CHAPTER SEVEN
Chaucer’s withdrawal to Kent after the 1386 Parliament was disruptive in every way. Events and the passage of time had already alienated him from most of the vivid and influential people with whom he had associated in recent years, and the move to Kent would drive a further wedge. In the spring of 1387 his wife, Philippa, only in her early forties, was to die of unknown causes. Her sparkling and frisky sister Katherine, to whom Chaucer was obliged for his Lancastrian connections, was becoming devoutly religious; she would eventually end her life as a crucial benefactor of the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral and live out her last years within the cathedral close. John of Gaunt returned from Spain in 1388 a discredited and effectively broken man; he married Katherine in order to legitimize their Beaufort offspring and effectively disappeared from court and the politics of the realm. The seemingly invulnerable Nicholas Brembre was on the ropes, striving without success to rally London followers on Richard’s behalf; he was accused of treason in the autumn of 1387 and executed a few months later. Just when he most needed it, Chaucer’s political and personal support system was stripped away.
His potential area of new assertion, his writing career, was threatened too. Exactly at the moment when he was beginning to think about expanding his audience, the forced relocation interrupted his ties with the audience that had previously sustained him. Nor does Kent, as it existed in 1386, appear to have been a promising place (or even a possible place!) in which to commence the search for a new one. Suppose, though, that the move to Kent might be viewed in a different way. The move to Kent, with all its dislocations, will prove a catalyst and crucial spur in Chaucer’s search for a new kind of author-audience relation.
In Kent
Where in Kent did Chaucer go to ground, and under what circumstances? He appears to have had nothing we might think of as a fixed address. He had some Kentish connections, but not necessarily people with whom he was on easy terms. These were mainly fellow factionalists whom he first met in 1385, when he was appointed as one of nine justices of the peace for the county of Kent, filling a vacancy created by the death of a reliable Ricardian party man there. But, typically, he would have found himself by far the least qualified among the justices with respect to rank, influence, land ownership, or any other criteria for service. Justices of the peace sat four times yearly, in the county of their appointment, to hear and make preliminary disposition of indictments for felony and trespass, as well as to accept guarantees in local complaints involving the keeping of the peace. Although such duties were often of a mundane character, those sitting to hear them were the county’s most conspicuous worthies. Most were resident landowners, of knightly rank or the judicial equivalent of knightly. Those appointed in 1385 and 1386, while Richard was still enjoying relatively untroubled sway, were of a decidedly loyalist character. Others reappointed in 1385 were a comparably distinguished group, including: Sir Simon de Burley (constable of Dover Castle), staunch Ricardian condemned by the Merciless Parliament in 1388; Lord John Cobham (justice of the King’s Bench, member of the king’s council, and prominent Kentish landowner); Sir Robert Belknap (sergeant-at-law, Kentish landowner), exiled by the Merciless Parliament; John Devereux (lord of Penshurst, garter knight, and member of the king’s council); Thomas Culpepper (knight, of a distinguished Kentish family); Sir Thomas Fogg (Ricardian and constable of Calais; succeeded Geoffrey as MP for Kent); Walter Clopton and Sir William Rickhill (distinguished barristers and sergeants-at-law); Sir Arnold Savage (country sheriff and lord of Bobbing); and Hugh Fastolf (a prominent Ricardian who would be named sheriff of London in 1387). Added in 1386 was Sir Robert Tresilian (chief justice of the King’s Bench, later condemned by the Merciless Parliament).
What we have here, in short, is a virtual honor roll of active Ricardians, mostly consisting of lords and landholding knights, mostly (excepting several of the jurists) prominent within Kent, and all exceeding Chaucer’s modest station. Only two—William Topcliffe (steward to the archbishop of Canterbury) and Fastolf (prosperous merchant of Great Yarmouth, London alderman, and ally of Nicholas Brembre)—lacked knightly standing, but each possessed other indices of rank. Aside from three of the justices, who were judged by other criteria, and Devereux and Fastolf (highly influential factionalists), all were Kentish landowners. Although insistence on residence as a condition of service on peace commissions did not gain statutory approval until 1388–89, it was just around the corner and already amounted to a de facto requirement—one that Chaucer, typically, did not meet.
Similarly, his initial election as a shire knight had been beholden to people better situated than himself—in particular, to the county sheriff responsible for his appointment. Sir Arnold Savage, who as sheriff of Kent received the writ of election in August 1386, was a man of considerable distinction: a frequent parliamentarian and the speaker of commons during the reign of Henry IV. He would have presided at the session of the shire court, in Rochester or Canterbury, at which Chaucer was selected. Although Savage proved flexible, weathering the different power transfers between Richard and the Appellants from 1387 to 1389 and the usurpation of 1399, his identifications in 1386 were primarily those of a king’s man. He presided over his father’s estates in Kent, including his principal seat at Bobbing, two miles west of Sittingbourne. Bobbing appears to be tagged in the Canterbury Tales as Bobbe-up-and-doun, the village where the Manciple abuses the Cook and then tells his tale. A nod to Savage would have been appropriate, since he was the man of position and authority who had placed Chaucer in Parliament despite his lack of residence or other normal qualifications.
Savage’s manor house is one of the few places in Kent where Chaucer can be imagined seeking some kind of Kentish refuge. Fortifying this possibility is the fact that Savage seems to have had some literary interests besides. He was an executor of John Gower’s will in 1408 and, while his administrative experience would have recommended him for such a post in any case, a personal interest in literature might have been the basis of his connection with this otherwise modestly situated esquire of a neighboring county. But Savage’s manor at Bobbing might be described as comfortable rather than grand, and would certainly not have had the space or resources of those great magnate households that customarily housed and patronized literary figures. Chaucer more probably remained a shadowy figure to such worthies as Savage, and very possibly a puzzling one: a king’s man, as most of them were, but a king’s man temporarily on the shelf. These are not conditions in which magnate hospitality customarily flourished.
Another, and completely different, possibility of haven presents itself. Had Chaucer wished to maintain as many London ties as possible, he might have considered the villages of Deptford or Greenwich, four or five miles downriver from the Wool Wharf and easily communicable by skiff or water taxi. In the 1380s they were simple fishing villages without urban amenities, and hardly places for a polished cosmopolite like Chaucer to love, hardly places where a water taxi would bother to call. Even so, some suggestive evidence of his presence in those environs does survive. On November 13, 1386, two weeks before Parliament’s end, Chaucer stood surety for the court appearance of one Simon Manning in a case of alleged debt. Manning was a resident of Cudham (Codham), Kent—a small village near the border with Surrey—but also had Greenwich ties of a suggestive sort.
A fugitive story, probably more a matter of fanciful tradition and less of historical fact, would strengthen the tie. Manning’s wife, Katherine, who had owned property in Greenwich, is identified in a document of 1619 as “sister to Chawcer, knight, and most celebrated of English poets.” Chaucer was far from knighthood and no fourteenth-century records suggest that he even had a sister. But this notion of Chaucer living among relatives, perhaps even rent-free, in the area of Deptford or Greenwich, or in a rural village of western Kent, would go a long way toward explaining the absence of any other record of his Kentish whereabouts. What it wouldn’t explain is how he was ever to form a new set of literary relations.
Here was Chaucer with all kinds of time to write. For the next three years his nightly and personal avocation might become his daily and principal vocation. But for whom was he now writing? Aside from the possibly incidental connection between Savage and Gower, nothing suggests that his associates in Kent were any sort of literati. His customary expectation of a responsive literary circle remained to be addressed. Launching a literary work without its accompanying circumstances of telling and hearing, performance and response, approval and disapproval, enjoyment and controversy would have remained problematic for a poet accustomed to a full measure of such actions and reactions. Whatever else it did and didn’t afford him, his sojourn in Kent would give him incentive and occasion to address this problem. It would be addressed, and memorably so.
No Audience? Invent One.
This is when Chaucer follows his own favorite advice by making virtue of necessity. He confronts his new circumstances by reconceiving the entire matter of his audience relations and, in the process, discovering a new and unprecedented form for his poetic endeavor. He needs a situation of direct address—he cannot imagine mobilizing a narrative without one—and he will satisfy this requirement with a dazzling act of imagination. He will keep on writing—but for an audience of his own invention. Its members will be the vivid portrait gallery of Canterbury Pilgrims—hearers, tellers, judges, and occasional victims—a body of ambitiously mixed participants suitable for a collection of tales unprecedented in their variety and scope. It will live within the boundaries of his work, perennially available as a resource for the telling and the hearing of tales. Above all else, it will be a portable audience, enabling Chaucer to create a work of art that will triumph over catastrophe by placing itself beyond the vagaries of time and circumstance.
This is Chaucer’s bold stroke, his sudden grasp of a new principle that permits an artistic breakthrough. The ancients used to explain such moments of artistic inspiration with the visit of a muse, and perhaps they weren’t so wrong. Chaucer seems, at least provisionally or wryly, to believe in such a thing, if the invocations to various muses with which he introduces the five books of his Troilus are taken to heart. His character Pandarus entertains a compatible belief, that an idea or a plan comes to you suddenly and complete; that you grasp it entirely and all at once. Pandarus, a bit of an author and artist figure in his own right, argues that he and Troilus must have a complete plan to seduce Criseide before they can begin. A person who wants to build a house, he says, doesn’t rush straight to the task (“Ne renneth nought the werk for to biginne / With rakel hond”) but waits a while until he has grasped it whole, formed a plan within his heart that will achieve his purpose (“but he wol bide a stounde / And send his hertes line out fro withinne / Alderfirst his purpos for to winne”). With respect to his new work, the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer has such a plan. He grasps its design, its total form, simultaneously and whole. The idea starts with a mixed company of Pilgrim tale-tellers. From this mixed company issues the form of the work: It will be serial, multivoiced, stylistically mixed, many-themed, and contentious.
The idea of a tale collection was not, in itself, new. Medieval literary culture was awash with poetry anthologies, sermon collections, compilations of saints’ lives, collections of aphorisms and literary excerpts called “florilegia,” exemplifications of vices and virtues, and the like. The Canterbury Tales even includes one such collection within its bounds, in the Monk’s tragedies. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower was working on his collection of moral or exemplary tales, the Confessio Amantis, or the Lover’s Confession, in which a poetic version of Gower himself receives narrative instruction.
Nor was Chaucer the first to hit upon the idea of including an audience, and its responses, within the body of a work. Back at the beginnings of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad includes a scene where Achilles consoles himself by listening to a bard recount his own exploits. The Odyssey includes a scene in which an audience, including Odysseus himself, listens to a poetic account of his deeds. The Thousand and One Nights contains a keenly attentive audience of one, the autocrat for whom Scheherazade spins her tales. Medieval works of religious homily and instruction often include a description of the devotional listeners at which they are aimed; medieval collections of saints’ lives contain frequent references to their intended audiences and what those audiences are expected to learn from them.
But no audience as varied as Chaucer’s Pilgrims had ever been implied or imagined within a literary work. Prior to Chaucer, imagined literary audiences tend to be homogeneous or consistent in their composition. Uniformity in the composition of a work’s audience encourages a comparable consistency in the narrative or narratives the work contains. Gower’s Confessio Amantis relies upon the presence of a spiritually obtuse version of himself who listens to, and comments upon, the edifying tales that Genius tells him. The presence of a single listener whose spiritual deficiencies persist from tale to tale encourages a tone of somber didacticism throughout the many tales he will be told, just as the presence of a single teller, Genius, supports Gower’s quest for a stylistic “middle way.” Even in Boccaccio, where we encounter multiple tellers and hearers, and narrative responsibility circulates in a manner analogous to the Canterbury Tales, the social uniformity of his company, or brigata, encourages a broadly congenial middle style that Boccaccio describes as a piano, or level plain. Similarly, although Boccaccio gathers all different sorts of tales for his collection, he aims to assimilate them into a new and inclusive category of novelle, seeking out qualities of stylistic similarity and likeness rather than dissimilarity and divergence. Closely as Boccaccio anticipates Chaucer’s artistic plan for communal tale telling, he has not hit upon the other critical component of the Pilgrim company: its inner variety and commitment to stylistic difference.
The idea of a socially mixed body of Pilgrim hearers and tellers originated with Chaucer, as an imaginatively lavish stroke with a variety of consequences. One is, of course, the creation of the Pilgrims as an end in themselves as a band of vividly realized characters whose pronounced personalities and entertaining shortcomings continue to engage readers seven centuries after their creation. Another is their suitability to an artistic ambition that Chaucer has increasingly entertained: to establish himself as a writer of incomparable versatility who can create a heady and utterly unpredictable grab bag of tales at all levels of taste and style. Even as he will mix gentle characters and bourgeoisie and lowlifes, so will he give us idealizing romances, moral tales, and scurrilous fabliaux, not to mention advice literature, parody, edifying examples, religious homilies and devotions, adventures, an animal fable, orientalist fantasy, knavery, dolorous tragedy, a sermon—God’s literary plenty indeed, all within a single work’s capacious bounds. And a final consequence is that this expansively imagined Pilgrim band may be taken as an emblem of Chaucer’s growing ambition for an enlarged literary public—not as an exact blueprint for that public but as a measure of his increasingly inclusive ambitions.
The Pilgrim Company
Back in his House of Fame, his character Geffrey visited the House of Rumor, a spinning wicket where “tidings,” gossip, and tall tales restlessly circulate in search of speakers who might tell them. The tales are finally united with their tellers, a ragtag bunch of shipmen and pilgrims and other celebrated liars; now that the tales have found someone to tell them they can issue forth into the world. This was prophetic, since Chaucer, arriving in Kent, brought a grab bag of uncirculated tales with him (ranging from his chivalric “Knight’s Tale” through his pious “Second Nun’s Tale” to his politically admonitory “Monk’s Tale”) and a considerably larger number of highly varied tales in mind that he still wanted to write. What he needed was tellers, but not just bland or faceless or monochromatic tellers. He needed tellers vivid enough in character and varied enough in social station to provide an apt counterpart for the cornucopia of genres and styles that he had in mind. And he needed characters who would enable him to enter imaginatively into the presentational situation he had left behind: into a climate of intimate and attentive and appreciative (if sometimes contentious) exchange, in which tales would be recited, given close attention, praised, or blamed. He could start with his own idea of shipmen and pilgrims and liars, but it would require a good deal of expansion.
Enter the Canterbury Pilgrims. Chaucer’s varied cast of rogues, pitchmen, scammers, sincere and insincere divines, social snobs, humble toilers, and the rest was, in its day, a miracle of imaginative inclusion. Galleries of such highly varied characters may be found here and there in literature and art just before and just after Chaucer, but only if we go looking for them. Prior to Chaucer, a category of learned satiric poems known as “estates satire,” written mainly in Latin and for limited circulation, reviewed the different ranks of society and castigated their moral shortcomings. But these were aloof in perspective and were wanting in the impartial generosity of Chaucer’s vision. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a macabre genre called the “Dance of Death” imagined all the different ranks of categories of society being led to judgment by mocking skeletons, but again for bluntly moralizing purposes rather remote from Chaucer’s own. For Chaucer’s contemporary readers, seeking out a literary experience of mixed entertainment and instruction written in their native tongue, the inclusiveness of his social vision and the gently pointed equanimity with which he views his characters would have been a revelation indeed.
Chaucer is not a photorealist or a social geographer. His ultimate purpose is to achieve the best possible mix of tale-tellers rather than accurate social description or ethnography for its own sake. If he were, for example, aiming at social accuracy, the actual conditions of medieval society would have required him to include twenty-four or twenty-five peasants and agricultural workers among his thirty-odd pilgrims. He chooses instead to make do with a single, rather idealized Plowman—and a rather prosperous professional plowman who sells his services on the open market rather than a serf bound to the land. Even then, his Plowman (along with the Five Guildsmen and a couple of servants and attendants) is the only character for whom he fails to dream up a tale. Similarly, at the high end of the scale, he gives us no great aristocrats, but only his gentle and relatively companionable Knight, together with his pretentious (but perhaps only quasi-gentle) Prioress. His great interest is in what may be called the “middle strata” of his society, the professionals and entrepreneurs and artisans and scrambling in-betweeners normally ignored in the formal medieval social theory that emphasizes the three estates of knighthood, priesthood, and peasantry. His interest is drawn to some two dozen possible forms of life and vocation hardly noticed in medieval social theory at all, ranging between the peasantry and the gentry. He gives us worthies (a distinguished jurist in the Man of Law, an early moneyman in the Merchant, an aspiring shire knight in the Franklin, an austere and antifeminist scholar in the Clerk), poseurs and social climbers (the self-consciously genteel Prioress, the socially ambitious Guildsmen), scammers and scramblers (the duplicitous Pardoner, the sex-pest Friar, the conniving Manciple), and rural workers (the boisterous Miller, the choleric Reeve).
The Prologue to his Tales is a dazzling tour de force. Imagine asking any reader to sit still for an initial rendering of twenty-two static portraits (treating the five guildsmen as a single entity and omitting the Prioress’s entourage and Chaucer himself). He achieves it with a mix of revealing and constantly varied detail (the Knight’s rust-stained tunic, the Prioress’s indulged canines, the Wife of Bath’s gapped teeth, the Pardoner’s long and thinning hair, the Miller’s door-busting head . . .) and by the sheer audacity of the enterprise.
When he’s through he has a pilgrim company ready to indulge, support, and further the widest possible range of literary tastes. Incidentally, Chaucer knows full well that the actual connection between a person’s social position and literary tastes is more complicated than he is making it out to be. He embraces the convenient but simplifying premise that knights like romances, that millers tell bawdy stories, that monks keep tragedies in their cells, that social-climbing franklins like tales illustrative of gentle conduct, that devout nuns tell saints’ lives, and that even the slightly less devout enjoy highly accented miracles of the Virgin, that parsons sermonize . . . and so on. This connection is reasonable enough on its face but never exactly borne out in practice. Consider the example of the Knight telling a “noble storie” laced with elements of chivalric ceremony and high romance, as compared with the Miller’s immediately following bawdy peasant’s, or “churl’s,” tale. In point of fact, mercantile audiences of Chaucer’s day were avid consumers of romance and all aspects of knightly culture. Nothing in life so pleased Nicholas Brembre as his knighthood, and the first thing most prosperous London merchants did with their money was buy country estates. The first collection of romances in English, the so-called Auchinleck Manuscript, was most definitely aimed at a London or bourgeois audience, as were fifteenth-century Arthurian tales such as those written by Lovelich and Malory. Even more surprisingly, the bawdy French fables (or fabliaux), which provided the precedents for those of the Miller and the Reeve, turn out to have been fancied mainly by aristocratic audiences and secondarily by socially mixed audiences with aristocratic and gentle components.
Although Chaucer makes his tale assignments along deliberately simplified class lines, he is too great an artist to rest complacently within this agenda. The voice and tone of his tales never strictly confine themselves to the character of their imagined teller, but ranges more widely than that. His “Knight’s Tale” punctuates its high seriousness with rough and rather decidedly ungentle joking about Arcite’s death, rather flippantly saying that when Nature is against him and medicine won’t work, the time has come to get the funeral started. (“And certeinly, ther Nature wol nat wirche, / Fare wel physik! Go ber the man to chirche!”) Just as, by contrast, the “Miller’s Tale” pauses in its account of sexual hijinks to gaze down upon the spontaneous Alison from an aloof social height (comparing her to a fresh wildflower fit “For any lord to lay down in his bed, / Or yet for any good yeoman to wed” (“For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to wedde”). This kind of migration of artworks from their ostensible moorings is familiar to us today, when grade-B movies, daily newspaper comics, rap music, and street graffiti move up, as well as down, the scale of social consumption. It is no less true in the fourteenth century, when an art form’s imagined point of social attachment, and its actual audience, may not nearly coincide.
If Chaucer’s premise that different styles and subject matters have strong vocational and class affiliations is more premise than reality, it remains an immensely productive one. His social and vocational mix of Canterbury Pilgrims, even though unrepresentative of actual pilgrimages, permits him to get on with his actual business, which is to gather a collection of wholly unprecedented variety. In this sense, Chaucer’s invented audience does double or multiple duty. Not only does his invention give him what he lacked—an audience—but it gives him the kind of audience that will support his staging of the most internally varied tale collection existing before or since.
Perhaps most important of all, the created Canterbury audience will give Chaucer something vital that has just gone missing from his actual life: an environment of avid interest in literature and its effects. Whatever its other spiritual and recreational objectives, this pilgrimage is above all else a literary occasion, and a highly interactive one. This is hardly to say that the Canterbury Pilgrims are all literary connoisseurs: They frequently go far off the track. But tales and tale telling are always at the center for them, and (save for a few moments of disappointment or pique, as when the Monk refuses to carry on after the Knight’s interruption) their interest is unflagging.
Tale telling is, after all, the whole purpose here. Once the pilgrims have constituted themselves as a group and have chosen the genial Harry Bailly as a kind of master of revels, he sets things in motion by instituting a tale-telling competition, with a reward for the pilgrim who tells the most instructive and enjoyable tale. The telling of tales—their uses and responsibilities as well as their enjoyment—will never be displaced as this group’s central activity. For their part, the pilgrims not only join the enterprise of tale telling with good will, but also surround it with an enlivened climate of commentary and opinion.
The Knight no sooner concludes his initial story than the body of pilgrims rush to praise it—especially, as Chaucer wryly observes, the “gentle” ones. The counterreaction is almost as swift, as the drunken Miller interrupts the order of tellers with his rejoinder, a bawdy fable that will pay back or requite (“quite”) the Knight’s more stately romance. When the Reeve responds to the Miller with his own comic tale of revenge, the Cook enjoys it so viscerally that he feels like the Reeve is scratching his back (“For joye him thoughte he clawed him on the bak”). The Friar critiques the Wife of Bath’s admittedly long prologue (“this is a long preamble of a tale”), and takes incidental note of the learning (“scole matere”) compacted within her otherwise earthy diatribe. When the Friar uses his tale to score points on Summoners, the Summoner is so angered that he quakes like an aspen (“lik an aspen leef he quook for ire”). Harry Bailly would rather his wife heard the Clerk’s tale than have a barrel of ale, and he pays stricken tribute to the Physician’s account of the death of Virginia, saying that his heart is lost for pity of the maid (“Min herte is lost for pitee of this maide”). Not that Harry lacks occasional severity; the Pilgrim Chaucer’s own stumbling parody of a popular romance so annoys him that he declares it “nat worth a toord.” The Prioress’s rather drastic miracle of the Virgin sobers the entire company, but such consensus is rare. The Knight, exasperated by the Monk’s tragic recitals, cuts him off in midstream with his preemptory “namoore of this!”
Chaucer doesn’t intend that his Pilgrims’ judgments be on the mark; quite the contrary, in most cases. They constantly overpraise and underpraise one another, miss the point, get the moral wrong, pursue unrelated quarrels, introduce arrant irrelevancies. But the interactive climate, mingling narrative action and audience response, is what he is looking for and what he achieves. There’s an underlying rationale here. At precisely the most estranged (and presumably lonely) moment of his life, Chaucer actively sets about the imaginary creation of a fellowship, a felaweshipe of pilgrims formed by chance but one that enters into strenuous and conflicted intimacy. All the more poignant that, at this moment of Chaucer’s separation from his London audience, this is a literary fellowship as well, one in which tale telling is central and really matters.
A generous inclusivity, a receptiveness to different voices, has been a benchmark of literary accomplishment in English from Shakespeare through Joyce. With the creation of the Canterbury pilgrimage, and its cacophony of competing speakers, Chaucer stands at its wellspring. He seizes every opportunity to throw elite and ordinary people into one another’s company, to mix “high” and “low” literary styles, to place apparently incompatible sorts of narrative side by side. His varied group of hearers and tellers anchors an altogether new work of literature, a tale collection founded on a preference for diversity over similarity, for variety rather than consistency of subject matter, viewpoint, and style.