02 Chaucer Canterbury Tales class


Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Incomparably the greatest poet of the English Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer lived in the second half of the 14th century and died in the first year of the 15th. He came from a middle-class family which rose in the world through four successive generations. The Chaucers were originally from France; chaussier means `shoemaker'. Geoffrey's grandfather was a wine merchant importing from France. Geoffrey's father, John was also a wine merchant in London. John once held a minor court office as Butler, and Geoffrey followed him in his career as a royal servant.

In his teens he fought in the English army in France, where he was captured; Edward III ransomed him in 1360. Little is known of him then until he is recorded as being in Spain in 1366. In 1367 he began travelling abroad on the King's business. In 1369 he fought in Picardy for John of Gaunt. In 1372 he went to Genoa and Florence on a diplomatic mission and in 1378 visited Italy again. Between his two Italian journeys he had been appointed controller of customs for wools, hides and wool-fells passing through the port of London. It was his function to collect taxes on these products being exported from England, an important and well-paid job.

Chaucer's name occurs four hundred times in the records, not as a poet. He lived in London and Kent, surviving the Black Death, the French wars, the Peasants' Revolt, the Lords Appellants challenge to Richard II, and Richard's deposition by Henry IV. Chaucer's writing reveals nothing of these, nor of his personal life. The poet's life was a varied one. He had many opportunities to view many ranks of society, both at home and abroad.

Chaucer's work falls into his French, Italian and English periods. Before 1378 he was heavily influenced by French traditions. He translated fragments of the famous Roman de la Rose and wrote The Book of Duchess (1369), his first original book in imitation of French allegorical dream-vision poems. His later dream-visions (The Hose of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls) are increasingly influenced by Italian models. Chaucer's second visit to Italy in 1378 opened his eyes to a much richer tradition in the work of Dante, whose Divina Commedia he echoes many times, and Boccaccio whose Teseida and Filostrato became Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The Canterbury Tales were probably conceived in 1385, when Chaucer went to Kent. The loose narrative framework enabled him to find room for some of his old stories, and to develop his dramatic and realistic abilities. This last phase contains Chaucer's most vigorous and artistically mature works. In Chaucer's large body of work, several traditions meet - popular, learned and courtly. He was a court poet, but as close to his audience as any populr entertainer. His formal education must have been rhetorical; he was full of French and Italian poetry, and he had scientific and philosophical interests.

Most people in the English society of Chaucer's time, about 600 years ago, viewed the world in a similar way and accepted the same beliefs. People then believed that behind the chaos and frustration of the day-to-day world there was a divine providence that gave a reason to everything, even though that reason wasn't always obvious. People in Chaucer's society could feel, at least much of the time, a sense of security about the world, knowing that it was following a divine plan. So behind all of Chaucer's satire and social put-downs in The Canterbury Tales is an unshaken belief in a divine order. It is easier to make fun of something when, underneath, you know you take it seriously. Also, as Chaucer knew, it is easier to write for a group of people who at least roughly share the same set of values, whether they be a cook, a parson, or an upper-class prioress.

Those values were represented in the medieval world by two structures: the class system and the church. In the Middle Ages, each individual was classified according to his or her “estate” or place on the social scale depending on birth, profession, and other factors (such as whether a woman was married - an important discussion of which is in the Wife of Bath's Tale as well as others). Each social grouping was like a symbol of the divine order, as immune to change as the hierarchy of angels. That's why a move from the peasant to the middle class, for example, was almost unheard of.

The middle class was in its infancy then. Chaucer himself was a member of what we would call the upper middle class; he received jobs at court without actually being a nobleman. He started his career as a page, serving meals and learning the role of a courtly gentleman. He quickly found out about the conflicting whims of human nature and the importance of the right appearances, both of which lessons he draws on in The Canterbury Tales. He evidently learned them well in real life, too, because as a diplomat he travelled for the king to France and Italy, where he was exposed to a number of literary influences that manifest themselves in The Canterbury Tales and other works. Chaucer foregrounds class structure very clearly in The Tales, presenting the Knight first and having him tell the first tale because he is the highest-ranking pilgrim present. The nobility, being at the top of the social scale, was responsible for cultivating virtue, keeping the peace by maintaining social order, and setting a moral example for the other classes to follow.

Apart from the worldly order but just as important was the church hierarchy. It, too, was a structure ordained by God. Yet within the church ranks there was incredible in-fighting between the “regular” clergy (those in convents and monasteries, like the Monk, Prioress, and Friar in the Tales) and the “secular” clergy (parish priests like the Parson and eventually perhaps the Clerk). Chaucer exemplifies this by showing an argument between the Pardoner (a church official of the secular variety) and the Friar, who is in direct competition with the Pardoner for money and religious influence over the parish villages they both travel through. The regular clergy, in particular, had a reputation for corruption at that time. Monasteries, which were supposed to be apart from the world and whose inhabitants were to avoid worldly goods, were almost as lavish as castles by the 14th century, and most people assumed that friars kept much of the money they were supposed to give to the poor. Yet even if the friar or pardoner were corrupt, giving to charity or buying a papal pardon could still help to find a way into heaven or at least take a few thousand years off in purgatory. Also, the social position of a friar or monk itself still commanded respect.

The search for salvation then explains the importance of pilgrimage in Chaucer's Tales. Pilgrims were ordinary people, not even necessarily very religious (as can be seen from the Prologue), who visited religious shrines as much for a holiday as for the heavenly benefits, with people like the Pardoner selling holy “relics” and souvenirs along the route. For some people, like the Wife of Bath, it was the only way to escape the pressures of home. Spring was a particularly popular pilgrimage time in England, and Chaucer duly begins this report of a pilgrimage with a description of the spring.

It is also not unusual to have a large, oddly assorted mixture of people heading out on a pilgrimage together. Travel was slow, roads were rutted, and there were highway robbers, accidents, and illness. Because of the festive atmosphere of many pilgrimages, some clerics frowned on them.