Abbreviations of Works Frequently Cited
Close Rolls
Calendar of Close Rolls, 1327–99. Numerous volumes, cited by year (London: Stationer’s Office, 1892–1927).
DNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com/public/index -content.php.
Fine Rolls
Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1307–99 (London: Stationer’s Office, 1912–29).
Froissart
Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: V. Devaux, 1867–77).
Gower, Complete Works
Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1899–1902).
History of Parliament
J. S. Roskell et al., The House of Commons, 1386–1421, The History of Parliament, 4 vols. (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992). http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org.
Knighton’s Chronicle
Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. G. H. Martin (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Letter Books
Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London. Electronically available from British History Online. www.british-history.ac.uk/subject.aspx?subject=7&gid=58. (Each volume cited by initial—G, H, etc.—pertaining to the period of time it covers; Letter Book H covers the period 1375–99.)
Life-Records
Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford University Press, 1966).
Memorials
Memorials of London Life, ed. H. T. Riley (London: Longmans, 1868). Electronically available from British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/.
Patent Rolls
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1327–99 (London: Stationer’s Office, 1891–1916).
Plea Rolls
Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, ed. A. H. Thomas, 6 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1926–61).
Riverside Chaucer
The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd. edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Rolls of Parliament
Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. CD-ROM and print. Ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005). Electronically available from British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/.
St. Albans Chronicle
St. Albans Chronicle (the Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham), vol. 1, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, vol. 1, 1376–94; vol. 2, 1394–1422 (Oxford University Press, 2003). (Alternately available in a spirited English translation as Thomas Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, trans. David Preest [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2005]).
Social Chaucer
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Harvard University Press, 1989; 1994).
Turbulent London
Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (New York: Longmans Green, 1949).
Westminster Chronicle
Westminster Chronicle 1381–94, eds. L. C. Hector and Barbara Harvey (Oxford University Press, 1966).
Introduction: Chaucer’s Crisis
Modern English translations of Chaucer are my own. The accompanying passages in his original Middle English are based on the Riverside Chaucer, but with substitution of the modern character “i” for the Middle English “y” for ease of interpretation.
This book concentrates on a single turning point in Chaucer’s life. For those interested in supplementing it with an account of his whole life, I recommend Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Also of interest is Donald Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987). A conveniently available and authoritative map re-creating the London of the 1520s, but still applicable in most respects to places and events in Chaucer’s own London, is Historical Map of Tudor London, c. 1520 (London: Shire Books, 2013).
In researching this book I have relied constantly on the definitive collection of Chaucer Life-Records, drawn from varied historical sources and edited by Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson. Records covering the events mentioned in my rapid survey of Chaucer’s adventures and misadventures are to be found in Life-Records, pp. 1–12 (mercantile origins), 23–24 (capture in France), 67–93 (marriage), 29–66 (journeys), 144–47 (residence above Aldgate), 344–46 (raptus of Cecily Champagne), and 477–89 (robbery by highwaymen). These and other persons and events mentioned in this introduction will be treated, with full references, in following chapters.
In the “Knight’s Tale” the wise Theseus, offering his consolation to those grieving the death of Arcite, urges, “Thanne is it wisdom, as it thinketh me, / To maken vertu of necessitee.” Chaucer repeats this sentiment on three other occasions in his poetry.
W. W. Skeat is the scholar who thought that the strident wake-up call must have come from Chaucer’s wife; for references to his and other interpretations of the passage, see the Riverside Chaucer, p. 982, note to House of Fame, ll. 561–62. An important and useful article on the status of first-person statements made within the boundaries of stories or poems is Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio, 4 (1946), pp. 414–22.
The subject of an author’s “circumstances” as a suitable emphasis in biographical inquiry has recently and trenchantly been addressed by Charles Nicholl, “Ben Jonson’s Chair,” The Guardian, 4 (July 2013).
Congenial thoughts on the applicability of present experience to the past are expressed by Ian Mortimer in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (London: Bodley Head, 2008). This book also serves as a useful introduction to fourteenth-century English life and culture for those new to the period.
Chapter One: A Married Man
Documents bearing on Chaucer’s family background and his and Philippa’s household appointments and associated rewards through 1377 are found in Life-Records, pp. 1–143. The prior lease for Chaucer’s dwelling to Walter Parmenter and his wife Joanna exists in Letter-Book G (f. 20v, p. 24); I am grateful to Caroline Barron for drawing my attention to it.
Background on the de Roets, including Thomas Swynford’s inheritance in Hainault, is found in J. M. Manly, New Light on Chaucer (New York: Henry Holt, 1926).
Gareth’s social predicament is delineated in all major editors of Malory’s works, including Le Morte d’Arthur (University of Michigan, 1997); http://quod .lib.umich.edu/C/cme/MaloryWks2/1:9, p. 219.
The basic life of John of Gaunt remains that of Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (London: Constable, 1904; frequently reprinted). See also Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1992). Some observations on Chaucer’s social standing are based on my own Social Chaucer. The duties of king’s esquires are described inThe Household of Edward IV: The Black Book, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1959).
Valuable background information on the Hainault connection is found in Henry Stephen Lucas, The Low Countries and the Hundred Years’ War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929) and Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009). The disparaging comment on male fashion in the court of Edward and Philippa is from the Eulogium Chronicle, Eulogium Historiarum sive Temporis, ed. F. F. Haydon, vol. 9, nos. 1–3 (Rolls Series, 1858–63), vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 230–31. The rage for “crakowes” or peaked shoes is further described by John Stow, A Survey of London (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2009), p. 299. On the frike ladies of Philippa’s court, see The Life of the Black Prince, eds. Mildred K. Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge (Oxford University Press, 1910); also available in translation as http://www.yorku.ca/inpav/chandos_pope.pdf.
Marriage ages in the medieval and early modern periods are discussed in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (Cambridge University Press, 1965).
Gaunt’s surviving records, including his gifts to Katherine, are gathered in John of Gaunt’s Register, pp. 372–76 (Camden Society, 3rd series, vols. 20–21) and 1379–83 (Camden Society, 3rd series, vols. 56–57). Other gifts to Katherine are also conveniently summarized in Armitage-Smith, pp. 462–63. On the 1371–72 English campaign in Aquitaine, and Gaunt’s involvement, see Goodman, pp. 47–49.
For Froissart’s Chronicles I rely on Kervyn de Lettenhove’s Oeuvres. Volumes of particular importance for this chapter include: vol. 1, part 1 (introductory material); vol. 2 (marriage of Edward III and Queen Philippa, her court, and Froissart’s assessment of her and her countrymen’s impact on English manners and culture); vol. 15 (for the marriage of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, scandalized commentary by ladies of the court, and Froissart’s own tempered comments, see pp. 239–40). For Gaunt flaunting his illicit relationship all over the countryside, see a textual variant printed with the St. Albans Chronicle, vol. 1, p. 970. The contemptuous reference to Katherine asalienigena appears inKnighton’s Chronicle, pp. 236–37. For the description of Gaunt’s temporary repentance, see St. Albans Chronicle, vol. 1, pp. 556–67. For Walsingham’s comment on her unsuitability for marriage to a man so eminent, see St. Albans Chronicle, vol. 2, pp. 38–39. The confirmation of Katherine’s right to Kettlethorpe is noted inPatent Rolls, 1381–85,for the year 1383, p. 317, as is evidence of local disturbances around her property and the useful services rendered by Sir William Hawley, pp. 501, 507. Katherine’s successful petition to enclose land at Kettlethorpe is recorded in Patent Rolls, 1381–85, p. 317. Evidence of the rebels’ detestation of Gaunt in 1381 is conveniently available in R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 2nd. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 33, 69, 75, 128, and 279. Goodman, John of Gaunt, summarizes the terms of Katherine’s loan to Gaunt, p. 379; it is datable either to 1386 or 1387, but more likely the former, in view of Gaunt’s financial necessities prior to his departure for Castile. Unsparing denunciations of Katherine are found in The Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), p. 153, and St. Alban’s Chronicle, p. 79.
Available information about Katherine, and her sanctified ending within the precincts of Lincoln Cathedral, is conveniently gathered in pamphlet form: Anthony Goodman, Katherine Swynford (Lincoln, UK: Honywood Press, 1994). Records of the induction ceremony at Lincoln Cathedral, at which Philippa was honored and Katherine was a behind-the-scenes presence, are printed in Life-Records, pp. 91–93. Katherine’s gifts to Lincoln Cathedral, including twenty-four copes adorned with her emblem of three wheels, are detailed in H. Bradshaw, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral (Cambridge University Press, 1897), p. 262.
John of Gaunt’s gifts and annuities to Philippa and to Geoffrey are detailed in the Life-Records, pp. 85–91 and 271–74. The warrant for payment of Philippa’s annuity in Lincolnshire is in Life-Records, p. 87. Evidence bearing on Chaucer’s children is presented in Life-Records, pp. 541–46.
Chaucer’s frequent return to the subject of marriage in his poetry, and especially in what he calls the “Marriage Group” of Canterbury Tales, was first observed by G. L. Kittredge in “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology, 9 (1911–12), pp. 435–67. On Chaucer’s late-life move to Westminster Abbey see Life-Records, pp. 535–40.
On Chaucer’s reliable activities as go-between, picking up the absent Philippa’s annuity checks and delivering them to her by his own hand, see Life-Records, pp. 77–78.
Chapter Two: Aldgate
General conditions for housing and occupancy in Chaucer’s London are described in John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (London: Paul Mellon, 1994), and Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: Collins, 1984).
W. R. Lethaby reports his archaeological investigations, including his measurement of the footprint of the towers, in “The Priory of Holy Trinity, or Christ Church, Aldgate,” Home Counties Magazine, 2 (1900), pp. 45–53. Also reproduced there is an excellent rendering of the sixteenth-century sketch map of the Holy Trinity grounds, including the north tower of Aldgate. The sketch map itself is beautifully reproduced in John Schofield and Richard Lea, Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, monograph 24 (London: Museum of London, 2005). The manuscript of Symonds’s sketch map is located in Hatfield House (Herts), the library of the Marquis of Salisbury: CPM I/10, I/19. The Agas engraving of 1561–70 is printed in Schofield and Lea, Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, p. 20. Valuable information on Westgate, Canterbury, is contained in Tim Tattin-Brown, The Westgate (Canterbury: Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 1985). For other information on the Westgate, see Close Rolls, 1385–89, pp. 120–21. Special thanks to Craig Bowen and Julian Spurrier of the Canterbury Heritage Museum for arranging and supervising my access to Westgate.
For Chaucer’s lease, together with related documents, see Life-Records, pp. 144–47; for a translation of the Latin lease see Memorials, pp. 377–78. On the terms of his occupancy, and profiles of other persons living over city gates after 1374–75, see Ernest P. Kuhl, “Chaucer and Aldgate,” PMLA 39 (1924), pp. 101–22. On Strode’s compensation for his lost lease, see Letter-Book H, p. 245. Stow’s sixteenth-century comments about the deeper history of Aldgate, and also his observations about the neighborhood, are taken from his Survey, pp. 132–42.
The Bastard of Falconbridge’s assault on London, and the lowering of Aldgate’s portcullis, is most fully described in The Arrivall of Edward IV (edited from British Library Manuscript Harley 543) by John Bruce, Camden Society, series 1, no. 1 (London, 1838). On the muster of 1386 and its reference to Aldgate, see Close Rolls, 1385–89, p. 264. The erection of “barbykanes” is described in Letter-Book H, pp. 64–65. The passages on invasion fears are from St. Albans Chronicle, vol. 1, pp. 792–93. Contents of the carts rumbling through Aldgate are from the Letter Books, especially Letter-Book F, p. 173, and Letter-Book H, p. 54.
My observations on Chaucer’s failure to claim London citizenship are informed by conversations with Caroline Barron.
Regulations governing the London Watch are found in Letter-Book C, p. 85. London ward arrangements, and ward politics, are described by Caroline M. Barron, London in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 121–26, 130–31. Other valuable material on the London wards is in Bird, Turbulent London, passim.
On all matters related to Holy Trinity Priory and its history, see Schofield and Lea, Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Records of the city’s temporary jurisdiction are cited in Patent Rolls, 1379–81, p. 599. The Agas woodcut’s rendering of the Aldgate neighborhood is reproduced in Schofield and Lea, p. 20. The priory’s property holdings are detailed in the Cartulary of Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, ed. G. A. J. Hodgett (Leicester, UK: London Record Society, 1971).
Information on Aldgate inns and taverns is contained in Plea Rolls, 1381–1412, mem. A27, pp. 83–85. The centrality of the parish in religious life, and the importance of parish burial, are described by Ellen Rentz in her forthcoming Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Ohio State University Press, in press).
On narrativity within medieval documentary archives, see Natalie Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). For the scandalous case of Margaret and Maud, see Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ed. G. O. Sayles, vol. 7, no. 23 (London: Selden Society, 1971). For Elizabeth and Johanna, see Letter-Book H, pp. 271–72.
Chaucer’s testimony about an encounter on Friday Street is reprinted in Life-Records, pp. 370–74.
Langland’s rendition of London street chatter occurs in Piers Plowman, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2008). For regulations on punishment of courtesans, see Liber Albus, p. 395.
On the bells of St. Botoph’s, see William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. and Michael Flachman (Los Angeles: Huntington Library, 1988), p. 55. Wymbissh’s Holy Trinity bell is described in Letter-Book D, p. 287. For translation, see Memorials, p. 287. Lincoln bell peals and other aspects of the daily service are described in Christopher Wordsworth, Notes on Medieval Services in England (London: T. Baker, 1898). For the peals of St. Mary on the Hill, see The Medieval Records of a London City Church, ed. Henry Littlehales (London: Early English Text Society, 1905). Other aspects of the daily service are usefully considered by J. C. Dickinson, Monastic Life in Medieval England (London: A. and C. Black, 1961). Valuable observations on liturgical time in a medieval monastery are found in Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540 (Oxford University Press, 1993); see also Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1977). For regulation of the London curfew by bells, see Letter-Book C, p. 85; also see Liber Albus, p. 240, and Riley, Memorials, p. 21. The cycle of liturgical times and services is described in Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages.
Chapter Three: The Wool Men
The chronology of events bearing on Chaucer’s appointment to the controllership is based on Life-Records, pp. 112, 148–52, 271. The most useful previous analysis of the circumstances of his appointment appears in J. R. Hulbert, Chaucer’s Official Life (Menasha, WI: Collegiate Press, 1912; reprinted New York: Phaeton Press, 1970).
Matthew Hale’s “Treatise in Three Parts” is published in Francis Hargrave, A Collection of Tracts (London and Dublin: E. Lynch, 1787).
For rules governing treatment of Lorrainers and other foreign traders, see Liber Custumarum, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series 12:2 (London, 1861). On the case of Johannes Imperial, see Paul Strohm, “Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Johannes Imperial,” Theory and the Premodern Text (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Observations on the general site of the customhouse and its riverside location, as well as a subsequent description of the customhouse itself, are based on “Excavations at the Custom House Site, city of London, 1973,” Tim Tatton-Brown et al., Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, vol. 25 (1974), pp. 117–219; vol. 26 (1975), pp. 103–70. The documents pertaining to Churchman’s Custom House are digested in the Patent Rolls, 1381–85, pp. 149, 249. For discussion and analysis, see Mabel H. Mills, “The London Customs House,” Archaeologia, 83 (1933), 307–25. She quotes the full description of the addition from the original patent roll entry: “nos pro eo idem Johannes preter dictam domum pro tronagio ordinatam & preter solarium super eande domum pro dicto computatorio dispositum nobis concesserit quandam camerulam pro latrina dicto computatorio annexam necnon solarium desuper computatorium predictum . . . in quo quidem solario sunt due camere & vnum garitum. . . .”
For Wyngaerde’s sketch map, see Antonis van den Wyngaerde, The Panorama of London circa 1544, drawing 9, publication 151 (London: London Topographical Society, 1966). The custom house may also be present, in a highly idealized form, in a well-known manuscript illumination of the fifteenth century, British Museum Manuscript Royal 16E ii f 73. For this illumination, with notes by Sonja Drimmer, see Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (London: British Library, 2011), pp. 376-77. The identification of the idealized building in MS Royal 16E as an evolved version of the medieval customhouse has been suggested by Julian Munby, “A Note on the Medieval Buildings,” in Tatton-Brown et al., vol. 26, p. 113. His identification is supported by the arcaded character of the building in the MS Royal illumination. A contending identification holds that this building is a new and arcaded city market just constructed in 1460 in Billingsgate with public funds. The argument for this alternative is presented inHugh Alley’s Caveat: The Markets of London, ed. Ian Archer, Caroline Barron, and Vanessa Harding (London: London Topographical Society, 1988), pp. 53, 84. Readers with a particular interest in the customhouse and in evolving conceptions of late medieval London may wish to seek out the Royal illumination, and also to compare the arguments of Munby and Archer et al.
For Gower’s acerbic remarks on the wool trade see Mirour de l’Omne, Complete Works, vol. 1, lines 25, pp. 357–500. The Mirour is also available in translation as Mirour de l’Omne (Mirror of Mankind), ed. and trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992).
Total crown revenues are notoriously difficult to compute, but general figures may be found in James H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066–1399, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1925). More specific information on the “income” side is to be found in Anthony Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485(Cambridge University Press, 1954). On the crown itself as security for loans, see Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 221 and note. For perspective on the development of institutions of public finance and on the relation of “consent” in taxation to the origins of Parliament, see Sydney Knox Mitchell, Taxation in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1951) and, especially, G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford University Press, 1975).
An excellent overview of the English wool trade in the later fourteenth century is included in J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London: Dent, 1980), esp. pp. 294–97. For particulars, and especially for the complicated history of the English Staple, the monopoly that benefited the London capitalists, see T. H. Lloyd,The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Both Lloyd and Ruth Bird, in Turbulent London, discuss the indictment of Lyons and de Bury in the “Good Parliament” of 1376. For additionally detailed information on London political alignments in the 1370s see Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocer’s Company and the Politics and Trade of London (Yale University Press, 1995). Information on Brembre’s loans is also to be found in Steel, Receipt, together with further information on his associations, finances, and accumulated property and wealth in Ruth Bird, Turbulent London. Loans to Edward III are intensively studied by Roger Axworthy, The Financial Relationship of the London Merchant Community with Edward III, 1327–77, 2 vols., thesis, University of London, 2001. (His data, drawn from receipts and issues of the exchequer, includes loans from Philipot and Walworth and many others but contains no notice of any loans from Brembre during Edward’s reign.) The Dictionary of National Biography contains informative entries on Brembre (by Andrew Prescott), Walworth (Pamela Nightingale), and Philipot (Pamela Nightingale). Lloyd addresses the subject of Brembre’s wool shipments. For evidence of bribery by Italian merchants in Southampton, I am indebted to A. Ruddock, Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton 1270–1600 (Southampton, UK: Southampton University Press, 1951).
For Brembre’s appointment and reappointment in the wool custom, see Fine Rolls, 1369–77, pp. 245, 293; and for 1377–83, pp. 7, 132. His 1375 termination is recorded in Close Rolls, 1374–77, pp. 166–67. His 1371 loan to Edward III is recorded in Letter-Book G, pp. 275–76. On his participation in the collective 1374 loan to Edward III, seePatent Rolls, 1374–77, p. 36. His first substantial loan to King Richard is recorded in Patent Rolls, 1374–77, p. 24 (including repayment from customs and subsidies). Among loans after 1377, see September 1378, Fine Rolls, 1377–83, p. 41 (particularly important for its provisions bearing on direct repayment from revenues of the wool custom). On outright gifts to Richard see Bird, Turbulent London. The Mercers’ Petition against Nicholas Brembre is printed in A Book of London English, 1384–1425, eds. R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt (Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 33–37. On Brembre’s downfall and 1388 trial and execution, see the Westminster Chronicle, esp. pp. 312–15. Parliamentary complaints against Richard Lyons are detailed in Rolls of Parliament for 1376.
On the imposition of wool duties in 1275 and early policies on division of the cocket seal, see Fine Rolls, 1272–1307, pp. 47, 60–61. For the quoted terms of the 1374 loan, see Patent Rolls, 1374–77, p. 36.
On the responsibilities of collectors and controllers of customs see E. M. Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford University Press, 1963). Carus-Wilson’s conclusions about the general reliability of customs accounts must be qualified by the far more jaundiced study of Robert L. Baker, whose detailed review of the crown’s futile attempts to ensure honest collection of the wool custom in the midcentury have informed several aspects of my analysis: The English Customs Service, 1307–43 (American Philosophical Society, 1961). See Baker, also, for the reformist legislation of 1331, which he transcribes in full on p. 23. Baker also relates the case of the fraudulent Ipswich collectors, p. 21. Similarly dubious about the integrity of the wool custom and its processes is Carus-Wilson’s collaborator, Olive Coleman. Her trenchant and worldly wise observations are to be found in “The Collectors of Customs in London Under Richard II,” Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edward Jones, ed. A. E. J. Hollander and William Kellaway (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 181–96. In this essay, Coleman details instances in which Brembre was on both ends of the transaction, holding the two halves of the cocket seal. My discussion of further malfeasance at Ipswich is based on the research of Isabel Abbott and Roland Latham, “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth,” Speculum 30 (1955), pp. 229–32. For the satiric verses against bribery in the exchequer see C. H. Haskins and M. Dorothy George, “Verses on the Exchequer in the Fifteenth Century,” English Historical Review 36 (1921), pp. 58–67.
Crow, Life-Records, continues to be indispensable, here for detailed information on the terms and language of Chaucer’s grants and letters of appointment, persons appointed to posts in customs and their terms of office, numbers of cargoes handled by Chaucer, records of the wool custom during Chaucer’s tenure, and also supplementary texts touching upon oaths taken by controllers, the case of the offending wool packers, and the honest controller Thomas Prudence. Andrew Prescott, a leading theorist of the medieval archive, has suggested in conversation that Chaucer’s own handwritten exchequer accounts may have been spirited away by a souvenir hunter; none of these have survived, although many other comparable accounts of the period have.
George Lyman Kittredge’s keen insight is from his superb Chaucer and His Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1915), pp. 45–47.
For actions for debt against Chaucer, 1388–90, see Life-Records, pp. 384–90; on the end of Philippa’s annuity, Life-Records, p. 78; on his sale of his exchequer annuities, Life-Records, pp. 336–39.
Chapter Four: In Parliament
A general outline of parliamentary procedures in the second half of the fourteenth century, including the social stratification of its membership, is provided by the contemporary Manner of Holding Parliament, edited by Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor in Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1980). Further comments on the summons to Parliament and electoral practices are based on the introductory discussion of J. S. Roskell, The House of Commons, 1386–1421 in History of Parliament, vol. 1. Chaucer’s own summons to Parliament is printed, like so many other central documents, in Crow, Life-Records.
Authorities differ on the matter of Chaucer’s own residence. J. S. Roskell’s study in the History of Parliament finds that of the 252 known members in 1386, all but nine were residents, and he counts Chaucer among the nonresident nine; yet the carefully researched biography printed elsewhere in the same series takes his residency for granted.
For the proceedings of the Parliaments of 1385 and 1386, see Parliament Rolls. The influential conclusion that the crown made no special effort to pack the Parliament of 1386 appears in Crow, pp. 366–67. On Chaucer’s fellow MPs Organ and Hadley, see the History of Parliament. Also see the History of Parliament for the biographies of individual shire knights of 1386, especially the commendable efforts of Carole Rawcliffe and L. S. Woodger, upon which I rely for my conclusions about the relative strength of the court party versus Gloucester’s oppositional alignment. The Gloucester party in the Parliament of 1386 can be reconstructed from hints in biographies of the seventy-four shire knights. Those knights opposed to Richard II and Chaucer’s faction can be identified by their signs of extra-parliamentary loyalty to the Duke of Gloucester and to his associates, the earls of Arundel and Warwick. Other clues to membership in this dissident faction include support for Richard’s eventual supplanter Henry of Derby, as well as other activities on behalf of the house of Lancaster. Finally, among those MPs who survived until 1397–98, former dissidents self-identify by scurrying to seek immunity when Richard sought long-delayed but savage revenge against Gloucester and his followers. Following such criteria, thirty to thirty-two shire knights of 1386 may be reckoned hard-core supporters of the Duke of Gloucester and his anti-Ricardian faction. A roughly equal number of shire knights were still hesitating at the opening of Parliament, waiting to see which way the balance would tip. It would tip decisively in the course of the session, and even from its opening gavel.
For data and interpretative discussion concerning fourteenth-century Westminster, I am indebted to Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1500 (Oxford University Press, 1989); Rosser translates the story of the unfortunate Whalley. Regulations of the Southwark stews, including attempts to close them during sessions of Parliament, are printed in J. Post, “A Fifteenth-Century Customary of the Southwark Stews,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 5 (1974–77), pp. 418–28.
The London MPs’ 1389 reimbursements are printed in Riley, Memorials. The original is found, in manuscript, in Letter-Book H, folio ccxlv. Hoccleve’s verses on the Westminster taverns are to be found in his “Male Regle,” a poem of personal misgovernance, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. F. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, vol. 61 (1892). The jaundiced (and extremely well-informed) description of malingerers in Parliament is from “Richard the Redeless” in The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr (New York: Dutton, 1993).
The most satisfactory general survey of time, clocks, and their effect on sensibility is Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, The History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Particularly helpful to me has been Caroline Barron’s unpublished paper “Telling the Time in Chaucer’s London,” which was delivered at the New Chaucer Society Congress in London on April 19–20, 2007; this paper includes the information on parliamentary timekeeping first noted by Robert Ellis. Jacques le Goff makes a valuable distinction between church’s time (sacred or liturgical time) and merchants’ time (practical and measured time) inTime, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1982). The shift from liturgical time to clock time was inexorable but uneven. Edward III installed his great clock in Westminster, but also hedged his bets: in 1366–67 he spent £246 16s. 8d. for three bells, the largest of them weighing over four tons. The entries concerning Edward III’s clock and bells are found in Pipe Roll 41 (1366–67), British National Archives. Logonier’s clock agreement is printed in Archaeological Journal, vol. 11 (1855).
The parliamentary outcry captured in the Bill of 1385 is available as an appendix to J. N. N. Palmer, “The Impeachment of Michael de la Pole in 1386,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 42 (1969), p. 101.
The late fourteenth-century locations of Parliament are carefully adduced in Ivy M. Cooper, “The Meeting-Places of Parliament in the Ancient Palace of Westminster,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, vol. 3 (1938), pp. 97–138. Specifics of the Painted Chamber are reconstructed by Paul Binski, “The Painted Chamber at Westminster, the Fall of Tyrants and the English Literary Model of Governance,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 74 (2011), pp. 121–54. An earlier, and partially superseded, study by Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1986), contains an excellent discussion of the symbolism of the royal bed. On the Canterbury Pilgrims’ efforts to interpret the cathedral’s stained-glass windows, see The Tale of Beryn, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Original Series, vol. 105 (1901).
One aspect of the 1386 Parliament’s business is treated in detail in J. S. Roskell, The Impeachment of Michael de la Pole Earl of Suffolk in 1386 (University of Manchester Press, 1984).
On the device of the “commune” or “common” petition, see Doris Rayner, “The Forms and Machinery of the Commune Petition in the Fourteenth Century, Parts I and II,” English Historical Review 56 (1941), pp. 198–233, 549–70. The significance of Richard’s absence from Parliament, and also the implications of his direct address (par sa bouche demesne) to the gathered body at the end of the session, are discussed by Phil Bradford, “A Silent Presence: The English King in Parliament in the Fourteenth Century,” Historical Research 84 (2011), pp. 189–211.
On Chaucer’s decision to vacate his posts and withdraw to Kent, see Paul Strohm, “Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s,” Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83–112. My earlier discussion of these matters placed somewhat more emphasis on his personal discretion and somewhat less emphasis on the elements of coercion surrounding his decision than the current discussion. On Richard Forester, see Life-Records, pp. 54, 99, 146. Brembre’s ill-timed gestures of all-out support for Richard, including his cash gifts directly to Richard’s Chamber, are detailed in Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 18–19, 110–11. For Nicholas Exton’s cagey relations with Brembre in 1386, see DNB. On the London representatives to the Parliament of 1388, see History of Parliament, vol. 2, pp. 128–31; vol. 3, pp. 773–76; vol. 4, pp. 343–46, 733–35. The grim circumstances of Brembre’s arraignment and betrayal by his fellow London merchant capitalists are detailed in Westminster Chronicle, pp. 312–15.
Chapter Five: The Other Chaucer
The suggestion that Chaucer juvenalia might have included poems in French is pursued by James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch,” Chaucer Studies, no. 9 (Cambridge, UK: D.S Brewer, 1982). T. S. Eliot’s comments on unified sensibility are found in “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).
The Usk reference is to The Testament of Love, ed. R. Allen Shoaf (TEAMS: Middle English Texts, 1998), book 3, chap. 4, lines 559–64. Details of Usk’s career, and emulation of Chaucer, may be found in Paul Strohm, “Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s,” Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530(University of California Press, 1990). Deschamps’s ballad and Gower’s admonition that Chaucer write a testament of his own are conveniently available in Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, ed. D. S. Brewer (London: Routledge, 1978). See also Gower, Complete Works, vol. 3, lines 15–16. On Chaucer’s and Gower’s interactions, the definitive account is John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York University Press, 1968). For Hoccleve’s claim that the older Chaucer was available to instruct him in his verse—“fayn wolde han me taught”—see his Regement of Princes, line 2078, and J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages Series (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), p. 10.
The matter of Chaucer’s literary circle is taken up in my Social Chaucer, esp. pp. 47–83, with documentation of his interactions with Clanvowe, Scogan, and others mentioned here. A recent essay by Derek Pearsall argues that the Canterbury Tales were nurtured by a supportive London audience; his and my views of Chaucer’s London public are congenial, although, as readers will see, I am inclined to connect Chaucer’s works before 1386, rather than the Canterbury Tales, with his access to a London circle. See Pearsall, “The Canterbury Tales and London Club Culture,” Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 95–108. The fascinating subject of Lewis Clifford as cultural intermediary between Chaucer and the French poet Eustache Deschamps has often been discussed, most notably by James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries (University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 242–72, and Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 143–55. Butterfield provides the best and most authoritative transcription and translation of the ballade Deschamps addressed to Chaucer, upon which I have relied here. She explains the hostility in Deschamps’s positioning of translation as a derivative activity (versus his own practices of original composition) and also (with the Hundred Years War still in progress) his view of French-English translation as a typical act of aggressive appropriation. We differ, though, in our estimate of Deschamps’s acquaintance with Chaucer’s English writings; my own view is that all Deschamps knew of Chaucer’s writings were things he might have been told by Clifford.
On the imaginary character of writers’ representations of audiences and audience relations, see Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA: Publication of the Modern Language Association 90 (1975), pp. 9–21. My comments on the utterance as a bridge between speaker and hearer are indebted to V. N. Voloshinov,Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 86. The aurality of medieval literature and the medieval author’s particular reliance upon an intimate circle are discussed by Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 1996); in this discussion I subscribe to her view. On St. Ambrose’s habits of silent reading, see Augustine, Confessions (Oxford University Press, 1991), bk. 6, pp. 92–93.
Chapter Six: The Problem of Fame
A rewarding discussion of self-naming by medieval authors is Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s Kynde Name,” Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History (Farnam, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 2013).
Gower advances his ambitious suppositions about Richard II’s encouragement in Gower, Complete Works, vol. 3, p. 4.
Purgatorio 9, lines 19–21 is quoted from Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
The literary tradition of Chaucer’s epilogue to Troilus is authoritatively discussed by J. S. P. Tatlock, “The Epilog of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus,’” Modern Philology 18 (1921), pp. 625–29.
Chaucer’s literary relations with Boccaccio have been discussed often, most recently and persuasively by David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity (Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 9–82. Although Chaucer knew other of Boccaccio’s works, his firsthand acquaintance with the Decameron remains in doubt. On the lack of evidence for such acquaintance, see Nicholas Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980), especially p. 12 and p. 197, n. 37.
The discovery of Thomas Spencer’s testimony about discharge of a debt with a copy of Troilus was announced by Martha Carlin, “Chaucer’s Southwark Network,” Thirteenth Conference of the Early Book Society, St. Andrews University, July 7, 2013.
Chapter Seven: Kent and Canterbury
Information about Chaucer’s fellow peace commissioners is given in Life-Records, pp. 348–63; see also the Dictionary of National Biography for Belknap, Burley, Clopton, Cobham, Devereux, Rickhill, Savage, and Tresilian. Savage is also treated in the History of Parliament. Savage’s seat at Bobbing may possibly be referenced in one of the place-names of the Canterbury pilgrimage, “Bobbe-up-and-doun” (fragment 9, l. 2)—although the connection, if granted, would create difficulties for the traditional ordering of the Canterbury tales. On Bobbing, see Notes and Queries no. 127 (1932), p. 26—though its author is unaware of the additional strength lent to Bobbing as Chaucer’s point of reference by the existence of the Savage connection. On Savage’s possible literary interests, as indicated by his service as an executor of John Gower’s will, see Gower, Complete Works, vol. 1, p. xviii.
On the possibility that Chaucer had a Kentish sister, Katherine, see A. A. Kern, “Chaucer’s Sister,” Modern Language Notes 23 (1908), 52.
For pertinent observations about “tydyngs” in the House of Fame and their relation to tale telling and the Canterbury project see Vincent Gillespie, “Authorship,” A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 137–54.
Ideas of literary form are usefully discussed in Christopher Cannon, “Form,” Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 177–90. Chaucer’s idea of literary form as something simultaneously apprehended may be traced to the medieval rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who recommends that a successful composition should be complete in its planner’s mind before it is undertaken. Using the analogy of house building, he says, “If a man has a house to build, his impetuous hand does not rush into action. The measuring line of his mind first lays out the work. . . . The mind’s hand shapes the entire house before the body’s hand builds it.” Its mode of being is archetypal before it is actual (prius achetypus quam sensilis). For the full passage, see Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (University of Toronto Press, 1967).
On various computational and calendar-based arguments for 1387 as the imagined date of the Canterbury pilgrimage, see W. W. Skeat, ed., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 1894), pp. 373–74.
On the unprecedented nature of Chaucer’s varied tale collection, I am in debt to Helen Cooper, whose The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983) remains fundamental for the study of Chaucer’s greatest work. The suggestion that the creation of the Canterbury Pilgrims might have followed, rather than preceded, the composition of the individual tales originates with C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style (University of North Carolina Press, 1986). The enlarged palette of vocational types in medieval satirical poetry is explored by Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Epilogue: Laureate Chaucer
On early references to Chaucer, see Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, vol. 1 (London: Chaucer Society, 1914) and Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, ed. Derek Brewer (London: Routledge, 1978).
The discussion of Adam Pinkhurst’s role in the production of Chaucer’s poems, and especially the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, is most tellingly inaugurated by Linne R. Mooney. For an even more ambitious rendering of his importance than I have offered here, see her “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006), pp. 97–138. Although elements of her analysis have been questioned, none have seriously doubted that Pinkhurst enjoyed privileged access to Chaucer’s papers after his death, and that his hand is present in these two crucial early manuscripts, as well as a fragmentary Troilus and a Boethius. For some thoughtful questions about the origin and status of Chaucer’s poem to Adam, see Alexandra Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” Chaucer Review 42 (2008), pp. 269–83. Also relevant to my discussion is Glending Olson, “Author, Scribe, and Curse: The Genre of Adam Scriveyn,” Chaucer Review 42 (2008), pp. 284–97. Olson makes the congenial point that the opening lines of the poem “suggest a certain struggle and perhaps audacity on Chaucer’s part in asserting himself as an author in the humanist mode.”
On the state of Chaucer’s papers at the time of his death, and also on the earliest owners of his manuscripts, see M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, vol. 2 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1997). With regard to the fifty-six existing whole or partial manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, he contends that “all derive ultimately from one set of unbound or partially bound booklets, put together as one collection in London shortly after Chaucer’s death (25 October 1400) in four slightly different editions.” The Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales have been accessibly published in facsimile: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile (Los Angeles: Huntington Library, 1996) and The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, ed. P. G. Ruggiers (University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).
Lancastrian encouragement of Chaucer’s works is suggestively treated by John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association 107 (1992), pp. 1168–80.
The growth of the English reading public is succinctly described by M. B. Parkes, “The Literacy of the Laity,” in Literature and Western Civilisation, II: The Medieval World, eds. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus, 1973), pp. 555–77. Three excellent surveys of manuscript circulation in the later Middle Ages are: J. Griffths and P. Pearsall, eds., Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1373–1475 (Cambridge University Press, 1989); C. F. Briggs, “Literacy, Reading, and Writing in the Medieval West,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000), pp. 397–420; and W. M. Ormrod, “The Use of English: Language, Law and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,”Speculum 78 (2003), pp. 750–87. For additional material on late medieval literacy, see Paul Strohm, “Reading and Writing,” A Social History of England 1200–1500, eds. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
The subject of scribal culture and manuscript production in later medieval London is in a period of rapid development right now; one starting point of special interest, because it involves Chaucer’s scribe Adam Pinkhurst, is provided by Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006), pp. 97–138. On other aspects of manuscript production and circulation, see M. A. Michael, “Urban Production of Manuscript Books,” pp. 168–94; Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “Middle English Literary Writings, 1150–1400,” pp. 380–90, both in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2, eds. Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Also see A. I. Doyle and M. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales,” Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries (London: Scolar Press, 1978). An especially valuable essay on early fifteenth-century production of manuscript books is C. Paul Christianson, “The Rise of London’s Book-Trade,” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge University Press, 1999). On production of paper in England, see David Christopher Chamberlain, “Paper,” Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 79–87, and with particular emphasis on the availability of paper in the fourteenth century, Orieta da Rold, “Materials,” in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, eds. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
The story of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the cultivation of laurel is recounted in Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works (London: Harvester Press, 1976), p. 112.