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ENGLAND IN EMBRYO

“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames!”

Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain from pressing too literally the poet’s fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer’s times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them; but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the 20th century. There is indeed a glory over the distant past which is (in spite of the paradox) scarcely less real for being to a great extent imaginary; scarcely less true because it owes so much to the beholder’s eye. It is like the subtle charm we feel every time we set foot afresh on a foreign shore. It is just because we should never dream of choosing France or Germany for our home that we love them so much for our holidays; it is just because we are so deeply rooted in our own age that we find so much pleasure and profit in the past, where we may build for ourselves a new heaven and a new earth out of the wreck of a vanished world. The very things which would oppress us out of all proportion as present-day realities dwindle to even less than their real significance in the long perspective of history. All the oppressions that were then done under the sun, and the tears of such as were oppressed, show very small in the sum-total of things; the ancient tale of wrong has little meaning to us who repose so far above it all; the real landmarks are the great men who for a moment moulded the world to their own will, or those still greater who kept themselves altogether unspotted from it. Human nature gives the lie direct to Mark Antony’s bitter rhetoric: it is rather the good that lives after a man, and the evil that is oft interred with his bones. The balance may not be very heavy, but it is on the right side; man’s insatiable curiosity about his fellow-men is as natural as his appetite for food, which may on the whole be trusted to refuse the evil and choose the good; and, in both cases, his taste is, within obvious limits, a true guide. It is a healthy instinct which prompts us to dwell on the beauties of an ancient timber-built house, or on the gorgeous pageantry of the Middle Ages, without a too curious scrutiny of what may lie under the surface; and at this distance the 14th century stands out to the modern eye with a clearness and brilliancy which few men can see in their own age, or even in that immediate past which must always be partially dimmed with the dust of present-day conflicts. Those who were separated by only a few generations from the Middle Ages could seldom judge them with sufficient sympathy. Even two hundred years ago, most Englishmen thought of that time as a great forest from which we had not long emerged; they looked back and saw it in imagination as Dante saw the dark wood of his own wanderings—bitter as death, cruel as the perilous sea from which a spent swimmer has just struggled out upon the shore. Then, with Goethe and Scott, came the Romantic Revival; and these men showed us the Middle Ages peopled with living creatures—beasts of prey, indeed, in very many cases, but always bright and swift and attractive, as wild beasts are in comparison with the commonplace stock of our fields and farmyards—bright in themselves, and heightened in colour by the artificial brilliancy which perspective gives to all that we see through the wrong end of a telescope. Since then men have turned the other end of the telescope on medieval society, and now, in due course, the microscope, with many curious results. But it is always good to balance our too detailed impressions with a general survey, and to take a brief holiday, of set purpose, from the world in which our own daily work has to be done, into a race of men so unlike our own even amid all their general resemblance.

For the England of Edward III. was already, in its main national features, the England in which we live to-day. “In no country of Europe are the present-day institutions and manners and beliefs so directly derived from the social state of five centuries ago.”[1] The year 1340, which saw the abolition of the law of Englishry, was very likely the exact year of Chaucer’s birth; and from that time forward our legislation ceased to recognize any distinction of races: all natives of England were alike Englishmen. Sixteen years later it was first enacted that cases in the Sheriff’s Courts of London should be pleaded in English; seven years later, again, this became in theory the language not only of the King’s law courts, but also to some extent of Parliament; and Nicolas quotes an amusing instance of two ambassadors to France, a Knight and a Doctor of Laws, who confessed in 1404 “we are as ignorant of French as of Hebrew.” The contemporary Trevisa apparently attributes this rapid breakdown to the Great Pestilence of 1349; but even before this the French language must have been in full decay among us, for at the Parliament which Edward III. called in 1337 to advise him about declaring war on France, the ambassador of Robert d’Artois took care to speak “in English, in order to be understanded of all folk, for a man ever knoweth better what he would say and propose in the language of his childhood than in any other.” Later in the same year, in the famous statute which forbade all sports except the longbow, it was further ordained “that all lords, barons, knights, and honourable men of good towns should be careful and diligent to teach and instruct their children in the French tongue, whereby they might be the more skilful and practised in their wars.”[2] But Acts of Parliament are not omnipotent even in the 20th century; and in the 14th they often represented rather pious aspirations than workaday facts. It was easier to foster a healthy pastime like archery than to enforce scholastic regulations which parents and masters were alike tempted to neglect; and certainly the French language lost ground very rapidly in the latter half of the century. In 1362 English superseded French as the spoken language of the law courts; next year the Chancellor opened Parliament in an English speech; and in 1385 Trevisa complained that boys at grammar-schools “know no more French than their left heel.” The language lingered, of course. Chaucer’s friend and contemporary, Gower, wrote as much in French as in English. French still kept the upper hand in Parliament till about fifty years after Chaucer’s death, nor did the statutes cease altogether to be published in that language until the reign of Henry VIII. But though it was still the Court tongue in Chaucer’s time, and though we do not know that Edward III. was capable of addressing his Commons in their native tongue, yet Henry IV. took care to claim the throne before Parliament in plain English;[3] and even before that time French had already become an exotic, an artificial dialect needing hothouse culture—no longer French of Paris, but that of “Stratford attë Bowë.”[4] The tongue sat ill on a nation that was already proud of its insularity and unity. Even while labouring to write in French, Gower dedicates his work to his country: “O gentile Engletere, a toi j’escrits.” It is not the least of Chaucer’s claims on our gratitude that, from the very first, he wrote for the English people in English—that is, in the mixed dialect of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French which was habitually spoken in London by the upper middle classes of a mingled Norman and Teutonic population[5]—and that in so doing he laid the foundations of a national literary language. Much, of course, still remained to be done. Caxton, in 1490, shows us how an Englishman might well be taken for a Frenchman outside his own country,[6] as in modern Germany a foreigner who speaks fluently, however incorrectly, passes easily for a German of some remote and barbarous province. Indeed, English unity in Chaucer’s time was as recent as that of the modern German empire. Men would still go before bishops and magistrates to purge themselves by a solemn oath from the injurious suspicion of being Scots, and therefore enemies to the realm; and a couple of generations earlier the suspected Welshman had found himself under the same necessity. The articles of peace drawn up in 1274 at Oxford between the northern and Irish scholars “read like a treaty of peace between hostile nations rather than an act of University legislation”; and even at the end of Chaucer’s life we may find royal letters “licensing John Russell, born in Ireland, to reside in England, notwithstanding the proclamation that all Irish-born were to go and stay in their own country.” But the Oxford Concordia of 1274 was the last which recognized that division of students into “nations” which still remained so real at Paris and other continental universities; and though blood still reddened Oxford streets for a century longer in the ancient quarrel of north and south, yet the “great slaughter” of 1354 was entirely a town and gown affray.[7]

The foundations of modern England were laid by Edward I., who did more than any other king to create a national parliament, a national system of justice, and a national army.[8] Edward III., with far less creative power, but with equal energy and ambition, inherited the ripe fruits of his grandfather’s policy, and raised England to a place in European politics which she had never reached before and was seldom to reach again. “That which touches all,” said Edward I., “should be approved by all”; and, though continental sovereigns might use similar language as a subtle cloke for their arbitrary encroachments, in England the maxim had from the first a real meaning. The great barons—themselves steadily dwindling in feudal power—no longer sat alone in the King’s councils; by their side sat country gentlemen and citizens elected to share in the responsibilities of government; and the clergy, but for their own persistent separatism, might have sent their chosen representatives to sit with the rest. Moreover, already in Chaucer’s time we find precedents for the boldest demands of the Long Parliament. The Commons claimed, and for a time obtained, the control of taxation; and five of Richard II.’s ministers were condemned as traitors for counselling him to measures which Parliament branded as unconstitutional. Professor Maitland has well described the “omnicompetence” of Parliament at this time. Nothing human was alien to its sphere of activity, from the sale of herrings at Yarmouth fair and the fashion of citizens’ girdles to those great constitutional questions which remained in dispute for three centuries longer, and were only settled at last by a civil war and a revolution.

Nor was the judicial system less truly national than the Parliament. Maitland has pointed out that the years 1272–1290 were more fruitful in epoch-making legislation than any other period of English history, except perhaps that which succeeded the Reform Bill of 1832. Chaucer, like ourselves, lived in an age which was consolidating the great achievements of two generations past, and looking forward to far-reaching social changes in the future. Already in his time the Roman Law was outlandish in England; our land laws were fixed in many principles which for centuries remained unquestioned, and which are often found to underlie even the present system. Already under Edward III., as for many centuries afterwards, men looked upon the main principles of English jurisprudence as settled for ever, and strove only by a series of ingenious accommodations to fit them in with the requirements of a changing world. The framework of the law courts, again, was roughly that of modern England. The King’s judges were no longer clerics, but laymen chosen from among the professional pleaders in the courts; and here again “one remarkable characteristic of our legal system is fixed.”

In many other ways, too, the kingdom had outgrown its clerical tutelage. Learning and art had long since ceased to be predominantly monastic; for at least two centuries before Chaucer’s birth they had left the protection of the cloister, and flourished far more luxuriantly in the great world than they ever could have done under strictly monastic conditions. True monasticism was predominantly puritan, and therefore unfavourable to free development in any direction but that of mystic contemplation; if the spirit of St. Bernard had lived among the Cistercians, the glories of Tintern and Rievaulx would have been impossible; and even our cathedrals and parish churches owed more of their beauties to laymen than to clerics. So also with our universities, which rose on the ruins of monastic learning; and in which, despite the fresh impetus received from the Friars, the lay spirit still grew rapidly under the shelter of the Church. In the 14th century, when Oxford could show such a roll of philosophers that “not all the other Nations and Universities of Europe between them could muster such a list,” a growing proportion of these were not cloistered, but secular clergy. At no earlier time could these latter have shown three such Oxford doctors as Bradwardine, Richard of Armagh, and Wycliffe. The General Chapter of the Benedictines strove repeatedly, but in vain, to compel a reasonable proportion of monks to study at Oxford or Cambridge.[9] Before the end of Edward III.’s reign, the English Universities had become far more truly national than at any previous time; their training and aims were less definitely ecclesiastical, and their culture overflowed to laymen like Chaucer and Gower.[10] Moreover, the Inns of Court had become practically lay universities of law: and, quite apart from Wycliffism, there was a rapid growth not only of the non-clerical but even of anti-clerical spirit. Blow after blow was struck at Papal privileges by successive Parliaments in which the representatives of the lower clergy no longer sat. The Pope’s demand for arrears of John’s tribute from England was rejected so emphatically that it was never pressed again; Parliament repudiated Papal claims of presentation to vacant benefices, and forbade, under the severest penalties, all unlicensed appeals to Rome from English courts. It is true that our kings constantly gave way on these two last points, but only because it was easier to share the spoils by connivance with the Popes; and these statutes mark none the less an epoch in English history. In 1371, again, Edward III. assented to a petition from Parliament which pleaded “inasmuch as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of the men of Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for their acts, whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may happen in times to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of his own realm be elected to replace them, and that none but laymen henceforth be chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of privy seal, or other great officers of the realm.” Already the partial sequestration of the Alien Priories by the three Edwards, and the total suppression and spoliation of the Templars in 1312, had accustomed men’s minds to schemes of wholesale disendowment which were advocated as earnestly by an anti-Lollard like Langland[11] as by Wycliffe himself; and indeed this writer, the most religious among the three principal poets of that age, was also the most anticlerical. In Edward III.’s reign the Reformation was already definitely in sight.

In short, Chaucer’s lot was cast in an epoch-making age. Then began our definite claim to the lordship of the sea; Sluys, our first great maritime victory, the Trafalgar of the Middle Ages, was won in the same year in which the poet was probably born; six years later we captured Calais, our first colony; and it was noted even in those days that the Englishman prospered still more abroad than at home. Never before or since have English armies been so frequently and so uniformly victorious as during the first thirty years of Chaucer’s life; seldom have our commerce and our liberties developed more rapidly; and if the disasters which he saw were no less strange, these also helped to ripen his many-sided genius. The Great Pestilence of 1349, more terrible than any other recorded in history; the first pitched battle between Labour and Capital in 1381; the first formal deposition of an English King in 1327, to be repeated still more solemnly in 1399; all these must have affected the poet almost as deeply as they affected the State, notwithstanding the persistency with which he generally looks upon the brighter side. Professor Raleigh has wittily applied to him the confession of Dr. Johnson’s friend, “I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” It is difficult, however, not to surmise a great deal of more or less unwilling philosophy beneath Chaucer’s delightful flow of good-humour. His subtle ironies may tell as plain a tale as other men’s open complaints; and sometimes he hastens to laugh where we might suspect a rising lump in his throat. But the laugh is there, or at least the easy, good-natured smile. Where Gower sees an England more hopelessly given over to the Devil than even in Carlyle’s most dyspeptic nightmares—where the robuster Langland sees an impending religious Armageddon, and the honest soul’s pilgrimage from the City of Destruction towards a New Jerusalem rather hoped for than seen even by the eye of faith—there Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry England to which the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death and Tyler’s revolt are but a foil. Like many others in the Middle Ages, he seems convinced of the peculiar instability of the English character. He knew that he was living—as all generations are more or less conscious of living—in an uncomfortable borderland between that which once was, but can be no longer, and that which shall be, but cannot yet come to pass; yet all these changes supplied the artist with that variety of colour and form which he needed; and the man seems to have gone through life in the tranquil conviction that this was a pleasant world, and his own land a particularly privileged spot. The England of Chaucer is that of which one of his most noted predecessors wrote, “England is a strong land and a sturdy, and the plenteousest corner of the world, so rich a land that unneth it needeth help of any land, and every other land needeth help of England. England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft times able to mirth and game, free men of heart and with tongue, but the hand is more better and more free than the tongue.”[12]