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Geoffrey Chaucer, Biography And Visits

Canterbury Cathedral

During Chaucer's lifetime many powerful people wanted to divide life up, into important and unimportant, sacred and profane, special and ordinary. The Church, for example, wanted a monopoly on what we think of as religion. Anything truly sacred existed only with the Church, and was shut away in a Latin Bible the vast majority of people could not read. Chaucer did not see things like this. His most famous book, the account of a pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales showed the ordinariness of apparently special people, and the special quality of those considered ordinary. He wrote in accessible English of religious matters which the Church wished to keep hidden away in obscure Latin. Chaucer's pilgrims made a lighthearted journey, which nevertheless had revolutionary implications. The pilgrims went on the only real holiday that was available to people in the fourteenth century. Then, as now, holidays are a time to relax, or seek adventure, climb mountains, or sit on beaches. It is a time of contrasts, a time which can have greater meaning, and a time which doesn't have to mean anything for a while. Some of Chaucer's pilgrims were on a spiritual quest, some were just taking a relaxing jaunt. In an age which strictly divided the meaningful from the ordinary, the sacred from the profane, Chaucer was to suggest that perhaps these categories meant nothing at all.

 

Position of Chaucer's wool wharf.

Chaucer was born around 1340, although the exact year of his birth is not known. He was the son of John Chaucer, a wealthy wine merchant who lived in Thames Street in the City of London. The site of this street was levelled in the nineteenth century, and again during the Blitz. As a young man Geoffrey Chaucer became a page in the service of the Countess of Ulster. The countess was the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward the Third. Chaucer was to remain linked to the royal household throughout his career. He rose through the ranks of royal service, going on foreign expeditions, which began with a trip to France in 1359. Chaucer was captured by the French, and a ransom of six pounds was paid for his release. In 1374 Chaucer was made controller of the wool custom at the Port of London, a job he would continue until 1386. He worked on the wharf between the Tower of London, and London Bridge. This picture, taken from London Bridge looking towards the Tower, shows the area as it appears today.

 

Position of the former Aldgate

John of Gaunt, Edward the Third's powerful sixth son, rewarded Chaucer for his years of loyal service with free lodging in a house over the Aldgate in what was then the wall of London. Traffic entering the city would pass beneath Chaucer's rooms. Today the walls of London only survive in a few places, and the Aldgate has gone; but the road that once ran through the Aldgate remains. The street now called Aldgate runs down towards Fenchurch Street, and about twenty yards before Fenchurch Street there is a road island where the gate once stood. A plaque on a wall beside the road carries a picture of the gate.

Although the gate has gone, there is a striking change as you leave Aldgate and start walking down Fenchurch Street. Crossing a single road junction the nature of the buildings changes completely. Quite suddenly you are in the City. Shiny headquarters of financial institutions tower on each side. Chaucer used to walk this way to work beside the Thames. On his walk Chaucer would pass close to the hovel of William Langland, author of Piers Plowman.

The years during which Chaucer worked at the Port of London were politically turbulent. The heir to the throne, Edward the Black Prince, died in 1376, and his father Edward the Third died the following year. Richard, son of the Black Prince was still a young boy when he became king, a situation which bred uncertainty. Meanwhile the Black Death raged. In itself bubonic plague, for all its vast death toll, seemed to have little real impact on social stability. But the plague led to profound social change, which in turn led to a violent upheaval. Losses to plague led to a labour shortage, which meant that the peasantry had more power, and were able to sell their talents to the highest bidder. Efforts to curtail these new freedoms led to the Peasants Revolt in 1381. The melee of the Peasants Revolt would have passed through the Aldgate, beneath Chaucer's rooms into the City .

Through it all Chaucer would go to work at the wool quay. In the 1390s Chaucer had been appointed clerk of the King's Works. He supervised the building of a new nave at Westminster Abbey, and looked after the maintenance of St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and Westminster Palace. By the 1390s Chaucer's life, and the life of England as a whole had become quieter and more peaceful. Into the reign of Richard the Second, beginning in 1377, peace and culture gradually become the focus of the royal court. It took time for the young king to establish his authority. But once Richard, at least temporally, succeeded in bringing the powerful nobles under control, his reign became a bright moment in a dark age. For a short time artists like Chaucer could spread their wings.

Chaucer wrote in English, a language that was becoming more important. Until now English had been something that people conducted their unimportant day to day affairs in. But that was changing. The radical Oxford theologian John Wyclif was calling for the Bible to be translated into English. Since 1215 when Pope Innocent the Third had called for teaching in the vernacular to bring congregations under closer control, English had become more important part of people's religious lives. An unintentional result of Innocent's plan was the encouragement of general debate about Christianity's basic beliefs. Although such debate was never the Church's intention, events took on a momentum of their own. Now Chaucer and other poets, such as William Langland were busy writing about religion in English, going on voyages of exploration, when the Church wanted people simply to sit and listen. It is difficult now to appreciate how new and exciting writing in English was. Even writing itself was new. Until the thirteenth century culture was mainly spoken. Minstrels enjoyed their heyday in the thirteenth century, singing, performing acrobatics and reciting pieces from memory. By the fourteenth century these all round verbal performers were falling out of favour. Now it was written culture that brought prestige. The fourteenth century saw Boccaccio at work in italy; King Richard's father in law, had been a patron of Petrarch, and her grandfather had been a patron of Dante. Chaucer himself mocks the popular romances memorised by minstrels in The Tale of Sir Thopas. There is a sense that the old stories are too well known. Something new was needed. Writing was new in itself, and in the things it dared to discuss.

In 1396 Chaucer may have retired to Kent, perhaps living in Greenwich. He spent his last years writing The Canterbury Tales, which told the story of a group of pilgrims travelling from Southwark to Canterbury. Using the unusual freedom provided by Richard the Second's reign, Chaucer wrote with humorous clarity of the basic motivations of the people on this journey. Church superstition and corruption are mocked in the characters of the Pardoner, the Summoner and the Friar. Religion is not seen as something essentially separate, that can be confined to, say, one special book, and is missing from all others. The Knight, right at the beginning of the General Prologue is described as having just got back from a campaign abroad. He doesn't even have time to change his clothes before he sets off on his pilgrimage. There is the sense of one journey moving seamlessly into another, as if the whole of life was a pilgrimage. The Church wanted to hold what we call religion for itself. Chaucer saw a much bigger and freer potential for this exploration.

George Inn, Southwark

Chaucer's pilgrims start their journey at the Tabard Inn, Southwark, which sadly was demolished in the nineteenth century. But part of the George Inn, which stood along side the Tabard survives. Interestingly the pilgrims did not start their journey from Southwark Cathedral. The route most pilgrims took to Canterbury was a re-enactment of the final journey of Archbishop Thomas Becket. In 1170 Becket had preached at Southwark Cathedral, and then travelled to Canterbury. A few careless words from King Henry the Second, with whom Becket was engaged in a power struggle, led to a group of hot headed knights killing the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral. For centuries afterwards pilgrims would travel from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury following the doomed archbishop's route. But Chaucer's pilgrims set off from a pub down the road. Perhaps the journey was big enough to stretch all the way from a pub to a cathedral.

The pilgrims would then have made their way down the Dover road towards Canterbury. But even when they reached their destination at Canterbury Cathedral, there was no real end to the journey for these pilgrims. The final Parson's Tale is all about penitence, looking at what you've done and deciding on a new and better direction:

"Stondeth upon the weyes and seeth and axeth of olde pathes (that is to seyn, of old sentences) which is the good wey."

Westminster Abbey

Ominously there is a Retraction following the Parson's Tale. It is probable that this piece, which seemingly has Chaucer remorseful for all his previous work, represents, the convulsive change that came in 1399 with Richard the Second's deposition by Henry the Fourth. Henry won the throne of England with the help of the fearsome Archbishop Arundel, who was determined to stamp all opposition to orthodox religion. Terry Jones describes the change that came to England in 1399 in memorable terms: "In 1399 almost overnight the country passed into an age of iron control, of Thought Police, and of intellectual strait jacketing on a level that has never been equalled before or since in this country. It was as if the nation passed from the permissive Sixties straight into Stalin's Russia." (Who Murdered Chaucer P2) It was perhaps this change that compelled Chaucer into writing his Retraction, one of many written by fearful writers of the time. Chaucer took out a lease on a house in Westminster, at that time an island and traditional place of sanctuary. Not even the king's authority was recognised here. Richard respected this old tradition on a number of occasions, but we can be fairly certain that Henry and Arundel would have had no qualms about crossing bridges into Westminster in the hunt for their enemies. It is not clear what happened to Chaucer. He could have died in the archbishop's jail at Saltwood Castle in Hythe. Perhaps he was attacked in the streets of Westminster itself, allowing a convenient quick burial in the Abbey. He could of course have died of old age, though quite why such a respected figure should die in complete obscurity is not clear. Sadly it seems possible, even probable, that Chaucer died at the hands of the agents of Henry the Fourth or Archbishop Arundel.

Chaucer did not fit into the new age, where the equivalent of iron curtains spilt up various spheres of life and thought. Instinctively Chaucer broke down divisions, so that the whole of life became a carefree pilgrimage. In his Retraction Chaucer can't help quietly suggesting that wisdom is not confined to the Bible. He writes: "Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine." This is a reminder of what the Bible itself says in Romans: "what evere thing ben writun, tho ben writun to oure techynge." (15:4) All writing, secular writing included, can teach in the same way. Arundel in contrast wanted distinction. He wanted the Bible to be shut away from all other literature. As Boccaccio wrote, this attitude made poets into enemies of the Church: "These enemies of poetry utter the taunt that poets are liars... my opponents curse the poet and clamour for the extinction of poetry as replete with pranks and adulteries of pagan gods." (Preface to Genealogy of the Gentile Gods) Arundel wanted to shut poets away from the Church's territory. Within the Church he also wanted to make a clear distinction between heretics and true believers. To do this he created the acid test of transubstantiation. If you did not believe that by some magic the bread and wine used during a church service magically changed into the body and blood of Christ, then you were a heretic and risked being burnt at the stake. It was against all this that the heart of Chaucer was instinctively set.

Approaching Canterbury Cathedral

Chaucer is famous for writing about a journey, and the point of a journey is usually assumed to be getting somewhere. I always feel that Chaucer didn't like getting somewhere. He seemed averse to making one point, without raising its opposite. Even in making a journey he seemed to dislike destinations, making sure that The Canterbury Tales, his companion towards the end of his life, could never really be finished. Each pilgrim was to tell four tales to pass the time on the journey. Chaucer didn't even come close to meeting that target before he died. There was far still to go, even when the Parson announces the final entry into Canterbury. For someone averse to endings like Chaucer, not getting to the destination can promise its own homecoming. Life is full of targets and deadlines, until you go on holiday and just lie on a beach. Sometimes the most worthwhile trip is one with no purpose. Chaucer might never have got where he wanted to go, his age may have ended in dark repression, rather than at the arrival in a promised land; and yet Chaucer cheerful as ever somehow promises that we still travel on a very successful journey.