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THE KING’S SQUIRE

For I, that God of Lovë’s servants serve, Dare not to Love for mine unlikeliness Prayen for speed, though I should therefore sterve, So far am I from this help in darkness! “Troilus and Criseyde,” i., 15

In Chaucer’s life, as in the “Seven Ages of Man,” the soldier follows hard upon the lover; he is scarcely out of his ’teens before we find him riding to the Great War, “in hope to stonden in his lady grace.” He fought in that strange campaign of 1359–60, which began with such magnificent preparations, but ended so ineffectually. Edward marched across France from Calais to Reims with a splendid army and an unheard-of baggage train; but the towns closed their gates, the French armies hovered out of his reach, and the weather was such that horses and men died like flies. “The xiii. day of Aprill [1360] King Edward with his Oost lay before the Citee off Parys; the which was a ffoule Derke day of myste, and off haylle, and so bytter colde, that syttyng on horse bak men dyed. Wherefore, unto this day yt ys called blak Monday, and wolle be longe tyme here affter.”[26] Edward felt that the stars fought against him, and was glad to make a less advantageous peace than he might have had before this wasteful raid. Chaucer’s friend and brother-poet, Eustache Deschamps, recalls how the English took up their quarters in the villages and convents that crown the heights round Reims, and watched forty days for a favourable opportunity of attack. Froissart also tells us how Edward feared to assault so strong a city, and only blockaded it for seven weeks, until “it began to irk him, and his men found nought more to forage, and began to lose their horses, and were at great disease for lack of victuals.” It was probably on one of these foraging parties that Chaucer was cut off with other stragglers by the French skirmishers; and the King paid £16 towards his ransom.[27] The items in the same account range from £50 paid towards the ransom of Richard Stury (a distinguished soldier who was afterwards a fellow-ambassador of Chaucer’s), to £6 13s. 4d. “in compensation for the Lord Andrew Lutterell’s dead horse,” and £2 towards an archer’s ransom.

John Chaucer died in 1366, and his thrifty widow hastened to marry Bartholomew Attechapel; “the funeral bakemeats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”[28] Geoffrey appears to have inherited little property from either of them; but it must be remembered that economies were difficult in the Middle Ages, so that men lived far more nearly up to their incomes than in modern times; and, again, that a considerable proportion of a citizen’s legacies often went to the Church. The healthy English and American practice of giving a boy a good start and then leaving him to shift for himself was therefore even more common in the 14th century than now. This is essentially the state of things which we find described with amazement, and doubtless with a good deal of exaggeration, in the “Italian Relation of England” of a century later. The English tradesmen (says the author) show so little affection towards their children that “after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.” Thus the children look more to their masters than to their natural parents, and, “having no hope of their paternal inheritance,” set up on their own account and marry away from home.[29] From this source (proceeds the Italian) springs that greed of gain and that omnipotence of money, even in the moral sphere, which are so characteristic of England. John Chaucer may have left little property to his son, but he had given him an excellent education, and put him in the way of making his own fortune; for in 1367 we find him a yeoman of the King’s chamber, and endowed with a life-pension of twenty marks “of our special grace, and for the good services which our beloved yeoman Geoffrey Chaucer hath rendered us and shall render us for the future.” The phrase makes it probable that he had already been some little time in the King’s service—very likely as early as the unlucky campaign in which Edward had helped towards his ransom—and other indications make it almost certain that he was by this time a married man. Nine years before this, side by side with Chaucer in the Countess of Ulster’s household accounts, we find among the ladies one Philippa Pan’, with a mark of abbreviation, which probably stands for panetaria, or mistress of the pantry. Just as the Countess bought Chaucer’s red-and-black hosen, so she paid “for the making of Philippa’s trimmings,” “for the fashioning of one tunic for Philippa,”[30] “for the making of a corset for Philippa and for the fur-work,” “for XLVIII great buttons of … [unfortunate gap in the MS.] … bought in London by the aforesaid John Massingham for buttoning the aforesaid Philippa’s trimmings”; and in each case her steward records the payment “for drink given to the aforesaid workmen according to the custom of London.” Eight years after this (1366) the Queen granted a life-pension to her “damoiselle of the chamber,” Philippa Chaucer. Six years later, again, Philippa Chaucer is in attendance upon John of Gaunt’s wife; and in another two years we find her definitely spoken of as the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, through whose hands her pension is paid on this occasion, and sometimes in later years. On the face of these documents the obvious conclusion would seem to be that the lady, who was certainly Philippa Chaucer in 1366, and equally certainly Philippa, wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1374, was already in 1366 our poet’s wife. The only argument of apparent weight which has been urged against it is in fact of very little account when we consider actual medieval conditions. It has been pleaded that if Chaucer complained in 1366 of an unrequited love which had tortured him for eight years and still overshadowed his life, he could not already be a married man. To urge this is to neglect one of the most characteristic features of good society in the Middle Ages. Even Léon Gautier, the enthusiastic apologist of chivalry, admits sadly that the feudal marriage was too often a loveless compact, except so far as the pair might shake down together afterwards;[31] and conjugal love plays a very secondary part in the great romances of chivalry. However apocryphal may be the alleged solemn verdict of a Court of Love that husband and wife had no right to be in love with each other, the sentence was at least recognized as ben trovato; and nobody who has closely studied medieval society, either in romance or in chronicle, would suppose that Chaucer blushed to feel a hopeless passion for another, or to write openly of it while he had a wife of his own. Dante’s Beatrice, and probably Petrarch’s Laura, were married women; and, however strongly we may be inclined to urge the exceptional and ethereal nature of these two cases, nothing of the kind can be pleaded for Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and Froissart’s anonymous lady-love. Chaucer, therefore, might well have followed the examples of the four greatest writers of his century. Moreover, in this case we have evidence that he and Philippa not only began, but continued and ended with at least a homœopathic dose of that “little aversion” which Mrs. Malaprop so strongly recommended in matrimony. His allusions to wedded life are predominantly disrespectful, or at best mockingly ironical; and though his own marriage may well have steadied him in some ways—Prof. Skeat points out that his least moral tales were all written after Philippa’s death in 1387—yet the evidence is against his having found in it such companionship as might have chained his too errant fancy. The lives of Burne-Jones and Morris throw unexpected sidelights on that of the master whom they loved so well; and neither of them seems fully to have realized how much his own development owed to modern things for which seventeen generations of men have struggled and suffered since Chaucer’s time. No artist of the Middle Ages—or, indeed, of any but quite recent times—could have earned by his genius a passport into society for wife and family as well as himself; nor could anything but a miracle have unbarred for Chaucer that paradise of splendid work, pure domestic felicity, and social success which attracts us so much in the life of Burne-Jones.[32] His wife was probably rather his social superior, and both would have had in any case a certain status as attendants at Court; but that was in itself an unhealthy life, and so far as Chaucer’s poetry raised him above his fellow yeomen or fellow squires, so far that special favour would tend to separate him from his wife. A courtly poet’s married life could scarcely be happy in an age compounded of such social licence and such galling restrictions: an age when a man might recite the Miller’s and Reve’s tales in mixed company, yet a girl was expected not to speak till she was addressed, to fold her hands when she sat down, to keep her eyes fixed on the ground as she walked, to assume that all talk of love meant illicit love, and to avoid even the most natural familiarities on pain of scandal.[33] We may very easily exaggerate the want of harmony in the Chaucer household; but everything tends to assure us that his was not altogether an ideal marriage. When, therefore, he tells us he has long been the servant of Love, and that he is the very clerk of Love, we need not suppose any reference here to the lady who had been his wife certainly for some years, and perhaps for nearly twenty. Prof. Hales, however, seems to go a good deal too far in assuming that Philippa was in attendance on Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, while her husband lived snugly in bachelor apartments over Aldgate.[34]

But who, it may be asked, was this Philippa of the Pantry before she became Philippa Chaucer? Here again the indications, though tantalizingly slight, all point towards some connection with John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s great patron. She was probably either a Swynford or a Roet, i.e. sister-in-law or own sister to Katherine Roet, who married Sir Thomas Swynford, and who became in after life first mistress and finally wife to John of Gaunt. From this marriage were descended the great Beaufort family, of which the most powerful member, the Cardinal Minister of Henry VI., speaks in one of his letters of his cousin, Thomas Chaucer.[35] This again is complicated by the doubt which has been thrown on a Thomas Chaucer’s sonship to Geoffrey, in spite of the definite assertion by the former’s contemporary, Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University.

WESTMINSTER HALL

(THE GREAT HALL OF THE KING’S PALACE AT WESTMINSTER)

Meanwhile, however, we are certain that Chaucer was in 1367 a Yeoman of Edward III.’s Chamber, and that he was promoted five years later to be a squire in the Royal household. The still existing Household Ordinances of Edward II. on one side, and Edward IV. on the other, agree so closely in their description of the duties of these two offices, that we may infer pretty exactly what they were in Chaucer’s time. The earlier ordinances prescribe that the yeomen “shall serve in the chamber, making beds, holding and carrying torches, and divers other things which [the King] and the chamberlain shall command them. These [yeomen] shall eat in the chamber before the King. And each of them, be he well or ill, shall have for livery one darre[36] of bread, one gallon of beer, a messe de gros[37] from the kitchen, and yearly a robe in cloth or a mark in money; and for shoes 4s. 8d., at two seasons in the year.[38] And if any of them be sent out of the Court in the King’s business, by his commandment, he shall have 4d. a day for his expenses.” The later ordinances add to these duties “to attend the Chamber, to watch the King by course, to go messages, etc.” The yeomen were bedded two by two, apparently on the floor of the great hall, so that visitors to Westminster Hall may well happen to tread on the spot where Chaucer nightly lay down to sleep. When he became a squire, he might either have found himself still on duty in the King’s chamber, or else an “Esquire for the King’s mouth,” to taste the food for fear of poison, to carve for the King, and to serve his wine on bended knee. He still shared a bed with some fellow squire; but they now shared a servant also and a private room, to which each might bring at night his gallon or half gallon of ale; “and for winter season, each of them two Paris candles, one faggot, or else a half of tallwood.” Besides his mess of great meat, he might now take a mess of roast also;[39] his wages were raised to 7½d. per day, and he received yearly “two robes of cloth, or 40s. in money.” Moreover, as the Household Book of Edward IV. adds, “these esquires of household of old be accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and in evenings to draw to Lords Chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of Chronicles of Kings, and of other policies, or in piping or harping, singing, or other acts martial, to help to occupy the Court, and accompany strangers till the time require of departing.” The same compiler looks back to Edward III.’s time as the crown and glory of English Court life; and indeed that King lived on a higher scale (as things went in those days) than any other medieval English King except his inglorious grandson, Richard II. King John of France might indeed marvel to find himself among a nation of shopkeepers, and laugh at the thrift and order which underlay even his Royal cousin’s extravagances.[40] But John’s son, Charles the Wise, was destined to earn that surname by nothing more than by his imitation of English business methods in peace and war; and meanwhile the longest laugh was with Edward, whose Court swarmed with French prisoners and hostages. Among the enforced guests were King John himself, four royal dukes, the flower of the nobility, and thirty-six substantial citizens sent over by the great towns as pledges for the enormous war indemnity, which was in fact never fully paid. All these were probably still at Court when Chaucer first joined it, and few poets have ever feasted their youthful eyes on more splendid sights than this. Palaces and castles were filled to overflowing with the spoils of France; and the prisoners themselves vied with their captors in knightly sports and knightly magnificence. One of the royal princes had sixteen servants with him in his captivity; all moved freely about the country on parole, hawking and hunting, dancing and flouting, rather like guests than prisoners. Indeed, as Mme. Darmesteter truly remarks, there was a natural freemasonry between the French nobility and the French-speaking courtiers of England; and Froissart draws a vivid contrast between our manners and those of the Germans in this respect. “For English and Gascons are of such condition that they put a knight or a squire courteously to ransom; but the custom of the Germans, and their courtesy [to their prisoners] is of no such sort hitherto—I know not how they will do henceforth—for hitherto they have had neither pity nor mercy on Christian gentlemen who fall into their hands as prisoners, but lay on them ransoms to the full of their estate and even beyond, and put them in chains, in irons, and in close prison like thieves and murderers; and all to extort the greater ransom.”[41] The French lords added rather to the gaiety of a Court which was already perhaps the gayest in Europe; a society all the merrier because it was spending money that had been so quickly won; and because, in those days of shifting fortune, the shadow of change might already be foreboded on the horizon. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may be captives in our turn. Few of the great leaders on either side escaped without paying ransom at least once in their lives; and the devil-may-care of the camp had its direct influence on Court manners. The extravagant and comparatively inartistic fashions which, at the end of the 14th century, displaced one of the simplest and most beautiful models of dress which have ever reigned, were invented, as a contemporary assures us, by “the unthrifty women that be evil of their body, and chamberers to Englishmen and other men of war that dwellen with them as their lemans; for they were the first that brought up this estate that ye use of great purfles and slit coats. … And as to my wife, she shall not; but the princesses and ladies of England have taken up the said state and guise, and they may well hold it if them list.”[42] Towards the end of Chaucer’s life, when Richard II. had increased his personal expenses in direct proportion to his ill-success in war and politics, the English Court reached its highest pitch of extravagance. The chronicler Hardyng writes—

“Truly I herd Robert Ireliffe say, Clerke of the grene cloth, that to the household Came every daye, for moost partie alwaye, Ten thousand folke, by his messes tould, That followed the hous, aye, as thei would; And in the kechin three hundred servitours, And in eche office many occupiours. “And ladies faire with their gentilwomen, Chamberers also and lavenders, Three hundred of them were occupied then: Ther was greate pride among the officers, And of al menne far passyng their compeers, Of riche araye, and muche more costious Than was before or sith, and more precious.”

And he adds a description of Court morals which may well suggest further reflections on Chaucer’s married life.[43]

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A TRAVELLING CARRIAGE

(FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER)

But the Court was all that the poet could desire as a school of worldly manners, of human passion and character, and of gorgeous pageantry. The King travelled much with his household; a grievous burden indeed to the poor country folk on whom his purveyors preyed, but to the world in general a glorious sight. He took with him a multitude of officers already suppressed as superfluous in the days of Edward IV., “as well Sergeants of Arms and Messagers many, with the twenty-four Archers before the King, shooting when he rode by the country, called Gard Corpes le Roy. And therefore the King journied not passing ten or twelve miles a day.” Ruskin traces much of his store of observation to the leisurely journeys round England with his father in Mr. Telford’s chaise; and the young Chaucer must have gathered from these Royal progresses a rich harvest of impressions for future use.