change in his circumstances that I have described, and probably before Troilus. It would be possible to accept the later date for the Knight’s Tale that is often put forward, or to contrive arguments about the introduction in revision of marginal asides to make the poem more suitable for an all-male audience, but it may be necessary only to recall that an ironic voice had often before been heard in Chaucer in the midst of a traditional advocacy of the high idealism of love.16 Pandarus, in a precisely and ironically controlled narrative context, provides some early rehearsings of this voice. I have perhaps already sufficiently characterised, by implication and otherwise, the audience to whom this kind of narrative commentary might have appealed. It was, as one imagines it, an audience of men, a clubbable male coterie, of whose nature there are hints in the Envoys to Scogan and Bukton. The Envoy to Scogan warns Scogan of the terrible vengeance that Cupid may visit upon him for having announced that he has given up his disdainful mistress, and expresses too Chaucer’s fears that the vengeance may extend to ‘alle hem that ben hoor and rounde of shap’, including himself. As he says, though, he himself gave up all that kind of thing long ago, and his ‘muse’, that he exercised when young, now rusts away quietly in its sheath. Probably written in the 1390s, when Chaucer liked to pretend that he was short of money and out of favour, the poem is a living witness to the kind of ironies, shifts of tone and double entendre that Chaucer could expect from members of a familiar circle of male intimates, and we can perhaps imagine something of the delight it created when it was read out at some convivial gathering.17 The begging envoy-stanza at the end, addressed more personally to Scogan, would have been less appropriate in such a gathering. It was evidently separable, since it appears in none of the extant manuscripts and is found now only in the early printed editions.

16 See further the essay by Butterfield cited in note 14 above. 17 R. T. Lenaghan, ‘Chaucer’s Envoy to Scogan: The Uses of Literary Conventions’, Chaucer Review, 10

(1975–6), 46–61 argues specifically that ‘The social context of the poem . . . is the civil service of Richard II, a bureaucracy of clerks and a fellowship of gentlemen’ (p. 46).

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The Envoy to Bukton – Bukton was an old friend of Chaucer’s who had served with him on campaign with Gaunt and given testimony with him at the Scrope-Grosvenor trial – is not so genial. Its advice to Bukton to avoid the prison of marriage has a bitter edge; it would have given pleasure in an all-male company. The suggestion that Bukton should take warning by reading the Wife of Bath on the subject is the kind of self-simplifying reference that Chaucer habitually makes to his own poetry. The tone of voice of the two Envoys is the tone of voice that is recurrent in the Canterbury Tales, and that I think may be plausibly associated with an audience of men. It might still be argued that the change in Chaucer’s attitude to or treatment of the narrative of idealised love did not have to do with a change of audience but simply with the fact that he was growing older, as he seems to acknowledge ruefully in the Envoy to Scogan. In medieval terms he was now, at the age of fifty or so, an ‘older man’, though people age at different rates and Chaucer’s ageing-rate remains unknown. But all talk about ageing is so obviously ‘essentialist’ that I feel obliged to have nothing more to do with it. The point I am making is not that this is how men behave when they get old but how they behave when they get together. So let us think of a clubbable coterie of men, and the leavening of the Canterbury Tales with appeals to their way of thinking, their prejudices, their sense of humour, that would have won applause. The stereotyping of male attitudes towards women is further well exemplified in the links between the tales, whether in the condescension of the friar to the Wife of Bath (III, 831) or the unctuous civility of the Host to the Prioress (VII, 447). The internal audience of the Tales is itself predominantly one of men, unlike the Decameron, where the proportion is seven women to three men. In the Canterbury Tales the twentynine (or thirty-one) pilgrims are divided twenty-six to three (or twenty-eight to three), the three being the Prioress, the Nun and the Wife of Bath.18 Any talk about token representation of women, when one of them is the Wife of Bath, is going to get into trouble, but the disproportion is striking. Why didn’t the Knight bring his lady, or the Franklin, the Merchant or the Man of Law their wives? Why didn’t the Guildsmen bring their wives? The answer, I fear, is only too obvious. Men don’t go out to clubs to be clubbable with their wives (nor even with other people’s). Who then were these cronies that Chaucer might have had in mind as he composed the Canterbury Tales? There has come to be a large measure of agreement on what might be called the ‘Chaucer circle’, composed of civil service officials, knights, squires and gentlemen, perhaps some merchants and clerics, its membership varying over the twenty years of Chaucer’s mature career, and its individual members more, or less, close to him.19 It is not difficult 18 The debate about the number of the pilgrims centres on lines 24 and 164 of the General Prologue, and

shows no signs of going away. 19 Patricia J. Eberle, ‘Commercial Language and the Commercial Outlook in the General Prologue’,

Chaucer Review, 18 (1983–4), 161–74, argues that the use of ‘commercial language’ and the ‘frequent

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to make a round-up of the usual suspects – such as Henry Scogan and Sir Peter Bukton, to whom Chaucer addressed the Envoys already mentioned, and John Gower and Ralph Strode, the dedicatees of Troilus. Relations with Gower may have cooled, but there was a more attractive alternative now in Thomas Hoccleve, whose puppyish devotion would have been pleasing to Chaucer in the 1390s. Then there was Sir Philip de la Vache and the group of so-called ‘Lollard knights’ that Chaucer is known to have had connections with, though these were now getting old and some had passed away, like Sir John Clanvowe. Two other members of a putative ‘Chaucer circle’, Sir Simon Burley and Thomas Usk, had met more violent ends, both having been executed in 1388. One would be reluctant to expand this list by recruiting the people for whom he acted as mainpernor and in other legal capacities in various actions he was called in on in the 1390s, but it is still possible to point to the existence of a nucleus of friends and readers and admirers who might have constituted a Chaucer circle, drawing away in the late 1380s from the circles that constituted the ‘court’ and becoming exclusively male.20 Where did they meet and on what occasions? My title may have created some expectation that I have evidence from the 1390s of the existence of clubs, or literary and bibliographical societies, or poetry-reading groups, a sort of late Ricardian equivalent of the Puy with the difference that the idealised praise of women and of the love of women is now the main joke and not the main business. Records survive indicating the existence in London in the early fourteenth century of an upper-class merchant organisation, or Puy, modelled on similar societies in France and devoted to competitive celebration in song of the praise of ladies.21 Women were excluded from the meetings. There is no evidence of the survival of such a society into the late fourteenth century, but there has to have been something of the kind, one is driven in desperation to assert, a group where Chaucer could read his latest stuff and try it out. The remarks he makes

mention of money’ are indications of an audience for the Canterbury Tales certainly familiar with the ‘commercial outlook’, though she draws away from identifying it as a merchant-audience. She hints (p. 144) at the rather attractive notion that the debtors of Gilbert Mawfield (Maghfeld), ironmonger and money lender, who included merchants of many guilds, knights and squires, clerks of the Exchequer, and clerics (and Chaucer, who owed him money in 1392), make a cross-section across London society similar to the ‘Chaucer circle’. 20 For further discussion and references, see Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 181–5. 21 For accounts of the Puy, see John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London, 1965), pp. 78–83, and Nigel Wilkins, ‘Music and Poetry at Court in England and France in the Later Middle Ages’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 183–204 (pp. 185–6), and the more recent work in Anne F. Sutton, ‘Merchants, Music and Social Harmony: The London Puy and its French and London Contexts, circa 1300’, The London Journal, 17 (1992), 1–17 and ‘The Tumbling Bear and its Patrons: A Venue for the London Puy and Mercery’, in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London, 1995), pp. 85–110; and also in Ardis Butterfield, ‘French Culture and the Ricardian Court’, in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. Alistair Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford, 1997), pp. 82–121 (pp. 88–9), and Helen Cooper’s essay in this volume, ‘London and Southwark Poetic Companies: “Si tost c’amis” and the Canterbury Tales’, pp. 109–25.

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in the Envoy to Scogan about the Wife of Bath would be meaningless if Scogan had not read her Prologue or, better, heard it in company. Scogan is the key figure here. At the time when Chaucer addressed the Envoy to him, in the mid-1390s, Henry Scogan is assumed to have been tutor to the sons of Henry, earl of Derby. Scogan survived Chaucer, and the boys he had been tutoring grew up to be the Prince of Wales and the future dukes of Bedford, Clarence and Gloucester. Some time after he had retired as their tutor and shortly before his death in 1407, Scogan addressed a verse epistle to the princes, the Moral Balade, and it was read or presented to them, according to John Shirley, at a supper of the merchants’ guild in London.22 It is the manner of his address to the young princes that led Skeat to conclude that he had been their tutor, and certainly it seems the only possible explanation of his way of speaking to them – any other would make him seem dangerously impertinent – even though, as Jennifer Nuttall points out to me in private correspondence, there is no known administrative record of such an appointment. He did, however, retain his position as a squire of the household in Henry IV’s reign. Scogan’s Moral Balade consists of twenty-one eight-line stanzas of advice to follow virtue and avoid vice such as would have had the young princes, now aged nineteen, eighteen, seventeen and sixteen respectively, nodding sage agreement if they hadn’t already nodded off to sleep on their benches. Rather rashly, if he was conscious of literary comparisons, Scogan included a complete text of Chaucer’s poem of Gentilesse cocooned within the programme of instruction. But the circumstances are interesting – a reading or presentation of a poem, in a city venue, before a burgher audience that included some royal visitors. Backdated to the 1390s it provides a model for imagining Chaucer’s circle (mixed upper bourgeoisie and gentry/aristocracy) and the club (a merchant’s hall or house, not a tavern) where they met. A suggestive parallel, if only for the mixing of such groups on a festive occasion, is provided by John Stow, who tells how Henry Picard, vintner, mayor of London 1356–7, in 1363 feasted four kings in one day at his house in that same Vintry, ‘and after kept his hall for all comers that were willing to play at dice, and hazard; the Ladie Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect’.23 I suspect, though, that what we have here is not unlike the many occasions when the mayor or a prominent city merchant would invite royalty to a great feast in the Guildhall, with many people present (the Scogan occasion may be another, more informal variant). These were not occasions for poetry-reading. The occasions of Lydgate’s Mummings, at a later date, are likewise of little use as parallels. John Shirley’s rubric for the poem, in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59, fol. 27r, reads in full:

22 The Moral Balade is printed in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, vol. vii: Supplement to The Complete

Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London, 1897), pp. 237–44. For Skeat’s notes on the poem, see his Introduction, pp. xli–xliii. 23 John Stow, A Survey of London, reprinted from the text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908), i, p. 106.

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Here foloweth next a Moral Balade, to my lord the Prince, to my lord of Clarence, to my lord of Bedford, and to my lord of Gloucestre, by Henry Scogan; at a souper of feorthe merchande in the Vyntre in London, at the hous of Lowys Johan.24

Shirley’s reliability, especially in the Ashmole manuscript, which was written when he was very old, is always a question. The two tests that scholars have become accustomed to apply are the test of circumstantiality – that is, the specificity of the detail, which here is good and authentic-sounding – and the test of profitability, in other words, what was to be gained by invention. Here, there may have been some promotional advantage in setting the scene for the first ‘publication’ of the poem at a city feast, but not much that I can see. Of course, Shirley doesn’t actually say that the poem was read out aloud there, and Scogan himself speaks of the poem as a ‘litel tretys’ that he is writing to send to them, but I take it that Shirley’s meaning is that it was prepared as a written document and presented or read out, or parts of it, on the occasion specified, whether or not in Scogan’s presence. It is certainly a very tantalising bit of information. Skeat takes ‘feorthe merchande’ to mean ‘fourth meeting of the merchants’ or fourth of the quarterly meetings of the guild. He points out that Toulmin Smith, in English Gilds, says that quarterly meetings for business were common, though some guilds met only once, twice, or thrice a year.25 Plenty is known about Lewis John:26 he was a Welshman who was naturalised by Act of Parliament in 1414, MP for various constituencies at different times, a sheriff, a collector of customs, a commissioner of enquiry on numerous occasions, receiver and steward of the duchy of Cornwall, and steward in the household of Joan of Navarre, Henry IV’s dowager queen, from 1424 until her death in 1437. But before all that he was deputy butler to the royal household from 1402 to 1407 when the chief butler, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, was Thomas Chaucer. Enigmatic as ever, Thomas Chaucer may have been an important link in the arrangements on this occasion: all Lewis John’s advancement was due to his patronage. The Vintry was the name of a ward of the city, as it happens the district where Geoffrey Chaucer’s family had had their house in Upper Thames Street. It was one of his old haunts. One can go no further, and certainly not as far as the scholar who wrote the entry for Lewis John in the History of Parliament: ‘there is some foundation for believing the report that Prince Henry and his three brothers were

24 Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces, p. 237. 25 English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of more than one hundred English Gilds, ed. Lucy Toulmin

Smith, EETS, OS, 40 (London, 1870), p. xxxii. These meetings were held on the morrow of the gild’s feast or celebration, and were called ‘mornspeches’ (English Gilds, pp. 65, 91). 26 See The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. J. S. Roskell, Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, 4 vols (Stroud, 1993), iii, pp. 494–8. There is some excited speculation about Lewis John’s career in Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher and Juliette Dor, Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (London, 2003), pp. 264–6.

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wont to drink and dine at his house in the Vintry, where the entertainment included the declamation of poetry’.27 It is possible that there is more to be found out about such occasions in Guild records or in the Letter Books or in other sources. The Guild records do not on the face of it look very promising. When not concerned with routine business they are much preoccupied with religious matters and observances. Likewise the Letter Books record what they record, and that does not include informal non-business occasions set aside for pleasure. As is often the case, the records tell us a lot about what we have no pressing need to know and nothing about what we do. Were the occasions I have in mind more like ‘la Court de bone conpaignie’ that Hoccleve mentions in a rubric to one of his begging-poems as a kind of dining club where he hopes to see his friends in the company of their master Sir Henry Somer, Chancellor of the Exchequer?28 But this may be imaginary. If I seem to be clutching at straws, I would have to point out that this is not an uncommon or unrespectable experience when one is trying to find historical record of essentially ‘non-historical’ events. Even in Joyce Coleman’s lengthy lists, the Scogan record is the only one, apart from some university occasions and occasions set aside for the reading of devotional texts, that is in a non-court setting (though of course it has a court-connection, and that is what made Shirley think it worth recording) and that does not involve romance or love-poetry or history.29 The only (partial) exception she finds, from a literary source, is the poem called Crowned King (1415), where a company of royal clerical officials, including the author of the poem, get together on the way to Southampton for an evening of ‘redyng of romaunces and reuelyng among’.30 But the less I find out, the more I am convinced that I am right, and the more vividly I imagine occasions of this kind, where Chaucer would read extracts from his latest opus, and where merchants and lawyers would join in the laughter at the shrewd identification of what might be called their ‘professional’ skills – Wel koude he in eschaunge sheeldes selle . . . (General Prologue, I, 278) And yet he semed bisier than he was . . . (General Prologue, I, 322)

And where the guildsmen might share the pleasure in having the satire redirected against their absent wives. There is something very important that needs, in conclusion, to be made 27 History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. Roskill, Clark and Rawcliffe, iii, p.

495. 28 Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, revised Jerome Mitch-

ell and A. I. Doyle, EETS, ES, 61 and 73 (1892 and 1927; Oxford, 1970), no. XVII, p. 64. 29 See Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public, pp. 110–40, for references in historical sources

to practice in England; the Scogan reference is at pp. 133–4. 30 Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public, p. 195.

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clear, something that has been implicit in all that I have said about the audience of the Canterbury Tales. I do not of course suggest that Chaucer’s real interest as a poet was in getting easy laughs at the expense of an idealised narrative of sexual love which neither he nor anyone in their senses had ever taken simply seriously anyway. But a poet has to have an audience, and in medieval times, as now, a poet had to have a real as well as an imagined audience (that real audience has to be construed to include God, of course), and he has to make some appeal to their tastes. There is, I am fully conscious, far more to the poems I have mentioned than the stray asides I have picked up in the attempt to identify an appeal to a coterie. Indeed, the full meaning of poems like the Franklin’s Tale or the Clerk’s Tale or the Wife of Bath’s Prologue may well be in the dismantling of the apparatus of easy male prejudice which is what they appeal to on some surface level. It is not so much that Chaucer was laughing up his sleeve at the ignorance and prejudice of his clubby male audience. Rather, whilst sharing in their pleasure in the jokes, he was also educating them through the special powers of poetic fiction in understanding more than their ignorance and prejudice seemed to allow.

London and Southwark Poetic Companies Helen Cooper

London and Southwark Poetic Companies: ‘Si tost c’amis’ and the Canterbury Tales HELEN COOPER

The narrative frame that Chaucer chooses for the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury, as the Hengwrt manuscript heads the work, is only intermittently about a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is a collection of stories, a ‘book of tales’, set in motion by the Host’s suggestion at the end of the General Prologue that the journey should become the opportunity for a competition, with a reward for the winner: And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle – That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas Tales of best sentence and moost solaas – Shal have a soper at oure aller cost Heere in this place. (I, 796–800)

Harry, it appears, is to be the arbiter, both of the contest and of any arguments that take place along the way, with a severe financial penalty for anyone who objects. From this moment on, the pilgrimage is relegated to the background, even in most of the links, to be replaced by something like a fourteenth-century Man Booker Prize – or perhaps, since most of the tales (as it is too easy to overlook) are in verse, a T. S. Eliot Prize. The very modernity of such a scenario is perhaps one reason why it has been backstaged in much Chaucer criticism. The nineteenth-century scholars who largely established the parameters of the critical tradition had to look back to Athenian drama or Theocritus-inf luenced eclogues to find poetic contests, but they regarded the naturalistic novel as the highest development of fiction; their emphasis on the pilgrimage over the competition followed inevitably. There was not, however, a two-thousand-year gap in literary competitions: they were thoroughly familiar in fourteenth-century Europe. A number of towns, in northern France and Flanders in particular, had founded fraternities or confréries, sometimes known as puys, which were devoted to the competitive writing of poetry.1 1

See Ardis Butterfield’s article ‘Puy’ in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and

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London itself founded its own puy at the end of the thirteenth century, in the lifetime and the milieu of Chaucer’s London grandparents.2 There is no documentary evidence to indicate that it survived into Chaucer’s lifetime, though it is not impossible that it did so; but the idea of a poetry contest was already familiar within the London civic context in which he grew up, and the continental puys remained a leading feature of the European poetic scene throughout his writing career and for long after. Froissart, who spent a considerable time at the English court, had five of his own poems ‘crowned’ by various of the northern French puys.3 Much attention has been paid in recent years to the importance of London as a political and social context for Chaucer; it has rarely been considered as providing any kind of literary context. The exceptions lie in such things as Laura Hibbard Loomis’s ‘London bookshop’ theory for the creation of the Auchinleck Manuscript, but the contents of that were drawn from across England rather than being distinctive of London alone;4 and they have generally been taken to represent the literary tradition that Chaucer rejected, as indicated by his parody of popular romance in Sir Thopas. The London Puy, with its emphasis on lyric accomplishment in the full courtly French fashion, offers an altogether different model. Chaucer may have rejected Anglo-Norman even more decisively than he rejected Middle English romances, but at the worst, the Puy is useful for his modern readers to think with. Most importantly, it demonstrates the existence of a sophisticated interest in and audience for poetry not just at court or among the aristocracy, but in his immediate urban context. He names Ralph Strode, common serjeant-at-law of London, and John Gower, probably resident in Southwark from c. 1377, as readers of his poetry; the existence of the Puy, even if it was defunct by Chaucer’s lifetime, suggests that they may have been representative of a much larger group in the city who could have taken an equally active interest in his work. The London Puy was founded by a group of leading merchants at an unknown date in the later thirteenth century. A good proportion of them seem to have been either mercers or vintners, who were especially likely to have interests and

2

3 4

Grover A. Zinn (New York and London, 1995), and her Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 133–50. On the London Puy, see Anne F. Sutton, ‘Merchants, Music and Social Harmony: The London Puy and its French and London Contexts, circa 1300’, London Journal, 17 (1992), 1–17. On the possibilities of the London Puy as a source for the Canterbury Tales, see Helen Cooper, ‘The Frame’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–22 (reprinted from SAC, 19 (1997), 183–210). There was also a lively tradition of Welsh bardic competitions in the fourteenth century, though there is no evidence that they influenced English practice: first recorded in 1176, these awarded a chair and a prize to the winning poet and musician (see A. O. H. Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes, A Guide to Welsh Literature, i (Swansea, 1976), pp. 134, 144). The Lyric Poems of Jean Froissart, ed. Rob Roy McGregor, Jr (Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 46, pp. 194–204 (texts) and 318–19 (notes). See Laura Hibbard Loomis, ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340’, PMLA, 57 (1942), 595–627; and for a more recent appraisal of the production and contents of the manuscript, Ralph Hanna, ‘Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. Derek Pearsall (York, 2000), pp. 91–102.

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connections on both sides of the Channel. One of the earliest known members, and a major benefactor to the confrérie, was Henry le Waleys, a man who was several times Mayor of London (1273–4, 1281–4, 1297–9) and once Mayor of Bordeaux. It may have been such international links that inspired the founding of the fraternity; and it is not impossible that there was royal encouragement too. Edward I certainly knew about puys, since before becoming king he had been named as a judge in a jeu-parti at the Arras confrérie; and he took London under direct royal control in 1285.5 The statutes of the Puy suggest that it was designed in part to promote London as a cultural centre equivalent to the cities with which it traded, to raise its status among its continental rivals. Its purposes, as they were recorded in the London Liber custumarum in 1321, state that the fraternity and its associated annual assembly, ‘une feste ke hom apele “Pui” ’, was established en le honour de Dieu, Madame Seinte Marie, touz Seinz, e toutes Seintes; e en le honour nostre Seignour le Roy e touz les Barons du pais; e por loial amour ensaucier. Et por ceo qe la ville de Lundres soit renomee de touz biens en tuz lieus; et por ceo qe jolietes, pais, honestez, douceur, deboneiretes, e bon amour, sanz infinite, soit maintenue.6 to the honour of God, our Lady Saint Mary, and all saints male and female; and in honour of our lord the King and all the barons of this land; and for the promotion of loyal friendship. And in order that the city of London may be renowned for all good things in all places; and in order that good fellowship, peace, and sweet and courtly pastimes, and true love, may be maintained without limit.

A prince was appointed each year to head the confrarie dou Pui and sort out quarrels between its members. Some of its activities, like those of any parish fraternity or trade guild, were religious and devotional;7 but its distinguishing activity was the holding of an annual feast to which members were supposed to come armed with an original song, both words and music. If they did so, they got their dinner free, at the expense of the rest of the compaignie – the statutes use the same word for the society as Chaucer does for his association of pilgrims. The prince and his newly appointed successor would judge the songs (later revised to specify two or three experts ‘qi se conoisent en chaunt et en musike’, p. 225); a copy of the best was to be hung on the wall of the hall below the prince’s blazon, and its composer crowned. At the conclusion of the feast, the winning poet, having enjoyed his free meal, rode through the city between the outgoing and incoming princes to the latter’s house, where all the members 5 6

7

Butterfield, Poetry and Music, p. 136; Sutton, ‘Merchants’, p. 7; and on London politics, Barron, London, p. 32. Henry le Waleys belonged to the king’s faction. Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Series, 3 vols (London, 1860), ii: Part I, pp. 216–28 (p. 216 quoted); a summary of the statutes and supplementary articles is given on pp. cxxix–xxxi. The later articles express a concern that the contest is turning into a poetry competition, and insist that music is required too (p. 225). For an account, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 141–54.

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would dance, drink once, and then return home on foot. The cosmopolitan interests of the membership are indicated by a further statute that makes careful provision about the subscriptions of anyone who was out of the country on the occasion of the feast. Expenses in excess of the entry fee and the 12d annual subscription for the cost of the feast were to be covered by all members equally, though the better-off showed themselves ready to help out with the more demanding costs. It all threatened to be rather expensive, especially for those without poetic or musical talent, and a supplementary set of articles (also incorporated in the 1321 document) prescribed fines for anyone defaulting or absent without due cause, and specified that the menu at the feast should not be too elaborate. As with other fraternities, provision was also made to ‘sustenir e relever de poverté’ any members who needed economic help (p. 224). The functioning of the London Puy is illuminating for Chaucer’s poetry in general and the Canterbury Tales in particular in various ways, some by comparison, some by contrast. In its broader organization, the Puy resembled a devotional guild, of the kind that Chaucer’s Guildsmen belong to: an association for the purposes of piety and mutual benevolence.8 The fraternity was associated with the building of the chapel of the Guildhall in 1299, and Henry le Waleys gave the Puy an annuity of five marks to maintain a chaplain there.9 As with the company of pilgrims, however, an ostensibly devotional purpose can easily merge with a more secular one, and the secularity of both the Puy and the Canterbury pilgrimage has to do with songs or tales. The appointment of a prince to maintain order, keep the peace among the members, and lead the judging of the songs is closely imitated in the pilgrims’ acceptance of Harry Bailey’s suggestion that they should appoint him as their ‘governour’, And of our tales juge and reportour, And sette a soper at a certen pris, And we wol reuled be at his devys In heigh and lough; and thus by oon assent We ben acorded to his juggement. (I, 814–18)

Literary judgement, the provision of a supper paid for by the members of the compaignie, and acceptance of the authority of the prince come as a single package for both groups. When Harry is not himself stirring up trouble among the pilgrims, he takes his task of maintaining the peace seriously: ‘In compaignye we wol have no debaat’ (III, 1288). The similarity between the climactic events of the two assemblies may be further enhanced – we do not know enough about the Puy to be sure – by the fact that the feast is to be in Harry’s own establishment, the Tabard Inn. It may be that the great merchant houses provided the venue for the feasts of the Puy, quite possibly that of the prince; or they may have been held in one of the city’s inns, a prime candidate being the 8 9

On the distinctions between trade guilds, fraternities and confraternities, see D. W. Robertson, Chaucer’s London (New York and London, 1968), pp. 81–6. Letter-Books, E 1–2 (flyleaf).

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Tumbling Bear, ubi le Bere toumbeth, which was owned by the third of the Puy’s princes, the vintner John of Cheshunt.10 Being prince of the Puy generally sounds as if it was an expensive business. It was John who instituted the annual presentation of a 50–pound candle at St Martin’s le Grand. Harry exploits his dual role as innkeeper and ruler of the compaignie to his own financial advantage; John of Cheshunt seems to have acted rather as benefactor to the activities of his own confrérie, a role that no doubt also helped to promote his standing in the city. The Puy did however differ from many religious fraternities, from the company of pilgrims, and even from chivalric institutions such as the Order of the Garter, in that it was an all-male club. This may have been initially a matter of some controversy, as it is only one of the later statutes that lays it down that ‘nule dame ne autre femme’ is to be admitted to the annual meeting. The statutes make some attempt to compensate for this by declaring that, since ladies will be the subject of every chaunt royale, members must be reminded by their absence that they are bound to honour all ladies at all times and in all places, when they are present as well as when they are not (p. 225). It is not an argument that would cut much ice with feminism. It does, however, intersect interestingly with the suggestion, made earlier in this volume by Derek Pearsall, that Chaucer may have read his own work to an all-male group, a homosocial circle with an interest in poetry. That may imply, as with the puys, an interest in the rhetorical skills of writing; it also implies a rather different dynamic from a mixed group when it came to the reception of his poetry about women – as most of his poetry is. The phrasing of the Puy statutes (the encouragement of ‘bon amour’, and the honouring of ladies at all times and in all places) lays down just what kind of poetry is expected, just as the revised stipulation for a chaunt royale lays down its form, or at least its ideal or hypothetical form.11 Many of the later continental puys were devoted to the composition of poems in honour of the Virgin (that founded in Amiens in 1388 is a leading example),12 but the London one seems to have kept its devotional practices strictly separate from the secular feast. If its songs were to be in honour of women, the Wife of Bath is not on the menu here; neither are women who can be regarded as moral or religious exempla –

10 See Anne F. Sutton, ‘The Tumbling Bear and its Patrons: A Venue for the London Puy and Mercery’,

in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London and Turnhout, 1995), pp. 85–110. 11 A chaunt royale consists of five stanzas and an envoy, generally rather like a balade though the details of line and stanza length can vary: see Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince (Paris, 1965), pp. 361–4, 369–74, and Gaston Raynaud’s introduction (vol. 11) to the Oeuvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1903), pp. 121–4. 12 Its winning chansons royaux from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with their accompanying pictures of the Virgin with allegorical attributes, were made into a fine manuscript presented in 1517 to Louise de Savoie: there is an old facsimile, Tableaux et Chants Royaux de la Confrérie du Puy Notre Dame d’Amiens, ed. George Durand (Amiens and Paris, 1911). The rules demanded a strict form of chanson royale, with stanzas consisting of eleven hendecasyllables, and the employment of a refrain set in advance.

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Custance, Griselda, Virginia, Prudence, Cecilia and their ilk.13 Chaucer’s narrative poetry moves away from ‘honouring’ ladies, not only because he rarely offers a courtly model of one, but because he gives his female characters much more by way of subjecthood. Emily would come nearest to fulfilling the courtly model; Criseyde does not, less because she is unfaithful (complaints about women who love other men are standard in French courtly poetry) but because she is presented through her own eyes as much as through Troilus’s. Lyric demands a much more restricted viewpoint, and Chaucer can provide that too: it is there in Troilus’s songs, or in his own balades and short poems on the topic of love. D. W. Robertson noted some time ago that his Womanly Noblesse was just the kind of thing that might have been appropriate for the London Puy.14 Its three stanzas, rhyming on just two rhymes throughout with a third introduced only in the Envoy, are notionally addressed to a woman, but in practice function as a showcase for the virtuosity of the poet set out for an audience capable of appreciating his art. The restriction of rhyme in this fashion is a characteristic of French verse, since French can call on so many more homophonic suffixes than English; to get the same effect, Chaucer has to put on display all his French-derived vocabulary, with a much narrower range of possible endings. So hath myn hert caught in remembraunce Yowre beaute hoole and stidefast governaunce, Yowre vertues al and yowre hie noblesse, That yow to serve is sette al my plesaunce. So wele me likith youre womanly contenaunce, Your fressh fetures and your comlynesse, That whiles I live myn hert to his maystresse Yow hath ful chose in triwe perseveraunce Never to chaunge for no maner distresse.15

The poem is preserved in a single manuscript, along with the Complaint unto Pity and Complaint to his Lady. All are addressed to hypothetical idealized and bloodless ladies, whom it is impossible to imagine having any real existence. Womanly Noblesse presents a scenario where the lady’s beauty and virtues cause the lover’s love and therefore also his suffering; the Complaints emphasise rather her unresponsiveness (‘cruelty’). The dual concentration on the skill of the poet and the emotion of the speaker, at the expense of any recognition that the object of the poem might herself have a subjectivity of her own, is almost a defining feature of lyric; it is also precisely the kind of thing found in the one 13 Denise N. Baker, ‘Chaucer and Moral Philosophy: The Virtuous Women of the Canterbury Tales’,

Medium Ævum, 60 (1991), 241–56, argues that the four secular protagonists are designed to embody the four cardinal virtues; a comparable case can be made that Cecilia represents the three theological virtues (see e.g. VIII, 110, 104, 118). 14 Robertson, Chaucer’s London, pp. 87–8. Chaucer’s authorship of the poem is not entirely certain, though it is ascribed to him in the single MS in which it is preserved (London, British Library Add. 34360): see A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume V: The Minor Poems, Part One, ed. G. B. Pace and Alfred David (Norman, 1982), pp. 179–80. 15 Text as ed. by Pace and David, p. 184, with u/v regularized and punctuation supplied; the standard text (Riverside Chaucer, pp. 649–50) gives an editorially massaged version.

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song, surviving in the Public Record Office, that seems to derive from the London Puy. Ascribed at the top of the single parchment sheet to one Renaus (Renaud) de Hoiland, this song seems, from the fact that a crown is roughly drawn in the middle of his name in the heading, to be the year’s winning entry in the contest, such as the statutes ordered should be hung on the wall.16 Nothing else is known of Renaud;17 but the song is rather more revealing in cultural rather than documentary ways. It handles Anglo-Norman with high competence. It takes some skill to compose poetry in a second language (if Anglo-Norman by this date counted as such), and in terms of metre and rhyme this appears to aim for meticulous accuracy, to the point where it becomes possible to emend in order to preserve the metre. Like Womanly Noblesse, it repeats its rhymes in every stanza. Anglo-Norman may have been looked down on by the French, who had been making jokes about it for over a century, but if, as many recent studies have suggested, it was a language that had to be learned rather than being a second mother tongue alongside English, it was clearly being learned very well.18 Around the wharves of London, French must have been as commonly heard as English is in commercial centres now, and the ability to speak it must have been equally valuable. There is no reason, furthermore, why that value should have been reduced over the course of the fourteenth century, even though English was famously encroaching on many areas previously reserved for French. The combined demands of trade and the Hundred Years War, with the consequent English occupation of large areas of France, helped to keep it as a language of currency. We are familiar with the idea of a francophone English court, its language practices endorsed by a succession of French-speaking queens (Edward II’s queen Isabella continued to appear at state occasions until her 16 PRO E 163/22/I/2 (the ‘s’ of Renaus in the heading marks the nominative masculine). The whole text

was printed by Thomas Wright in his Anecdota Literaria (London, 1844), pp. 88–9. The music is here freshly transcribed by Helen Deeming; it has been published previously, with the words of the first stanza, by Christopher Page, ‘Secular Music’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain ii, ed. Boris Ford (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 235–50 (p. 237). Page comments that ‘the musical notes are messy and seem to have been copied too soon after a feast’, but that is somewhat unfair: it is a neatly written document, even if densely spaced, with rubricated capital letters for the start of each stanza. Helen Deeming comments that ‘the notation would be quite old-fashioned for 1300, but certainly possible if this is an “amateur” music-scribe’. See also John Stevens, ‘Alphabetical Check-list of Anglo-Norman Songs c. 1150–c. 1350’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 3 (1994), 1–22 (pp. 15–17). 17 This, along with the fact that it does not conform to strict chant royale form, leads Anne Sutton to doubt the connection of the song with the London Puy (‘Merchants, Music’, note 24); but given that it keeps the five stanza plus envoy structure, is crowned, refers to a puy, has features of Anglo- Norman, and is preserved among the Exchequer records, any other origin becomes hard to imagine. Helen Deeming further believes the music hand more likely to be Anglo-Norman than French. A Ralph Holand who had acquired his London property partly by inheritance, and who therefore must have had London forebears, appears in a list of aldermanic families in the fifteenth century, but any connection is untraceable (Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Chicago, 1948), p. 350). 18 See William Rothwell, ‘The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer’, SAC, 16 (1994), 45–67 (in which he notes that Anglo-French and Middle English were ‘used in one stratum of society on a daily basis by generations of scribes, officials and scholars’, p. 66); ‘English and French in England after 1362’, English Studies, 82 (2001), 839–59; and ‘The Teaching and Learning of French in Later Medieval England’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 111 (2001), 1–18.

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death in 1358; Philippa of Hainault brought both French writers and texts to England; Richard II not only took the French princess Isabelle as his second wife, but probably had French as his first language in common with Anne of Bohemia), and, after the battle of Poitiers, by the influx of aristocratic French hostages. The English Henry of Lancaster (father of the Blanche of Book of the Duchess fame) and the Hainaulter herald of Sir John Chandos both took for granted that a court audience, or an audience with courtly associations or aspirations, would want their reading-matter in Anglo-Norman or French. The currency of French did however extend much more widely. The trilingual Harley manuscript 2253, probably of the 1340s, the decade of Chaucer’s birth, testifies to a lively familiarity with Anglo-Norman verse-writing in the Welsh Marches.19 If the evidence of the London Puy is anything to go by, the city was as ready as the court not only to keep its records in Anglo-Norman but to speak it too, and moreover to compose poetry in a fashion for which ‘courtly’ is the only possible adjective. Chaucer arrived at court as a squire in the same decade in which Henry of Lancaster was writing, and a decade or two before Gower wrote his Miroir de l’Omme for a readership that shows no signs of being aristocratic. When Chaucer chose to write in English, he was making a break, not only with the royal court where he was employed in his younger years, but with the official language of the city fathers too. Womanly Noblesse and the Complaints indicate that the break in language did not necessarily mean a break in cultural continuity: this is poetry that has far more in common with what was being written in French and Anglo-Norman than with English lyric, with its greater directness and freshness. When Chaucer moved the site of his poetry-competition outside the walls of London, however, things changed decisively. He is not bound by any considerations of raising London’s standing in the world by imitating continental lyric forms, and the prince he devises for his competition would, one imagines, have a short way with any such highbrow pretensions. The presence of women on the pilgrimage – few in number, but with the Wife worth the weight of a good many men – is an indicator of how much space will be given to female characters both outside and inside the tales, not just as objects of poetic virtuosity but as individuals who are allowed emotions and actions of their own. The shift to Southwark marks a move from the French-derived lyric complexities appropriate for the rivalry of a poetic guild to a contest among mixed-gendered English-speaking pilgrims, where even rhyme royal never demands more than three rhyming words, and riding rhyme can surpass the fluency of prose. Renaud de Hoiland’s poem would be as inappropriate for Harry Bailey’s contest as the tales would be for the Puy, and not only because it does not tell a story. It requires a concentrated effort of comprehension, though the problems are not those of authorial incompetence in the language. Understanding is not 19 Carter Revard’s work confirms the location (around Ludlow) but argues against a connection with the

Mortimer court based at Wigmore: see his ‘Scribe and Provenance’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), pp. 21–109, esp. pp. 21–30.

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helped by certain features of later Anglo-Norman, in particular the loss of a regular system of grammatical gender and its markers, but that is not the fault of the poet. The poem is written almost in an Anglo-Norman equivalent of trobar clus, a dense and complex self-enfolding syntax that rejoices in paradox. Love poetry had of course thrived on paradoxes since its very beginnings in the medieval vernaculars, in Occitan lyric and French and Anglo-Norman romance; Petrarchism may have received such a willing acceptance not because it was revolutionary but because it did so very well what was already familiar. The Puy song takes such contradictions a step further, with its playing off of Lady Love against the beloved lady, Love’s interests against the lover’s, delay against haste, suffering as a cause of laughter, humility as a condition for achievement. Formally too it is complex even by continental French standards, or by comparison with Gower’s Anglo-French lyrics: late fourteenth-century balades and chants royaux generally work by aggregation, paratactic reinforcement of a simple base idea rather than the hypotactic sophisms of the Puy poem.20 Its metrical scheme is similarly much more elaborate than the usual range allowed for chants royaux. Its complexities seem all the more surprising in view of its social context: not the court, nor female audiences such as have conventionally been taken to foster courtly poetry about idealized objects of adoration, but the social group into which Chaucer was born, the merchant classes of medieval London, and a group that defined itself as all-male. When the pilgrim Chaucer rode out of the city to join Harry Bailey and the company of pilgrims in the inn at Southwark, he was turning his back on a certain kind of civic performance as well as on the poetry of princely courts.

Appendix: An Edition and Translation of Renaud de Hoiland, ‘Si tost c’amis’ A full text of the song is given below, together with an attempt at translation. It is, I believe, part of the responsibility of an editor to have some idea of what the text in question means, and to share that with one’s readers, however provisional that translation may be – and especially in the cases of the first stanza and the envoy, the translation offered here is very provisional indeed.21 A glossary alone may have the virtue of leaving interpretation open, and therefore of not imposing a single meaning; but with a poem of this kind, there is a greater risk that readers may come away from it with no sense of any meaning at all. Anyone who can make better sense of it than I have managed is strongly encouraged to 20 As represented, for instance, by the works of Froissart and Deschamps, or in the anthology of later

fourteenth-century continental French love-songs (one of them written for a puy) preserved in Pennsylvania MS French 15 (James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, Chaucer Studies, 9 (Cambridge, 1982), esp. pp. 32–5). 21 Sincere thanks go to Tony Hunt for his help and advice, especially as regards metrical emendation, and to William Rothwell for further advice on the first stanza; my apologies to them for ignoring their advice against translation. I have also consulted The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, compiled by William Rothwell, Louise W. Stone and T. B. W. Reid (London, 1992). My greatest debt is to Helen Deeming for her assistance with the music; some of her comments also have implications for the meaning of the text.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 2 (a) ‘Si tost c’amis’, reproduced by permission of The National Archives (PRO), ref. E 163/22/1/2

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(b) Music edited by Helen Deeming, with a transcription of the text

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do so, and I hope that the translation offered will at least serve as a foundation for further efforts. PRO E 163/22/1/2 The form of the poem is a10 b10 a10 b10 b7 c8 c8 d7 d10, with the same rhymes repeated in each stanza; the envoy runs c8 c8 d7 d10. Wright’s text in his Anecdota Literaria is largely confirmed by my own transcription; any substantive disagreements (e.g. other than punctuation not affecting the meaning) are noted in the textual apparatus (W). I have modernized y/i/j and medial u for v, and I have supplied accents, apostrophes and punctuation; other transcription differences are noted. Line division is indicated in the manuscript by a dot, but there is no other punctuation. Helen Deeming’s comments on the music are incorporated into the textual notes. Renaus de [crown] hoilande Si tost c’amis entant à ben amer, prant garde amours si doit merchi avoir, qui se garde por a celi donner qui servi l’a si qu’il i doit paroir. Por çou ai Jou tel voloir que [certes] je ne voel mie que ma dame eüst m’amie Esté lors que je le vi, pour autre tour s’estre pooit ensi. Car on peut ben à le fois trop haster, et se doit ben cascons amans savoir c’amours ne veut nus des siens oublier, mais selonc chou que cascons a d’espoir, a amours d’aidier pooir; et se fait ele partie, quant ele entant c’amis prie,

2 3

5 6 8

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10

15

W inserts a comma after ‘amours’. merchi: the musical note for ‘mer-’ is a plicated F (as also, though less clearly, for ‘i’ in line 4), probably indicating some nuancing in performance (Deeming). se: on the music, Deeming notes, ‘MS has B; but perhaps the scribe intended A (see the same phrase in line 1, and the C-A-G-E progression in line 5)’. por a: MS por a a; W pora à; emendation for metrical reasons. Deeming notes, however, that ‘it is common in medieval French song to elide vowels in these sorts of circumstances’; see also note to line 48 below. Jou: the capital suggests that the syllable cannot be connected to the previous syllable (Deeming). certes: not in MS or W; supplied here for metrical reasons. The music supplies too many notes for the syllables in the line as it stands (see transcription). que je le vi: MS queielevi; W que je levi

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As soon as a lover sets his mind on falling in love, Love takes note and is bound to have mercy. Love serves her own interests in giving to one who has served her, in such a way as to make it obvious. Therefore I have this wish, that indeed I do not wish that my lady had become my sweetheart when I [first] saw her, if things might carry on longer thus (i.e. if Love’s rewards might not become obvious for a further period).

For one can at the same time hurry [and go] too fast, and every lover must know that Love does not wish to forget any of her followers; but Love has power to help each one according to how much hope each has; and if she takes a part, when she hears that a lover is praying to her as one who has served well, Love nominates him as the lady’s beloved.

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Helen Cooper con cieus qui ben a servi, amours le fait nommer de dame ami. En çou me doi adès reconforter, car nus ne peut parfaitement voloir, S’il ne li plaist autant à endurer çou dont amours fait les siens endoloir, con de merchi recevoir; car puis c’amours le maistrie, pour son profit le castie, et pur ben savoir ensi s’amours vauroit pour riens metre en oubli. Ceste raison me fait lié porter çou dont amours fait les siens esmouvoir, Qu’il m’est avis seulement dou pensser, c’à paines mieux doit fins amis voloir; et quant celi puis veoir vers qui mes cuers s’umelie, il convient ten..nt qu’il rie, ains qu’il se taingne à gari, car je ne vis fors d’amours et de li. Dame, por tous nices cuers dotriner sage de droiste onnesté concevoir, Je ne vos os de moi merchi rouver, mais s’ensi est qu’en face mon devoir moi voele ramentevoir amours par sa cortoisie, tant qu’en vous pités nourie soit par amours, que j’empri si qu’ele soit avoec amours pour mi.

19 22 27 28 29 34 35 37 39 44 45

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reconforter: W reconforte endoloir: W en doloir vauroit: W vanroit lié: MS, W si lié; emendation for metrical reasons siens esmouvoir: MS siens en [doleir deleted] esmouvoir; W siens en esmouvoir. (‘En’ is hypermetrical, but is left from what was presumably the scribe’s eyeskip to line 22.) ten..nt: MS smudged; W ten..ist. Neither reading offers easy completion. à gari: MS, W agari MS point as for line ending after cuers dotriner: W dotrinez vos: W vus rouver: W rouner j’empri: W j’em pri pour mi: W pourmi

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I should take consolation from this, for no one can perfectly [attain his] desire if he is not willing to endure equally what Love makes her followers suffer just as much as what she has them receive through her mercy; for since Love masters him, she chastises him for his own good and so that he may know well if love is of sufficient value to make him forget all that [suffering].

This thought makes me happily bear whatever Love uses to move her followers, for it seems to me from the thought alone that a courtly lover should scarcely desire anything better; and when I can see her towards whom my heart humbles itself, it is right [at once?] that it should laugh, even before it holds itself cured, for I live off nothing but Love and her.

Lady, in order to teach all inexperienced hearts wisely to conceive true honour, I do not dare ask you to have mercy on me; but if I do indeed do my duty, may Love by her courtesy remember me, in as much as pity may be nourished in you by Love – whom I beseech that she may be [nourished] with love for me.

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Helen Cooper Loes que ma cançons oïe ert à ce pui envoie sera ma dame par qui amours me tient amoureus et joli.

46 oïe: W oie. Oïe would presumably be fem. of oï, p.p. of oïr; the consistency of rhyme across stanzas, as well as standard AN practice, rules out oié, from the alternative (more restricted) form of the verb oyer. 47 envoie: the exclusion of a p.p. -é ending is more problematic here; did the poet fail to keep his rhymes going, and rely on the music to cover the inaccuracy? 48 sera: perhaps an elision for ‘sera à’? (cf. line 3) 49 tient amoureus: W; MS tient amours amoureus. The correct reading is confirmed by the metre of the last four lines of each of the preceding stanzas.

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As soon as my song will have been conveyed aloud to this pui, it will [go to] my lady, through whom Love keeps me loving and happy.

INSTITUTIONS

Literary Cont ests and London Records C. David Benson

Literary Contests and London Records in the Canterbury Tales C. DAVID BENSON

Perhaps no English poet has been better situated than Chaucer to describe the institutional workings of London. His family was prominent in the commercial life that was central to the city, and he himself, even when under royal patronage, held a number of jobs that involved him closely with municipal affairs and the powerful international merchants who controlled the economic and political life of London. As controller of customs in the port of London, Chaucer worked under such magnates as Nicholas Brembre, John Philpot, and William Walworth, all of whom served as aldermen and mayors of the city. The wealthy Philpot, who financed a private navy to defeat pirates attacking English shipping, was close enough to Chaucer to be a witness to his release from the charge of raptus against Cecilia Chaumpainge.1 At the end of Troilus and Criseyde the poet appeals for correction to Ralph Strode, who was the common sergeant of London, the city’s attorney.2 Despite his many connections to those who ran the metropolis, Chaucer avoids direct reference to the subject of London in his early poetry, and it is not prominent in the Canterbury Tales: the pilgrimage originates outside the city walls and contains only two tales set in London: the unfinished Cook’s Tale and the second part of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The London we see in each is not the aristocratic and mercantile world we might expect because it was so well known to Chaucer, but rather an underworld of immorality, fraud, misrule, and other threats to decency and the good order of the city. The urban activities described in these two tales have many parallels in the surviving records of London municipal court cases. Knowledge of these records provides an important context for each tale, neither of which has an identifiable source, and reveals Chaucer’s surprising familiarity with some of the more squalid and dangerous practices of contemporary London. The unfinished tale 1 2

See Richard Firth Green, ‘Jack Philipot, John of Gaunt, and a Poem of 1380’, Speculum, 66 (1991), 330–41; and Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin Crow and Clair Olson (Oxford, 1966), p. 343. For the office of common serjeant-at-law, see Barron, London, pp. 189–90. Strode was involved in many of the kinds of legal cases discussed below; see, for example, Calendar of PMR (1364–1381), p. 186 (Roll A20, membr. 3, 3b), p. 226 (Roll A21, membr. 12b), p. 228 (Roll A21, membr. 13).

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of the Cook and even the second half of the Canon’s Yeoman’s tale are also statements, indirect and disguised in the Chaucerian manner, of some of the central interests, methods, and ambitions of the Canterbury Tales. Each London episode is strategically located, one at the conclusion of the first fragment and the other near the end of the collection as a whole, and show a delight in story-telling, again in parallel with the city records, revealing the benefits, in fiction if not in life, of the outrageous and disruptive. The contesting voices of the trials in the London records further suggest the discursive variety and crucial role of the reader in the Tales. Chaucer, whether from caution or taste and unlike his contemporaries Gower and Langland, does not engage directly with contemporary civic (or national) politics in his poetry. In his early writing he retreats into dreams and old books, whereas in the Canterbury Tales he transforms sensitive London topics into art and play. His transgressions and achievements are literary. We are accustomed to historical and critical studies of late fourteenthcentury London that present the city as an especially turbulent society.3 Yet the capital was a site of intense social, political, and cultural factional competition long before this period and long after. Indeed, what great city is not? Conflict and turbulence are marks of urban life; they are part of its excitement and difficulty. Experiencing the city in literature is not usually as stressful, of course; the tumult of the streets can be expressed in less directly threatening ways and even made enjoyable: potentially violent disputes may be transformed into entertainment and conf lict into a tale-telling contest. London is glimpsed only elusively in Chaucer’s earliest poetry. These works are visionary rather than urban, and their perspective is courtly rather than bourgeois. The Book of the Duchess is set in the kind of rural landscape that was the basis of medieval aristocratic power.4 The sorrowing central figure of the poem is generally taken to be John of Gaunt, but, while Gaunt was a major and contentious player for many years in the political affairs of London, he is shown here only as a knight and lover – a character from chivalry rather than politics or commerce. In Book II of the House of Fame, London is presumably the site of the dreamer’s ‘rekenynges’ (653), which would describe Chaucer’s job as clerk of customs, but we see no external view of the city as the eagle snatches him away to realms more celestial and allegorical. When cities appear in some detail in Chaucer’s mature poetry, they tend to be ancient and distant and governed by an aristocracy. The Troy of Troilus and Criseyde has been said to be a warning to London (which was believed once to

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See, for example, Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949); and David Wallace, ‘Chaucer and the Absent City’, in Chaucer’s England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 59–90. Cf. Ardis Butterfield, ‘Pastoral and the Politics of Plague in Machaut and Chaucer’, SAC, 16 (1994), 3–27.

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have been called ‘Troynovant’), but the similarities remain general. The same is true of Athens in the Knight’s Tale, which appears to have been first written before the Canterbury Tales. The excited preparations in Athens before the great tournament (I, 2483–522) may reflect Chaucer’s knowledge of similar knightly events in London (which as clerk of the king’s works he would have helped to arrange), but, once again, there is nothing that refers to specific locations or events. Troilus and Criseyde and especially the Knight’s Tale each describe their cities as controlled by aristocrats, though in neither case is this rule wholly successful. Despite the attractiveness of the Trojan royal family (especially their support for Criseyde), their power over the city is limited and ultimately doomed. Hector’s insistence that Trojans do not sell women is hooted down as chivalric ‘fantasies’ (IV, 193) by the parliament, which instead makes the fatal exchange for Antenor. Theseus’s rule over Athens is more total, but even he cannot prevent Arcite’s unfair death. And Theseus remains more a symbolic than a real governor: for all his projects, processions, and speeches, we are given no details about the practical way he manages Athens.5 The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales would seem to offer Chaucer the ideal opportunity to follow two of his literary models, Dante and Boccaccio, and at last describe his native city and its residents. Yet in these portraits the poet might be thought to be teasing us with his reluctance to engage straightforwardly with the city. As many have noted, the General Prologue begins not within London proper but across the river in Southwark, and then the company moves steadily away from the capital. Although several pilgrims have been assumed to be London residents, almost none is definitely so.6 The Merchant, Man of Law, and Guildsmen are clearly urban figures and might be Londoners, but we are never told so explicitly. Other pilgrims from the metropolitan region are apparently suburbanites, including the Pardoner from Charing Cross, the Prioress from Stratford atte Bowe, and the Host from Southwark. The Manciple, from one of the Inns of Court, is probably within the city’s jurisdiction, though dwelling outside its walls. London itself is thus constantly suggested in the General Prologue, but more by implication than directly. Only one teller is clearly labeled a Londoner: not Chaucer the Pilgrim but the Cook, and even he appears not to be a native, for his name is Roger of Ware (I, 4336), suggesting that he, like so many other citizens of the city, emigrated from the provinces. That Chaucer introduces London so obliquely in the Canterbury Tales does not necessarily mean a lack of interest, however, for the poet is a master of the ironic, indirect, and unexpected. The Wife of Bath, whose literacy is in question, makes more learned allusions than any other teller, for example, whereas the bookish Clerk makes almost none. The poetry of Chaucer himself is dismissed by more than one pilgrim. Chaucer demands constant alertness and we 5

6

Three Canterbury Tales are also set in ancient (or early Christian) Rome: the Man of Law’s Tale, the Physician’s Tale, and the Second Nun’s Tale, and a few other contemporary cities, such as Pavia in the Merchant’s Tale and Paris in the Shipman’s Tale, are mentioned briefly elsewhere in the Tales. C. David Benson, ‘London’, in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 66–80.

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do wrong to ignore the short, truncated Cook’s Tale. Although he breaks off after only 57 lines, the ‘Cook of Londoun’ (I, 4325) provides the most detailed picture of London, ‘oure citee’ (I, 4365), in all of Chaucer’s works. After a prologue in which the Host refers to the Cook’s various culinary frauds and deficiencies, and the Cook suggests he might later say a thing or two about innkeepers, we are introduced to Perkyn Reveler. An apprentice to a London victualler, Perkyn prefers jolly times with his friends to working in his master’s shop (from which he steals) and, when finally dismissed, goes to live with a friend whose wife’s shop is only a front for her prostitution. Because of its brevity, the Cook’s Tale tends to be overlooked, and, when discussed, is often presented as part of a process of generic and moral degeneration that begins with the noble romance of the Knight and descends through the increasingly nasty fabliaux of the Miller and Reeve to its final stage in this tale. But such a negative view is not the only way to understand the tale. The Cook’s Tale not only contains many specific references to late medieval London life (mostly low life), but also can be seen as both a capstone to the literary achievement of the first fragment and a preview of coming attractions in the Canterbury Tales. In a pioneering study, V. A. Kolve called attention to the delight and energy in the tale and to its two distinct narrative voices. He argued that the initial presentation of Perkyn is ‘celebratory in tone’, even his dicing is presented for our approval: ‘As full of love as a hive full of honey, merry as a goldfinch in a grove, he is constantly in motion and in search of a good time.’7 Yet, Perkyn is seen as attractive only in the first part of the tale; the remainder views him from his master’s disapproving perspective: ‘The tone has suddenly become moral, though in a highly specific way. Its ethos is that of trade, its standards those of profit and respectability’ (pp. 267–8). This, we might say, is the expression of those who ran the city of London: its merchants, guildsmen, and officials.8 But there is more to the Cook’s Tale than these two moral positions: the contrast between the ‘values of the body and its pleasure’ and the ‘bourgeois values of trade’.9 The tale touches on many important aspects of contemporary London (from citizenship to law and order), while also, as we shall see below, expressing some of the central energies of Chaucer’s poetry. In its few lines the Cook’s Tale says quite a lot about London in the late fourteenth century. The name of its narrator, like that of Harry Bailey, may refer to a real person, for there is a London record of Roger Knight of Ware, a cook, who, appropriately enough, was accused of being ‘a common nightwalker,’ one found on the streets after curfew.10 The tale itself mentions specific London locations 7

V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, 1984), pp. 267–8. See also the excellent essay by William Woods, who stresses the urban vitality of the tale: ‘Society and Nature in the Cook’s Tale’, Papers on Language and Literature, 32 (1996), 189–205. 8 The second voice of the London establishment has often been seen as the dominant one in the Cook’s Tale. See Paul Strohm, ‘ “Lad with Revel to Newegate” ’, in Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp. 51–64; and David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity (Stanford, 1997), p. 174. 9 Kolve, p. 279. 10 John Scattergood, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2002), i, pp. 75–86.

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such as Cheapside, the main commercial street of the city, and Newgate, a prison for municipal offenders. It also deals with two related issues at the centre of late medieval life – guilds and citizenship. Unlike other English towns that had a single merchant guild, London had many guilds of varying functions and importance that were crucial to its commercial, social, and religious life.11 Trade guilds helped to regulate the manufacture and distribution of goods on which the wealth and power of the city depended, and they also, along with parish fraternities, provided both fellowship and spiritual support (guild members paraded and feasted together as well as burying and praying for their deceased members). The rights and privileges of citizenship, which were enjoyed by only a percentage of the total residents of London (women, children, and most aliens were automatically excluded), were usually attained in this period by serving an apprenticeship under a master of a particular guild, which would, at the conclusion of the apprentice’s service, propose him for the franchise. This is undoubtedly how the Cook, a ‘foreigner’ from Ware, became naturalized, whereas Perkyn’s failure to fulfill his apprenticeship probably means that he will never became a citizen but instead will continue to inhabit the criminal underworld of London in which we see him when the tale ends. The knowledge of this underworld is remarkable in Chaucer, given that he was the son of a prominent merchant, holder of responsible offices, and associate of city leaders like Philpot and Strode. Far from the recluse unaware of his neighbours’ activities described by the eagle in the House of Fame, Chaucer reveals himself at the beginning of the Cook’s Tale to be familiar with the London street at its most colourful. Accounts of the scandalous but entertaining demi-monde of London became a staple of London literature in the Renaissance, perhaps most famously in Shakespeare’s depictions of Falstaff’s revels with Prince Hal in the first part of Henry IV, but they are less common in Middle English. Perhaps more surprising than Chaucer’s ability and desire to portray this world is his presentation of it, at least initially, as alluring: Perkyn’s dancing, singing, and loving suggest the Squire of the General Prologue.12 Perkyn, however, is a thoroughly urban adventurer. The shop where his duties lie (as well as his opportunities for advancement) cannot restrain him from participating in the drama of the streets: For whan ther any ridyng was in Chepe, Out of the shoppe thider wolde he lepe. (I, 4377–8)

Such processional riding through London may evoke something of the world of the Squire, but once out of the shop, Perkyn is attracted to more disreputable if 11 For an authoritative recent survey of medieval London craft guilds, see Barron, London, pp. 199–234;

for the related parish fraternities, to which the pilgrim Guildsmen but not Perkyn seem to belong, see Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. Caroline Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 13–37. 12 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 168.

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social and enjoyable pursuits: he gathers a group of like-minded fellows (‘a meynee of his sort’) to jump about, sing, and ‘maken swich disport’ (I, 4381–2), arranging with them to ‘pleyen at the dys in swich a streete’ (I, 4384). Just before the perspective of the tale switches to that of the city elite and their condemnation of such ‘a prentys revelour/ That haunteth dys, riot, or paramour’ (I, 4392), Perkyn’s success at playing his favorite game is extolled: For in the toune nas ther no prentys That fairer koude caste a paire of dys Than Perkyn koude. (I, 4385–87)

Chaucer is the most bookish of poets (as the eagle correctly noted), but his account of Perkyn does not depend on any known literary original. Some time ago, Earl Lyon noted parallels to elements of the tale in the surviving London records, especially the Letter Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls that, among other municipal affairs, report cases of misbehavior that were dealt with in the city’s courts, usually before the mayor and aldermen.13 Chaucer might have known of these judicial proceedings at first hand as a witness, juror, or defendant, and at second hand from associates, like Strode and Philpot, who were directly involved in them. As Lyon notes, offences committed by apprentices like Perkyn, specifically gambling and theft, appear often in the London records.14 The prostitute wife of Perkyn’s friend mentioned at the end of the Cook’s Tale also, as Lyon shows, has her counterparts in the London records. 15 In addition to the personal vices mentioned briefly by Lyon, the London records can also help us recognize more serious civic issues in the Cook’s Tale. The Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls, for example, contain many accounts of disputes between masters and apprentices. This relationship was crucial to London because on it depended the regulation of the commercial life of the city, as well as the quality of its future citizens. Perkyn represents a master’s worst nightmare, not only because of his thieving and negligence of the

13 Earl Lyon, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan

and Germaine Dempster (1941; repr. New York, 1958), pp. 152–4. John Scattergood in the new Sources and Analogues suggests that Chaucer may be drawing on ‘contemporary legal documents relating to apprenticeship – instructions, oaths, and indentures – and contemporary satirical poetry’, i, p. 82. Scattergood’s non-narrative documents are less like the stories in the other London records that I (like Lyon) find closer to the Cook’s Tale and the second part of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, though both Scattergood and Lyon believe that Chaucer may be representing actual city events. The Letter Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls are kept in the library of the Corporation of London Records Office in the Guildhall. Calendars of the Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls for this period have been published and will be cited below. A generous and useful selection of this material has been translated by H. T. Riley in his Memorials. For full references see the Abbreviations. Citations from Riley and the Calendars of Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls have been checked with the original documents when these were available to me; translations are based on Riley but adapted by me unless otherwise noted. 14 Lyon, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, pp. 152–3. 15 Lyon, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, pp. 153–4. See also the later example of a man sentenced to the pillory in 1406 for pimping his wife to a chaplain: Letter Book I, fol. cclxxxvib (Letter-Books, p. 276; Riley, Memorials, p. 566).

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shop despite repeated rebukes (‘al were he snybbed bothe erly and late’, I, 4401), but also because of the supervisor’s fear that this single ‘roten appul’ will corrupt his other servants (I, 4404–10). The London records similarly recognize that serving men are ‘a folk youthful and unstable’ and need careful supervision by their masters.16 As to stealing, the ordinances of the London pewterers given to the mayor and aldermen in 1348 call for an apprentice who steals from his master to be, on the third offense, ‘removed from the trade’ like Perkyn.17 The officials of medieval London, not unlike later governments, were constantly worried about confederacies, conspiracies, or ‘covyns’ against the established order, especially in times of war or unrest.18 The danger that servant organizations and fraternities, alone or in union with others, might pose to the economic and even political stability of the city is mentioned several times in the records.19 For example, in 1362 the regulations of the alien weavers in London submitted to the mayor and aldermen seek to end the practice of workmen, when in dispute with their masters, colluding with other city workers in the trade to stop work until the disagreement was resolved.20 Likewise, in 1387, serving men of the cordwainers were accused of assembling an illegal confederacy against their supervisors and trying to get this fraternity recognized by the pope.21 These conspiratorial threats may often have been exaggerated, and, despite some lurid charges in the records, most seem to have been resolved.22 Whatever the actual danger from subaltern conspiracies to the guild and governmental structure of medieval London, Perkyn is no part of it. He is a reveler not a rebel. Although he gathers ‘a meynee of his sort’ (I, 4381), this mob of young men have no wider ambitions than ‘to hoppe and synge and maken swich disport’ (I, 4382). When they take to the street it is not to erect barricades but ‘to pleyen at the dys’ (I, 4384). Perkyn and his fellows may momentarily raise the 16 Letter Book I, fol. clib (Letter-Books I, p. 137; Riley, Memorials, p. 611). 17 Letter Book F, fol. clvb (Letter-Books F, p. 183; Riley, Memorials, 243). 18 See, for example, Letter Book E, fol. cxcivb (Letter-Books E, p. 238; Riley, Memorials, p. 173); Letter

19

20

21 22

Book G, fol. x (Letter-Books G, p. 13; Riley, Memorials, p. 272); Letter Book H, fol. clxxii, in English (Letter-Books H, p. 226; Riley, Memorials, pp. 480–1). It is not always clear (at least to me) when the records speak of serving men or even yeomen under a master whether the reference is to apprentices or employed freemen, sometimes called journeymen (the categories were perhaps somewhat fluid). The apprentice Perkyn is called a ‘servaunt’ (4407; cf. 4410). Letter Book G, fol. xciiib (Letter-Books G, p. 130; Riley, Memorials, p. 307); for the medieval fear of journeyman organizations, see David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City 1300–1500 (London, 1997), p. 245. Letter Book H, fol. ccxix (Letter-Books H, pp. 311–12; Riley, Memorials, pp. 495–6). For example, there seems to have been much dissension between the masters and servants of the trade of saddlers over their respective rights and obligations. In 1396 each side argued its case before the mayor and aldermen. Their verdict was that servants should be under the governance of their masters and not form any separate organization, but that masters, in turn, must treat their servants properly, with the promise that any grievances of the latter would be dealt with speedily and justly by the mayor and aldermen (Letter Book H, fol. cccixb [Letter-Books H, pp. 431–2; Riley, Memorials, pp. 542–4]). For the argument that masters and journeymen ‘inhabited essentially the same cultural environment’, see Gervase Rosser, ‘Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town’, Past and Present, 154 (1997), 3–31 (p. 16).

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spectre of insurrection, but any anxiety is quickly relieved by their fun and games. Chaucer is only playing with politics and, as with cuckoldry in the previous fabliaux, makes literary entertainment out of what in real life a solid citizen might consider genuine peril. A more widespread, if less dramatic threat to the well-being of London, was commercial fraud, especially involving the basic necessities of life, such as selling rotten or overpriced food and drink. Retribution was severe: the offender was usually sentenced to be displayed on the pillory where he would be subject to the taunts (and worse) of his fellow citizens, commonly with a written notice of his crime and even the offending item burnt at his feet.23 To call even more attention to his guilt, the malefactor was sometimes paraded from the prison at Newgate to the pillory and then back again with music.24 Once again, for all his other failings and though he is apprenticed to a victualler, Perkyn is not accused of cheating Londoners and threatening their health with bad food, as so many others are convicted of doing in the London records. The glancing reference that Perkyn himself had been ‘somtyme lad with revel to Newegate’ (I, 4402) does not specify his crime, but probably refers to punishment for the sexual vices or gambling we see him associated with, civic crimes that also merited the pillory.25 Perkyn is no menace to the city as a whole or to its citizens: he harms no one except his master and his own prospects of advancement. Perhaps his most subversive quality is his utter indifference to city values. The danger of selling spoiled food, mentioned so prominently in the London records, is, however, directly raised, not in the Cook’s Tale itself, but in the Prologue. Harry Bailey responds to the Cook’s offer to tell the next tale by noting that Roger has reheated and resold as if fresh many a ‘pastee’ and other filled pies and also that he has received ‘Crisest curs’ from pilgrims for other unsanitary dishes (I, 4346–52). These accusations were serious ones and in real life, as we have seen, might have sent Roger to Newgate and the city pillory. Moreover, the Host’s attack and the Cook’s warning that he could tell a thing or two about Harry suggests, as others have noted, the long-running tensions between the victualling and non-victualling trades in the late fourteenth century that figured so prominently in the sometimes stormy mayoralty campaigns of John of Northampton and Nicholas Brembre.26 These are the kinds of conflict and tumult in late medieval London that have been emphasized by previous histori23 For examples of those sent to the pillory for selling putrid meat, see Letter Book F, fol. cliiib

(Letter-Books F, p. 181; Riley, Memorials, pp. 240–1) and Letter Book G, fol. vib (Letter-Books G, p. 8; Riley, Memorials, pp. 270–1). 24 For such a procession in 1382, though as part of a punishment for forgery not bad food, see Letter Book H, fol. cxliii (Letter-Books H, p. 181; Riley, Memorials, p. 459). See also Christopher Cannon’s essay in this volume, pp. 85–6. 25 For an example of punishment on the pillory for false gaming, see Letter Book H, fol. xxxiib (Letter-Books H, p. 25; Riley, Memorials, pp. 395–6). 26 Pamela Nightingale redresses previous treatments of Northampton as a populist in ‘Capitalists, Crafts and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 124 (1989), 3–35; and in A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London 1000–1485 (New Haven, 1995).

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ans and critics (individual vendors versus consumers and guilds against guilds), but however intense these clashes were on the streets, they remain under control on the pilgrimage of the Canterbury Tales and do not lead to criminal indictments or violence. The Host and the Cook both manage to turn their potentially serious charges into good-humored comedy: Harry insists he spoke only in ‘game and pley’ (I, 4355) and urges the Cook to tell on, and Roger laughs and does just that (I, 4363–4). The Cook’s Prologue, like his Tale, testifies to Chaucer’s knowledge of London and London life (including its more squalid aspects), but it does not rupture the pilgrim fellowship or halt the tale-telling contest.27 The court cases in the London record books not only parallel details in the Cook’s Prologue and Tale, they also suggest deeper affinities with Chaucer’s art here and elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. The Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls, though official documents, are constantly relating entertaining stories.28 Indeed most are stronger narratives than the unresolved Cook’s Tale itself and some would be worthy to be judged as tales of solaas as well as of sentence. The municipal records give full details about the crimes they discuss (who is supposed to have done what and to whom, sometimes with humorous details), and they also report the conduct of the trial itself and its outcome, including any punishments. The appeal of such stories even after six hundred years suggests why crime fiction and courtroom drama are still popular today, whether it be the fiction of John Grisham or the actuality of the O. J. Simpson trial. Moreover, just as Chaucer’s works contain a range of remarkable characters who fool others, often through their skill with words, the London records also display an interest in (and even admiration for) clever frauds and verbal deception, what David Wallace calls ‘some quite spectacular examples of native wit and inventiveness’.29 A particularly ingenious fraud occurred in 1327 when a certain John Bird was accused of cheating his neighbors when they brought dough to his ovens to be baked. Bird’s ploy was to shape the dough on a ‘moldingborde’ (the word is in English in the original), which he had ‘skillfully and artfully’ (prudenter artificioseque) prepared with a hole so that a servant could sit beneath the table and ‘with subtlety’ (subtiliter) steal some of the dough.30 Other con-men were found guilty in the city courts of false writing, including forgeries of pardons, deeds, and Papal bulls, or false speech, including claiming to be a various officials or even the son of an earl.31 The horrified 27 I am indebted to Daniel Stokes of the University of Connecticut for drawing my attention to the peace-

ful resolution of the potentially serious conflict between Host and Cook. 28 Lyon, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, p. 154. 29 Wallace, ‘Chaucer and the Absent City’, p. 62. 30 The story is recorded at length in Latin in both a Plea and Memoranda Roll, A1b memb. 16 (Calendar

of PMR (1323–1364), p. 44) and the Assize of Bread, fols 79b–80a; it may once have appeared in a Letter Book (see Riley, Memorials, pp. 162–5). The transcription from the Assize in Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, ed. Henry T. Riley, Rolls Series, 3 vols (London, 1859–62), iii, pp. 416–20, has been checked with the original and the almost identical account in the Plea and Memoranda Roll. 31 For various examples of forgeries punished by the pillory, see Letter Book H, fols livb, cxxv, cclixb (Letter-Books H, pp. 54, 152, 365; Riley, Memorials, pp. 404–5, 442–3, 527–9). For the forgery of

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fascination with such rogues in these records, where it is difficult to distinguish outrage from at least a sneaking admiration, is an analogue to the more complex responses of readers to Chaucer’s tricksters, who include some of his greatest characters such as Pandarus, Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale, the Pardoner, and the Wife of Bath. The London records also suggest in embryo the very form of the Canterbury Tales. The various cases in the Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls are presented as if they were a kind of tale-telling contest, a series of competing discourses. The initial indictment or complaint offers a narrative about the supposed crime, then the defendant, if not simply admitting guilt, offers an alternative narrative exculpating himself, and, finally, the jury offers a third, authoritative narrative about what they say really happened. In an early case of 1291, the clerk of the sheriff’s court complains that when the sheriff denied Robert de Suttone permission to plead in his court, Robert showed his contempt to the sheriff (and thus the king) by uttering the following sounds: ‘Tprhurt, Tprhurt, Tphurt’ (the words appear in English in the original Latin record). Robert strongly denies the accusation and insists that he did and said nothing that was in contempt of the court or the king. The jury, which included a goldsmith, baker, tailor, clerk and attorney (among others), then give their verdict, which agrees with the complaint but provides an even fuller narrative: they say that in court Robert scorned the sheriff’s decision not to allow him to plead and contemptuously uttered ‘Tphurpt, Tphurt’ in English (the words are repeated), while raising his thumb in derision. 32 Duelling narratives also occur in a 1320 victualling case in which Thomas the Smythe is brought before the mayor’s court accused by Nicholas Schyngal of having bought putrid meat to sell in London. Thomas says that he did not buy the meat, but it was Nicholas who did. Nicholas, however, denies any knowledge of the meat. Both men appeal to the court, and the jury, on oath, gets the final word: Thomas is not guilty of the accusation, but Nicholas did buy the meat and intended to sell it in the city in deceit of the people.33 An even more elaborate series of narrations concerns the sensational accusation in 1364 by John de Hakford before the mayor and aldermen that a certain Richard Hay approached him on Cornhill and, after some conversation, asked him if he was a tailor and if he was aware of the intended plot. John testifies that he said that he was a tailor but knew of no plot. He states that Richard then told him that ten thousand Londoners had agreed to kill ‘all the best people, and the great folk,

Papal bulls in 1412, see Letter Book I, fol. cxv (Letter-Books I, p. 105; Riley, Memorials, pp. 587–9). For examples of those who pretended to be ecclesiastical, civic, or royal officials, see Letter Book G, fol. cxlviiib (Letter-Books G, p. 183; Riley, Memorials, pp. 320–1), Letter Book H, fols xxvib, ccix (Letter-Books H, pp. 18–19, 295; Riley, Memorials, pp. 390–1, 489–90). For the impostor who claimed to be the son of the Earl of Ormound, see Letter Book H, fol. ccxixb (Letter-Books H, p. 312; Riley, Memorials, pp. 496–8). 32 Letter Book A, fol. xcvi (Letter-Books A, p. 192; Riley, Memorials, pp. 27–8, not checked with the original record. 33 Letter Book E, fol. cvb (Letter-Books E, p. 126; Riley, Memorials, pp. 139–40).

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and the officers’ (meilleurs & les grantz & minystres) of the city, and told John to be ready when the signal was given. Richard is committed to Newgate prison, and when brought before the mayor and alderman declares that he is not guilty. A jury is assembled who declare that Richard is indeed innocent of the charges, but, citing the words of the king, further state that if John’s accusation was false he should be punished. John is remanded to the mayor and alderman, who not only punish him but also produce further narratives. They say that John is to be imprisoned for a year and a day and during that period sent to the pillory four times: moreover, each trip to the pillory is to tell the story of his crime in various forms: dramatically he is to walk to the pillory barefoot, accompanied, like Perkyn, with trumpets to announce his shame; symbolically he is to bear a whetstone around his neck as a sign of being a ‘false liar’ (faux mentour), perhaps because every lie has an edge or a liar must file his tongue; and verbally the reason for his punishment is to be solemnly proclaimed at the pillor y.34 I am not claiming that these London records of municipal trials are a direct source for the Canterbury Tales, only that they provide another context for its contesting voices.35 Chaucer often has his characters engage in forensic speech: the pilgrim Friar offers a full indictment of the various forms of corruption of summoners, and the pilgrim Summoner responds with a parallel list of charges against friars. With her unstoppable gusto, the Wife of Bath plays the role of both parties in a trial: she is prosecutor (of clerks and her husbands) as well as defense attorney (for herself and other women). The Pardoner’s Prologue is also a kind of judicial confessional, complicated by the fact that he both indicts himself as a vicious man and extols his cleverness. In a more general but equally significant way, the format of these city records is echoed in the very arrangement of the Canterbury Tales. The Knight tells his story and then the Miller responds using some of the same details (two men in love with one woman, for example) to produce a different narrative in a different voice and to a different purpose. Legal proceedings are one of the purest forms of debate, and, in a much more complex way than ever found in the medieval London courts, the rest of the Canterbury Tales is a kind of multidimensional trial: not one case and two or three opposing voices, but a series of competing genres, themes, plot elements, types of characters, styles, and points of view are presented throughout the tale-telling contest. The final and most important narrative in these municipal court cases is that given by the jury. This distinct feature of the English legal system, in which citizens rather than officials interpret what has been presented to them, is relevant even to those Canterbury tales that are not distinctly accusatory or exculpatory. For ultimately it is up to Chaucer’s readers, like a jury, to weigh and assess his

34 Letter Book G, fol. cxxxviiib–cxxxix (Letter-Books G, pp. 176–7; Riley, Memorials, pp. 315–16). 35 For recent examples of applying such contexts to English literature see Emily Steiner, Documentary

Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2003), and Steiner and Candace Barrington, The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, 2002).

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tales, to decide which parts to accept and which to reject: whether, for example, we find the world of the Miller’s Tale more convincing and true to life or that of the Knight’s Tale, and whether we judge Walter in the Clerk’s Tale (or Griselda for that matter) to be god-like or monstrous. One advantage that literary critics have over jurors is that they do not have to arrive at a single, fixed conclusion and ultimately choose between the stark polarities of guilt or innocence. But even London juries were capable of the interpretive skills and distinctions that make for good readers. In one 1364 case, John atte Wode, a baker, was accused of two trading abuses to increase the price of wheat: the jury acquitted John of the first charge, but convicted him of the second.36 Similarly, in the case mentioned above of John Bird and the fraudulent ‘molding boards’ used to steal dough, all the bakers sentenced with him were forced to have dough hung around their necks (another symbolic narrative) on the pillory, except for Bird himself and one other, who were not found with stolen dough. As for Chaucer’s own verdict on Perkyn Reveler, I assume that as the son of a citizen he would have shared the views of the London authorities among whom he lived so much of his life. How could Chaucer the associate of Philpot and Strode not endorse the verdict of the guild master (and the London establishment) expressed so clearly in the second part of the Cook’s Tale, which finds no delight in Perkyn but only theft, disobedience, rottenness, and riot. The ceremonial ‘ryding . . . in Chepe’ that entices the apprentice from his shop in the first part of the tale is transformed into a more derisive procession in the second part when the prisoner Perkyn is ‘lad with revel to Newegate’ (I, 4402), just as the attractive sexuality first associated with him (‘He was as ful of love and paramour/ As is the hyve ful of hony sweete’, I, 4372–3) is replaced by the sordid, commercial copulation of his friend’s wife that so dramatically ends the tale: ‘And swyved for her sustenance’ (I, 4422). The disdain of Chaucer’s class for those who did not measure up to the bourgeois standards of the guilds and government of London is presented here as self-evident truth: Revel and trouthe, as in a lowe degree, They been ful wrothe al day, as men may see.

(4397–98)

But the views of Chaucer the poet are different from those we assume for Chaucer the London resident. The former finds value in the transgressive energy of Perkyn Reveler. It is, after all, that same energy that animates the pilgrim Miller and gives life to the Canterbury Tales. The Cook’s rival, the Host, wanted the Monk to tell the second tale on the journey, a choice in accord with those medieval ideas of order and hierarchy enforced by the London authorities. Yet when the Monk’s long list of tragedies is eventually related, the Knight finds them too depressing and the Host judges them too dull. Had the Monk’s Tale actually been allowed to follow the extensive Knight’s Tale, the tale telling might have died of inertia, its solaas smothered by excessive sentence. It 36 Letter Book G, fols cxxxii–cxxxiib (Letter-Books G, p. 171; Riley, Memorials, pp. 317–18).

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is the riotous interruption of the Miller that first indicates the range and daring of the contest that is the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer and his class would have deplored the real-life Miller as much as they did Perkyn (perhaps even more so because of his provincialism), but the Miller’s literary contribution is essential to the work. Near the beginning of the first fragment, his voice and tale suggest the variety of genres and perspectives to come. Perkyn serves a similar function at the end of the first fragment. Far from being simply a degeneration from the stately Knight’s Tale, the Cook’s Tale, like that of the Miller, offers another, distinct kind of discourse to ‘requite’ that ancient romance. In contrast to the order and noble pageantry of Athens, it introduces the demotic energies of life on the streets of London. We may, with the citizens of Athens, look up to Theseus as a god-like ruler and, with the citizens of London, look down on Perkyn as a reveler, but each makes its contribution to the contesting voices of the tales. Of course one of these voices is the one that dominates the second part of the Cook’s Tale: that of the master who deplores and finally expels Perkyn. His is the voice of the guild system that controlled much of the commercial and political life of medieval London. There is a tendency by modern literary scholars to celebrate the communal, associational values of the urban guilds and find them central to the Canterbury pilgrimage.37 Chaucer the poet, as opposed to Chaucer the citizen, is more skeptical of the reality of these organizations, however, as his patronizing portrait of the five Guildsmen in the General Prologue suggests. The social values of the medieval London guilds, as is made clear in their surviving charters, were sober, respectful conduct, unity among their members, and the reconciliation of quarrels.38 Perkyn is the antithesis of such propriety, as indicated by the articles of the pouchmakers given to the mayor and aldermen in 1371, which include the declaration that none of them will receive into service anyone who, among other faults, is a ‘rioter, or of bad reputation, or who will not be ruled by the masters of such trade’.39 The excitement, delight, and seriousness of the Canterbury Tales go far beyond such decorous, deferential behavior. As an artist, Chaucer is on the side of Perkyn, not his master. The story of a loyal apprentice working conscientiously in his shop might be admirable as a civic lesson, but it would be duller than the Monk’s tragedies: good for society, perhaps, but not for fiction.40 In another sense, however, the Canterbury pilgrimage is even more committed to holding together the association of its membership than were the London guilds. The Cook is accused of serious urban crimes by the Host, as we have seen, but he like the Miller and later the Pardoner, is not punished for his misdeeds and not expelled from the Canterbury fellowship, as Perkyn is from 37 See, for example, Paul Strohm, ‘The Social and Literary Scene in England’, in The Cambridge Com-

panion to Chaucer, 2nd edn, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 1–19 (p. 15); Wallace, ‘Absent City’, p. 81. 38 See Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities’, and Barron and Laura Wright, ‘The London Middle English Guild Certificates of 1388–9’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 39 (1995), 108–45. 39 Letter Book G, fol. cclxxxiv (Letter-Books G, p. 290; Riley, Memorials, p. 360). 40 See Woods, ‘Society and Nature’, p. 197.

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his shop, trade, and chance for citizenship. All remain to take their part in the tale-telling contest. Because the Cook’s Tale ends so abruptly, medieval readers and scribes were tempted to fill in the gap, especially, in twenty-five manuscripts, with the romance of Gamelyn, a decidedly rural tale.41 I would suggest that the undeveloped and unfinished energies of the Cook’s Tale are best understood as completed in the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Perkyn looks back to the Miller’s narrative disobedience, as already noted, as well as to the shameless but vital characters of his tale.42 He also looks forward to some of the central figures of the work, especially to the equally transgressive, but more articulate Pardoner and Wife of Bath. The Wife, in her own fashion, ‘swyved for her sustenance’ and resisted established authority. The Pardoner is even more disturbing to bourgeois conventions than Perkyn, and even more committed to getting money by any means necessary, but his exemplum also demonstrates the deadly wages waiting for revelers. Neither would make a well-behaved citizen of London, but they are wonderful storytellers. The Cook’s Tale, despite its brief scope, ends the first fragment in a way that tells us more about Chaucer’s artistry than his politics. It and its Prologue refer clearly, unlike any other Canterbury tale, to the factional conflicts and street crime of contemporary London, but it uses that material not to state a position about city affairs but to entertain and prepare us for the dazzling contests of genre, voice, and values that follow. The one other Canterbury narrative set in London is the second part of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. Like the Cook’s Tale, it also occurs at a significant point in the Canterbury Tales and suggests the general achievement of Chaucer’s poetry. Pars secunda of the tale, which tells how a chantry priest is fooled by a canon into believing that he has witnessed successful alchemy and thus is induced to pay forty pounds to learn the secret, takes place indoors. London itself is mentioned only once near the beginning of the story (VIII, 1012), and we are never shown anything of the racy life on the London streets. It is a more general kind of urban story because, in contrast to the Cook’s Tale, it might just as well be set in another English or Continent al city. As with the Cook’s Tale, no definite source has been identified for the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, but the kind of fraud it describes is similar to that we find detailed in the London municipal letter books and memoranda.43 The sort of cheating for profit of which the canon is guilty, the deceiving of fellow residents of London, is frequently denounced in the city records, though, as with the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, not without a certain acknowledgement, as we have already seen, that such fabrications could be ingenuous. The second part of Chaucer’s tale has little to do with alchemical knowledge or belief (except on the part of the priest), but instead involves a series of clever and deceptive sub-

41 Scattergood, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, i, p. 77. 42 See Woods, pp. 192–3. 43 Albert E. Hartung, ‘ “Pars Secunda” and the Development of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, Chaucer

Review, 12 (1977), 111–28, suggests that the second part of the tale hints at actual people and situations, and he refers to the London archives, though only generally.

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stitutions by which the victim is swindled. Similar legerdemain in the London records, though with somewhat different materials, is found in the 1414 account of what happened to a Southwark pelterer. He was shown by one John Bereford, as collateral for some expensive furs, a box that held sixteen gold nobles and a necklace. But as the two men conversed, John secretly substituted another, identical box containing only sand and stones. The falsitate & deceptione by which John is twice accused of getting something valuable for nothing is similar to the canon’s gulling the priest into thinking he has seen things that he has not – in the former that gold has been exchanged, in the latter that gold has been created.44 The canon is condemned by the yeoman narrator as a superlative example of urban falseness (VIII, 972–80) and his lack of truth is stressed (VIII, 1039, 1042, 1044). But even though denounced as a fiend more than once (VIII, 984, 1071, 1303), the canon is also said to be as clever as a fox (VIII, 1079–80) and, as we saw with the molding board trick of John Bird, the subtlety of his scam is emphasized (VIII, 1091, 1161, 1247, 1371). At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer is often thought to be bidding farewell to the delights of imaginative fiction and instead asserting the simplicity of supernatural truth.45 Indeed, the Second Nun’s Tale argues that the things of this world are but dreams compared to the next world, the Manciple’s Tale casts doubt on the efficacy of human language itself, and the teller of the final Parson’s Tale scorns ‘fables and swich wrecchednesse’ (X, 34) as well as both alliterative and rhyming poetry (X, 43–4) in favor of straightforward instruction about ‘moralitee and vertuous mateere’ (X, 38). In the midst of these leave-takings, if that is what they are, Chaucer nevertheless pauses to defend his literary art in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The Prologue to the tale is as lively and dramatic as any of the previous links and suggests an opening up, not a closing down, of the Canterbury fiction. Moreover, general similarities between Chaucer’s poetic practice and that of alchemy have been noticed by some critics.46 But in addition to previous emphasis on the teller or his master or the alchemical arts, I want to stress the poetic implications of the second part of the tale. The narrative declares the ingenuity, power, as well as the danger of fiction. The verbal skills of the trickster canon recall the greater verbal skills of those other clever wordsmiths in Chaucer’s verse: Pandarus, the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath, even Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale. The story of the canon and priest may offer little specific information about London, but it does remind us that some

44 Letter Book I, fol. cxxxvb (Letter-Books I, pp. 128–9; Riley, pp. 599–600). 45 See, for example, John Fyler, ‘Nimrod, the Commentaries on Genesis, and Chaucer’, in The Uses of

Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen, ed. Charlotte Morse, Penelope Doob, and Marjorie Woods (Kalamazoo, 1992), p. 195. 46 See, for example, Lee Patterson, ‘Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self’, SAC, 15 (1993), 39–40; Mark J. Bruhn, ‘Art, Anxiety, and Alchemy in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 33 (1999), 290–2; and, especially, David Raybin, ‘ “And pave it al of silver and of gold”: The Humane Artistry of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, in Rebel and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Susanna Fein, David Raybin, and Peter Braeger (Kalamazoo, 1991), pp. 189–212.

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city games end unjustly (unlike the charlatans in the city records or Perkyn Reveler, the canon apparently suffers no punishment for his crime). The only sure winners of this and the other contests in the story-telling of the Canterbury Tales are Chaucer’s readers.

The Great Household in the City Elliot Kendall

The Great Household in the City: The Shipman’s Tale ELLIOT KENDALL

Medieval cities are unreceptive of any simple economic or institutional explanation. Cities or towns were not singular mercantile, capitalist cells evolving in isolation from a primitive feudal countryside. Towns and countryside were interdependent and pervasively implicated in each other’s development.1 Yet to say that complex explanations are called for is not to abandon the city as formless or impossible for medieval writers to imagine (or simplify). Mercantile ideas of the city and class identity were formed in the midst of the diversity which has been identified as the fundamental characteristic of medieval urban society.2 Cities and towns, by this definition, were places which supported not a single main occupation, such as agriculture or tin mining, but multiple industrial and trade occupations. The merchant is a convenient symbol of the city not because the urban was coextensive with the mercantile but because merchants were only to be found in urban places and because the larger and more intensively urban a town became, the more likely it was to be economically and politically dominated by merchants. English merchant elites constructed their own powerful and merchant-centred idea of the city through their control of civic government, regulating labour, access to markets and rights of citizenship, and through proclamations, records and civic ceremony which valorised ‘prudence’ and the ‘more sufficient’ members of the urban community.3 Merchant elites could sustain their idea of the city partly because, as Christopher Dyer states, 1

2 3

See Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (London, 2003), pp. 225–7; Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser, ‘The English Town in the Middle Ages’, in The English Medieval Town: A Reader in English Urban History 1200–1540, ed. Holt and Rosser (London, 1990), pp. 1–4. Holt and Rosser, ‘English Town’, p. 4; cf. R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53–4. See Barron, London, pp. 4, 139; Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948; repr. Ann Arbor, MI, 1962), pp. 14–15. On the discursive strategies by which fourteenthcentury London merchants reinforced or amplified their integral role in urban identity, see also Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284–93.

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‘without their management of the higher levels of the trading system, the larger towns in which they were based could not have existed’.4 In its essential diversity, however, the city meant as well that merchant culture intersected with different interests which also had a stake in urban society. One such intersection, central to late medieval society and, I wish to argue, to Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, involved commerce and the aristocratic household. 5 In a sense similar to the rather narrow one in which the late medieval city could be symbolised or spoken for by the merchant, the aristocratic or great household primarily projected a non-commercial way of living. Much of this lifestyle can be described as feudal in a general sense and it privileged ‘free’ or gift exchanges and enduring social relationships based on a diffuse and continually renewable sense of obligation. In the Shipman’s Tale, the urban merchant protagonist almost eats and breathes a commercial outlook, and several critics have engaged rewardingly with this dimension of the tale.6 It is less well appreciated that the merchant’s commercialism is beaten into shape in the tale against a set of non-commercial assumptions that answers to the model of the great household. Its dexterity in associating individual characters with both kinds of economy means that Chaucer’s short narrative neatly encodes the complex possibilities attending what Christopher Baswell has called ‘the increasingly divided, yet mutually embedded and mutually dependent, aristocratic and urban cultures of later medieval England’.7 Chaucer’s text accentuates the actual combination of great household and urban cultures which other texts insist on keeping apart. In Louise Fradenburg’s terms, the city was imagined as a site in which commercial exchange was isolated (as mercantile preoccupation or sin) so that ‘fantasies of magical surplus’ could be sustained by ‘an aristocratic order largely devoted to other methods of enrichment and to the joys of the gift’.8 Yet constructed separateness registers anxieties about much more complex real situations of overlap and movement between household modes. Merchants and aristocrats cultivated social links with each other, and merchants were able in the city to participate in the same 4

5

6

7 8

Dyer, Making a Living, p. 206. Cf. Jacques Le Goff’s remark that, in the medieval urban stereotype, ‘the central element of the city . . . is the marketplace’: The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1985), p. 155. For a caution against seeing markets as sufficient rather than necessary causes of urban development, see Holt and Rosser, ‘English Town’, p. 7. I use ‘aristocracy’ in a sense which includes all of the landed elites – lay nobility, gentry and higher clergy – who were distinguished by possessing manorial lordship. Cf. Dyer, Making a Living, p. 8; Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 75–7, 244. See, for example, V. J. Scattergood, ‘The Originality of the Shipman’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 11 (1976–7), 210–31; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 100–1, 123–4; Albert H. Silverman, ‘Sex and Money in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale’, Philological Quarterly, 32 (1953), 329–36; Peter Nicholson, ‘The “Shipman’s Tale” and the Fabliaux’, ELH, 45 (1978), 583–96; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI and London, 1991), pp. 322–33, 344–66. Christopher Baswell, ‘Aeneas in 1381’, NML, 5 (2002), 7–58 (p. 17). Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI, 1991), pp. 19, 6. Le Goff discusses twelfth-century French imaginings of the city in terms of a military class’s fears of eclipse by urbanisation and powerful bourgeois: The Medieval Imagination, pp. 151–76.

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kinds of consumption as the landed classes.9 For its part, the great household was never free (or determined to be free) of a commercial economy. Landowners owned towns and their markets, farmed out estates, knew that plate was a good way of storing capital as well as displaying eminence, and sought profit in trade.10 Developments in the fourteenth century saw great households become still more deeply involved with the cash nexus and the city. Demesne leasing increased, provincial fairs lost ground to the trade of London and other cities, and the lay aristocracy began taking up town houses in numbers in London and Southwark.11 Nevertheless, the gift economy, manorial lordship, and distinctive uses of land remained essential to the culture of the great household. The contemporary imagination of social identities could radically oversimplify and stratify aristocratic and urban spheres of interest, but its constructions also shaped aspirations, reinforced existing economic structures, and determined the public profiles of households. Wealthy landowning merchants did not always own land in an aristocratic way. Many Londoners bought land primarily to defray risk and not as a means to acquire aristocratic interests such as a patrimony to be preserved for the next generation, manorial lordship, or entry into the local community of ‘substantial men’ who took up local offices and commissions.12 By the same token, and unlike city-dwellers elsewhere in Europe, London citizens in Chaucer’s day did not become involved in the chivalric culture of tourney and heraldry in the way that Londoners would under Edward IV.13 Neither does aristocratic-style consumption by fourteenth-century London citizens generally seem to have rivalled that of their fifteenth-century and Tudor counterparts.14 Chaucer’s perception of urban culture would presumably have been most significantly shaped by his experience of London. The imagination of aristocracy and ‘urbanness’ which drives the Shipman’s Tale, however, is pertinent to any medieval urban place in which the surpluses of the most successful (typically mercantile) households presented the opportunity to exert political influence by the conversion of capital into non-commercial culture. Any particular medieval

9

10

11

12

13

14

See Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520, rev. edn (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 193, 205–8; Thrupp, Merchant Class, pp. 125, 130–90, 259–69; Barron, London, pp. 152–3, 224, 248–50. See Hilton, English and French Towns, p. 53; Dyer, Making a Living, esp. pp. 136–7, 218–27, 343–6; Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 46, 77–83; Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), pp. 249–51. Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 67–9, 92; Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 330–43; Barron, London, pp. 76–81; Caroline M. Barron, ‘Centres of Conspicuous Consumption: The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200–1550’, London Journal, 20 (1995), 1–16. See Thrupp, Merchant Class, pp. 121–7, 227–30. For the importance of patrimony to an aristocratic mentality and of local office-holding as a mark of gentry status, see Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 244–62, 275–346, 347–50. Caroline Barron, ‘Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture in Medieval London’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 219–41; Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘The Smithfield Tournament of 1390’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (1990), 1–20 (pp. 8–15); Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, pp. 300–8. See Thrupp, Merchant Class, esp. pp. 29, 33, 153–4, 259–60; Barron, London, p. 69.

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merchant may reveal a complex mixture of urban and provincial, commercial and largesse-based, mercantile and aristocratic attributes.15 The negotiations between bourgeois and aristocratic versions of the household in the tale refract social and economic complexities which were manifest on differing scale across northern Europe, in small towns (such as Saint-Denis) as well as metropolises (such as Bruges and London). Chaucer’s narrative fragments normative relationships between social status and economic behaviour, depicting moments of heterogeneity and suspended transition.

Commercial and Non-Commercial Economies The Shipman’s Tale is about a wealthy merchant who is seemingly in a position to adopt the economic practices of aristocracy. In thickening the fabliau plot of cozening and adultery with detailed evocation of mercantile and seigneurial milieux, Chaucer fashions a meditation on social groups’ tendency to self-fashion according to a select, artificially concentrated set of ideas. The Shipman’s Tale posits the availability of ethical, social-economic principles outside those status groups which would claim privileged possession of them. For the merchant in the tale behaves according to deep-rooted non-commercial assumptions about certain social relations, while Daun John, expert in accumulating social capital by the non-commercial codes of the great household, elsewhere displays a very keen commercial instinct in the adultery plot. This pluralism complicates a narrative about the cultural mechanics of social transition which ultimately suggests an accommodation between disparate economic modes. The merchant’s household economy shifts more firmly into a mode of largesse and worship, even if his own commercial instincts remain undimmed in the tale’s final lines. The merchant has attracted a great deal of critical attention as representative of an urban commercial class, but the comparable significance of his friend’s portrayal as an aristocrat is seldom enlarged upon.16 Merely his identification as a monk, which distinguishes Chaucer’s tale from its analogues,17 would have associated the friend with a medieval audience’s ideas about the great household. As Dyer has observed, monasteries increasingly resembled collective versions of gentry households in the late Middle Ages, ‘well integrated into local landed society’ so that ‘the better-off churchmen seem [sociologically] almost

15 For a study of the careers of two fourteenth-century London mercers which exemplifies this point, see

Stephen O’Connor, ‘Adam Fraunceys and John Pyel: Perceptions of Status among Merchants in Fourteenth-Century London’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. Dorothy J. Clayton, Richard G. Davies and Peter McNiven (Stroud, 1994), pp. 17–35. 16 For a succinct view of the generic, socially representative quality of the merchant, see Scattergood, ‘Originality’, p. 213. Scattergood reads the monk as a literary type in a moral frame of reference (p. 211; cf. pp. 214–15). 17 See Murray Copland, ‘The Shipman’s Tale: Chaucer and Boccaccio’, Medium Ævum, 35 (1966), 11–28 (pp. 11–13).

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indistinguishable from lay lords’.18 Moreover, the qualities which did distinguish monks from gentry – spiritual functions, celibacy and non-itinerancy – are precisely those which are suppressed or absent in the Shipman’s monk. This is hardly a literary accident. The conventions of estates satire, which Jill Mann has taught us to recognise in the Canterbury Tales, could only intensify the audience’s expectations of finding ‘daun John’ every inch the aristocrat. The stereotypical qualities of monkhood in sermons and poetry amount to a stylised inventory of the great household’s recreational and luxury culture. Even when complaint censures this culture in its own right, it is still assumed to be quintessentially aristocratic, and the cultural conspectus is often developed in neutral, even idealising language. This is because the tension between the ideas of a secular great household and a religious profession constitutes the satirical crux of the monastic stereotype. The signature vice of the monk in medieval homily and complaint is that he behaves exactly like a lay lord of the manor.19 Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrim Monk and the Shipman’s monk very naturally and plausibly take up the economy of the great household.20 The conventional ‘manorial’ monk is seen to hunt, to take on manorial responsibilities and to indulge a lord-like taste for luxury commodities. A facility for courtesy also sometimes features in his portrayal. Piers Plowman attacks a monk for lordship, for being an arbiter and land-purchaser: A ledere of lovedayes and a lond buggere, A prikere on a palfrey fro manere to manere, An heep of houndes at his ers as he a lord were.

(X, 304–6)21

The sumptuously dressed manorial supervisor of Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme ‘fait despense au large mein’ (spends open-handedly) and behaves ‘seignoral’, and in the fourteenth-century English poem ‘The Simonie’, monastic hunters ‘contrefeten knihtes’.22 The Shipman’s ‘noble monk’ is no exception in this context. He is ‘my lord daun John’ (VII, 312) and never fails with a gift of game fowl (VII, 72) – a luxury item which often stood for monks’ unclergy-like consumption.23 He also, of course, bears responsibility for his house’s demesne economy, ‘To seen hir graunges and hire bernes wyde’ (VII, 66) and (apparently) ‘To stoore’ properties with cattle (VII, 273). The introduction of the free-giving monk prepares an audience to understand 18 Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 54, 21. 19 See Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General

Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 17–37. 20 See Mann, Estates Satire, pp. 23–37. 21 William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C.

Schmidt, 2nd edn (London, 1987). 22 John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1899–1902), i,

lines 20958, 20961; The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. Thomas Wright, Camden Society, 6 (London, 1839), p. 329, line 122 (quoted in Mann, Estates Satire, p. 34). 23 Mann, Estates Satire, pp. 19–20; cf. Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 59–61.

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the Shipman’s Tale as a dialectic between urban and great household economic modes. The exchange theories of Pierre Bourdieu can be enlisted here to differentiate commercial behaviour, which the late medieval great household affects to disown, from the non-commercial exchange practices (including hospitality, gift- and almsgiving, quasi-feudal retaining, and manorial justice) which it privileges. Building on the work of Marcel Mauss, Bourdieu understands a wide spectrum of ‘gift’ or non-commercial exchanges, material and symbolic alike, as economically motivated but ostensibly non-economic. In contrast to commercial exchanges, which are explicitly and exactly economic, these exchanges depend upon processes of misrecognition (méconnaissance) which obscure and forestall resemblance to commercial exchange and so constitute the ‘sincere fiction of disinterested exchange’.24 Whereas commercial exchange requires exact counter-giving, time and difference cause a non-commercial exchange to be misrecognised as neither constituting nor requiring a sufficient act of counter-giving. Deferral of the counter-gift, and differentiation lest it be recognisable as an exact swap for the initial exchange, allow it to be perceived and experienced as a discrete act unconstrained by obligation or self-interest, ‘without any past or future, i.e. without calculation’.25 Commercial exchanges collapse the temporal interval and inexactitude which enable misrecognition. They disclose calculation in providing explicitly and exactly for an answering exchange. The respective (dominant) economic modes of the mercantile household and the great household affected not only the way capital was accumulated but the kinds of capital accumulated and the social stances they entailed. Commercial profit consists of exactly what is gained in a calculated transaction, and in the case of trade this meant cash, credit or further goods for exchange. Non-commercial profit, on the other hand, comprises the social capital of obligation. Thus, the great household exchanged largesse for ‘worship’ – deference which could be converted into various kinds of action and support within the manorial or regional community. In Chaucer’s tale, the monk accrues impressive social capital from the merchant’s household group by his guest-largesse. His unstudied ‘dispence’ and his ‘diligence/ To doon plesaunce’ (VII, 44–5) evidently pay off in changed circumstances. A neat echo connects the largesse of his earlier visits to his success when he comes to the merchant’s wife to complete their assignation: He noght forgat to yeve the leeste page In al that hous. (VII, 46–7) In al the hous ther nas so litel a knave Ne no wight elles, that he nas ful fayn That my lord daun John was come agayn.

(VII, 310)

24 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 5–6,

171. 25 Bourdieu, Theory of Practice, p. 171, emphasis original; cf. pp. 4–7.

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In this echo, the economics of largesse, its past and future, are made audible. As befits a non-commercial exchange nexus, however, the verbal and syntactical parallelism here intimates the household’s expectations without making any calculation on their part explicit. The history of their goodwill towards the monk is nonetheless apparent, and by making the household’s goodwill attend the adultery’s achievement (in the form finally of a lack of ‘suspecioun’, VII, 322), the tale completes the sequence whereby social capital generated by gift-giving turns out to guarantee the conversion of money into sex. A set of complementary scenes deepens the dialectic of great household and commerce across the complication of Chaucer’s plot. Two efficient vignettes of the merchant at work frame the tale’s longest and pivotal scene comprising the wife and the monk’s interview in the garden. The garden scene counterpoints the space, time and action of the framing episodes, dissecting commercial and non-commercial postures and social strategies.26 In these scenes, the merchant is at his most intransigently commercial while his wife and the monk combine in aristocratic style (VII, 75–254). The merchant, conspicuously placed in the business space of the counting house, is associated with kinds of exactness, literalness, and immediacy (or the direct, productive use of time) consistent with explicit calculation. Conversely, the encounter in the conventionally aristocratic leisure space of the garden is governed by non-commercial qualities of deferral, differentiation and indeterminacy. The ambience in the garden seems initially to dispel calculation. There is a marked divide between the scenes in terms of literal and non-literal speaking. The merchant gives his wife a literal, unembellished assessment of his occupation, in which ‘Scarsly amonges twelve tweye shul thryve’ (VII, 228), and instructs her without circumlocution (VII, 239–48). For the monk and the merchant’s wife, however, language is not a commercial currency. It is rendered inadequate for calculation. In the first place, their language is not comprehensive; it does not carry the whole burden of what is to be exchanged. When the monk ‘with that word . . . lough ful murily,/ And of his owene thought he wax al reed’ (VII, 110–11), non-verbal expression and physical signs even less precise than language stand for the thought which is the monk’s portion of exchange. Then, the less ambiguous gestures with which the monk connects cash and sex (‘And with that word he caughte hire by the flankes,/ And hire embraceth harde, and kiste hire ofte’, VII, 202–3) are unaccompanied by speech, as though silence at this moment will prevent the pair’s calculation springing outright into the open. Secondly, language in the garden is not transparent: it need not recognise its own meaning and the social exchange it facilitates. In other words, it enables misrecognition, as when the wife begins to complain about her husband:

26 The expository opening (VII, 1–52) and the bustling narrative paragraph which follows (VII, 53–61)

offer similarly structured contrasts.

152

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(VII, 163–5)

This disclaimer claims for itself and for the speech it prefaces the power not to say what it says, as well as implying unspoken sexual dissatisfaction by the convenient specificity (‘ “Neither abedde . . .” ’) of what is technically speaking a general statement (‘ “ne in noon oother place” ’). Finally, the markedly non-literal quality of the monk and wife’s conversation deflects calculation. In particular, their language is neither exact nor proportionate, so that no calculable relation can be established between the speaker’s situation or emotion and its expression. The wife indulges in exaggerated, unassessable absolutes (‘ “In al the reawme of France is ther no wyf/ . . .” ’, VII, 116; ‘ “Myn housbonde is to me the worste man/ That evere was sith that the world bigan” ’, VII, 161–2), and extreme imaginings (‘ “I swere,/ Though men me wolde al into pieces tere” ’, VII, 135–6). For her story of bourgeois domestic discontent she borrows the template of a saint’s ‘ “legende” ’ (VII, 145), having conjectured a kind of martyrdom by exile or suicide (VII, 121–3), and the monk answers this cue with oaths by saints (VII, 148–51). Suffering is unspeakable and a friendship can be instantaneously re-evaluated at the worth of a convenient leaf (VII, 147–50). For language to settle the value of anything in this territory – consolation, sex, one hundred francs – is an impossibility. This is not to say that the garden scene is not about an exchange of one thing for another. Indeed, at the level of action, the episode comprises a strikingly commercial exchange, as many critics have remarked, with the crux coming at the ‘ “frankes” ’/‘flankes’ couplet (VII, 201–2).27 The exchanges (money for sex) make a commercial transaction above all because the promise of sex is undeferred (and so recognisable as completing the exchange of money). This commercial substructure, however, is precisely the reason that the wife and the monk are so careful to de-commercialise their exchange at the level of language. As the great household is fully economic but fashions its social identity by privileging non-commercial exchange practices, so the wife and the monk handle the garden encounter as non-commercial communication (free, unbounded, and widely interested in much more about the interlocutor than money or sex). On one hand, we recognise the pair’s non-commercial language as cynical pretence. On the other hand, the language matters; for neither party would contemplate transacting sex and money in the merchant’s literalist parole. Approaching such a transaction directly would explode their shared (if lightly held) codes of social propriety. The incalculable language of the monk and wife resonates with ‘unreckoned’ narrative surplus in the garden scene. The merchant’s activity which bookends 27 See Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 100; Scattergood, ‘Originality’, p. 223; Nicholson, ‘The “Shipman’s

Tale” and the Fabliaux’, p. 589; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 350; also George R. Keiser, ‘Language and Meaning in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 12 (1977–8), 147–61 (pp. 148–51, 156).

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the scene is linear, purposive and measurable. The business of ‘reckoning’ an annual account accounts for every minute of the ‘meene tyme’ (VII, 87) while his wife dallies in the garden, and is itself, of course, quintessentially calculative. The merchant’s objectives are clear and he uses time insistently: the quality most characteristically associated with his activity is ‘haste’. Even – especially – when he entertains a guest, the narrative is brisk and full of briskness: And doun he gooth, no lenger wolde he lette. But hastily a messe was ther seyd, And spedily the tables were yleyd, And to the dyner faste they hem spedde, And richely this monk the chapman fedde. (VII, 250–4)

Akin to his initial travel preparations (VII, 53–61), the merchant’s eventual business in Bruges is a model of purpose and efficiency. Guided smoothly to his destination by his apprentice and, once there, going ‘faste and bisily/ Aboute his nede’ without diversions, ‘But as a marchaunt’ (VII, 300–5), his trip and its narration are the antithesis of knight errantry. Behaviour and accessories in the garden, conversely, appear to have no designated or acknowledged end. The monk is discovered straying ‘to and fro’ (VII, 90) while reciting devotions.28 Adding to a sense of superfluity, he performs his ritual ‘ful curteisly’ (VII, 91) and we notice in passing the wife’s ‘mayde child’ (VII, 95) whose presence proves only decorous.29 Certain inanimate objects also underwrite the split between mercantile and aristocratic economies. These domestic properties have little bearing on the plot, so, unlike everyday instruments such as Nicholas’s tubs in the Miller’s Tale or Symkyn’s staff in the Reeve’s Tale, they fulfil no fabliau expectations by symbolising cunning contrivance or apt comeuppance. The Shipman’s uniformly spare narrative style nonetheless affords the objects prominence, and they function like ciphers for the text’s twin discourses. The merchant is associated vividly with the door to his counting room, and especially with the deliberate, private and limiting action of shutting it fast (VII, 85–7, 249). His own person remains all but blank, uncluttered by items (apart from the hundred francs he lends) which might testify to sociability and the fluid exchange of gifts. The room in his house which we are allowed to visualise is not the communal hall but the private counting house, which presents not trestles, salt cellars and utensils for feasting, neither tapestries nor other ornament, but a ‘countyng-bord’ (VII, 83) and other utilitarian equipment of trade. The monk, in comparison, is a kind of walking 28 Cf. the monk’s roaming away out of the narrative after his adultery (‘And forth he rydeth hoom to his

abbeye,/ Or where hym list; namoore of hym I seye’, VII, 323–4) in contrast to the merchant’s insistently reiterated Bruges itinerary (55, 61, 199, 239, 258–60, 299–300). Much in this tale is suggestive of Jacques Le Goff’s opposition between ‘merchant’s time’ and ‘church’s time’ in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), pp. 29–42. Cf. Strohm, Social Chaucer, 123–5. 29 See Scattergood, ‘Originality’, p. 213; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 363–4.

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surplus, suggestive of the great household’s investment in largesse and the conversion of wealth into specially visible forms. He is repeatedly presented holding prestigious objects, either exchanging them in answer to no similar or temporally proximate initiating exchange (in the case of the game and full jugs of wine, 70–2), or simply revealing them to our gaze without intimating any significant transaction (the breviary and portable sundial which appear in the garden, 91, 131, 206).

Mixed Economies The work of the Shipman’s Tale, however, is intersectional, not polarising. Despite such vivid means of evoking competing economic modes and social typing, the tale does not chart a course to subordinate one elite in relation to the other, or to mark narrative and social success by the abandonment of one condition for the trappings of a loftier status. Despite cuckolding a representative merchant with a representative aristocrat, the narrative eschews sympathies which would render commerce and the merchant unsophisticated, unevolved victims of the worldly intelligence and subtlety of the monk and his milieu.30 Instead, it argues that values and traits commonly attributed to one social group are neither invariably nor exclusively the property of that group. The monk is shown to be adept in commercial and opportunistic behaviour, while the character most fully enacting the great household’s idealised values of enduring, non-commercially organised relationship is, in fact, the merchant. The main setting, introduced in the tale’s first line, itself announces the simultaneity and interpenetration of commercial and great household concerns. Saint-Denis had strong associations with mercantile as well as aristocratic milieux. The town staged an important fair and was well placed for commercial traffic on the road south to Paris. The Lendit fair ‘made Saint-Denis the commercial heart of the Île-de-France’ after it was granted in the early twelfth century, and it was still noteworthy three centuries later.31 Yet Saint-Denis was far-famed, of course, not only for trade but for its illustrious monastery (which itself owned the fair) and the monastery’s very strong associations with royal symbolism and ceremony. This religious great household presided over France’s royal mausoleum, the orif lamme, the head of the traditional royal entry route into Paris and, in its singular chronicle tradition, royal history itself.32 The merchant finds himself co-ordinated with both major aspects of his hometown. 30 On the unsanctimonious tone of the tale’s resolution, see Scattergood, ‘Originality’, pp. 226–7;

Nicholson, ‘The “Shipman’s Tale” and the Fabliaux’, pp. 584–5; but cf. Keiser, ‘Language and Meaning’, pp. 155–61. 31 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA, 1978), p. 30; A Parisian Journal 1405–1449, trans. Janet Shirley (Oxford, 1968), pp. 354, 365. See also Nicole Crossley-Holland, Living and Dining in Medieval Paris: The Household of a Fourteenth-Century Knight (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 67, 83–4; Atlas historique de Saint-Denis: Des origines au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Michaël Wyss (Paris, 1996), pp. 188–97. 32 Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 118–19; Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, p. 7.

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The monk first appears as a free-giving guest, a noble ‘waster’ who calculates only social degree. But a secondary introduction is attuned to the commercial base upon which largesse is ultimately founded: This noble monk, of which I yow devyse, Hath of his abbot, as hym list, licence, By cause he was a man of heigh prudence And eek an officer, out for to ryde, To seen hir graunges and hire bernes wyde.

(VII, 62–66)

As well as conforming to the ‘monk out of his cloister’ template of estates satire, this description of the monk presents a profile of the great household drawn from a commercial discourse as the abbot considers his institution according to mechanistic, explicitly economic imperatives of ‘prudence’.33 This version of the great household (of productive land and ‘winning’ as opposed to ‘wasting’) is of a piece with the counting house and reckonings of the merchant’s household. Both the monk (as an aristocrat) and the merchant behave partly against type in relation to personal trouthe. The conservative position on trouthe and social flux held ideal human relations to be based on enduring bonds which reflected social hierarchies (such as kinship, marriage, and service and affinity to the great household).34 The word signified in this context an imagined permanence and lack of self-interest or calculated exchanges in the maintenance of these bonds. Subversive relations, from the conservative viewpoint, were not cemented under the influence of unchanging hierarchy but responded to limited circumstances and the prospect of change beyond them.35 The social mobility and pressure on manorial relations which followed in the wake of the economic crises of the fourteenth century gave notions of trouthe and its implications of social stability a special currency and charge by the later decades of the century.36 The great household’s largesse and the city’s reputation as a place of economic opportunity and flux might suggest a sharp aristocratic–mercantile dichotomy around the question of trouthe-based relations. Yet, the pattern which emerges in the Shipman’s Tale is in no way so clear-cut. In the first place, the denizen of the abbey turns out to have the ethos furthest removed from trouthe. The monk invokes trouthe enigmatically (‘ “beeth as trewe as I shal 33 On Cistercian granges and their management, which combined commercial and feudal qualities, see

Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 134–7. Scattergood notes that the stewardship of granges typically fell to the office of cellarer (‘Originality’, pp. 214–15 and n. 33). 34 For the indenture mechanism of so-called ‘bastard feudalism’ as an attempt to adapt and preserve non-commercial means of obligation, see Scott L. Waugh, ‘Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 811–39. 35 Strohm has called attention to tensions between principles of permanent and ‘contractual’ relation in Chaucer’s world and writings, as well as these principles’ correspondence to non-commercial and commercial ideas: Social Chaucer, pp. 13–21, 84–109. 36 For the social impact of the fourteenth-century crises of famine and disease, see Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 271–97. Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, 1999) discusses pressures on established ideas of trouthe during the period.

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be” ’, VII, 207) and selectively. When he swears on ‘ “my trouthe” ’ (VII, 198) to supply money, his oath does not appeal to notions of permanent, uncalculated obligation to the wife, but is limited to fixing his side of a contract (the other side of which he implies when he catches hold of the wife). Moreover, this contract and the limited trouthe of the oath supersede the uncalculated ‘eterne alliaunce’ (VII, 40) which the monk owes to the man the oath will betray. Yet a general ‘commodification of exchange relations’ and an ‘extension of a mercantile ethos to all spheres of activity’ is not, I would argue, the tale’s bottom line.37 For the merchant’s part, of course, his business dealings and his domestic homily to his wife delivered before ‘his countour-dore’ present a thoroughly commercial (if hardly volatile) persona. A certain space is reserved in his character, however, for obligation grounded in the largesse imaginary and thence in unalloyed trouthe. The circulation of the one hundred francs is most often commented upon as tracing commercial exchanges (of initial loan, then loan reciprocated by sex, then loan repayment), but the money begins moving with an exchange which, though not a gift, is not fully commercial. For, described as behaving ‘gentilly’ (VII, 281), the merchant frames his generosity with a self-effacing rhetoric of free giving and backs up this rhetoric with a material displacement and deferral of calculation. His immediate response to the monk’s request, and the main impression he wishes to convey, is of largesse: ‘O cosyn myn, daun John, Now sikerly this is a smal requeste. My gold is youres, whan that it yow leste, And nat oonly my gold, but my chaffare. Take what yow list; God shilde that ye spare.’

(VII, 282–6)

The merchant goes on to impress on the monk, perhaps with some embarrassment (or instinct for the economic values his friend displays), that the loan is in fact an exchange that will need to be exactly reciprocated (VII, 287–92). Yet strikingly, in the light of other credit transactions constituted formally by recognisance (VII, 330–1), the merchant establishes nothing in writing (or by equivalent forms of oral witness and commemoration), and he stipulates neither a particular time limit (‘ “Paye it agayn whan it lith in youre ese” ’, VII, 291) nor any interest on this loan. He makes no commercial ‘rekynynge’, in other words, for the tying up of his capital.38 The suppression of interest and deferral of obligation allowed by the merchant constitute significant elements of misrecognition in this exchange of the hundred francs. The merchant’s address demonstrates that he decides his loan-gift according 37 Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 100, citing a critical tradition for this reading (n. 37). 38 An expectation of interest would not morally have been out of the question for the merchant. On theo-

logical views of usury, and canon law justifications of interest as compensation for damages pertaining to a loan contract or, indeed, as indemnification for lost (potential) profit under the title lucrum cessans, see Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 80–7.

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to a sense of misrecognised obligation. Responding to the monk as “ ‘cosyn myn’ ”, he recalls for us the non-commercial ingredients of permanent association (‘eterne alliaunce’) which were introduced at the beginning of the tale. A shared (birth)place has given rise to a loosely defined kinship (or ‘cosynage’, VII, 36) which the merchant continues to recognise as a powerful social force just as the great household and its lord were supposed to recognise the claims of kin and worthy neighbours (especially when reinforced by histories of hospitality). Surprisingly, in fact, the merchant proves to have no calculating view at all of his special association with the monk. This is evinced by the misunderstanding which arises between the friends in Paris when the monk takes friendly catching up for a hint about his loan (VII, 332–64). Chaucer takes some pains here and in the merchant’s recollection of his sincere embarrassment to his wife to make it clear that the merchant ‘ “thoughte nat to axen hym no thyng” ’ (VII, 394). We have seen the merchant unaffectedly ‘as glad . . . as fowel of day’ (VII, 38) at the inception of a relationship for which the monk may already harbour exploitative intentions, and the same ingenuousness marks his visit to the monk in Paris. Paradoxically, his literalism, which seems so commercial elsewhere, allows the merchant to compartmentalise attitudes that might otherwise interfere with each other. His own misrecognition of his loan-gift as uneconomic, and hence not akin to a commercial loan at all, is so sincere and unexamined that he fails to anticipate the monk’s reading surplus meaning into remarks about arranging finance.39 Even though his commercial and largesse mentalities are distinct, however, the merchant’s commercial interest drastically circumscribes his capacity for largesse. Effectively confined to a single friend in the narrative, the merchant’s largesse cannot develop into an aristocratic economy at the level of the household. The giving of the free loan demonstrates this limitation – the gift happens not in the public world of largesse but ‘prively’, witnessed by ‘No wight in al this world’ (VII, 294–5) – and the merchant’s explanation of his secrecy (that he must preserve his ‘ “name” ’ in order to ‘ “creaunce” ’, VII, 289) highlights his dependence on trade and credit. The merchant invests in future exchanges by his reputation for not giving open-endedly, diametrically opposing the great household’s investment in future exchanges by a reputation for free giving. Regardless of his care to limit its scope, the merchant’s dedication to relationships of uncalculated ‘chiertee’ (VII, 336) is exploited. Retrospectively, the monk’s initial ‘claiming’ of the merchant’s friendship appears less affable poise, more the boisterous bullying of a social-climbing con-artist: This yonge monk, that was so fair of face, Aqueynted was so with the goode man, Sith that hir firste knoweliche bigan, That in his hous as famulier was he As it is possible any freend to be. 39 For an alternative reading of this episode, based on a merchant who is insensitive and only superfi-

cially committed to friendship with the monk, see Keiser, ‘Language and Meaning’, pp. 151–5.

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Elliot Kendall And for as muchel as this goode man, And eek this monk of which that I bigan, Were bothe two yborn in o village, The monk hym claymeth as for cosynage, And he agayn; he seith nat ones nay. (VII, 28–37)

Phrases such as ‘hir first knoweliche’ and ‘eterne alliaunce’ (VII, 40) chime with the merchant’s ingenuous ‘plesaunce’ (VII, 39) to suggest a history of ‘cosynage’ stretching back to a period when the friends were ‘yborn in o village’. It is nowhere clear, however, how longstanding the friendship actually is. In unpunctuated lines, there is a strong ambiguity about the phrase ‘Sith that hir firste knoweliche bigan’. Does it signify the venerability or the unusual intensity of the pair’s acquaintance? Have the friends been acquainted since they were very young (and first capable of knowledge) or has the monk from the very outset of a new relationship made himself so acquainted with the merchant as to be extraordinarily ‘famulier’? Since the monk is co-opting a fact about his and the merchant’s lives actively to assert (‘claymeth’) a special relationship, we may detect a sense of urgency and chronological constriction inconsistent with aristocratic notions of the gradual, unwilled evolution of such bonds. The superlative characterisation of the monk’s ‘famulier’ status shifts in this context to sound like Chaucerian overstatement, and the language of ‘bretherhede’ and of mutual commitment for life (VII, 40–2) takes on overtones of the kinds of narrow relations forged for concerted and hierarchically exclusive ends which conservative views held to be deeply suspect. 40 From the beginning of the tale, then, we are prepared to discover that the merchant’s own naive, uncomplicated subscription to social values and principles of association which underpin the aristocratic management of largesse makes him vulnerable to their appropriation (by an aristocrat) for hidden commercial ends.

The Merchant, his Wife and her Aristocratic Economy The merchant’s enthusiasm for principles of association and obligation entirely compatible with an aristocratic social economy leads him to a limited kind of largesse. The scope of this giving, however, does not extend beyond his privileged friend to a household sphere and is evidently hemmed in by strong mercantile concerns of thrift, prudence and financial risk management. These concerns are voiced in his homily on keeping a ‘ “thrifty houshold” ’ (VII, 246) and his caveat impressing on the monk the importance of repayment. Ultimately, however, it may be that the circulation of the hundred francs leads the merchant into a more expansive engagement with the distinctive economic principles of the great household. 40 See Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. 91–6 and (on the Shipman’s Tale) pp. 100–2; cf. Paul Strohm,

Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), p. 60.

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The ending of the Shipman’s Tale and the wife’s joke of trading sex for dress money (to be scored ‘on my taille’, VII, 416) are sometimes read as a surrender to commercialism, either morally neutral or enervated.41 Such a reading risks reducing the complexity of the ending’s language and, by paying insufficient attention to the wife’s objectives, shuts out the non-commercial, largesse side of the dialectic that has been the warp and weft of the narrative from the beginning. The ending comes closer to a conflation of largesse and commerce than a suppression of one by the other. Since the opening of the tale, the wife has been aligned with the largesse economy of the great household. Her economic assumptions and desires are simply encoded in her seeking ‘array’ for dancing. This appetite for dress is an ordinary enough satirical trope, but array and dancing are not the final function of the wife’s desires. The presence of local, politically interested (if not astute) social esteem in the ‘greet repair’ (VII, 21) of the tale’s opening vignette intimates as much and, precisely because it is conventional, the wife’s demand for fashion can efficiently signify a wide set of economic principles and processes. The sumptuary legislation of the fourteenth century similarly construes ‘array’ as political, attempting to fix social hierarchy by stratifying its visual representation in dress.42 Clothing as a function of largesse and the household economy was especially important in the late medieval great household, and this is reflected by the value and wide distribution of livery of cloth and by taxation exemptions which seem to recognise clothing as a prerogative of a different order for knights and gentry than for burgesses.43 The great household required differentiated exchanges to disguise the economic roots of the material culture it transformed into extensive and politically important social relations. Gifts of livery robes were exchanged for service and loyalty without equating with payment from estate revenue. The ‘festes’ for which the wife wants ‘array’ produce goodwill, whether in the form of seemingly ephemeral ‘chiere and reverence’ or the more robust-sounding ‘worshipe’ (VII, 4–14). In the mid-century economic dialogue Wynnere and Wastoure, Winner rearticulates his core position in his bemusement at the ploughing of estate resources into expensive clothing ‘ “Lesse [þat]
e wrethe
our wifes þaire willes to folowe” ’.44 Unable to comprehend the social economics of ‘wasting’, Winner can see no imperative to keep spending and consuming when times are 41 See, for example, Scattergood, ‘Originality’, pp. 224–7; Silverman, ‘Sex and Money’, pp. 330–1;

Nicholson, ‘The “Shipman’s Tale” and the Fabliaux’, pp. 583–6, 592. 42 England’s most comprehensive sumptuary legislation was an ordinance of 1363: Statutes of the

Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–28), i, pp. 380–2. 43 Frédérique Lachaud, ‘Dress and Social Status in England before the Sumptuary Laws’, in Heraldry,

Pageantry and Social Display, ed. Coss and Keen, pp. 112–13; cf. Frédérique Lachaud, ‘Liveries of Robes in England, c.1200–c.1330’, English Historical Review, 111 (1996), 279–98. This economic function did not mean that merchants did not dress as expensively as aristocrats before (and then despite) the fourteenth-century sumptuary laws, but that clothing’s roles as prestigious gift and as symbolic enhancement of a household were perceived as aristocratic rather than urban. 44 Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg, EETS, OS, 297 (Oxford, 1990), line 395, cf. lines 402–14.

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tight in the landed economy. He thus ascribes wasting to non-rational (or feminine) impulse, so that wives and fashionable dresses become emblematic of wasting’s commercially impenetrable investment in social capital. Waster’s retort describes a complex, differentiated economy in which gift is commuted into affection, affection into confidence and prowess, and prowess into honour: ‘It lyes wele for a lede his lemman to fynde, Aftir hir faire chere to forthir hir herte. Then will scho loue hym lelely as hir lyfe one Make hym bolde and bown with brandes to smytte To schonn schenchipe and schame þer schalkes ere gadird.’ (428–32)

The anatomy of hospitality in the opening lines of the Shipman’s Tale does not unpack the nexus of array and worship with equivalent elaboration, but the somewhat conflicted exposition, combining materialistic calculation and incalculable social equations, closely resembles the earlier poem’s debate. On one side of these dialectics, Waster and the wife would agree that (by an unreckoned, misrecognised course) the end product of array and dancing is to be worship for the head of the household (VII, 13). The wife and monk’s roundabout success in transforming the merchant’s hundred francs into array and, apparently, in entrenching this resource allocation for the future marks a tentative new phase for great household economics in the merchant’s establishment. The commercialised terms in which the wife bargains to secure this arrangement are less of a threat to it than is the merchant’s persistent concern with thrift. The wife re-reads the monk’s circulation of the hundred francs as a contribution to a great household’s gift economy: ‘For, God it woot, I wende, withouten doute, That he hadde yeve it me bycause of yow To doon therwith myn honour and my prow, For cosynage, and eek for beele cheere That he hath had ful ofte tymes heere.’ (VII, 406–10)

The wife glosses the money economically but not commercially, as a gift or ‘thank’. The criteria it answers, the debts it repays from an uncounted history of hospitality (‘ “ful ofte tymes” ’) are too diverse and too imprecise (uncalculated or incalculable ‘ “cosynage” ’) to be commercially reckoned. It follows, then, that this gift can appropriately be reinvested in the largesse economy of ‘ “myn honour” ’, ‘ “my prow” ’ and ‘ “myn array” ’ (VII, 418). In this context, and in accordance with her consistent refrain about her husband’s honour (VII, 421), the wife is able to insist that the reinvestment is ‘ “nat on wast” ’ (VII, 419) but instead is economically useful consumption. Her extended joke on sexual debt and repayment (VII, 413–24) seems judged to ease her husband into a new receptiveness to the demands of largesse. Certainly, the joke commercialises their domestic economy of sex and array. The cost of array will not be provided freely (with misrecognition) but ‘scored’ to

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the wife’s bodily account. Yet the expression of this calculation – the joke – itself depends on polyvalent language, simultaneous meanings which are overdetermined in commercial terms and uncharacteristic of the merchant’s literalism. Moreover, the husband and wife’s commerce will produce a mixed economy. The commercial transactions of sex and dress money at the private centre of the merchant’s household will serve a largesse economy in the wider, public household. From this perspective, the new arrangement seems equivalent to the combined economy of any great household, in which largesse and commercial economies are mutually dependent. However commercially the merchant understands the exchange of sex for money, the array it yields functions non-commercially when the household engages ‘freely’ with the surrounding community. The wife seems to have diverted her husband’s sexual drive (which his exuberance on his return from Paris suggests has always been bound up with commercial ebbs and flows, VII, 375–9) into a system ultimately productive of further, social capital. Only the merchant’s final injunction to thrift (‘ “ne be namoore so large” ’, VII, 430–2) encumbers this redirection and clouds the prospect of his fuller, knowing embrace of great household economics. The tale is not resolved in terms of a progression from exclusively commercial to exclusively largesse economies. Instead, the opportunity for household reorganisation promises not metamorphosis but a recombination or shift of emphases. Largesse is revealed as different from but supported by commerce – a different balance from the monk’s use of largesse as a glossy vehicle for brazenly commercial conduct. The narrative arrives at a working relationship between the internal commercial exchange of sex and money by merchant and wife and the external largesse exchange of array and worship through hospitality. Chaucer’s tale receives the impression of the social possibilities of the late fourteenth-century city rather than seeking to disentangle and confine them. It registers the complex historical reality that ostensibly antithetical economic modes were differently combined in different situations and were mutually accommodating, indeed mutually reinforcing, in the households of both urban and aristocratic elites.

London and Money John Scatt ergood

London and Money: Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse JOHN SCATTERGOOD

I What is commonly considered to be Chaucer’s final poem, the Complaint to his Purse, is about money: it is a begging poem based on a witty comparison between a recalcitrant mistress and an empty purse. It juggles with the tropes of love poetry and exploits puns in its inimitable serio-comic vein. There have been various attempts to locate Chaucer’s inspiration in earlier begging poems by Deschamps, who was, like Chaucer, a royal servant who was often short of money,1 but none have been particularly persuasive: the fact that both Latin bursa and French bourse are feminine nouns may have been enough to spark Chaucer’s imagination, as also may the proverbial collocations between love and money. Or, at a deep level of self-parody, of which he was very capable, Chaucer may have been suggesting that his posture in his earlier days as an unsuccessful lover is matched in old age by a lack of success in acquiring money – since avarice was supposedly a characteristic vice of old age. But, whatever their origin, the puns pour out, in a copiousness which contrasts with the poem’s emphasis on lack: the ‘lyght’ (3) – that is ‘unchaste’ – mistress is asked to be serious or stable again (hevy, 4), just as the purse is asked to be filled; the desirable, peerless, golden ‘yelownesse’ (11) of the lady’s hair, or possibly complexion, is equated with gold; her wonderful voice (soune, 9) is compared to the jingle of coins. More poignantly, if Chaucer was aware of any

1

The debt to Deschamps was first proposed by W. W. Skeat in his edition of Chaucer: The Minor Poems (Oxford, 1888), p. 396. A. S. Cook suggested other begging poems by Deschamps which he thought were closer to Chaucer, and a non-satirical love ballade by the Châtelain de Coucy with an opening which is very similar to Chaucer’s, ‘A vos, amant, plus qu’a nule altre gent/ Est bien raisons que ma dolor complaigne . . .’ (see ‘Chaucerian Papers’, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 23 (1919), 33–8). After reviewing the evidence G. B. Pace and Alfred David conclude, ‘None of the alleged sources or of the imitations comes close to the language and humor of Chaucer’s poem’ (A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume V: The Minor Poems, Part One (Norman, 1982), p. 123).

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sort of illness he thought might be terminal, he uses the ‘dying for love’ topos in his refrains in the three-stanza ballade, though, tactfully, not in the envoy which holds out the possibility of rescue by Henry IV. A lack of love or a lack of money, he says, might be the death of him: ‘elles mote I dye’ (7, 14, 21). On this, an essentially literal level, the manner of the poem and its thrust are not difficult to understand. But the obvious biographical dimension of it provokes questions. The envoy represents Chaucer’s attempt, at some level, to come to terms with the new regime of Henry IV, but precisely how it does this has been a matter for debate.2 That line, however, which appears in the body of the poem, in which Chaucer asks his purse, ‘Out of this toune helpe me thurgh your myght’ (17), has largely been ignored by Chaucer’s biographers and critics, with a few exceptions. E. T. Donaldson read ‘tonne’ for ‘toune’ and glossed it as ‘predicament’ making the poem into a general complaint.3 Curt Bühler referred to the reading in the Morgan MS, ‘this night’ for ‘thurgh your myght’, and suggested that there was an earlier version of the poem in which Chaucer is expressing the need to avoid his debtors, by escape under cover of darkness, by doing a ‘moonlight flit’.4 Andrew Finnel, however, interprets ‘toune’ as Westminster, where Chaucer had taken a lease on a property on 24 December 1399, and asks ‘if Chaucer were to get the money he was asking for, why would he want to move out of London?’ He glosses line 17 as, ‘Help me so that I can once more walk the streets of London, help me so that I can leave this enclosure, this monastery.’5 His view is that Chaucer took a lease on a dwelling in Westminster so that he could escape his creditors – and his argument that sanctuary at Westminster was used for this purpose has some force. However, this interpretation of the poem, and its dating after Chaucer took the lease on the dwelling in Westminster, are not propositions with which I agree, and I should like to suggest an alternative reading which is bound up with ideas about the city of London, about the ethos of urban centres in general, and about escape from them.

II In his monumental study of the emergence of social space in Europe, Henri Lefebvre proposes that medieval cities are the products of what Marx called ‘accumulation’. Though medieval cities did not cease to be centres of government or religious centres they came to be associated, and shaped, by the ‘accumulation of riches’. The significant development, he argues, in the later Middle

2 3 4 5

For a recent review of the evidence and some new proposals, see Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 75–94. Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2nd edn (New York, 1975), p. 702. ‘A New Lydgate-Chaucer Manuscript’, Modern Language Notes, 52 (1937), 1–9. ‘The Poet as Sunday Man: “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse” ’, Chaucer Review, 8 (1973), 147–58.

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Ages was the marketplace, and, along with it, the market hall. What he says is worth quoting in full: The medieval revolution brought commerce inside the town and lodged it at the centre of a transformed urban space. The marketplace differed from the forum as from the agora: access to it was free, and it opened up on every side onto the surrounding territory – the territory the town dominated and exploited – and onto the countryside’s network of roads and lanes. The market hall, an inspired invention, was for its part as far removed from the portico as it was from the basilica; its function was to shelter the transaction of business while permitting the authorities to control it. The cathedral church was certainly not far away, but its tower no longer bore the symbols of knowledge and power; instead the freestanding campanile now dominated space – and would soon, as clock-tower, come to dominate time too.6

This is a generalisation, or better, a series of generalisations. The general truth of it is borne out by the physical remains of medieval cities. One only has to think of the cloth-hall which dominates the centre of Crakow, or the guildhouses which overlook the centres of Antwerp or Brussels, or the way in which the mechanical clock, used as a means of determining the length of the working day, proliferated through the cloth-towns of northern France and the Low Countries in the fourteenth century,7 to see the general truth of this. The present London Guildhall dates from 1411, though there was clearly some structure, probably on an adjacent site, as early as the first quarter of the twelfth century.8 What is more, the medieval street names of the city testify to the way in which it became dominated by trade – Cheapside, Cornhill, the Poultry, the Vintry, Bread Street, Pudding Lane. It is also evidence of the way in which cities were dominated by and controlled by mercantile interests that, when William Dunbar wanted to express his dissatisfaction with the state of Edinburgh, he calls upon merchants to do something about it: Quhy will ye merchantis of renoun Lat Edinburgh your nobill toun For laik of reformatioun The commone proffeitt tyine, and fame? Think ye not schame, That onie uther regioun Sall with dishonour hurt your name? (To the Merchantis of Edinburgh, 1–7)9

6 7

8 9

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), p. 265. On the development and proliferation of mechanical clocks in the later Middle Ages see Jacques le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), pp. 29–52; David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 1982), pp. 67–82. See Caroline M. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London, 1974), especially pp. 25–39. The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1979), no. 75, pp. 201–3.

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If Edinburgh is to maintain its reputation (name, 7), it is not the crown or the church who will have to exert themselves, but ‘merchantis of renoun’. But there are merchants and merchants. What Dunbar means by ‘merchantis of renoun’ are the substantial citizens of the town, not simply traders who sell their wares there: At your hie croce quhar gold and silk Sould be, thair is bot crudis and milk; And at your trone bot cokill and wilk, Pansches, pudingis of Jok and Jame . . .

(22–5)

So far as Dunbar is concerned the decay of Edinburgh is attributable to the appropriation of the space of the city by sellers of inferior goods – curds and milk, shellfish, tripe and sausages (or perhaps haggises) – who have displaced the goldsmiths and the silk merchants. This is a suggestion that an oligarchy of substantial merchants should reassert themselves, and it chimes well, in spirit, with the celebration in the poem on London of the luxury trades and their representative, a goldsmith. Written by a Scot, who may have been Dunbar,10 as a kind of literary thank-you and presented at a banquet given in Christmas week 1501 by the London citizenry in honour of the Scottish ambassadors, who were in London to negotiate the marriage between James IV and Margaret Tudor, London, Thou Art the Flour of Cities All ends with lavish praise of John Shaa, a goldsmith, who was mayor in that year: Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, With swerd of justise the rulith prudently. No Lord of Parys, Venyce or Floraunce In dygnytie or honoure goeth hym nye. He is exemplar, loode-ster, and guye; Principall patrone and roose orygynalle, Above all Maires as maister moost worthy; London, thou art the flour of Cities all. (49–56)11

Though John Shaa’s governance of the city is ‘pryncely’ he is not himself a prince. And when this author wants standards of comparison he uses the lords of other famous cities of western Europe, which are carefully chosen: in 1501 Paris was not the seat of the French kings; and Venice and Florence were each controlled by a signoria which consisted principally of merchants. Co-terminus with this growth in the importance of merchants went the development of a money economy, especially in cities. In his study of the use of money in medieval Europe, Peter Spufford argues that the money economy 10 For the problem of the authorship of London, thou art the Flour of Cities All see J. W. Baxter, William

Dunbar: A Biographical Study (Edinburgh, 1952), pp. 85–92, who reviews the evidence and believes on balance that the author was not Dunbar. For a more recent study which accepts this view see Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), pp. 44, 82. 11 For a text see The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. W. Mackay MacKenzie (Edinburgh, 1932), no. 88, pp. 177–8. For the editor’s defence of Dunbar’s authorship see pp. 240–1.

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came about as a result of a series of linked developments occurring in what he calls ‘the long thirteenth century’ and amounted to a commercial revolution. ‘In the countryside,’ he writes, ‘money-rent could oust both labour-rent and rent in kind as the dominant form of peasant rent.’ This had the advantage of freeing the more resourceful peasants from burdensome labour services, allowing them to develop their own farms and to sell the produce for cash. It was also in line with the wishes of the larger landlords to turn their assets into cash: Just as cultivable land ceased to be regarded as a source of immediately consumable produce and came to be seen as a source of money, so other resources came to be judged in terms of the money they would produce. Forests ceased to be seen merely in terms of hunting for pleasure or food and were valued in money terms.12

There is an interesting reflex of this in Winner and Waster, written about 1352 or a little later, where Winner makes this accusation in relation to the past and present behaviour of landowners: ‘
our forfadirs were fayne when any frende come For to schake to þe schawe and shewe hym þe estres, In iche holt that þay had ane hare for to fynde, Bryng to the brode lande bukkes ynewe To lache and to late goo to lightten þaire hertis. Now es it sett and solde, my sorowe es þe more, Wastes alle wilfully
oure wyfes to paye. That are were lordes in londe and ladyes riche, Now are þay nysottes of þe new gett so nysely attyred With sle
e slabbande sleves sleght to þe grounde, Ourlede all umbtourne with ermyn aboute . . .’ (402–12)13

The ancestral woodlands, which once provided for the chase, are being leased or sold for ready money in order to provide for a fashionable lifestyle. And the power of money, for the more traditional minded, was a source of disquiet. Throughout the later Middle Ages, as John A. Yunck long ago demonstrated, money became the subject of satirical writing: in Latin, ‘Nummus’ and ‘Munera’ emerged as powerful malign personifications, as in French did ‘Dan Denier’, and in English ‘Sir Penny’ – all of whom exercised massive influences in the new materialistic, proto-capitalist culture which was emerging.14 In a fifteenth-century English lyric, appropriately entitled by R. H. Robbins Money, Money!, the collocation between money and fashionable dress is made plain:

12 Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 241, 245. I am much indebted to this

comprehensive account, on which many of my generalizations in what follows are based. 13 Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (London,

1989), pp. 41–66. 14 The Lineage of Lady Meed: The Development of Mediaeval Venality Satire (Notre Dame, 1963), espe-

cially pp. 133–283.

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In kynges corte, wher money dothe route, Yt makyth the galandes to Iett, And for to were gorgeouse ther gere, Ther cappes a-wry to sett. (51, 9–12)15

It is not a historical accident that the earliest sumptuary laws to be promulgated in England date from the later Middle Ages – a rather timid ordinance of 1337 prohibiting the wearing of fur by certain categories of society, and a bolder, more far-reaching set of prohibitions in 1363. Significantly, neither seems to have had the least effect: the latter was withdrawn in the following year.16 The domination of money was perceived to be irresistible. The increased availability of money allowed for direct taxation, and as the incomes of kings and princes went up they began to pay their armies and officials in money rather than in grants of land. This increase in the availability of ready money also allowed rulers to stay in one place for longer: they did not any more have to ‘perambulate incessantly between places to which the produce of their estates could conveniently be brought for consumption’.17 Static administrative centres, provincial cities of importance, and eventually capitals grew up. By the end of the fourteenth century the central administrative offices of England were located in Westminster, staffed by men like Chaucer and Hoccleve, who received wages for their work; the law courts were in Westminster and London; and the royal court increasingly spent time in the capital. Because of a similar access to ready money lords were able to spend more time at court in the capital, bringing wealth from their country estates to their ‘hotels’ or ‘inns’ in the city. In London these were commonly built within the walls or along the river to the west and east ends of the city, or in the fields beyond: the Savoy palace of John of Gaunt was in the Strand between London and Westminster. To cater for less permanent dwellers in the capital – lesser lords and the gentry – herbergerie in the form of ‘commercial inns’ were developed, and it was one such, displaying ‘un novelle signe’, which caught Chaucer’s attention, according to his testimony of 15 October 1386, as he walked along Friday Street in the city of London, and mistook the arms of Sir Robert Grosvenor, of the county of Cheshire, for those of the Scrope family.18 The presence of lords such as these in the capital helped to create a market, based on their ability to spend

15 Historical Poems of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 1959), pp. 134–7. 16 For these attempts at legislation see Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders, 11 vols (London, 1810–28),

I. 280–1, and 380–2. For an account of this legislation see Francis Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926), especially pp. 53–5, for the lack of enforcement of the 1363 act and its repeal. See also my essay ‘Fashion and Morality in the Late Middle Ages’, in Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 1996), pp. 240–57. 17 Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, p. 249. 18 For Chaucer’s deposition in the Scrope against Grosvenor case see Chaucer Life-Records, ed. M. M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford, 1966), pp. 270–4. For a recent study of the incident in relation to other London itineraries of the same period see Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp. 3–19.

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ready money, for luxury goods, jewellery, clothes, food: ‘conspicuous consumption,’ to use Caroline Barron’s phrase, was part of their agenda.19 By the end of the fourteenth century, with its 30 to 40,000 inhabitants, London was easily the biggest city in England, and had been for some time the wealthiest.20 According to J. L. Bolton, by the first half of the century, this wealth ‘was beginning to act as a magnet to up-and-coming young men, especially from Norfolk and the East Midlands’.21 Such was the immigration from these areas that, it has been argued, a change in the dialect of London took place in the direction of east Midland.22 People were also drawn towards London by the possibility of making a living if their circumstances in the country were unfavourable, through some unforeseen disaster. In Piers Plowman, Langland testifies to the way in which ‘persones and parisch prestes’ complained to their bishops because their parishes ‘were pore sith the pestilence tyme’ to have permission ‘at London to dwelle’, so that they could try to make a living – presumably as chantry priests or as priests in guild chapels – ‘for silver is swete’ (B. Prologue, 83–86). Langland himself, who had a clerical training in ‘scole’, appears to have been one of the religious proletariat who were forced to come to London to eke out a living: ‘so Y leve in London and uplond bothe’ (C. V, 44), he says in a strongly autobiographical passage, implying that he goes wherever he can find work.23 But most of those who had business in London brought wealth in from the country. There is an interesting vignette of this in Winner and Waster, where the king advises Waster to set up as a restaurateur to cater for those coming in from outside the city: Chese þe forþe into þe Chepe, a chamber þou rere. Loke þi wyndowe be wyde and wayte þe aboute Where any botet beryn þurgh the burgh passe; Teche hym to þe taverne till he tayte worþe, Doo hym drynk al ny
te þat he dry be at morow, Sythen ken hym to þe crete to comforth his vaynes, Brynge hym to Bred Strete, bikken þi fynger, Schew hym of fatt schepe scholdirs ynewe Hotte for þe hungry, a hen oþer twayne, Sett hym softe one a sege and syþen sende after, Bryng out of þe burgh þe best þou may finde, And luke thi knave hafe a knoke bot he þe clothe spred; Bote late hym paye or he passe, and pik hym so clene 19 ‘Centres of Conspicuous Consumption: The Aristocratic Town House in London, 1200–1550’,

London Journal, 20 (1995), 1–16. 20 See Barron, London, pp. 238–41. 21 The Medieval English Economy 1150–1500 (London, 1980), p. 205. 22 For a careful summary of the evidence see David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (London,

1983), pp. 108–14. 23 Quotations are from The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols

(Oxford, 1886). On Langland and London see particularly Caroline Barron, ‘William Langland: A London Poet’, in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 91–109.

London and Money Þat fynd a peny in his purse and put owte his eghe! When þat es dronken and don, duell þer no lenger, Bot teche hym owt of þe townn to trotte aftir more, Then passe to þe Pultrie, þe peple þe knowes, And ken wele þi katour to knawen þi fode: The herons, þe hasteletez, þe henne wele serve, Þe pertrikes, þe plovers, þe oþer pulled bryddes, Þe albus, þis oþer foules, þe egretes dere. Þe more þou wastis þi wele, þe better þe Wynner lykes.

169

(474–95)

Generally, this is a passage, as the last line indicates, about the circulation of money: what is spent by one provides an income for another. But it is more precisely about a circulation which brings wealth into London. It is evident, from the precise articulation of space in the poem, that the mercantile nature of London, and only that, is stressed – ‘Chepe’, ‘Brede Strete’, ‘the Pultrie’ are all streets associated with trade, the last two with the victualling trades. And it is clear from the wine which is available, and especially from the range of game birds mentioned, that this is a fairly expensive eating-house. What is most interesting, though, in the present context, is that the wealth which sustains this luxury comes from outside London and that the replenishment of this wealth has to come from the same source. When the customer has spent all his money, Waster is advised to ‘teche him out of þe townn to trotte aftir more’. In this version of events, new money comes from the countryside. Towns can only function if they suck in wealth, and if, in turn, they provide goods and services for those who visit them. But for those needing these goods and services who did not have access to wealth, cities and towns were problematic, as is clear, in the fiction of London Lickpenny, from the predicament of the man from Kent who comes to the capital in search of justice.24 Ostensibly the poem is a satire on the venality of lawyers, of a fairly traditional sort. The man from Kent comes with a written ‘playnt’ (33) about how his ‘goodes were defrauded me by falshood’ (26), and shows it to lawyers at various courts – the King’s Bench, the Common Pleas, the court of Chancery. But though everybody thinks he has a good case nobody is prepared to prosecute it for him because he has no money: They lyked it well, when they had it reade; But, lackyng mony, I could not be sped. (34–5)

As he wanders disappointed through the unfamiliar urban landscape, the poem’s attack on a money-oriented society becomes broader: his hood is stolen (9) in Westminster, and in Cornhill, later, among ‘mutch stolen gere’ he sees it for sale (85–91), but cannot buy it back. Nor can he buy the ‘fyne felt hattes, or spectacles to reede’ (48) offered by the Flemish traders in Westminster, or the ‘velvet, sylke, and lawne’ or ‘Parys threde, the fynest in the land’ in Cheapside (64–8), 24 Historical Poems of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, no. 50, pp. 130–4.

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or the ‘spyce, peper and safforne’ (61–2), or the various cooked meats in the taverns,25 or the vegetables on offer, in various other locations throughout the city. He consoles himself with the thought that ‘a peny can do no more then it may’, drinks a pint of wine (95–6), and crosses the Thames back to Kent, though not by boat from Billingsgate because he does not have the fare (99–105). The venality of lawyers and the materialism of the city are part of the same culture, the poem suggests, which is based on the power of money. The narrator links the two in his closing couplet: Save London, and send trew lawyers there mede! For who-so wantes mony, with them shall not spede.

(111–12)

The ‘them’ of the final line is a little ambiguous: it could refer to ‘lawyers’, but is more likely to refer both to ‘London’ and to them, because they share a common orientation towards money. Government employees working in the capital, such as Chaucer, were not poor, but they did find it difficult when their salaries or annuities were late in being paid – as the case of Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk at the Office of the Privy Seal, demonstrates repeatedly, since he articulates his problems and grievances in a discontinuous series of confessional ‘begging poems’. In La Male Regle (1405–6) he confesses to having ruined his health and wasted his fortune through vanity and self-indulgence: he had a penchant for being called ‘maistir’ by Thames boatmen who transported him around the capital (185–208), and by the cooks at Westminster Gate (177–84); he frequented taverns, such as the Paul’s Head, with ‘Venus femal lusty children deere’, with whom he took ‘sweet wyn’ and ‘wafres thikke’ (137–52).26 For Hoccleve, in this poem, London is full of expensive temptations he is not strong enough to resist. And all this is a prelude to a request to Thomas Nevill, Lord Furnivall, sub-treasurer from December 1404 to April 1407, for payment of the Michaelmas instalment of his £10 annuity of 25 September 1405. Other poems make similar requests – one of the best of which is an elegant ballade to Sir Henry Somer, Lord Furnivall’s successor as sub-treasurer, punning on his name and asking in a series of seasonal metaphors, on behalf of himself and his fellow clerks, for payment of ‘our fruytes this late Mighelmesse’, that is, the autumn payment of 1407.27 The closure of La Male Regle is interesting in its intertextual nuances: As I seide, reewe on myn impotence, That likely am to sterve yit or eeve

25 Cookshops and restaurants had been a feature of London for a long time. In the description of William

FitzStephen, in about 1173, a cookshop (coquina) is mentioned: see F. Donald Logan and Sir Frank Stenton, Norman London (New York, 1990), pp. 52–3. 26 Quotations are from Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford, 1981), pp. 12–23. 27 See Selections from Hoccleve, pp. 25–6 for this poem. For the significance of Michaelmas in relation to the payment of government employees and references in Chaucer and Hoccleve see the essay, ‘Old Age, Love and Friendship in Chaucer’s Envoy to Scogan’, in John Scattergood, Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 1996), pp. 215–25.

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But if thow in this wyse me releeve. By coyn I gete may swich medecyne As may my hurtes alle that me greeve Exyle clene and voide me of peyne. (441–8)

This has much in common with Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse: in both there is a plea to a powerful man for money owed which, in the fictions of the poems (one regarding love and one regarding health) may save the writer’s life; Chaucer’s ‘or hyt be nyght’ may have suggested Hoccleve’s ‘or eeve’; and the ability to amend ‘alle oure harmes’ (25) in Chaucer may have suggested ‘my hurtes alle’. Hoccleve, who claims to have known Chaucer (and probably did) and to have been his poetic disciple, seems here to be rewriting Chaucer, because he recognised a similarity in their predicaments and realised what kind of poem Chaucer’s last poem is.

III There is evidence that by the late fourteenth century London had acquired the reputation for being a morally dubious and very expensive place. To be sure, it had acquired this reputation earlier with some writers. In a famous passage in his Chronicle, Richard of Devizes, in 1192 or 1193, had described London in highly uncomplimentary terms. A French Jew warns a junior colleague who is about to travel to London about the iniquities he can expect to find there: Londiniam venies. Ecce predico tibi. Quicquid in singulis, quicquid in universis partibus mundi mali vel militie est, in una illa civitate repperies. Lenonum choros non adeas. Ganearum gregibus non immiscearis. Vita thalum et tesserum, theatrum et tabernam. Plures ibi quam in tota Gallia trasones offendes. Gnatonum autem infinitus est numerus. Histriones, scurre, glabriones, garamantes, palpones, pusiones, molles, mascularii, ambubiae, farmacapole, crissarie, phitonisse, vultuarie, noctivage, magi, mimi, mendici, balatrones. Hoc genus omne totas replevere domos. Ergo, si nolueris habitare cum turpibus, non habitabis Londonie. [You will arrive in London. Behold, I prophesy to you. Whatever evil or malicious thing that can be found in any part of the world, you will find in that one city. Do not associate with the crowd of pimps; do not mingle with the throngs in the eating-houses; avoid dice and gambling, the theatre and the tavern. You will encounter more braggarts than in the whole of France. The number of parasites is infinite. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty-boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing- and dancing-girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-walkers, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons. All this sort of people fill all the houses. Therefore, if you do not want to live with evil-doers, do not live in London.]28 28 Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. John T. Appleby

(London and Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 65–6.

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This cannot be taken simply at face value. For one thing, William Fitzstephen had described the city in much different, more laudatory terms, twenty years earlier. But, more significantly, Richard of Devizes has no good word to say about any city he describes, except Winchester, probably because he was a monk at St Swithun’s Abbey there, though he does say that the citizens are prone to lying and spreading malicious rumours. Again, behind this text is another text. The sequence of criticism, ‘ambubiae, farmacapole . . . mimi, mendici, balatrones. Hoc genus omne . . .’, is based, with slight changes, on Horace’s Satires, I. ii. 1–3, so perhaps Richard of Devizes is writing this description essentially from written sources without having experienced London in any detail. Nevertheless, this unfavourable version of London did take hold, and evidently fed into the descriptions of the city which were produced in the fourteenth century. Chaucer, who was born in London and worked there and in Westminster for much of his life, probably left the city in 1386 when he gave up his lease on his dwelling in Aldgate and went to live in north Kent, possibly in Greenwich. In the same year, perhaps due to political pressure, he resigned his post at the London Customs House. From 12 July 1389 to 17 June 1391 he was Clerk of the King’s Works, but thereafter he had no regular employment and lived on his annuities and grants. Evidently he moved back to London, probably in 1398. In this year the responsibility for collecting a long-standing though small debt was transferred from the Sheriff of Kent to the Sheriff of London, which, according to Derek Pearsall, ‘suggests that Chaucer was back in the capital a year at least before he took the lease on the house in Westminster on 24 December 1399’.29 So, when Richard II was deposed on 30 September 1399 Chaucer found himself living in an expensive city with no guarantee that his annuities and grants would be renewed: for one thing, he had lost his copies of the documents which showed he was entitled to a £20 annuity and a tun of wine, and on 21 October 1399 new copies had to be issued. Chaucer had been sued for debt quite frequently through his life, and had had to borrow money, but now he may have been in real financial difficulties, or perhaps anticipated he would be. It seems to me that the Complaint to his Purse was written in the autumn of 1399, not in 1400 as is often argued, and that lines 17–18 embody the expectation that he will not be treated with particular generosity by Henry IV, but that he is asking for some money: Out of this toune helpe me thurgh your myght, Syn that ye wole nat ben my tresorere . . .

Line 18 appears to recognise that Chaucer’s purse is never going to be able to acquire for him or to provide him with great wealth: it will never be his ‘tresorere’, an official who in royal and noble households had the responsibility 29 The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 225. Though I do not agree

with Derek Pearsall’s dating of Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse, I am much indebted to his sure-footed account of Chaucer’s last years.

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for the acquisition and control of large quantities of money. Since this is the case, since he feels his income will never be large, Chaucer asks for some smaller amount of money in line 17, which Skeat, rightly in my view, glossed, ‘help me to retire from London to some cheaper place’.30 It seems to me that Chaucer is reacting to political difficulties in 1399 in the same way that he did in 1386, by trying to get out of London, which he perceives as an expensive and threatening place. He may even have been remembering the advice he had given in Truth, sometimes entitled ‘balade de bon conseyl’, to Sir Philip de la Vache, as Richard II’s supporters made themselves scarce when the Lords Appellant took control in 1386: Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse; Suffyce unto thy thing, though it be smal . . . (15–16)

Here the agenda is Stoic: Chaucer argues for withdrawal into a private and personal sense of the good, that salvation depends on the internalisation of virtue, the integrity of the individual, and on his good sense, which involves avoidance not confrontation.31 In the Complaint to his Purse there seems to be no leisure for a philosophical justification of action: the request in the envoy is raw and urgent, the request of someone who knows he is in immediate difficulties. In the event, Chaucer’s anxieties about money proved to be groundless. Something like ‘protected accommodation’ was organized, within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, in a house in which both his predecessor and successor were royal servants: the system, such as it was, evidently picked him up and helped to take care of him. And his grants and annuities were renewed – but not until mid-February 1400, though the letters patent confirming them are dated 13 October 1399, the date of Henry IV’s coronation.32 And, later in 1400, further gifts and grants came his way: a gift of £10 from the king on 21 February, to pay for the arrears of his annuity due on 29 September 1399, mandates on 11 May and 14 May 1400 for payment of the arrears that had accrued since Henry IV came to the throne on the new annuity of 40 marks and the former annuity of £20. Chaucer got £5 as part payment of the latter on 5 June 1400.33 Whether he felt himself to be financially secure cannot be known, but his situation had certainly improved. Nevertheless, October, November, and early December 1399 must have been worrying months for Chaucer, so much so that once again, though old and possibly ill, he had to contemplate leaving his native city, this time not primarily for political reasons but for economic ones.

30 Chaucer: The Minor Poems, p. 397. 31 For an interpretation of the poem in these terms see my Reading the Past, pp. 199–214. 32 See the excellent account of the renewal of Chaucer’s grants by Sumner Ferris, ‘The Date of Chau-

cer’s Final Annuity and “The Complaint to his Empty Purse”’, Modern Philology, 65 (1967), 45–52. 33 For details see Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 525–34.

AFTERLIVES

After the Fire Paul Davis

After the Fire: Chaucer and Urban Poetics, 1666–1743 PAUL DAVIS

I The London destroyed by the Great Fire was Chaucer’s London. As dawn broke over the capital on 2 September 1666, ‘London within the wall remained a medieval city’,1 and it was predominantly London within the wall that had been reduced to ashes by sundown on 7 September.2 More particularly, the fire originated in London’s most Chaucerian neighbourhood. During the period he was resident in the city as Controller of the Wool Custom, the poet would most days have walked the half-mile or so from Aldgate to the Wool Quay, near Billingsgate, between the Tower and London Bridge; and that half-mile, plus the further ten minutes’ walk along Thames Street required to reach his father’s house in the Vintry Ward, took Chaucer through the epicentre of the conflagration. Once the flames had passed on eastwards and northwards, Samuel Pepys took much the same route, surveying the damage. The diarist was a great admirer of Chaucer, put on to the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde during his early days in naval adminstration by the veteran mariner Sir John Mennes, and responsible in later life for persuading Dryden to ‘translate’ the portrait of the Parson from the General Prologue.3 With his taste for farce and gift for the colloquial, he is often described as a Chaucerian writer.4 Yet there is no sign in his 1 2

3

4

W. G. Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666 (London, 1923; repr. 1994), p. 6. The committee appointed to investigate the Fire recorded that it had consumed ‘three hundred seventy three Acres within the Walls of the City of London, and sixty three Acres . . . outside the Walls’, leaving only ‘seventy five Acres yet standing within the Walls unburnt’: A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations . . . [concerning] the late Dreadful Burning of the City of London (London, 1667), p. 1. For Pepys’ admiration of Chaucer, see The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (1970–83; repr. London, 1995), iv, p. 184; v, pp. 199, 237; and for his role in persuading Dryden to translate Chaucer’s character of the Parson, Letters and the Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. G. Howarth (London, 1932), p. 281. As, for instance, by Claire Tomalin, in Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (London, 2002), p. 88: ‘[The Diary’s] near literary relation is the fiction of Chaucer . . . another Londoner who worked in colloquial language three hundred years before [Pepys].’

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celebrated account of ‘walking through the town among the hot coals’ with his friends Mr Young and Mr Whistler, ‘our feet ready to burn’, that Pepys realised they were treading on the ashes of Chaucer’s London.5 It is not that Chaucer’s ties with London were unknown in the Restoration. That he held court employments under Edward III and Richard II, and was related through marriage to John of Gaunt, were matters Pepys could have found documented in the bible of Tudor antiquarianism, William Camden’s Britannia (1586); while from John Stow’s Survey of London (1580) he could have learned that Chaucer and his family had lodgings in Aldgate. Indeed, Chaucer was, if anything, more closely associated with London in Pepys’s lifetime than he is now. The parameters of the Chaucerian canon had not yet been securely established, and one effect of the many poems erroneously attributed to Chaucer was to exaggerate the centrality of the capital in his work. Stow, for instance, believed that the anonymous satire ‘Chance of the Dice’ was by Chaucer because it referred to the church of St Andrew the Apostle near Aldgate by its local nickname. More significantly, Chaucer’s seventeenth-century editor Thomas Speght identified the poet’s place of birth as London on the evidence of the paean to the capital contained in the most substantial of the poems he fathered on Chaucer: namely, the Testament of Love.6 Since this misattribution remained in force until the nineteenth century, for readers throughout the period covered by this essay it was not Thomas Usk but his more celebrated poetic friend who declared his ‘kindely love’ for ‘the Citie of London, that is to mee so deare and sweete, in which I was forth growne’.7 However, these urban tendencies in early-modern Chaucer scholarship were overridden by forces which impelled readers to think of him instead as the first great poet of the English countryside. Misattribution once again played a role: among the poems included in Speght’s edition and its eighteenth-century successors were a number of country tales and ‘faery’ idylls, notably the Flower and the Leaf which Dryden, by translating it, later made central to contemporary views of Chaucer’s mentality and career. But it was folk biography that did most to spread the idea that Chaucer was a rural poet. Popular encyclopaedias like Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662) and William Winstanley’s Lives of the English Poets (1687) retailed two traditions deriving ultimately from Camden, which identified Chaucer with Berkshire and Oxfordshire respectively. Camden had recorded that Dennington (i.e. Donnington) Castle, near Newbury, once belonged to a ‘Chaucer’,8 and while the great antiquarian specifically did not say that this was the poet, his readers were not so fastidious: passing the ruins of the castle on 9 June 1654, John 5 6 7

8

Diary, vii, p. 276 (5 September 1666). The passage in question occurs at I, 6. 86ff: Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. Gary W. Shawver (Toronto, 2002), p. 66. ‘The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer’, in The Workes of our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Speght (1598; repr. London, 1687) sig. a2r; ‘The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer’, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. William Urry and John Dart (London, 1721), p. ii. William Camden, Britannia (1586), trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1637), p. 284.

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Evelyn noted in his diary that it was ‘the possession of old Geofrie Chaucer’.9 For the view of Chaucer as the poet of the Oxfordshire countryside Camden was more to blame. His confident pronouncement that the poet had been ‘born and bred’ at Woodstock spawned over the course of the seventeenth century subsidiary legends of a ‘Chaucer’s house’, granted the poet in recompense for his diplomatic services to the crown and situated on the precise spot from which the park’s ‘famous polysyllabic echoes’ could best be heard, and a ‘Chaucer’s oak’ beneath which the poet whiled away his autumn years immortalising the surrounding landscape in verse.10 Each of these rural Chaucers was in some measure an ideological creation. The one who haunted the ruins of Dennington Castle was the genius loci of a ruralising royalist melancholy; for the castle had been destroyed, in the aftermath of the battle of Newbury, by the parliamentary army which, like the republican cause it served, royalists like Evelyn characterised as exclusively metropolitan.11 As for Woodstock Chaucer, he was caught in the crossfire surrounding what was arguably the single most contested rural site in the political geography of early eighteenth-century England. Queen Anne had bequeathed the park to the Duke of Marlborough, as a token of the nation’s thanks for his victory at the battle of Blenheim (1704), and thereafter it served to focus the controversy between supporters and critics of the Whig military hero. So when Chaucer ‘warble[d] through the Glades’ for the entertainment of Marlborough in Thomas Tickell’s On the Prospect of Peace (1712), he was conferring on the Duke a mantle of rural patriotism, deftly evoked by allusion to Milton’s line about Shakespeare ‘Warbl[ing] his native Wood-notes wilde’.12 Conversely, in George Lyttelton’s Blenheim (1727), on the surface another hymn to Marlborough and all his works, Chaucer’s surprise at finding that ‘His humble dwelling should the neighbour be/ Of Blenheim, house superb’, already seems to indict Marlborough of metropolitan arrogance and grandiosity, charges Lyttleton was soon to join in preferring against the Duke, as one of the group of disaffected Whigs, or so-called ‘boy patriots’, which came into being in the 1730s.13 9 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1955), iii, p. 100. 10 Edward Marshall, The Early History of Woodstock and its Environs (London, 1873), pp. 107–25. 11 London’s status as the home of rebellion is colourfully exemplified in the peroration of the royalist

pamphlet London’s Confession, but not Repentance (London, 1643): ‘If therefore Posterity shall aske, who broke down the bonds, to those streames of Blood, that have stained this earth; if they aske, who made Liberty captive, Truth criminall, Rapine just, Tyranny and Oppression lawfull; who blanched Rebellion, with the specious pretence of defence of Lawes, and Liberties, Warre with the desire of an established Peace, Sacriledge and Prophanation, with the Shew of Zeale, and Reformation: Lastly, if they aske who would have pulled the crown from the Kings head, taken the government off the hinge, dissolved Monarchy, inslaved the Lawes, and ruined their Countrey; say, ’twas the proud, unthankful, Schismatical, Rebellious, Bloody City of London.’ 12 Tickell, On the Prospect of Peace (London, 1712), p. 10; Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, 134, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flanagan (Boston, MA, 1998), p. 71. 13 Lyttelton, Blenheim (London, 1727), lines 141–2; for Lyttelton’s subsequent involvement with the ‘boy patriots’, see Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 85–7.

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In such contexts, Chaucer is not merely a country poet but a ‘Country’ poet. He adopts the ruralist idiom favoured by opponents of the metropolitan practices and values of successive ‘Court’ élites between the Interregnum and the middle of the eighteenth century.14 Under the terms of this idiom, London was a byword for corruption and opportunism, whether moral, political or economic; while the countryside was synonymous with constancy and rectitude. To compare the prefatory biography provided in Speght’s edition (1598) with the revised version printed in the edition compiled by Urry and Dart (1721) is to gain an aerial view of the progressive ‘Countrification’ of Chaucer over the course of the period treated in this essay. Speght recounts Chaucer’s various migrations to and from London – his attendance at the court of Edward III, his retreat into the country during the conflict between Richard II and the appellant lords, and his return to the capital on business in the year of his death – but he does so baldly. For Dart,15 by contrast, these migrations are freighted with ideological significance; they compose an exemplary narrative. ‘Dispossessed of places, power and wealth’ following the Peasants’ Revolt, Dart’s Chaucer retires to Woodstock for ‘quiet and the calm pleasures of a studious safety’, and then, in spite of inducements to return to court upon the accession of Henry IV, to the deeper countryside of Dennington, thinking it ‘high time to withdraw from the Court Stage . . . to consider and at distant leisure reflect upon what he had been doing’.16 ‘Quiet’ and ‘distant’ there connote not only geographical but also mental detachment, the altruistic largeness of outlook regularly ascribed in ‘Country’ rhetoric to those who enjoy panoramic country views, as Dart takes care to point out Chaucer did from Dennington Castle, with its ‘very fine prospect of several counties’.17 All in all, so thoroughly does Dart ‘Countrify’ Chaucer that, coming finally to his account of how the poet ‘while he followed his Causes at London . . . fell sick’ and died, it is difficult to believe the biographer did not intend his participial grammar to imply a measure of causality.

14 The first use of the adjective ‘Country’ to denote a cohesive ideology is often said to occur in the title

of A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (London, 1675), an attack on the absolutist and Catholicising tendencies of Charles II’s court; but elements of the ideology are clearly latent within Interregnum culture, to which effect see J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658–1714 (London, 1978). The best survey of the successive manifestations of ‘Country’ ideology over the course of the long eighteenth century remains J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985). 15 Significantly in the present connection, Dart’s revision of Speght’s biography may itself have been revised by the Jacobite cleric and leading ‘Country’ ideologue Francis Atterbury: for Atterbury’s probable involvement in the Urry & Dart edition, see William Alderson and Arnold Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship (Berkeley, CA, 1970), pp. 91–9; and on Atterbury as a spiritual leader of the ‘Country’ interest, see G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975). 16 ‘Life of Chaucer’, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. William Urry and John Dart (London, 1721), pp. xi, xiii. 17 Ibid., pp. xiv, xv; for the connection between ruralism and disinterest in eighteenth-century ‘prospect’ poems and landscape painting, see further John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–1830: An Equal Wide Survey (London, 1983).

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II The ‘translations’ from the Canterbury Tales included in Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) might be expected to conform to the tradition of ‘Countrifying’ Chaucer sketched in the last section. Having forfeited for his faith the metropolitan eminence he had enjoyed as Poet Laureate and Historiographer-Royal to the courts of Charles II and James II in the aftermath of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688, Dryden adopted a posture of ‘Country’ opposition for the remaining twelve years of his life. Barred as a Roman Catholic from living within a twelve-mile radius of the court, he made frequent visits to his relatives in Northamptonshire,18 and came increasingly to espouse ruralist principles. These principles inform much of Fables: most obviously, the volume’s longest ‘original’ poem, ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntingdonshire, Esquire’ which lauds the poet’s parliamentarian cousin for opposing on behalf of his rural constituents the despotic centralising ambitions of the Williamite court; and also, it would seem, the Chaucer translations. In ‘Palamon and Arcite: or, The Knight’s Tale’, Theseus, ample of moral vision and disinterested in the exercise of his regal power,19 is a grander version of John Driden, a ‘Country’ king; ‘The Character of a Good Parson’ has been called ‘a supplement’ to ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman’, advocating the equivalent in ecclesiastical policy of cousin Driden’s ‘Country’ politics;20 and the remaining tales are from the rural end of the Chaucerian poetic spectrum: ‘The Flower and the Leaf’, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (rustically re-named ‘The Cock and the Fox’) and ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (without the Prologue which establishes the Wife as Chaucer’s finest urban creation). In case there should remain any doubt about the reason for these choices, Dryden stipulated in the preface that ‘If I had desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, the Sumner, and, above all, the Wife of Bath, in the Prologue to her Tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town.’21 Yet, as we shall see in this section, Dryden’s Chaucer is not in fact a ‘Country’ poet. On the contrary, the view of Chaucer which Dryden expounds in the preface to Fables and which is implicit in his translations from the Canterbury Tales represents a significant challenge to the ‘Countrified’ norm. To begin with, his repudiation of ‘the town’ as a potential market for the translations needs careful interpretation; by ‘the town’ Dryden did not mean ‘London’, but 18 James Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, CT, 1987), pp. 500–9. 19 For his possession of the former quality, see David Hopkins, John Dryden (Cambridge, 1986), pp.

196–200; for his possession of the latter see, for instance, Dryden’s pointed upgrading of ‘this is my fulle assent,/ With al th’avys heere of my parlement’, in Theseus’s final speech, to ‘I have gained the assent/ Of my free people in full parliament’ (1121–2). 20 Cedric D. Reverand II, ‘Dryden’s Alter Egos’, in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2000), pp. 282–307 (p. 291). 21 Preface to Fables, in John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1987), p. 563.

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the newest of the three psycho-geographical locales into which the metropolis was conventionally divided in the later seventeenth century, to be distinguished from ‘the court’ on the one hand and ‘the city’ on the other.22 Having sprung up in the region now known as the West End during the intensive burst of redevelopment necessitated by the Great Fire, ‘the town’ was home to a mixture of the minor aristocracy priced out of the immediate environs of the court and up-and-coming rural bourgeois following the new fashion for spending the winter – the parliamentary and theatrical season – in the capital.23 At first, Dryden had assiduously cultivated this emergent audience as an alternative to the court whose reliability as a source of patronage was demonstrably on the wane; by the time he began work on Fables, however, his high hopes for it had been dashed. The self-elected arbiters of ‘the taste of the town’, crying out endlessly for sex comedies, had proved no less prescriptive in their demands than their courtly counterparts. It was the modishly debauched tastes of this particular metropolitan demographic, rather than urban readers in general, that Dryden was refusing to gratify when he decided not to include in Fables translations of Chaucer’s fabliaux.24 An alternative species of Londoner might have gathered from reading Dryden’s discussion of Chaucer in the preface that he was a poet after their own hearts. They would have needed to read it carefully, though; for it is only obliquely that Dryden brings Chaucer into relation with their untownly urban values and interests. Indeed, they might have needed to read it more than once to be sure of what they were hearing, for the values and interests in question, those of ‘the City’, are ones Dryden had made his name attacking as Poet Laureate to the courts of Charles II and James II. The merchants and bankers resident within the walls of the medieval City of London were a constant thorn in the side of Dryden’s royal masters: hotly Protestant, and increasingly prosperous, they wielded the engines of municipal government against the Catholicising and absolutist drift of court policy.25 In his great triptych of anti-City satires, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), MacFlecknoe (1682) and The Medal (1682), Dryden had assailed them with a variant of ‘Country’ ideology. He had made the City a metonym for moral corruption and cultural instability: moneymindedness, mob government, and sub-literary ephemera.26 But the Dryden of 22 See Harold Love, ‘Dryden, Rochester, and the Invention of the Town’, in John Dryden (1631–1700):

23

24

25

26

His Politics, his Plays, and his Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Newark, DE, 2004), pp. 36–50. Lawrence Stone, ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malment (Manchester, 1980), pp. 167–212. A trend for presenting Chaucer as a poet of urban bawdy had been set by, for instance, Thomas Jordan, The Walks of Islington (London, 1657), in which the rake Wildblood enters exclaiming: ‘By the wanton memory of Chaucer I could turn Poet,/ And write in as Heathen English; and as bawdy;/ I’le not to bed to night’. For the political and religious contexts of Dryden’s attacks on the City in this period, see Robert W. McHenry, ‘Dryden and the “Metropolis of Great Britain” ’, in The Restoration Mind, ed. Alan Marshall (Newark, DE, 1997), pp. 179–92 (pp. 184–9). In MacFlecknoe, stray sheets from the works of ‘neglected authors’ festoon Fleckno’s coronation in

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Fables occupied a rather different position on the cultural map of late seventeenth-century London: disillusioned with the town and cut off from the court, he was in the process of reconceiving his relation to the City, and Chaucer had a role to play in this process. The trading and financial districts of London provide the setting for Dryden’s account of Chaucer in the preface to Fables, the metaphorical backdrop against which his understanding of Chaucer’s sensibility comes into focus. Consider, first, the analogy Dryden uses to justify his modernisation of Chaucer’s language: ‘Words are not landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed.’27 Implicitly, this connects Chaucer with the Great Fire which had ‘removed’ many of the landmarks of the City of London as Dryden had first known it: the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, and (to turn from secular to ‘sacred’) St Paul’s and eighty-seven other parish churches.28 It had removed countless private landmarks too, the boundaries between individual Londoners’ properties within the labyrinthine streets of the medieval City, a fact which also registers in Dryden’s analogy whose phrasing inverts Deuteronomy 27: 17 in the King James Bible: ‘Cursed be he that removes his neighbour’s landmark.’ For several years after 1666 that biblical prohibition against invasions of property was impossible to sustain in London: special ‘Fire Courts’ were set up to hear the myriad disputes which arose among householders in connection with the ownership of land and liability for the expenses of rebuilding within the devastated areas of the City.29 The City atmosphere thickens as Dryden goes on to counter the objections of the scholarly élite capable of reading Chaucer in unmodernised form: Let them neglect my version, because they have no need of it. I made it for their sakes who understand sense and poetry as well as they; when that poetry and sense is put into words which they understand. I will go further, and dare to add, that what beauties I lose in some places, I give to others which had not them originally. But in this I may be partial to myself; let the reader judge, and I submit to his decision. Yet I think I have just occasion to complain of them, who because they understand Chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their countrymen of the same advantage, and hoard him up, as misers do their grandam gold, only to look on it themselves and hinder others from making use of it.30

27 28

29 30

the City, destined to be re-used as kitchen wrapping and toilet-paper, ‘Martys of pies, and relics of the bum’ (MacFlecknoe, 100–1; The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond, 5 vols (London, 1995), i, p. 323); in Absalom and Achitophel, the City mayor Slingsby Bethel argues that ‘kings were useless, and a clog to trade’ (615; Poems, i, p. 502); and in The Medal, Shaftesbury flatters his City supporters that ‘the multitude can never err,/ And sets the people in the papal chair’ (86–7; Poems, ii, p. 21). John Dryden, ed. Walker, p. 566. In a recent essay on ‘Dryden’s London’, Harold Love has described it as characteristic of Dryden’s response to the Fire that his ‘enormous desolation and sense of loss . . . are excluded from direct mention’, emerging instead metaphorically, in the form, for instance, of ‘a sense of time itself as only to be retained in confused, unsatisfactory snatches’: in Steven Zwicker, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 113–30 (pp. 114–15). T. F. Reddaway, London 1666: Fire and Rebuilding (London, 1966), pp. 6, 8–11. John Dryden, ed. Walker, p. 566.

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In valuing Chaucer’s work for its ‘sense and poetry’, in spite of its want of verbal elegance, Dryden flouts the insistence on dictional refinement which had long prevailed in courtly circles as well as those sections of the town which took their lead in matters of taste from the court.31 His equation of ‘sense’ with ‘poetry’ is more in keeping with the ethos of the City, the self-image of those who earn their living through trade, and who (then as now) like to think of themselves as solidly pragmatic, unpretentious but dependable, down to earth and brass tacks. That Dryden was speaking the dialect of this mercantile tribe is confirmed by the final sentence. For by construing ‘gold’ to be ‘used’ (re-cast in modern English and so made readable) by the ‘greater part of [his] countrymen’ rather than ‘hoarded’ by ‘misers’ (the ‘old Saxon friends’, as he belittlingly dubs them, who have no need of a modernized version) Dryden was tapping into a financial grievance sharply current among City merchants during the late 1690s. Throughout the Restoration, debate about the status of gold had raged between aristocrats who considered it the unchanging ground of value and as such not to be transacted, and mercantilists who treated it as a commodity to be exchanged like any other.32 This debate came to a head in the years immediately preceding the publication of Fables, as rumours of an imminent devaluation of the coinage frightened the ‘Nobilities’ into ‘hoarding and carrying of Gold in their Pockets’, with potentially deleterious consequences, as several spokesmen for the trading interest in the City disgustedly pointed out, for the economic health of the nation. 33 Taken together, those analogies and metaphors amount to a revaluation of the ethos of the City as Dryden had negatively defined it twenty years earlier. At the heart of this revaluation is a new attitude towards change. It had been a staple notion of Dryden’s satires on the City that it was an hysterically changeable environment, its politics subject to the violent and momentary whims of street mobs, its culture conditioned by the throwaway gazettes and lampoons which were the preferred reading matter of the apprentices who made up those mobs. Here again, transience is a defining condition of City life; but the citizen’s exposure to change, whether involuntary (the devastation wrought by the Fire) or voluntary (the circulation of money and goods) is presented as a human advantage, at worst leading to acceptance of an inevitable reality, at best sponsoring dynamic and creative forms of behaviour. Now, of course, it is Dryden himself rather than Chaucer who presents it in these positive moral lights. Chaucer is the catalyst, one might say, for Dryden’s self-identification with the City. Yet catalysts do not merely accompany processes; they enable them. To turn from

31 For the town as a satellite of the court, and its fashionable residents as imitators of the vocabulary

(especially French) and style of speech of courtiers, see Love, ‘Dryden, Rochester, and the Invention of the Town’, pp. 46–8. 32 A narrative of the controversy is provided in Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 173–6, 202–5. 33 Hugh Chamberlain, A Collection of Some Papers Writ upon Several Occasions, Concerning Clipt and Counterfeit Money, and Trade, so far as it relates to the Exportation of Bullion (London, 1696), p. 4.

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Dryden’s account of Chaucer in the preface to Fables to the Chaucerian translations themselves within the volume is to observe the part Chaucer played in bringing Dryden to embrace the state of flux metonymically represented by the City. It is to come to see that for Dryden Chaucer, whether or not he happened to be addressing an urban subject or writing in an urban mode, was a poet of the City, in the deep-lying moral sense of being constitutionally preoccupied with vicissitude as an ineluctable fact of human life, and, moreover, of regarding acceptance of that fact as a moral virtue, a high humane achievement. Witness Dryden’s translation of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the one he reports in the preface he was first driven to translate as he looked through the Canterbury Tales. What he specially valued in the tale was the hag’s speech to the knight on their wedding night; her ‘argument of preferring virtue to nobility of blood and titles’ struck him as the quintessence of Chaucerian ‘good sense’.34 That may appear to suggest that read Chaucer as a poet of moral truism; but within the translation itself what Dryden’s hag opposes to the knight’s snobbishness is not lumpen moralising but a yeasty vision of human changefulness, a vision Dryden rises to the task of realising in couplets strikingly various and liquid in their movement: The father sinks within his son, we see, And often rises in the third degree; If better luck a better mother give, Chance gave us being, and by chance we live. Such as our atoms were, e’en such are we, Or call it chance, or strong necessity: Thus loaded with dead weight, the will is free. And thus it needs must be; for seed conjoined Lets into nature’s work the imperfect kind; But fire, the enlivener of the general frame, Is one, its operation still the same. Its principle is in itself: while ours Works, as confederates war, with mingled powers; Or man or woman, whichsoever fails; And oft the vigour of the worse prevails. Ether, with sulphur blended, alters hue, And casts a dusky gleam of Sodom blue. Thus in a brute their ancient honour ends, And the fair mermaid in a fish descends: The line is gone; no longer duke or earl; But by himself degraded, turns a churl.35

420

425

430

435

With its mobile disposition of the caesura (418, 427–30, 433), its arrangement of internal rhyme across line and period divisions to loosen syntax (424–5, 432–3, 434–5), its interposition of triplets and alexandrines (422–4, 430) to 34 John Dryden, ed. Walker, p. 564. 35 ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, 418–38; in John Dryden, ed. Walker, pp. 812–13.

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variegate prosody, and its improvisatory way with conjunctions (419, 423, 425), this speech convinces as much by its cadence as its content. Given the hag’s ‘faery’ provenance, her attunement to the shocks of change which human kind is heir to cannot be made explicitly to emerge from urban experience; but it is, in the terms of Dryden’s engagement with Chaucer, implicitly urban. The knight’s sclerotic fixation on pedigree is a product of his ‘Country’ upbringing at the hands of ‘ancestors, who puff your mind with pride,/ And vast estates to mighty titles tied’ (393–4), and the sane corrective the hag offers to it is recognisably continuous with that Dryden offers in the preface to readers of Chaucer who venerate his words as ‘landmarks so sacred as never to be removed’: most strikingly so when she brings out mankind’s subjection to flux by contrast with the irreducible element – fire – which had lately reduced to ash so many of London’s landmarks. Both are forms of urban ‘good sense’, exposing the element of fantasy entailed in ‘Country’ aspirations towards changeless permanence. The notably responsive movement of the couplets Dryden found for the hag’s speech is not the only sign that the lesson which she teaches the knight was one for which he felt a particular affinity. Twice in the last couplet – at ‘line’ and again at ‘turns’ – Dryden tacitly applies her understanding of impermanence as an inescapable condition of human being to his own case as a poet. The ‘line’ is primarily a line of breeding, but also, by secondary implication, a line of verse. Similarly, ‘turns’ means, first and foremost, ‘changes’, but may in the circumstances also bring to mind ‘translates’. Early on in the preface Dryden asserted that poets ‘have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families’: ‘Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax’, while ‘Spenser more than once insinuates that . . . he was begotten by [Chaucer] two hundred years after his decease.’36 Chaucer’s hag reminded him of the corollary of that gratifying speculation: poetic heritages can no more remain unchangingly pure than the bloodlines of the nobility. To turn the work of a poetic ancestor, as Dryden did Chaucer’s, is necessarily, in some measure, to bastardise it. Some at least of the original poet’s lines must go if his poetic line is to be perpetuated. The republic of letters is a city, its skyline constantly remodelled, its wealth ceaselessly circulated. From the hag’s speech Dryden deduced that Chaucer recognised his writings, like London itself, would survive for future generations only in and through change, cross-breeding, as what the hag calls ‘imperfect kind’. Dryden accepted as much where his own works were concerned when in the preface, having remarked that he had taken the liberty to alter Chaucer’s text ‘where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true lustre for want of words in the beginning of our language’, he went on: ‘Another poet in another age may take the same liberty with my writings; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction.’37

36 Ibid., pp. 552–3. 37 Ibid., p. 565.

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III The place in Chaucer’s work where the three concerns I argued in the last section he prompted Dryden to connect – the city, change, and fame – come most directly into relation is in the description of the House of Rumour. Yet, perhaps because it lacks the strong narrative pulse that characterises the poems included in Fables, Dryden never translated the House of Fame. That task he left for the other first-rank English poet who engaged sustainedly with Chaucer during the period surveyed in this essay: his poetic ‘son’ Alexander Pope. The Temple of Fame (as it became in Pope’s version) was published in 1715 but composed some years earlier as part of a programme of Chaucerian translation Pope undertook in his early twenties in the interests of stylistic self-education.38 The other products of that programme were ‘January and May; Or, The Merchant’s Tale’, included in Poetical Miscellanies, the Sixth Part (1709) and ‘The Wife of Bath, her Prologue’, in Richard Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (1713). Both had featured among the parts of the Canterbury Tales which Dryden had avoided as too prone to appeal to ‘the beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town’, and that was precisely the audience Pope had in mind as he translated them. His version of how the Wife of Bath kept her husbands keen by treating them mean is characteristic: ‘I levied first a tax upon his need,/ Then let him – ’twas a nicety indeed!’39 That lubricious aposiopesis is the rhetorical calling-card of the man-about-town, which is what the young Pope, rusticated at Binfield, was desperate to seem in letters to metropolitan friends like Henry Cromwell and William Wycherley.40 Such callow urbanities are absent from The Temple of Fame. Aimed not at a ‘town’ audience, indeed, to a significant extent, at no audience beyond Pope himself, it marks the beginning of a new maturity and interiority in his relationship with Chaucer, and in particular with Chaucer’s urban vision. A diligent and devoted student of Dryden’s writings, Pope appears to have taken the force of Dryden’s self-identification with Chaucer over the vicissitudes of literary futurity; some celebrated lines from An Essay on Criticism (1711) twin the two poets in this connection: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare threescore is all ev’n that can boast; Our sons their fathers failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.41

38 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT, 1985), pp. 125, 163. 39 ‘The Wife of Bath, her Prologue’, 166–9; Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1966; repr.

1978), p. 172. 40 On Pope’s early self-presentation as urbane amorist, see Dustin Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in

the Poems (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 39–42. 41 An Essay on Criticism, 480–3; Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 77.

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But much as Pope admired Dryden, referring to him as his ‘master’ as well as his ‘father’, his sensibility contrasted with Dryden’s in a number of respects. Their attitudes towards fame were one such point of contrast. Whereas Dryden took little thought for his poetic legacy, neglecting to hone his writings through revision or mould them into a stable and unified oeuvre,42 Pope notoriously went to considerable lengths to do both, preoccupied as he was throughout his career by his prospects of lasting futurity.43 That the literary afterlife might be as subject to the vagaries of change and chance as any earthly city was a possibility Dryden had contemplated in his translation of the Wife of Bath’s Tale with something approaching equanimity; but when Pope was brought to confront that possibility by Chaucer’s presentation of the House of Rumour, it stirred up in him a deep-lying anxiety. This anxiety comes to a head when Chaucer’s dreamer compares the febrile, hyper-kinetic activity inside the House of Rumour to the spread of fire within a city; an image which for any Londoner of this period inevitably brought to mind – and had, in Chaucerian contexts, brought to Dryden’s mind – the precarious and volatile nature of their urban environment: Thus, north and southe Went every [mote] fro mouthe to mouthe, And that encresing ever moo, As fir ys wont to quyk and goo From a spark spronge amys, Till alle a citee brent up ys. (The House of Fame, 2075–80)44

In Chaucer, these lines culminate a passage describing in generalised terms the inflation of rumours as they spread from ‘oon’ to ‘another wight’ and on to a ‘thrid’; the dreamer reports what he saw in a wide-eyed tone established by the passage’s introductory phrase: ‘But al the wondermost was this’.45 Had Dryden translated the passage for Fables, he would probably have preserved its strain of wonder – amazement shading into awe – at the chaotic vitality of the urban scene. Contrast Pope: Above, below, without, within, around, Confus’d, unnumber’d multitudes are found, Who pass, repass, advance, and glide away; Hosts rais’d by fear, and phantoms of a day: Astrologers, that future fates foreshew, Projectors, quacks, and lawyers not a few;

42 Paul Hammond, ‘The Circulation of Dryden’s Poetry’, in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of

America, 86 (1992), 379–409 (pp. 380–2). 43 The classic account of the contrast between Pope and Dryden on this score is Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life

of Pope’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols (Oxford, 1905; repr. New York, 1967), iii, pp. 221–3. 44 Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (Harlow, 1997), pp. 209–10. 45 The House of Fame, 2060–1, 2070, 2059.

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And priests, and party-zealots, num’rous bands With home-born lyes, or tales from foreign lands; Each talk’d aloud, or in some secret place, And wild impatience star’d in ev’ry face. The flying rumours gather’d as they roll’d. Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who heard it, made enlargements too, In ev’ry ear it spread, on ev’ry tongue it grew. Thus flying east and west, and north and south, News travel’d with increase from mouth to mouth. So from a spark, that kindled first by chance, With gath’ring force the quick’ning flames aspire, And tow’rs and temples sink in floods of fire.46

‘Fear’, not wonder, is now the prevailing emotion. What kind of fear is suggested by Pope’s roster of rumour-mongers, which is more particularised than Chaucer’s, and especially by the pairing with which it reaches its plosive climax: ‘priests, and party-zealots’. This doublet broaches the long-running history of scares about ‘Popery’ (politically subversive Catholicism) which made London throughout the period treated in this essay an incendiary and provisional environment – a veritable House of Rumour – for Roman Catholics like Pope. At any moment, ‘Hosts rais’d by fear’ – the phrase equally evokes a fifth column of rebellious Catholics rumoured into existence by paranoid Londoners, and a vengeful Protestant mob brought out on to London’s streets by rumours of ‘the church in danger’ – might throw the daily lives of the capital’s Catholics into confusion. Years of existing peaceably alongside their fellow Londoners could be effaced by the transient insecurities of the Protestant government at home (‘home-born lyes’) or the faddish adventurism of Roman Catholic powers on the continent (‘tales from foreign lands’). Publication of The Temple of Fame coincided with an eruption of such anti-Catholic panic, caused by the first Jacobite rebellion of 1715; a later flare-up in 1723, when unfounded rumours of a second rebellion were cynically fanned by the Whig ministry, almost resulted in Pope being imprisoned or exiled.47 But the provisionality of life as a Roman Catholic in London had been a condition of the poet’s existence long before he encountered it at first-hand as an adult: the prospect of reprisals following the ‘Glorious’ Revolution persuaded his father, Alexander Pope senior, to fold up his profitable import-export linen business at about the time of the poet’s birth, and then, once those reprisals materialised, to move the family out of the capital, first to Hammersmith and then to Binfield.48 The event which for Pope encapsulated this entire formative history of subjection to change and chance, and in particular its consequences

46 The Temple of Fame (1715), 458–78; Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 145. 47 Mack, Pope: A Life, pp. 392–403. 48 Ibid., pp. 21–4, 37–40.

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for him as an aspirant to literary fame, was the Great Fire. In later years, his futurity now more or less assured, Pope would angrily denounce the Monument in the Epistle to Bathurst (1733) as the fit landmark of the Protestant City, ‘London’s column’ which ‘pointing at the skies,/ Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lyes’:49 that is to say, perpetuates the rumour that Catholics started the Fire. But for the Pope of The Temple of Fame, a poet in the early stages of ‘building a monument’,50 such defiance was not yet possible. In him, the Fire as a trope of anarchic urban caprice – and of his special vulnerability as a Roman Catholic to the effects of such caprice – roused not ire but ‘fear’, the fear that ‘a spark, . . . kindled first by chance’ would consume his hopes of one day entering the Temple of Fame as it had once consumed the ‘temples’ of medieval – Catholic – London. The various avenues of argument pursued in this essay converge on The Dunciad (1728–43). Pope’s masterpiece of urban satire gives a final twist to the interrelations between Chaucer, the incendiary changeableness of the City, and the ethics of fame. The poem extrapolates on an epic scale the analysis of the culture of early eighteenth-century London which Chaucer’s description of the House of Rumour had incited Pope to broach. Once again, the City is a hive of capricious and diurnal activity: spreading from the centre of the capital’s book-trade around St Paul’s and Moorfields out across ‘the town’ to the court, the anecdotal gossip and scandalous chit-chat which passes now for literature is threatening to drown out traditionary canons of truth and value: economic, political, moral, religious. Yet, as commentators have increasingly insisted in recent years, The Dunciad is no mere ‘Country’ manifesto. Pope may have designed it as a smoothly functioning ideological vehicle; but there is a ghost in the machine. Between the poem’s lines there runs a vein of sympathy – even fondness – for the dunces.51 Their unselfconscious and unapologetic mediocrity, their sheer imperviousness to anxieties about the worth of their work, the security of their claims to fame, occasioned in Pope not only the disgust which is his ostensible response, but also, latently, something approximating to the ‘wonder’ which the denizens of the House of Rumour provoke in Chaucer’s dreamer. In The Temple of Fame, Pope had proved unwilling or unable to find the ephemeral energies of the City wondrous. But he did so in passages from The Dunciad such as the description of the phantom poet for whom the hack booksellers run their footrace during the ‘heroic’ games in Book II – ‘A shapeless shade . . . / Like forms in clouds, or visions of the night’ – or the account in Book III of the ‘new world’ staged in Drury Lane pantomimes – ‘The forests dance, the rivers upward rise,/ Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies;/ And last, to give the whole creation grace,/ Lo! one vast Egg produces human race’.52 In 49 Epistle to Bathurst (1733), 339–40; Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 312. 50 Preface to Works (1717); Poetical Works, p. 5. 51 The classic exposition of this view of the poem is Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and Dulness’, in Proceedings of

the British Academy, 54 (1968), 231–63. 52 The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), II, 111–12; III, 245–8; I quote from the text of Valerie Rumbold’s

Longman Annotated Texts edition (Harlow, 1999), pp. 161, 250–1.

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such passages, it might be said, The Dunciad manifests a Chaucerian urban sub-conscious. But The Dunciad is not pro-City. To stress its unconscious urban affinities at the expense of its conscious design, as some modern critics have done in their determination to prevent Pope from being taken for a ‘Country’ reactionary, is to risk misrepresenting both the poem and its author. Between finishing The Temple of Fame and beginning The Dunciad, Pope had not completely conquered the fear of his own evanescence aroused in him by urban phenomena. The Dunciad was designed to obviate that fear: it is, after all, an epic – a singular kind of epic, admittedly, but an epic nonetheless – and of all the genres epic conferred the largest measure of fame on its practitioners. But how to build a lasting poetic monument out of the perishable materials of the City? Some of Pope’s friends doubted it could be done. Obsolescence seemed inbuilt into the poem’s satirical method, its dependence on topical knowledge of events and personalities relating to the contemporary London cultural scene. Swift saw the danger, and suggested a means of avoiding it: The Notes I could wish to be very large, in what relates to the persons concerned; for I have long observed that twenty miles from London no body understands hints, initial letters, or town-facts and passages; and in a few years not even those who live in London. I would have the names of those scriblers printed indexically at the beginning or end of the Poem, with an account of their works, for the reader to refer to. I would have all the Parodies (as they are called) referred to the authors they imitate – .53

In subsequent editions, Pope did indeed expand the commentary; but his successive tinkerings with the notes accentuated rather than redressed the poem’s ephemerality: instead of clarifying existing references, Pope introduced new ones, mindful of metropolitan consumers’ ravenous appetite for novelty. But that is not to say Pope ignored the risk he was taking with his own futurity in The Dunciad. That risk was, in a sense, a Chaucerian one – ‘such as Chaucer is, so shall Pope be’ – and among the measures he deployed to counter it as The Dunciad evolved towards its final four-book form were some he had learned from Chaucer. At the start of Pope’s life of writing, Chaucer had stoked up his fear that his life’s work might amount to nothing more than an urban craze; now, near the end of Pope’s career, Chaucer helped him extinguish those fears. The solution came from the same Chaucerian source as had raised the problem: The Dunciad is Pope’s second re-writing of ‘The House of Fame’. In a note to The Dunciad Variorum (1735) justifying his decision to include the lawyer and pro-Walpolean journalist William Arnall among the dunces, Pope remarked that ‘by the most unexampled insolence, and personal abuse of several great men, the Poet’s particular friends, he most amply deserved a niche in the

53 Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols (1963–5), iii, p.

423.

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Temple of Infamy’.54 As John Sitter showed some years ago in a groundbreaking discussion, this remark uncovers a Chaucerian infrastructure within The Dunciad. Pope shored up his tottering House of Rumour with two fragments of technique Chaucer had used to construct his House of Fame: its ‘emblematic, iconographical’ modes of description, and its larger dream-visionary unity of conception. The former suggested to Pope how he might arrange the dunces, those ‘shapeless shades’ ever threatening to elude his poetic grasp, into postures of enduring significance; the latter taught him to subordinate the dunces to a governing allegorical deity – the Queen of Dulness – whose independent abstract life would ensure the survival of the poem long after they and their works had passed into oblivion.55 So it was that Chaucer oversaw the fulfilment of Pope’s destiny as the author of an epic of ephemerality, a timeless poem about transience: a work which made him at once the talk of the town and freeman of the City which ‘with time itself shall last;/ . . . nor subject to decays’.56

54 Quoted in John Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad (Minneapolis, MN, 1971), pp. 67–8. 55 For further discussion and examples, see ibid., pp. 68–78. 56 The Temple of Fame, lines 50–1; Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 133.

Chaucer and the Ninet eenth-Century City Helen Phillips

Chaucer and the Nineteenth-Century City HELEN PHILLIPS

This essay argues that the warm acclaim the Victorians gave to Chaucer reflects to a significant extent the era’s own anxious and conflicted responses to rapid urbanisation. And correspondingly, changes in the perception of Chaucer between 1800 and the Edwardians have parallels in changing attitudes to the city during that period. The 1868 Westminster Abbey Chaucer Window chose only images from the Flower and the Leaf and General Prologue to represent Chaucer’s genius (together with words from Truth), typifying the mid nineteenth century’s, to many modern readers, extraordinary esteem for the (apocryphal) Flower and the Leaf, regarded as foremost among a group of poems that established Chaucer as a great Nature-poet.1 The two texts illustrated exemplify the period’s dual construction of Chaucer as a poet of Nature and Human Nature, two sides of the era’s concept of literary genius, with its tendency to see the acme of literary achievement as residing either in celebration of Nature or creation of character.2 Admiration for the General Prologue’s God’s Plenty of human character was already established and would continue after the nineteenth century (the Prioress’s Tale and Clerk’s Tale were also prized for capturing human nature, especially in the form of pathos) but it is the image of Chaucer the Nature-poet that is distinctive to the century’s central decades. Early in the century Chaucer’s characteristics were generally seen, as in the eighteenth century, as social observation of human types, satire, and, for some still, a primitive lack of morality and literary polish: poetry of human nature and activity and the bustling social world not of solitary natural contemplation. Caroline Spurgeon’s collection of Chaucer allusions amply demonstrates this view continuing up to the 1820s. Corroboration of the earlier attitude comes from three of Scott’s works that draw 1 2

The window, destroyed in the Second World War, appears in Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Centuries of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1925), ii, plate 19 (hereafter Spurgeon). On the nineteenth-century Chaucer see Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Chaucer and Victorian Medievalism: Culture and Society’, Poetica, 29–30 (1989), 118–20; Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern World (Minneapolis, 2000).

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on the Flower and the Leaf, later to become the canonical text for Chaucer the Nature-poet: Rokeby (1813), The Antiquary (1816) and Ivanhoe (1820); Scott (reading the medieval poem through the prism of Dryden’s more moralising and military version) finds his inspiration in its themes of masculine endeavour and tournaments more than its natural descriptions.3 Between the 1820s and 1870s a different image, of Chaucer the Nature-poet, flourished, became to a striking degree standardised – and deflected attention from the earlier sense of his immorality. This Chaucer was derived from a group of writings that includes his genuine dream poems plus the anonymous Flower and the Leaf, Isle of Ladies, Court of Love, Clanvowe’s Cuckoo and the Nightingale and Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight. The favourite mid-century Chaucer is a man with a passion for early morning walks, fresh air and clean water, flowers, birdsong, and new green spring foliage. Partly this is over-literal, autobiographical reading of passages describing such scenes in the poems just listed. It was buttressed by the belief that Chaucer was given the royal manor of Woodstock and spent years there in rural retirement writing the Canterbury Tales. But the insistent repetition of this picture of the poet as early-morning walker among healthy, clean, rural scenes suggests also a contemporary cultural hunger for the vision as a counter to the contemporary trauma of environmental damage. Certain words recur in allusions to Chaucer during this period: ‘fresh’, ‘healthy’, ‘bright’, ‘hale’, ‘green’, ‘manly’. There appears an implicit expectation that the Father of English Poetry will reflect back the nation’s pre-industrial identity before the environment had been assaulted. The favourite epithets above correspond directly to the grime, polluted water and air, smoke and noise, and the encroachment by brick streets and railways, engulfing what had, within living memory, been villages on the edge of city-areas.4 Health in the expanding cities was an increasing concern: mid-century life expectancy for those born in towns was half that for the countryside. London cholera epidemics caused by polluted city water killed over ten thousand in the 1850s, six thousand in the 1860s, accelerating civic action to improve urban conditions. The key decades for a sense of national disaster overtaking England’s cities were precisely those, from the 1820s to the 1870s, when Chaucer was being most insistently presented as a healthy country walker in a bright, environmentally cleaner England of the past. Literary anthologies, including those meant for schools, represented Chaucer often by nature descriptions, for example, the Canterbury Tales opening, the Flower and the Leaf or Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight.5 Urban schoolchildren imbibed a

3 4 5

See Helen Phillips, ‘ “This Mystique Show”: Dryden and the Flower and the Leaf’, Reading Medieval Studies, 39 (2003), 51–70. London’s population was 958,863 in 1801, 6,586,000 in 1901 (Stephen Inwood, A History of London [New York, 1998], p. 411). Rev. Dr Giles, Poetic Treasures (London, n.d.), is typical with the General Prologue opening and ‘Morning Walk’: i.e. Lydgate’s Complaint.

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national heritage as alien as poetry of spring and daffodils was for Australian children. Issues of national and masculine identity come into this rural and healthy image, and the mid century’s tendency to locate the other Chaucer – the observer of Human Nature – in portraits of female pathos seems not unrelated to the hale and masculine Chaucer who prefers country to city: the selection of traits that shape the mid-nineteenth-century Chaucer into such an exemplary heterosexual includes a quality of being ‘tender’ – a term which domesticates him and hallows the period’s taste for his oppressed heroines. 6 Certainty that nature-poetry was central to Chaucer’s genius declined in the century’s last decades as swiftly as it had burgeoned, partly because of recognition that many of the poems listed above were not by Chaucer. But the era of Baudelaire and the fin de siècle also produced renewed cultural acceptance of the city. And legislation during the second half of the century meant that gradually the environmental and health disaster in the great cities ameliorated: London’s death rate fell in the last three decades. The trauma of sudden urbanisation became more distant, healed or scarred over. The middle and writing classes moved to suburbs. An 1854 textbook pronounces Chaucer ‘preëminently a poet of nature. He is a poet of spring, of the singing of the birds, of the zephyrs and the flowers.’7 Cardinal Wiseman observes, ‘An intense love [of Nature] is to be found in the father of our poetry.’8 An anonymous 1859 essay calls Flower and the Leaf ‘the most beautiful and pure of all Chaucer’s works’.9 Sidney Lanier in 1879 declared it ‘a far finer poem than any of the Canterbury Tales’.10 For Furnivall, Chaucer was ‘bright and fresh as the glad light green of the May he so much loved’.11 No wonder Coventry Patmore, mid-century, summing up the great poets, wrote: ‘Rich Spenser, deep-toned Wordsworth, Chaucer green’.12 Alongside these endlessly repeated, mainstream stereotypes, yet drawing on the same enthusiasms and same group of courtly texts, some writers – notably Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Barrett Browning – create more complex, original responses. Keats explores, like Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women, tensions between literary tradition and experience of Nature in poems which show Chaucer’s influence, Endymion and Sleep and Poetry; Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women explores masculine oppression of women, as Chaucer’s Legend did. Wordsworth, clearly inspired by the Legend in his Daisy lyrics, builds more originally on motifs from the Legend for his ‘Matthew’ poems, and arguably

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

See Ellis, Chaucer at Large, pp. 20–23, on the theme of manly Englishness. M. P. Case, Chaucer and his Times (Andover, MA, 1854), p. 414. Cardinal Wiseman, On the Perception of Natural Beauty (1856), in Spurgeon, ii, p. 29. Spurgeon, ii, p. 48. Sidney Lanier, Shakespere and his Forerunners (London, 1902), p. 56. F. J. Furnivall, ‘Recent Work on Chaucer’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 27 (March 1873), 383–93 (p. 389). Coventry Patmore, Sonnet, in The Poems of Coventry Patmore (London, 1949), p. 200.

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found in Dryden’s reworking of the Flower and the Leaf seeds of the Nature mysticism of his own most profound poetry.13 It is ironical that Chaucer the Londoner, whose oeuvre shows lifelong familiarity with the worlds of Westminster and the City, the court and parliament, as well as mercantile society in England and the continent, during a century that saw the beginnings of the commercialisation of English society, should become an anti-city icon and a poet of unchanging rural serenity for much of the nineteenth century. Chaucer’s acute eye for socio-economic trends includes many occurring in towns: rich urban tradesmen like John the Carpenter with his fashionable wife (a woman ‘of towne’ [I, 3380]); the rise of secular administrators like the London Manciple; the distinctly modern property-buying practices of the London lawyer; the lifestyle of the urban merchant manipulating exchange markets (Shipman’s Tale); the sordid shanty-towns of London’s ‘suburbes’ (Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue); and anti-social City apprentices (Cook’s Tale). Yet the most important socio-economic change occurred in the post-pestilence countryside and when Chaucer looks at the countryside what interests him is analogous to his urban focus: the aggressively upwardly-mobile entrepreneur at Trumpington mill; the well-off churl of the Summoner’s Tale, with enough new wealth to attract the attentions of a mendicant and enough new confidence to shock his manorial lord with his disrespect; the profiteering Reeve, another secular administrator and another ‘proude cherl’ (III, 2227). Chaucer does celebrate, Roman de la Rose-style, May mornings, flowers and birds, but these as often express human, social issues as timeless rural serenity: his bird assembly reflects the class conflicts of Parliament; his crow conveys a courtier-poet’s advice about not offending great lords; Chauntecleer, a cocky rural upstart like the proude cherles, and equally requiring to be curbed, provides the context for Chaucer’s only allusion to 1381. It is, then, hard to find unmediated Nature in Chaucer. The Legend of Good Women (whose flowers and birds too represent contemporary human themes) probes whether there ever can be any unmediated literary expression – any ‘naked truth’ – whether of Nature, history, or of truths in translation. When Chaucer is translated into Victorian culture it is through the grimy filter of that age’s encounter with the modern city in its raw first onslaught on green and pleasant England. The perception also reflects Romantic ideology. William Hazlitt, writing in 1817, articulates central elements in this: Nature is the soul of art. There is a strength in the imagination that reposes entirely on nature, which nothing else can supply. There is in the old poets and painters a vigour and grasp of mind, a full possession of their subject . . . It was the same trust in nature that enabled Chaucer to describe the patient sorrow of Griselda; or the delight of that young beauty in the Flower and the Leaf, shrouded in her bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes

13 Phillips, ‘Mystique Show’, pp. 59–60.

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out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases and repeats and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb.14

Romantic commentators often describe Chaucer as achieving direct transference of the natural scene onto the page. Keats gives seminal expression to what became a standard attitude, writing of the Flower and the Leaf, ‘This pleasant Tale is like a little copse’: its reader ‘feels the dewy drops/ Come cool and soft against his face’.15 John Hamilton Reynolds replied in similar vein – Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, Or white flowers pluck’d from some sweet lily-bed –

turning the medieval original’s allegorical leaf and flower into this nineteenth-century myth of great poetry as natural phenomena.16 Hazlitt says Chaucer ‘exhibits . . . the naked object . . . He does not affect to show his power over the reader’s mind, but the power which his subject has over his own’; ‘His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger’; Chaucer’s rural descriptions have ‘a local truth and freshness, which gives the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground’.17 Reynolds’ sonnet fuses Keats as writer with Chaucer the country-walker: Go on! And keep thee to thine own green way, Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; . . . Be thou companion of the Summer day, Roaming the fields and olden woods among.18

Tennyson uses this trope of the modern poet becoming one with that famous morning walk. His Chaucer also becomes the first warbler of a dawn chorus of English literature: I read, before my eyelids dropt their shade, ‘The Legend of Good Women’, long ago Sung by the morning star of song, who made His music here below; Dan Chaucer, the first warbler . . . At last methought that I had wondered far In an old wood: fresh-washed in coolest dew The maiden splendours of the morning star Shook in steadfast blue. (The Dream of Fair Women, 1–5, 53–6)19 14 William Hazlitt, ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’ (1817), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 15 16 17 18 19

ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto, 1930–4), xviii, p. 9. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1970), pp. 103–4. John Hamilton Reynolds, Poetry and Prose (London, 1928), p. 174. Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Works, v, pp. 22, 27. Reynolds, Poetry and Prose, p. 174. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969), pp. 440–1, 443.

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Longfellow’s sonnet ‘Chaucer’ imagines him at Woodstock, ‘An old man in a lodge within a park’, with hunting scenes on the walls, hearing the lark and laughing at the sound coming through stained glass.20 An Oxfordshire lark’s song here represents Chaucer’s inspiration for his Canterbury Tales: the inspiration Longfellow recreates for those pre-eminently social, often urban, texts derives from two key sources for the Victorian pastoral Chaucer – Chaucer’s lark comes from the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women and the chamber with painted walls, where bright morning spring sunshine and outdoors sounds (including hunting) are heard through stained-glass panes, from the Book of the Duchess. He concludes: He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, in his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead.

His next sonnet, celebrating Shakespeare, starts contrastingly: A vision as of crowded city streets . . .

So far have the Victorians travelled away from the bustling, urban and satirical world of Chaucer’s poetry perceived by the eighteenth century. Charles Kent’s ‘Chaucer at Woodstock’ visualises him ‘basking’ on his ‘garden-terrace’ by his sparkling clear fountain and ‘the parterre’s floral glories’, dreaming the Canterbury pilgrims:21 a distinctly suburban rendering of the Chaucer who, as in Burne-Jones’ depictions of him asleep, dreams his poetry among daisies, as much the Romantic contemplative poet who creates in reverie amid greenery far from cities as the Chaucer of the Legend who instructs his servant to make a couch for him in his garden.22 Ford Madox Brown’s famous picture of 1851 portrays Chaucer reading his poetry to Edward III’s court but contrives to set this out of doors, with a country vista behind it, and setting his lectern besides a tree and near a fountain. The period seized on a link between Chaucer and clean water. From many examples a few suffice. Stopford Brooke: Chaucer’s poetry: ‘possesses almost always the same elements . . . a May morning – the greenwood or garden – some clear running water – meadows covered with flowers – some delectable places or other with an arbour laid down with soft and fresh-cut turf . . . exquisitely fresh, natural, and true in spite of its being conventional’; ‘the scent of flowers,

20 Poetical Works of Longfellow (London, 1904), p. 711. 21 W. Charles Kent, Dreamland with Other Poems (London, 1862), pp. 10, 15. 22 Dreamland, with Other Poems, pp. 10–16. Burne-Jones’ designs: Albert Charles Sewter, The Stained

Glass of William Morris and his Circle (New Haven, 1975), pp. 44–5, 154; Birmingham City Art Gallery, Catalogue of Drawings (Derby, 1939), p. 127.

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and the songs of birds, and now and then of the noise of water’;23 Keats: ‘dewy drops’ (above) and ‘ethereal dew’ (Endymion, 131); Hazlitt: the Flower and the Leaf is ‘an ebullition of natural delight, “welling out of the heart”, like water from a crystal spring’;24 Lanier: Chaucer’s words are ‘showers sweet of rain’.25 An anonymous poet stresses the clean sparkle of the older atmosphere: O’er Chaucer’s blithe old world, forever new, In noon’s broad sunbeam shines the morning dew . . .

which ‘glows with joy that clears the gloom of today’s less bright light’.26 The American poet, Lowell, says: There is in him the exuberant freshness and greenness of spring. Everything he touches leaps into full blossom. His goodness and humour and pathos are irrepressible as a fountain . . . they bubble forth . . . with a delighted gurgle . . . Reading him is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise. Everything is new and sparkling and fragrant.27

England’s first great poetry is the opposite of environmental pollution and anything mechanical or sophisticated: a natural growth. That morning walk becomes the standard terminology for talking about Chaucer’s writing. Leigh Hunt writes: ‘It is pure morning freshness, enthusiasm, and music’28; Lowell: ‘The whole is full of open air . . . There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man, – a vernal property that soothes and refreshes’29; Thoreau: ‘the personification of spring . . . the poetry of youth and life rather than of thought’, with his ‘pure and genuine and childlike love of Nature’.30 Chaucer even smells fresh: Longfellow says ‘odours of ploughed field or flowery mead’; Lowell: ‘new, sparkling and fragrant’; and Chaucer’s muse ‘scents all the year long of June like a new-made haycock’; ‘a healthy and hearty man’; reading him ‘one is always the better for a walk in the morning air’;31 Furnivall declares: the more we read him the more we love him, sunning ourselves in the bright sheen of his humour, and sniffing the fragrance of his verse, as on a bright spring day on his own Kent downs.32

23 Stopford Brooke, quoted in Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, ed. Derek Brewer, 2 vols (London, 1978), 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

ii, p. 150. Hazlitt, ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’, Works, xviii, p. 160. Lanier, Shakespere and his Forerunners, pp. 56–7. Spurgeon, ii, p. 246. James Russell Lowell, ‘Chaucer’, in Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (London, 1845), p. 25. Leigh Hunt, ‘Prefaces to Stories in Verse’, in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Lawrence H. Houtchens and Carolyn W. Houtchens (New York, 1956), p. 297. Lowell, ‘Chaucer’, in My Study Windows (London, 1871), pp. 168, 209. Henry D. Thoreau, ‘Lecture on Poetry’ (1843), in Spurgeon, ii, pp. 250, 251. Poetical Works of Longfellow, p. 711; Lowell, ‘Chaucer’ (1871), pp. 168, 169. F. J. Furnivall, Chaucer and Arthur (review in The Reader, 1865), in Spurgeon, ii, p. 77.

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Edward Fitzgerald exclaims: how the fresh air of the Kent hills, over which he rode four hundred years ago, breathes in his verses still. They have a perfume like fine old hay, that will not lose its sweetness, having been cut and carried so fresh. All his poetry bespeaks a man of sound mind and body.33

Contrast between Chaucer’s fresh air, water and smells and the modern city’s pollution sometimes becomes explicit. Aubrey de Vere begins his ‘Chaucer’: Escaped from the city – its smoke, its glare – ’Tis pleasant (showers over, and birds in chorus) To sit in green alleys and breathe cool air Which the violet only has breathed before us! Such healthful solace is ours . . .

That ‘healthful solace’ is Chaucer’s poetry. It smells of the country, unlike more ‘modish’ writing with its ‘cynical mirth’ and ‘paint’: Hands rubb’d together smell still of earth: – The hot-bed verse has a hot-bed taint.34

The most profound treatments of this contrast are by William Morris: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of a packhorse on the down, And dream of London, small and white and clean, And clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

He imagines the medieval quayside: Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery, The cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne,

while Chaucer’s pen ‘Moves over bills of lading’ (The Earthly Paradise).35 Packhorses on the downs suggest the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury, the reference to Chaucer’s job at the Customs House recalls the opening of the House of Fame, an inspiration perhaps for Morris’s juxtaposition of the commercial diurnal work of the city with the poet’s aspirations for flights of transcendent fancy and invention. Even during the mid century, the image of Chaucer is neither static nor uniform. While contemporary culture generally disassociated Chaucer from the city, Morris, the prophet of a socialist regeneration of work 33 Edward Fitzgerald, Euphranor, A Dialogue of Youth, in Poetical and Prose Writings, 7 vols, ed.

George Bentham (New York, 1967), i, p. 210. 34 Aubrey de Vere, The Sisters, Inisfail and Other Poems (London, 1861), pp. 64–5. 35 William Morris, Collected Works, ed. May Morris, 24 vols (London, 1910), iii, p. 3.

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and the built environment, keeps him in the urban world of work and commerce but in a city before smoke, steam-engines and railways, before pollution and grime and the disappearance of a greener, whiter London under black brick houses (characteristically he sees affinity between Chaucer’s inspiration and not simply green nature but also as the less grimy architecture of his own England in ‘Feudal England’: architecture ‘gay and bright . . . so clear, defined and elegant’).36 The Earthly Paradise imagines a ‘nameless city in a distant sea,/ White as the changing walls of faërie’, with ‘clear green water and the quays’, like the past-future Utopian London of News from Nowhere, an idealisation of the cleaner London of Chaucer’s time. Steve Ellis suggests this white London is classicisation37 but possibly Morris also knew the manuscript of Charles d’Orléans poetry, showing the Tower spectacularly white with a vista of the late-medieval Thames and London behind, British Library MS Royal 16 F ii (fol. 73). Morris creates, with the ‘white’ and ‘green’, a palette for the city that corresponds to what delighted the Victorians in the Chaucerian ‘daisy’ poems and contrasts with the horrifying effects of smoke on contemporary London. Blake’s ‘blackening’ churches and ‘dirty’ streets near the Thames in his 1791 ‘London’ are an early allusion. The Gentleman’s Magazine lamented in 1822 that Chaucer’s Westminster Abbey tomb was ‘presently merely coloured black’; an 1843 observer makes its grimed state a metaphor for his modern reception.38 A similar contrast in Morris’s Life and Death of Jason, 1867, links Chaucer’s poetry to the urgent topical problem of a healthy urban water-supply, the appalling state of the Thames and measures being taken to improve the city’s sewage. Like other contemporaries, Morris represents the inspiration of Chaucer as an emanation from the countryside he loved to roam: Would that I Had but some portion of that mastery That from the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent Through these five hundred years such songs have sent To us, who, meshed within this smoky net Of unrejoicing labour, love them yet. And though, O Master! – Yea, my master still, Whatever feet have scaled Parnassus’ hill, Since like thy measures, clear, and sweet, and strong, Thames stream scarce fettered drave the dace along Unto the bastioned bridge, his only chain (5–15)39

Chaucer’s verse (‘measures’), so often associated with fresh water and dew, here specifically resembles unpolluted London water, sweet clear river-water: dace require very clean water. Contemporary efforts to speed the river through embankment, to shift putrid matter more efficiently, underlie Morris’s stress on 36 37 38 39

Morris, Collected Works, xxiii, p. 51. See Ellis, Chaucer at Large, p. 9. Spurgeon, ii, pp. 138, 248–9. Morris, Collected Works, ii, p. 259.

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the strong current in Chaucer’s day and the speed with which it ‘drave the dace along’. Morris, however, regrets the necessity for the imprisonment of the modern Thames through Bazalgette’s embankments, which began in the mid 1860s. The period’s recurrent association between Chaucer and fresh clean water seems related to the background of horror at what had happened to England’s rivers and water. 1858 was the ‘Year of the Great Stink’. The shocking state of the Fleet had an iconic status for the nineteenth century analogous to that of the stinking Thames. Early in the century there were still villages, fields and pleasant streams along the valley of the Fleet north of the City. By mid century the fish were dead and the southern Fleet ran as an open sewer. The nineteenth-century Chaucer is at times a locus for awareness of a profound change for city-dwellers, including a major conceptual change in British culture: strict demarcation between urban and rural. The areas north of Oxford Street and Bloomsbury were those whose rapid disappearance under brick, railways, grime and streets made the greatest impression on Londoners. Gillian Tindall’s The Fields Beneath charts the swift transformation of Kentish Town from village to city streets, and the horror and protest expressed in reminiscences, complaints, pictures and literature.40 When Brooke in an 1871 essay imagines Chaucer’s sources of inspiration, he tellingly locates him enjoying his May rambles precisely in this area north of Oxford Street and St Pancras, recalling nostalgically a time when Londoners could easily reach their own countryside: the woods we get into in Chaucer are not the wild greenwood of the ballads, but the pleasant woods full of glades which were near many of the English towns. He lived for the most part in London. Highgate, Hampstead, and all the hills on the north and the northwest were then covered with great trees; and exactly such a landscape as we find him describing, with the soft sward and the sparsely-planted trees, and the fresh river running near, he could see any morning he pleased by walking up the valley of the Fleet towards the pleasant ridge of City Road.41

Mrs Haweis’ Chaucer for Children stresses the contrast between nineteenth-century London with its recent modern expansion and Chaucer’s city where he could easily reach his favourite dawn walks: even when Chaucer walked in the streets, ‘birds sang over his head and the hawthorn and primrose bloomed where now the black smoke and dust would soon kill most green things’.42 William Rands perceptively observed that no medieval city was ‘so large, so thickly built, or so exclusive of field and garden, that the contrast between “nature” and the “city” could exist, with its modern intensity of signifi40 Gillian Tindall, The Fields Beneath: The History of one London Village (London, 1977). 41 Stopford Brooke, quoted in Brewer, Chaucer, ii, p. 155. 42 Mrs H. R. Haweis, Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key (London, 1877), p. 4.

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cance’, adding that the nineteenth-century ‘Wordsworthian’ understanding of ‘nature’ is not a good guide to understanding the concept in Chaucer’s writing.43 Ruskin describes Chaucer’s London as one where city-dwellers could still enjoy green May mornings. In medieval England, Ruskin writes: the ‘greenwood’ coming up to the very walls of the towns, it was possible to be ‘merry in the good greenwood’ in a sense which an Italian would not have understood. Hence, Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspere send their favourites perpetually to the woods for pleasure or meditation.44

There were other analyses. Hunt argued that the May Day described by Chaucer and other early poets, where Londoners went into neighbouring fields to gather greenery, had disappeared because of the growth of trade and increased separation of the classes.45 Carolyn Collette cites a North British Review essay, 1849, which claims that Chaucer’s world and language still exists in a rural substratum in the mid nineteenth century, in ‘fields, or the cottage, or maybe the farm remote from the railways and press’.46 The relationship of Chaucer to the nineteenth-century city reflects the wider tendency to define a poet as one whose natural sphere and subject are rural and who operates therefore by shutting off the modern noisy and ungreen city. There are many successors to Milton’s image of the man ‘long in populous cities pent’, breathing a cleaner air on a summer’s morn in a village: Coleridge and Keats used the trope and Wordsworth’s Westminster Bridge sonnet temporarily reversed the effects of urbanisation.47 Keats’ Endymion, written at a time of intensive reading of Chaucer and Chaucerian poems, employs the spring morning walk with a bower and daisies as its preface and says, ‘So I will begin/ Now while I cannot hear the city’s din’ (1–2). Keats, educated in still-rural Enfield, enjoying the escape from the ‘city’s din’ at Hampstead, knew well during their drastic first growth-period, the rapidly urbanised fringes surrounding central London. His bitter, complex, lament, Robin Hood, 1818, including an echo of the Friar’s Tale (Chaucer’s satire on ruthless profiteering against the poor) contrasts the old greenwood with the grim forces of capital, war, and modern development that are destroying England’s forest and laying a symbolic gloom, a ‘down-trodden pall’ on human lives since men have come to know ‘rents and leases’.48 As the century advanced, denial of the city becomes an issue. Tennyson tried towards the end of his life to acknowledge the realities of the modern city in poetry. Robert Buchanan’s London Poems, 1866, sets out ‘to

43 William Rands, quoted in Brewer, Chaucer, ii, p. 128–9. 44 Modern Painters, The Works of Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London,

1903–12), v, p. 274. 45 Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, in The Literary Pocket Book (London, 1818), pp. 215–29. 46 Collette, pp. 119–20. 47 Coleridge, To the Nightingale, line 2; This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, lines 28–30; Keats, ‘To One

who has been long in city pent’ and Endymion, lines 39–40. 48 Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Allott, pp. 303–4.

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make/ The busy life of London musical’ but a recurrent contrast between city and country, London’s roar and ‘The sounding sea, the presence of the hills’, throughout the volume implies a tension between the expected subject of poetry and this new attempt to paint scenes of ‘The terrible city’.49 The pre-1820s dominant image of Chaucer as a social observer and bawdy humorist had occasioned condemnation of his immorality: Byron called him ‘obscene and contemptible’.50 The mainstream later view is of morality, clean living as well as clean air, seamlessly linked.51 The North British Review, 1849, for example, argued that: We believe that no writer was ever more healthy than Chaucer; and we dwell on this characteristic with the greater pleasure that it seems a proof of the thoroughly good constitution with which our English life began. Even where he comes in contact with grossness and immorality, they never seem to taint him . . . There is nothing French about him.52

The epithet ‘manly’ had multiple and shifting connotations: always conveying a positive sense of his affinity with ideals of English masculinity, it changes during the century from denoting Chaucer’s humour (as in Coleridge’s ‘manly hilarity’, ‘manly cheerfulness’53), functioning partly as a euphemism for bawdy, to suggesting rather, together with ‘healthy’, and ‘hale’, that his poetry is conducive to giving nineteenth-century readers a healthful, even educative, experience of a world of clean thinking and clean environment. A reading public encountering him now often in extracts and urged to admire his May mornings may have avoided encountering his bawdy. Praise of Chaucer the Nature-poet is also a reaction against Augustan culture, perceived as urban, artificial, unhealthy, morally dubious, even un-English. Chaucer’s fresh-air virtues are frequently contrasted with one or more of these faults in the age of Pope and Swift.54 This polarity makes an early appearance in an 1821 article: ‘I have an utter distaste for Pope, and a most marvellous clinging to Chaucer’s fragrant lusty descriptions of May Scenery.’55 Lowell’s 1845 ‘Chaucer’ essay typifies the tendency to oppose Chaucer in the first half of the century to the despised urban and artificial aesthetic of Dryden, Pope and the Regency: ‘St James’s coffee-house or Regent Street’ and the eighteenthcentury’s ‘artificial style of writing’; he has no ‘French lustre’; the lady in the 49 Robert Buchanan, London Poems (London, 1866), pp. 5, 7, 8. 50 Memorandum Book (1807), in The Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore

(London, 1892), p. 49. 51 Chaucer’s bawdy is either passed over or considered regrettable. Burne-Jones did not illustrate the

52 53 54

55

fabliaux in the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896; like Ruskin and, unsurprisingly Cardinal Wiseman, who both admired the Nature poetry, he disliked them; see Spurgeon, ii, pp. 29, 59, 124. Anon., ‘Chaucer’, in The North British Review, 10 (1849), p. 325. Spurgeon, ii, pp. 85, 190. Andrew Motion discusses Keats’ use of the Flower and the Leaf and Chaucer as an expression of radical English ‘greenwood’ values and a counter to Augustan non-English aesthetics: Keats (London, 1994), pp. 145–6, 175, 479–80. Thomas G. Wainewright, quoted in Spurgeon, ii, p. 135.

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Book of the Duchess is such a woman ‘as you would never look for in a ball-room but might expect to meet in the dewy woods just after sunrise, when you were hunting for late violets’.56 The return of the city to cultural importance in the fin-de-siècle coincided both with a shift in attitudes to Chaucer and a return to fashion of the eighteenth century in literature art, and design. Furnivall praised ‘the cheery dear old man, who so loved women, and the “glad light green” of spring’.57 The group of courtly poems that engendered Chaucer the Nature-poet also inspired art celebrating women that includes Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women and Morris’s and Burne-Jones’ designs for windows and tapestries based on the Legend of Good Women. The Victorian hale and manly Chaucer is congruent with this other element in the period’s extraordinary creative reception of that group of poems: the inspiration for works celebrating good wives, beautiful women and the designers’ ideals of reviving the domestic arts of embroidery and aesthetic textile designs, and reform of the nineteenth-century house. Early in the mid-century period that saw the cultural image of Chaucer the Nature-poet, two works published following Victoria’s accession portray him as deeply indebted to Queen Philippa’s patronage and her court’s alleged morality: Agnes and Elizabeth Stricklands’ Lives of the Queens of England (1840) and Hannah Lawrance’s Historical Memoirs of the Queens of England (1838); Lawrance considered the courtly poems his masterpieces and observed that his London had forest to its north and west where recently ‘a complete town has been built’.58 These studies link Chaucer to family values and align him with early-Victorian forces that rejected the racier values of the Regency and Augustan past in favour of a purer, more domestic court and a more moral society. The virtuous mid-century Chaucer is associated with ruddy cheeks. In his ‘Chaucer’, De Vere, a Catholic, writes: His England lay laughing in Faith’s bright morn! Life in his eye look’d as rosy and round As the cheek of the huntsman that blows the horn When the stag leaps up, and loud bays the hound.59

We should read Chaucer in spring, ‘For Chaucer is spring!’ George Meredith calls his poetry: fresh featured and ruddy As dawn when the drowsy farm-yard has thrice heard Chaunteclere. Tender to tearfulness – childlike, and manly, and motherly; Here beats true English blood richest joyance on sweet English ground.60 56 Lowell, ‘Chaucer’ (1845), pp. 17, 26, 33, 95 and passim. 57 F. J. Furnivall, ed., Robert Mannyng: Handlynge Synne, Roxburghe Club, 61 (London, 1862), p. iv. 58 Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (London, 1840–3); Hannah

Lawrance, Historical Memoirs of the Queens of England, 2 vols (London, 1838), ii, p. 133. 59 Aubrey de Vere, The Sisters, p. 64. 60 George Meredith, ‘The Poetry of Chaucer’, Poems (London, 1936), p. 22.

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Wendell Holmes calls him ‘Rich, juicy, fragrant, russet-skinned old Chaucer’ – he is comparing him to a russet pear – ‘The buds of summer were swelling when he ripened’.61 Leigh Hunt wrote: But when morning pleasures are to be spoken of, the lovers of poetry who do not know Chaucer are like those who do not know what it is to be up in the morning.62

This is Chaucer the back-packer: He slaps us on the shoulder and makes us spring up, while dew is on the grass. We feel strong in the freshness round . . . having such a companion in our walk.63

Walter Savage Landor’s sonnet ‘To Robert Browning’ declares:64 Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walk’d along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

Fitzgerald’s Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth, 1851, links this bucolic, muscular Chaucer to the creation of sound mind and body in the nation’s youth. The undergraduate-narrator is woken at Cambridge by energetic friends for a morning of vigorous rowing and a day of literary discussion by the Cam. Enthusiasm for Chaucer runs through their conversation. They discuss ‘chivalry’ as a masculine ideal of generous and heroic spirit, engendered by enjoyment of the English outdoors and English literature, with Chaucer’s gifts of tenderness and natural observation prominent. There is a double ideal here: health of body through fresh outdoor exercise amid clean meadows and river together with nurturing of the imagination and spirit through old English poets, while rejecting over-rigid book-learning in the continental style. The Victorian Chaucer, rural, tender and cheerful, fits both parts of this ideal. The vision of young Englishmen achieving perfect education through cheerful outdoors leisure and unstructured reading contributes to a myth of English effortless superiority, common in the imperial age, just as, in its own way, does the myth of Chaucer’s effortless direct transference of fresh nature to the page. It was not only Pugin and others animated by ecclesiastical or conservative medieval nostalgia who considered the medieval economy and city to have been better than the modern city for its citizens. Disraeli’s knowledgeable Chartist Gerard says that peasants just before the Wars of the Roses had better food and housing than modern thrall-like industrial workers, with the terrible modern urban life-expectancy.65 Morris’s News from Nowhere is as concerned about the 61 62 63 64 65

Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, ed. John Downie (London, 1902), p. 79. Leigh Hunt, ‘Mayday’ (1820), quoted in Spurgeon, ii, p. 124. Walter Savage Landor, Blackwood’s Magazine (1842), quoted in Spurgeon, ii, p. 272. Landor, Morning Chronicle, 22 Nov. 1845. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or the Two Nations, ed. Philip Guedalla (London, 1927), pp. 199–200.

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alienation of work as the lost cleanness of the Thames or lost brightness of London’s buildings. The values invested in Chaucer the Nature-poet belong to a multi-facetted ideal of the social, environmental and spiritual inspiration medievalism offered to the mid-nineteenth-century industrialised city and its inhabitants. At times writers, though going along with the stereotype, acknowledge that the real Chaucer was a man of political circles and urban activity. This is clearest among the earlier and more radical writers. William Godwin’s 1802 Life erred on the side of exaggerating Chaucer’s role in contemporary national affairs, though already averring that his greatest delight was the country walks. The radical Hunt observes that Chaucer was a reformer and ‘stirrer up out in the world’, yet was a great poet in everything, especially ‘in loving the country and the trees and the fields’.66 He comments that Chaucer, having invented a mechanical horse in the Squire’s Tale would have relished a contemporary invention, ‘your fiery Locomotive’, which he sees as connecting peoples and bringing about ‘the seeds of universal brotherhood’.67 William Minto in an 1876 essay warns that though Chaucer’s poetry attracts modern readers by its delight in nature, the ‘love of green leaves and sweet air’ in Chaucer should not stop us recognising his deference to the court, even though – Minto concedes – it seems natural to read him in ‘[t]he open air, on the breezy hillside or by a murmuring brook’.68 Minto, here resisting the fifty-year-old myth of Chaucer the Nature-poet myth, reflects the growing argument that poetry should not cling to the rural ideal but face the realities of the modern city.69 Chaucer’s mid-century relationship to the city was not always conceived as one of simple flight. Ruskin and Morris, like Pugin, though in differing ways, were confident that ideals drawn from the medieval built environment, with its perceived organic power and aesthetics, could reform modern urban life. And the Westminster memorial window offers a complex meditation, contrasting natural and urban values, civic duty and spiritual contemplation – as befits a monument to English literature’s founding-father, in Westminster Abbey, opposite the Houses of Parliament. The roundels showing the ladies of the Leaf and the Flower represent Chaucer the Nature-poet and the moral message of the Flower and Leaf: ‘virtue . . . without regard to worldly respects’, as a contemporary guidebook said.70 Other illustrations represent Chaucer’s involvement with leading political figures, including Edward III and Wyclif, and his employment as royal emissary. Yet the lines from Truth turn away from worldly bustle, ‘Flee from the prees and dwell with sothfastnesse . . . The wrastling for this world 66 Hunt, ‘A Jar of Honey’, in Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. Charles Mahoney, 6 vols (London,

2003), iv, p. 257. 67 ‘Prefaces to Stories in Verse’, in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Houtchens and Houtchens, pp.

587–8. 68 William Minto, quoted in Brewer, Chaucer, ii, p. 187. 69 On this argument see William B. Thesing, The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City

(Athens, GA, 1982), pp. 34–92. 70 A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey, printed for the Vergers (London, 1882), 110–11.

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asketh a fall’. The pilgrims appear in two groups: members of the Church and men active in the world, including occupations relevant to London: the lawyer, manciple, doctor and shipman. Each group has an urban background: the Tabard Inn for the professionals and for the clerics a scene of Canterbury, apparently derived from the British Library manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes.71 Interest in England’s rapidly disappearing coaching inns, including those with literary associations like the Mermaid and Tabard, in pictures and essays, is the counterside to awareness of the revolutionary changes brought by the railways. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in an 1842 essay characterises Chaucer in a sparkling rendition of the standard image: [Chaucer] was made for an early poet, and the metaphors of dawn and spring doubly become him. A morning-star, a lark’s exaltation, cannot usher in glory better. The ‘cheerful morning face’, ‘the breezy call of incense-breathing morn’, you recognise in his countenance and voice.

He is a nightingale heard before the cuckoo; he gets up in the morning as early as his own Emily. Then she contrasts his poetry with the railway: He sent us a train of pilgrims . . . all the way from Southwark and the Tabard Inn, to Canterbury and Becket’s shrine; and their laughter never comes to an end, and their talk goes on to the stars, and all the railroads which may intersect the spoilt earth for ever, cannot hush the ‘tramp, tramp’ of their horses’ feet.72

Her ‘spoilt earth’, intersected by the railways and their noise, is another perception of Chaucer in binary opposition to modern urbanisation and all the scarring and polluting of the contemporary environment. It is cheering to find Samuel Butler in 1891, however, able to welcome the railway and imagine a coalescence of Chaucer and the railway: he describes a train full of South-Eastern Railway day-trippers as Canterbury Pilgrims: all Chaucer’s pilgrims, man and woman for man and woman, on board the Lord of the Isles and the Clacton Belle. Why, I have seen the Wife of Bath on the Lord of the Isles myself. She was eating her luncheon off an Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday which was spread out on her knees. 73

It seems not far-fetched to see in the difference between this and Barrett Browning’s words, fifty years earlier, a new acceptance of the by-now old revolution wrought by urbanisation and transport and a new return to appreciation of Chaucer as humorous celebrant of the social scene rather than lone rhapsodist of the rural. 71 British Library, MS Royal 18 D 11, fol. 148. 72 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, in Complete Works, ed.

Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke,6 vols (New York, 1890), vi, pp. 203–4. 73 The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (London, 1912), p. 262.

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Many factors contributed to the decline of Chaucer the Nature-poet. The century’s final decades saw recognition that many of the nature passages were not written by Chaucer. At the same time, the rise of English Studies and scholarship dedicated to source-research engendered more awareness of how much Chaucer’s landscapes owed to other men’s books – especially French books – and the myth of Chaucer’s direct transference of the English country walks he loved onto the page of his poetry was less tenable. Chaucer returned to being pre-eminently the observer of men and social types: Kittredge was soon to give memorable expression to the post-Victorian aesthetic that saw him above all as a dramatist of human personality. By the fin-de-siècle, the dirt, sin, noise and unnatural lighting of city streets constituted themselves an image of beauty for poets and artists. Two examples exemplify the change. First Lionel Johnson’s ‘London’, starting with verbal allusion (‘chaunt’) to the aesthetics of medievalism – Let others chaunt a country praise, Fair river walks and meadow ways.

Dearer to him is London Town, a place of noise (‘loud/ As thunder from a purple cloud,/ Comes the deep thunder of the crowd’), pollution (‘O gray, O gloomy skies!’, ‘grim fogs, black fold on fold’), and ‘passions, to madden or control’.74 The image of Chaucer as the manly rural enthusiast had been a mid-century image of heterosexual purity as well as a flight from the polluted city.75 Johnson’s 1890s reviews show him also a champion of eighteenth-century culture and neoclassical city architecture, in opposition to Morris’s neo-rural vision of the city in News from Nowhere.76 The second example is Wilde’s evocation of dirty modern London in fashionable fin-de-siècle Japanese style: An omnibus across the bridge Crawls like a yellow butterfly . . . And, like a yellow, silken scarf, The thick fog hangs along the quay.77

It is a view of Blackfriars Bridge and the Embankment. The Thames, soiled and shamed by the rapid growth of the nineteenth-century city, has appeared before in this study of views of Chaucer from that century, a representative of the perception of an assault by urbanisation on the spirit and health of the inhabitants. Here both the omnibus and the choking, grime-filled, yellow London 74 Lionel Johnson, ‘London’, in Poetical Works (London, 1917), pp. 175–8. 75 On conflicting homosexual attitudes towards urban and pastoral cultural values in the fin-de-siècle,

see Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 122–42. 76 Lionel Johnson, Reviews and Critical Papers (London, 1921), pp. 52–7, 71–83. 77 Oscar Wilde, ‘Symphony in Yellow’, in Complete Works, ii, Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford, 2000), p. 168.

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smog of the period have become not the antipodes to poetry but its inspiration. Wilde’s flower was the sunflower, loved for its artificiality, not the daisy. Chaucer for Patmore’s contemporaries had been green. Now green was out; yellow was in.

Bibliography All quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1988), and cited by line number, or, in the case of the Canterbury Tales, by fragment (in roman numerals) and line number in the text. Post-1666 primary sources are not included in this bibliography; full references are given in footnotes.

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Index Ackroyd, Peter 41 Adam of Usk, Chronicle 26 Agamben, Giorgio 15, 44, 53–6 Allen, Rosamund S. 14n.28 Antwerp 164 Appellant, Lords 28, 44–8, 173, 180 Architecture, and the city 15, 58, 62, 67, 69 Arras 90 Associations and associational forms 27–8, 81–2, 141 (see also Guilds and Puy) Audience (see Chaucer) Augustine 21, 48 Ball, John 20 Barron, Caroline 12–13n.23, 14n.32, 16, 25–6, 27n.13n.14, 82n.7, 84n.15, 111n.5, 129n.2, 133n.11, 145n.3, 164n.8, 168 and nn.19, 20 and 23 Baswell, Christopher 31, 146 Baudrillard, Jean 51 Benjamin, Walter 5, 6–8, 19 Benoit de St-Maure, Roman de Troie 73 Benson, C. David 18, 42n.5 Bobbe-up-and-down 80 Boccaccio, Giovanni De casibus virorum illustrium 47 Il Filostrato 16, 57–61, 67, 71 Body, the, and space 52 as imitation 49 Christ’s body as legal charter 46 signs of 51–3 vulnerable 47 Bologna 18 Bolton, J. L. 168 Book trade 190 Bourdieu, Pierre 150 Brembre, Nicholas, mayor 28, 35, 44, 84, 129, 136 Britby, John 48–9 Brooke, Stopford 198, 202 Brown, Ford Madox 198 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 208 Bruges 7, 148, 153

Brussels 164 Buchanan, Robert 203–4 Bühler, Curt 163 Burne-Jones, Edward 198, 205 Butler, Judith 7 Butler, Samuel 208 Butterfield, Ardis 12n.22, 100n.14, 104n.21, 109n.1, 130n.4 Camden, William, Britannia 178 Cannon, Christopher 17 Canterbury 28 Carcassonne 7 Carnival, the carnivalesque 51 Carrruthers, Mary 59 Certeau, Michel de 5, 8–9, 12, 58, 63 Chandos, John 116 Chants royaux 113, 117 Chaucer, Geoffrey, and language 16–17, 79–94 as anti-city icon 196 as country poet 178–81 as poet of nature or spring 195 audience, 95–108 as male 102–4; in relation to Puy 113 audience, women in 98–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Life, as ‘court’ poet 97 as Controller of Customs 129, 200 career break in 1386–89 97 charge of raptus 129 ‘Chaucer circle’ 103–4 financial concerns in 1399–1400 163–73 his scribe (Adam) 17 resigns from Custom House 44, 97 sees Scrope-Grosvenor arms 167 takes lease at Westminster 19, 163, 172 youth in Thames Street 82, 106 Chaucer, Geoffrey, misattributions to 209 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Works, Boece 90 Book of the Duchess 130, 204–5

226

Index

Canterbury Tales 42, 54, 139 Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale 30, 82, 86–8, 91–4, 129–30, 142–4 Clerk’s Tale 55, 101–2, 193 Cook’s Prologue 30, 136–7 Cook’s Tale 18, 27–8, 80, 85, 90–1, 129–30, 132–42 Franklin’s Tale 98–99 Friar’s Tale 203 General Prologue 39, 88, 89, 107, 109, 131, 141 (Guildsmen), 177, 193 Knight’s Tale 54, 89, 100–1, 102, 131, 139 Man of Law’s Tale 101 Manciple’s Prologue 30, 80–1 Manciple’s Tale 143 Melibee 14, 36–9 Merchant’s Tale 99–100 Miller’s Prologue 81, 140–1 Miller’s Tale 100, 139, 153 Monk’s Prologue 39 Monk’s Tale 47 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 80 Pardoner’s Prologue 139 Pardoner’s Tale 48, 49, 52, 142 Parson’s Tale 143 Physician’s Tale 55, 102 Prioress’s Tale 193 Reeve’s Tale 92n.34, 153 Second Nun’s Tale 52, 55, 143 Shipman’s Tale 18, 51, 146–61, 196 Sir Thopas 110 Squire’s Tale 99–100 Summoner’s Tale 196 Wife of Bath’s Prologue 139, 142 Complaint to his Lady 114, 116 Complaint to his Purse 18, 162–73 Complaint unto Pity 114, 116 Envoy to Bukton 103 Envoy to Scogan 102–3 Gentillesse 105 House of Fame 10–11, 35–6, 90, 130, 133, 187–92; (and Pope) 200 Legend of Good Women 90, 97–8, 196 Parliament of Fowls 88 Romaunt of the Rose 90 Troilus and Criseyde 11–12, 15–16, 30–3, 34–5, 57–75, 90, 97, 130–31 Truth 173, 193, 207–8 Womanly Noblesse 114, 116 Chaucer, Thomas 106 Cheshunt, John of, vintner, Prince of the London Puy 113

City, the, abandoned 62 alien trade in 8, 35, 50, 84, 135 as culturally and spatially split 25 as gynotopia 51 ban and 53–6 bells in 34, 68 citee 89–91 concept-city 58, 68 dwelling in 58, 62–3, 70–5 fear in 189–91 heterotopias in 51, 52 isolation in 11–12 mercantile character of 38, 145–6, 164–5 (in 17th century) 182–4 migrational or metaphorical 63 readable or legible 3–4, 62–3 sex in 48–51 social space in 42–3 sound in (of craft) 3–4, 10–11, 80–9 strangers in 10–12 the order of 50 trapped in 69–70 urbs capta 59, 63, 71 walking or roaming in (Roger [Knight] of Ware) 50, 63, 132 Clanvowe, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale 194 Coleman, Joyce 96, 107 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 203, 204 Common Hunt 26 Compaignie 111 Confession 48 Confrérie 109, 111 (Arras) Conspiracies, confederacies 135 Cooper, Helen 17 Country, countryside and the city 145, 165–6, 168–9, 177–92 Court of Love, The 194 Court, the (or crown) and the city 16, 31 Craft guilds, see Guilds Crakow 164 Crime, fraud (food and drink) 136–7, 143 pillory 136, 139 prison 29, 136, 139 Crowned King, The 107 Cummings, Brian 9 Davis, Paul 19–20 Death, as performance 46 Deschamps, Eustache 162 Devereux, John 44–5 Dickens, Charles 41

Index

227

Dinshaw, Carolyn 49n.23, 64n.20 Dion, Mark 4, 13 Disraeli, Benjamin 206 Donaldson, E.T. 163 Donnington [Dennington] Castle 178–9, 180 Drama 46 Dryden, John 20, 177, 181–7, 196 Dryden, John, Palamon and Arcite: or The Knight’s Tale 181 The Cock and the Fox 181 Wife of Bath’s Tale 181, 185–6, 188 Dunbar, William 164 Dyer, Christopher 145–6, 148–9

Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae 58, 68n.23 Guilds, and craft associations 49, 79–84, 133 carpenters 83 cordwainers 135 Grocer’s Company 85 Gild of Garlickhite 84 Guild Records 107 pewterers 135 physicians 86 powche makers 83, 142 social values of 142 victuallers 84, 136, 138 weavers 135

Edinburgh Edward III Ellis, Steve Evans, Ruth

Haanawalt, Barbara 26n.10 Hanna, Ralph 110n.4 Harbledown 80 Harwood, Britten 87 Hazlitt, William 196–97, 199 Heal, Felicity 38 Henry IV 172, 173 Hoccleve, Thomas (La Male Regle) 104, 107, 167, 170–1 Homo sacer 53–6 Horace, Satires 172 Household, the Great 18–19, 146–61 Hudson, Anne 82–3 Hunt, Leigh 199, 203, 206, 207

164–5 50 201 15

Favent, Thomas 43 Federico, Sylvia 42n.8, 57n.4 Finnel, Andrew 163 Fire (see also Great Fire) 21, 35 Fitzgerald, Edward 200, 206 Fitzstephen, William 26n.11, 172 Flemish, Flemings 37, 80, 169 Florence 165 Floure and the Leaf, The 178, 181, 193–6, 207 Foucault, Michel 45–6, 51, 53, 55n.41 Fradenburg, Louise Olga Aranye 146 Freud, Sigmund 7, 19, 53n.39 Froissart, Jean 110 Fuller, Thomas 178 Furnivall, F.J. 195, 199, 205 Gamelyn, The Tale of 142 Garden(s), city 66 Gaunt, John of 130 Gender, gendered space 58, 66–7; transgression of 49–51 Ghent 90 Gift economy 146–8, 150–1, 156–7 Godwin, William 207 Gog and Magog 42 Gossip, or rumour 29, 34–6, 85, 188–90 Gower, John 42, 94n.36, 97, 104, 116 (Miroir), 117 (ballades), 149 (Miroir) Great Fire 7, 19, 177–8, 182, 183, 186, 188–90 Green, R.F. 155n.36

Immigration (into London) Inns of Court 131 Iser, Wolfgang 95 Isle of Ladies, The 194

135

Jerusalem 90 John, Lewis 106 Johnson, Lionel 209 Justice, Steven 52 Keats, John 195, 197, 199, 203 Kendall, Elliot 18 Kent, W. Charles 198 Knighton, Henry 21 Kolve, V. A. 132 Labour 49 Lambert, Mark 63 Lancaster, Henry of 116 Landor, Walter Savage 206 Langland, William, Piers Plowman 18, 79, 81, 149, 168

228

Index

Language 16, 18 Anglo-Norman 115–16, 117, 120–25 English 82 (London), 88, 93–4 Flemish 30 of crafts 82–94 Lanier, Sydney 195, 199 Law, courts 18, 27 influence of curial prose 25 inversion of legal charter 46 letters patent 47 satire on lawyers 169–70 Scandalum Magnatum 35 Statute of treason 36 Statute of York (1335, 1351) 50 sumptuary legislation 159, 167 Lawrance, Hannah 205 Le Goff, Jacques 146n.4 n.8, 164n.7 Lefebvre, Henri 4, 15, 33, 38, 42–8, 50–2, 163–4 Lendit fair 154 Léry, Jean de 8–9 Letter Books 18, 107, 112n.9, 134–41 Liber customarum 111 Lindahl, Carl 35 Lollards 82 London Lickpenny 169 London, absence/ presence 12, 27–8, 52, 56, 80, 129–30, 131 and fraud (see also Crime) 136, 137, 138, 143 as person 41–2 as Troy (as Troynovant) 16; 31, 130–1 as walled space 25, 27, 28 citizens, citizenship 133, 147 curfew 132 geographical and cultural meaning of 25–40 murder in (and pardon) 27, 28 parish fraternities 133 politics, ‘Merciless Parliament’ 44 aldermen 49, 84 citizens of 165 Common Council 84 craft-rivalries in 81–2 the ban, sovereign power and 53–6 war 37 population 26, 168 proclamations in 35, 84 restaurants 79, 136, 168–70 and n.25 rivalry 30, 81–2 salaries (Chaucer) 170, 172–3

shopping 6, 168, 169–70 Street names, places, and buildings Bankside 3, 4 Blackfriars Bridge 209 Bloomsbury 202 Bread Street 164, 168–9 Charing Cross 131 Cheapside 29, 48, 50, 133, 164, 168–9 City gates 13, 20, 82, 97; Aldgate, 20–1, 177; Billingsgate 170; Bishopsgate 50; Newgate 133, 136, 139, 140 Cock Lane 29 Conduyt of London 84 Cornhill 29 (the Tunne), 82, 138, 164, 169 Custom House 14 Embankment 209 Enfield 203 Friday Street 167 Garlickhite (parish) 84 Guildhall 7, 105, 112, 164 Hampstead 202, 203 Highgate 202 Inns of Court 13, 131 Kentish Town 202 London Bridge 14, 20 Millbank 4 Minoresses 15 Monument 19, 190 Moorfields 190 Oxford Street 202 Paul’s Head (tavern) 170 Pimlico 4 Poultry, The 164, 169 Pudding Lane 19, 164 Putney Bridge 14 River Thames 4–5, 14, 47, 170, 201–2, 209 Savoy Palace 13, 21, 167 St Andrew the Apostle 178 St Katherine’s Church 50 St Pancras 202 St Paul’s 3, 19, 27 (Cross), 190 Seint John Baptist of Haliwelle-bysyde London 84 Seint Thomas of Acon 84 Sheen 27 Smithfield 21, 29 Soper’s Lane 48 Southwark 4, 20, 26–30, 116, 131, 143, 147; 14 (St Mary Overy’s) Stews 29

Index Strand 13, 167 Tabard Inn 112, 208 Thames Street 82, 84, 106, 177 Tower 29, 44, 45–51 Tumbling Bear 113 Tyburn 15, 44, 46, 52 Upper Thames Street (see Thames Street) Vintry (Ward) 82, 106–7, 164 (Street), 177 Walls/Ditch 13, 25, 47, 182 Whitefriars 15 Wool Quay 177 London, Thou Art the Flour of Cities All 165 Longfellow, H.W. 198, 199 Lowell, James Russell 199, 204 Lydgate, John, Complaint of the Black Knight 194 Fall of Princes 97, 194 Mummings 105 Siege of Thebes 208 Lyon, Earl 134 Lyttelton, George, Blenheim 179 Maidstone, Richard 14, 26–7, 42 Mann, Jill 149 Manuscripts, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 396D (Hengwrt) 101, 109 British Library Harley MS 2253 116 MS Ashmole 59 105 MS Royal 16 F ii 201 MS Royal 18 D 11 208 Additional MS 35286 101n.15 Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27 101n.15 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61 97–8 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1 (Auchinleck) 45, 110 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 4 163 San Marino CA, Huntington Library, MS El 26 C 9 (Ellesmere) 101 Trinity College, Cambridge MS O.9.38 28 Marx, Karl 51 Méconnaissance 42; Bourdieu 150, 151–52, 160

229

Memory, arts of 59 gradus amoris 61, 67, 69, 73 gradus amoris, alloquium 60–1, 65, 68, 73 gradus amoris, factum 61, 69 gradus amoris, osculum 61, 68 gradus amoris, tactus 61, 68 gradus amoris, visus 60–1, 66, 73 locationary sites 59–60, 72 Merchants 145, 156-61 Meredith, George 205 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 58, 64 Mills, Robert 52 Milton, John 179, 203 Minto, William 207 Mirror for Magistrates 47 Money 156–7, 158, 160, 162–73, 184; and clothing 159 Money, Money! 166-7 Montaigne, Michel de 8 Morris, William 200–2, 205, 206 Multilingualism (see also language) 18 Music 3–4, 8–9, 18, 111, 118; minstralcie 85-6, 136 Nancy, Jean-Luc 52–3 Nauman, Bruce 3–4 Nevill, Thomas, Lord Furnivall 170 New York 3, 5 Nolan, Barbara 15 North British Review, The 203, 204 Northampton, John of 28, 136 Ong, Walter J. 95–6 Ormrod, Mark 50 Outlaws 47, 53–6 Ovid 57, 60 Page, Christopher 115n.16 Paris 18, 90, 154, 157, 161 Pastoral 20–1 Patmore, Coventry 195 Pavia 90 Pearsall, Derek 17, 26, 31, 42n.5, 65, 172 Peasants’ Revolt (see Rising, 1381) Pepys, Samuel 177–8 Phillips, Helen 19–20 Philpot, John 129 Picard, Henry, mayor 105 Plato 42, 44, 49 (Republic) Plea and Memoranda Rolls 134 and n.13, 137–40, 142–3

230

Index

Polis 43, 47, 53–6 Pope, Alexander 20, 187–92, 204 Essay on Criticism 187 January and May; Or, The Merchant’s Tale 187 The Temple of Fame 187–92 The Wife of Bath, her Prologue 187 Privy Seal, Office of the 170 Prostitutes (‘Stews’) 29, 49 Punishment (see also Crime) 15 Punishment, hanging 44, 45–6 Puy, continental 109–10 Puy, London 17, 18, 104, 110–13; Puy statutes (Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis) 111 Quintilian

59n.12

Rancière, Jacques 15, 44, 49–50 Reich, Steve 3–4 Renaus (Renaud) de Hoilande 115, 117–25 Reynolds, John Hamilton 197 Rhetorica ad Herennium 59 Richard II 27, 36, 47–8, 51 Richard of Devizes, Chronicle 171–72 Rising, 1381 20–1, 26, 28, 31, 80, 180, 196 Roman de la Rose, Le 98 Rome 6–7, 19, 22 Rothwell, William 115n.18 Ruskin, John 203, 207 Rykener, John/Eleanor 15, 43, 48–51 Saint-Denis 148, 154 St Erkenwald 19 Salter, Elizabeth 98 Scattergood, John 18–19, 37n.50 Schmitt, Carl 53 Scogan, Henry, Moral Balade 105–6 Scott, Walter 193–4 Shaa, John, goldsmith and mayor 165 Shaw, Diane 42 Shirley, John 105-6 Simonie, The 149 Simpson, James 81 Sir Orfeo 45 Slander 30, 35, 92 (insults) Smyser, Hamilton 62 Sodomy 49 Somer, Henry 107, 170 Song (see also Music) 66–7 Space, accumulation and exchange in 33, 48, 50

and the body 52 architectural 16, 62 domestic 58, 59, 65–8 imagined 46–8 libidinous freedom in 48 networks (of travel, writing, public discourse) 45 ‘representational spaces’ 15, 46 ‘spatial practice’ 46 street spaces 15, 50 symbolic organisation of 50 the production of 42 Speght, Thomas 178, 180 Spivak, Gayatri 7 Spufford, Peter 165–6 Staley, Lynn 38n.63 Stevens, John 115n.16 Stores of the Cities, The 14, 28–9 Stow, John 13–14, 105, 178 Stratford atte Bowe 131 Stricklands, Agnes, and Elizabeth 205 Strode, Ralph 97, 104, 110, 129 Strohm, Paul 17, 50, 51, 96 Suburbs 35 Tax (on cloth) 159 Tennyson, Alfred 195, 197, 205 Tickell, Thomas, On the Prospect of Peace 179 Time, and transience 20–2, 184–6, 188–92 Tonge, William, alderman 21 Tragedy 47 Treason 47 Tresilian, Robert 15, 44–8 Trouthe 155–6 Troy, 27, 31, 55–75, 90, see also London; 57–75, 130–1 Turner, Marion 13–14 Tyler, Wat 20–1 Urry, William and John Dart 180 Usk, Thomas 25, 38, 46, 104 The Testament of Love 178 Vache, Philip de la 104, 173 Venice 90, 165 Vere, Aubrey de 200, 205 Violence 20–1, 36–9 Waleys, Henry Le, mayor 111, 112 Wallace, David 13, 27–8, 29, 42, 80, 81n.4, 90, 137 Walsingham, Thomas 21 Walworth, William, mayor 129

Index Ware, Roger [Knight] of 131–2 Waterbailiff 26 Westminster (town) 16, 26, 27, 29, 47, 167, 169 Abbey 5, 173, 193, 201; Chaucer’s tomb 207 Gate 14; stairs, 170 Palace of 44, 47 Wilde, Oscar 209–10 Williams, Raymond 20, 83

231

Winchester 172 Winner and Waster 159–60, 166, 168–9 Winstanley, William 178 Woodstock 179, 194, 198 Wordsworth, William 41, 195, 203 York 27, 50 Ypres 90 Yunck, John A. 166

CHAUCER STUDIES I II

MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. D. Burnley III ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N. R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis IX CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, James I. Wimsatt X CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani XI INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XII CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace XIII CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIV CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson XVI EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden XVII THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVIII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis XIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt XX CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XXI CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXII CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl XXIII CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya XXIV CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler XXVI CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel XXX FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann

XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI

NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel RETHINKING THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN, edited by Carolyn P. Collette