Читать книгу Chaucer and His England - G. G. Coulton - Страница 8

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LONDON BRIDGE, ETC., IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE’S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS’S MAP)

THE MOUTH OF THE WALBROOK MAY BE SEEN BETWEEN TWO HOUSES JUST ABOVE THE RIGHT-HAND COW.

THAMES STREET IS THE LONG STREET PARALLEL TO THE RIVER

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about the year 1340, in his father’s London dwelling, which is described in a legal document of the time as “a certain tenement situate in the parish of St. Martin at Vintry, between the tenement of William le Gauger on the east and that which once belonged to John le Mazelyner on the west: and it extendeth in length from the King’s highway of Thames Street southwards, unto the water of Walbrook northwards.”[17] The Water of Walbrook rose in the northern heights of Hampstead and Highbury, spread with others into the swamp of Moorfields, divided the city roughly into two halves, and discharged its sluggish waters into the Thames about where Cannon Street station now stands. Similar streams, or “fleets,” creeping between overhanging houses, are still frequent enough in little continental towns, and survive here and there even in England.[18] Stow, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, describes how the lower part of Walbrook was bricked over in 1462, leaving it still “a fair brook of sweet water” in its upper course; and he takes pains to assure us that it was not really called after Galus, “a Roman captain slain by Asclepiodatus, and thrown therein, as some have fabled.” In Chaucer’s time it ran openly through the wall between Moorgate and Bishopsgate, washed St. Margaret’s, Lothbury, and ran under the kitchen of Grocer’s Hall, and again under St. Mildred’s church; “from thence through Bucklersbury, by one great house built of stone and timber called the Old Barge, because barges out of the river of Thames were rowed so far into this brook, on the back side of the houses in Walbrook Street.” In this last statement, however, Stow himself had probably built too rashly upon a mere name; for no barges can have come any distance up the stream for centuries before its final bricking up. The mass of miscellaneous documents preserved at the Guildhall, from which so much can be done to reconstitute medieval London, give us a most unflattering picture of the Walbrook. From 1278 to 1415 we find it periodically “stopped up by divers filth and dung thrown therein by persons who have houses along the said course, to the great nuisance and damage of all the city.” The “King’s highway of Thames Street,” though one of the chief arteries of the city, cannot have been very spacious in these days, when even Cheapside was only just wide enough to allow two chariots to pass each other; and when Chaucer became his own master he doubtless did well to live in hired houses over the gate of Aldgate or in the Abbey garden of Westminster, and sell the paternal dwelling to a fellow-citizen who was presumably of tougher fibre than himself. Yet, in spite of Walbrook and those riverside lanes which Dr. Creighton surmises to have been the least sanitary spots of medieval London, the Vintry was far from being one of the worst quarters of the town. On the contrary, it was rather select, as befitted the “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne,” many of whom were mayors of the city; and Stow’s survey records many conspicuous buildings in this ward. First, the headquarters of the wine trade, “a large house built of stone and timber, with vaults for the storage of wines, and is called the Vintry. There dwelt John Gisers, vintner, mayor of London and constable of the town.” Here also “Henry Picard, vintner (mayor, 1357), in the year 1363, did in one day sumptuously feast Edward III., King of England, John, King of France, David, King of Scots, the King of Cyprus (then all in England), Edward, Prince of Wales, with many other noblemen, and after kept his hall for all comers that were willing to play at dice and hazard. The Lady Margaret, his wife, kept her chamber to the same effect.” Picard, as Mr. Rye points out, was one of John Chaucer’s fellow-vintners on Edward III.’s Rhine journey in 1338.[19] Then there were the Vintner’s Hall and almshouses, which were built in Chaucer’s lifetime; the three Guild Halls of the Cutlers, Plumbers, and Glaziers; the town mansions of the Earls of Worcester and Ormond, and the great house of the Ypres family, at which John of Gaunt was dining in 1377 when a knight burst in with news that London was up in arms against him, “and unless he took great heed, that day would be his last. With which words the duke leapt so hastily from his oysters that he hurt both his legs against the form. Wine was offered, but he could not drink for haste, and so fled with his fellow Henry Percy out at a back gate, and entering the Thames, never stayed rowing until they came to a house near the manor of Kennington, where at that time the princess [of Wales] lay with Richard the young prince, before whom he made his complaint.”

MEDIEVAL COCK-FIGHTING, ACTUAL AND METAPHORICAL

(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)

Of Chaucer’s childhood we have no direct record. No doubt he played with other boys at forbidden games of ball in the narrow streets, to the serious risk of other people’s windows or limbs; no doubt he brought his cock to fight in school, under magisterial supervision, on Shrove Tuesday, and played in the fields outside the walls at the still rougher game of football, or at “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, and casting the stone.” In winter, when the great swamp of Moorfields was frozen, he would be sure to flock out with the rest to “play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels, and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the time of war.”[20] In spring he would watch the orchards of Southwark put on their fresh leaves and blossoms, and walk abroad with his father in the evening to the pleasant little village of Holborn; but he had a perennial source of amusement nearer home than this. Nearly all the old wall along the Thames had already been broken down, as the city had grown in population and security, while more ships came daily to unload their cargoes at the wharves. Here and there stood mighty survivals of the old riverside fortifications: Montfitchet’s Tower flanking the walls up-stream and the Tower of London down-stream; and between them, close by Chaucer’s own home, the “Tower Royal,” in which the Queen Dowager found safety during Wat Tyler’s revolt. But the Thames itself was now bordered by an almost continuous line of open quays, among the busiest of which were those of Vintry ward, “where the merchants of Bordeaux craned their wines out of lighters and other vessels,” and finally built their vaulted warehouses so thickly as to crowd out the cooks’ shops; “for Fitzstephen, in the reign of Henry II., writeth, that upon the river’s side, between the wine in ships and the wine to be sold in Taverns, was a common cookery or cooks’ row.” Here, then, Chaucer would loiter to study the natural history of the English shipman, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard. Here he would see not only native craft from “far by west,” but broad-sailed vessels from every country of Europe, with cargoes as various as their nationalities. Not a stone’s throw from his father’s house stood the great fortified hall and wharf of the Hanse merchants, the Easterlings who gave their name to our standard coinage, and whose London premises remained the property of Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen until 1853.[21] Chief among the Easterlings at this time were the Cologne merchants, with whom John Chaucer had specially close relations; so that the little Geoffrey must often have trotted in with his father to see the vines and fruit-trees with which these thrifty Germans had laid out a plot of make-believe Rhineland beside far-off Thames shore. Often must he have wondered at the half-monastic, half-military discipline which these knights of commerce kept inside their high stone walls, and sat down to nibble at his share of “a Dutch bun and a keg of sturgeon,” or dipped his childish beak in the paternal flagon of Rhenish. Meanwhile he went to school, since his writings show a very considerable amount of learning for a layman of his time. French he would pick up easily enough among this colony of “Merchant Vintners of Gascoyne”; and for Latin there were at least three grammar schools attached to different churches in London, of which St. Paul’s lay nearest to Chaucer’s home. But he probably began first with one of the many clerks in lower orders, who, all through the Middle Ages, eked out their scanty income by teaching boys and girls to read; and here we may remember what a contemporary man of letters tells us of his own childhood in a great merchant city. “When they put me to school,” writes Froissart, “there were little girls who were young in my days, and I, who was a little boy, would serve them with pins, or with an apple or a pear, or a plain glass ring; and in truth methought it great prowess to win their grace … and then would I say to myself, ‘When will the hour strike for me, that I shall be able to love in earnest?’ … When I was grown a little wiser, it behoved me to be more obedient; for they made me learn Latin, and if I varied in repeating my lessons, they gave me the rod. … I could not be at rest; I was beaten, and I beat in turn; then was I in such disarray that ofttimes I came home with torn clothes, when I was chidden and beaten again; but all their pains were utterly lost, for I took no heed thereof. When I saw my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go and tumble with them again.”[22] Is not childhood essentially the same in all countries and in all ages?

The first certain glimpse we get of the future poet is at the age of seventeen or eighteen. A manuscript of the British Museum containing poems by Chaucer’s contemporaries, Lydgate and Hoccleve, needed rebinding; and the old binding was found, as often, to have been strengthened with two sheets of parchment pasted inside the covers. These sheets, religiously preserved, in accordance with the traditions of the Museum, were found to contain household accounts of the Countess of Ulster, wife to that Prince Lionel who had been born so near to the time of John Chaucer’s continental journey, and who was therefore two or three years older than the poet. Among the items were found records of clothes given to different members of the household for Easter, 1357; and low down on the list comes Geoffrey Chaucer, who received a short cloak, a pair of tight breeches in red and black, and shoes. In these red-and-black hosen the poet comes for the first time into full light on the stage of history. Two other trifling payments to him are recorded later on; but the chief interest of the remaining accounts lies in the light they throw on the Countess’s movements. We see that she travelled much and was present at several great Court festivities; and we have every right to assume that Chaucer in her train had an equally varied experience. “We may catch glimpses of Chaucer in London, at Windsor, at the feast of St. George, held there with great pomp in connection with the newly founded Order of the Garter, again in London, then at Woodstock, at the celebration of the feast at Pentecost, at Doncaster, at Hatfield in Yorkshire, where he spends Christmas, again at Windsor, in Anglesey (August, 1358), at Liverpool, at the funeral of Queen Isabella at the Grey Friars Church, London (November 27th, 1358), at Reading, again in London, visiting the lions in the Tower.”[23]

Lionel himself, the romance of whose too brief life was said to have begun even before his birth,[24] was the tallest and handsomest of all the King’s sons. As the chronicler Hardyng says—

“In all the world was then no prince hym like, Of his stature and of all semelynesse Above all men within his hole kyngrike By the shulders he might be seen doutlesse, [And] as a mayde in halle of gentilnesse.”

His second marriage and tragic death, not without suspicion of poison, may be found written in Froissart under the year 1368; but as yet there was no shadow over his life, and in 1357 there can have been few gayer Courts for a young poet than this, to which there came, at the end of the year, among other great folk, the great prince John of Gaunt, who was afterwards to be Chaucer’s and Wycliffe’s best patron. For all John Chaucer’s favour with the King, the vintner’s son could never have found a place in this great society without brilliant qualities of his own. We must think of him like his own squire—singing, fluting, and dancing, fresh as the month of May; already a poet, and warbling his love-songs like the nightingale while staider folk snored in their beds. His earliest poems refer to an unrequited passion, not so much natural as positively inevitable under those conditions. Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more complacently to the page’s love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their messes. The desire of the moth for the star may be sad enough, but it is far worse when the star is a close and tangible flame. The tale of Petit Jean de Saintré and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry afford the best possible commentary on Chaucer’s Court life.

Heavily as we may discount the autobiographical touches in his early poems, there is still quite enough to show that, from his twenty-first year at least, he spent many years of love-longing and unrest, and that (as in Shakespeare’s case) differences of rank added to his despair. It may well be that the references are to more than one lady; for there is no reason to suppose that Chaucer’s affections were less mercurial than those of Burns or Heine, whose hearts were often enough in two or three places at once. But we have no reason to doubt him when he assures us, in 1369, that he has lost his sleep and his cheerfulness—

I hold it to be a sickness That I have suffered this eight year, And yet my boote is never the nere; For there is physician but one That may me heal; but that is done.

Her name, he says about the same time, is Bounty, Beauty, and Pleasance; but her surname is Fair-Ruthless. Again, he tells us how he ran to Pity with his complaints of Love’s tyranny; but, alas!

I found her dead, and buried in an heart. … And no wight wot that she is dead but I.

The cruel fair stands high above him, a lady of royal excellence, humble indeed of heart, yet he scarce dares to call himself her servant—

Have mercy on me, thou serenest queen, That you have sought so tenderly and yore, Let some stream of your light on me be seen, That love and dread you ever longer the more; For, soothly for to say, I bear the sore, And though I be not cunning for to plain, For Goddës love, have mercy on my pain!

But all is vain, for in the end “Ye recke not whether I float or sink.” Like the contemporary poets of Piers Plowman, Chaucer discovered soon enough that the high road to wisdom lies through “Suffer-both-well-and-woe;” and that, before we can possess our souls, we must “see much and suffer more.”[25] There is more than mere graceful irony in the beautiful lines with which, a few years later, he begins his “Troilus and Criseyde.” He is (he says) the bondservant of Love, one whose own woes help him to comfort others’ pain, or again, to enlist the sympathy of Fortune’s favourite—

But ye lovéres, that bathen in gladness, If any drop of pity in you be, Remembreth you on passéd heaviness That ye have felt, and on th’ adversitie Of other folk, and thinketh how that ye Have felt that Lovë durstë you displease, Or ye have won him with too great an ease. And prayeth for them that be in the case Of Troilus, as ye may after hear, That Love them bring in heaven to solace; And eke for me prayeth to God so dear. … And biddeth eke for them that be despaired In love, that never will recovered be. … And biddeth eke for them that be at ease, That God them grant aye good perséverance, And send them might their ladies so to please That it to Love be worship and pleasance. For so hope I my soulë best t’ advance, To pray for them that Lovë’s servants be, And write their woe, and live in charitie.