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Chaucer Lee Patterson, A
Lecture delivered 9/14/94 in English 125, Yale University. (For a more detailed treatment of the issues discussed
in this lecture, and for an account of The
Miller's Tale itself, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of
History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). I want to start with a
methodological remark about this lecture, so you will know the kind of
lecture you're going to be listening to and the reasons why I'm giving this
kind of lecture rather than some other kind. For the next forty minutes or so
I will be discussing the economic, the social, and the political conditions
of the last half of the fourteenth century in England, Chaucer's place in
this world, and the relation of this to Chaucer's poetry. I will be offering,
in other words, what is known in literary criticism as an
historicist account. By this I mean not simply an account that seeks to
understand Chaucer's poetry in terms of history per se, since there are many
kinds of history. I will not talk, for example, about literary history, the
kinds of sources that Chaucer used, the writers who provided him with
inspiration, and so on. I also won't talk -- except in passing -- about
cultural history. This would include the kind of art that was produced during
his time, the kinds of books that were read, the forms by which the religious
feelings of the time were expressed, the kinds of public rituals that were
practiced, and so on. Instead, I will discuss what could be called the material conditions of Chaucer's
world. With this phrase -- material conditions -- I mean to designate all of those elements of life that determine
people's economic, social, and physical situation. These elements
include, for example, the economic conditions of the time, the social
structure, the political practices, the vocational opportunities or lack of
them -- in other words, all of those
elements of life that condition -- condition, not determine -- a person's
place in the world and his or her life choices. As you probably know, this form of
literary analysis is deeply antipathetic to the Anglo- American tradition of
literary criticism. The reason is because this tradition has always
privileged the individual over history: the record of English and American
literature is typically thought of as a sequence of geniuses, one remarkable
man (or, occasionally, woman) followed by another. This kind of understanding
is usually called humanist, or liberal humanist: it places the individual
above history, and esteems the human capacity not to be made by but to make
history. An excellent example of this way of thinking is this very course,
English 125, which traces the route marked out by great geniuses: Chaucer,
Spenser, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Eliot. It
is not an accident that this course has been a cornerstone of the English
Department curriculum since the 1920s. Because it is a course that
celebrates, by its very nature, something that is at the very heart of
American life, and that is individualism. By this I
mean the transcendence of the individual -- and especially the remarkable
individual -- over historical circumstances. For Americans, success or
failure in life is characteristically understood as a matter of individual
choice. For instance, this individualism tends to dominate our political
discourse, in which social problems are typically understood in terms of
individual choices. We have a drug problem because individual teenagers just
won't say no; we have a crime problem because individual wrongdoers are not
being incarcerated often enough or long enough; we have a welfare problem
because individuals behave irresponsibly and have children they cannot
support. And so on. My point is not to make a
political speech but simply to indicate to you that (1) the natural way we
think of human life is in terms of individuals who stand apart from the
material conditions of their lives; and (2) that English 125 is a course that
is structured in terms of this natural way of thinking. Now there is a third
point that is relevant. The reason we start this course with Chaucer is
because he is the most readable of medieval English poets -- by which we mean
the most like us, the most modern and the least medieval. His contemporaries
-- Langland, Gower, the so-called Pearl-poet, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and others
-- are didactic, moralistic, pious, and intensely interested in local
political questions. Chaucer is none of these things, and what's more -- what
makes him not just the initial figure for this course but for the whole of
English literature, so that in 1700 Dryden called him the Father of English
Poetry, a title he has never lost -- what's more is that Chaucer is not only not interested in the drearily medieval topics of
his contemporaries but he is interested in the topic that has become, for us,
the quintessential and defining mark of the modern. In literary terms we call
this topic character; philosophically and politically we call it
individualism. It is important to stress just how profound is Chaucer's
focus on the individual. The great innovation of the Canterbury Tales is that our
attention in reading the tales is always drawn to the tellers: the meaning of
each tale cannot only not be divorced from the teller
but is both initially and finally referred back to him or her. It is fair to
say, then, that none of the tales (with the exception of the Parson's Tale)
can stand alone from its teller -- it must be read as told, in the light of
the consciousness that creates it and that it creates. In a very real sense,
the subject of the Canterbury Tales is
the subject -- by which I mean subjectivity itself. Or think of the General
Prologue. There Chaucer defines each pilgrim in terms of his estate, by which
he means his social role: we have a knight, a squire, a prioress, a friar, a
merchant -- and so on. But in virtually every instance his focus in the
descriptions is not upon the pilgrim's social role -- his or her function in
society -- but upon the character -- the individualism -- that inhabits,
often uncomfortably, that role. So, for instance, the Monk's passion for
hunting, and the erotic energy that drives it, may make him a poor monk, but
his failure as a monk, and any social consequences that it might have, is
given very little attention. Now it would be wrong to say that
Chaucer is the first person in the Middle Ages to attend above all to
character. But the precedents for his interest are really quite limited. The
fact is that Chaucer's innovation is truly innovative. He is an original, and
so is rightly taken as an origin -- the Father of English Poetry. And the
fact that his originality consists in celebrating the individual makes him the
perfect origin for a critical and political tradition that celebrates
individualism. So to conclude this methodological
introduction, this lecture is going to be go against
the grain of both this course and this poet. I am going to offer you a social analysis of Chaucer's interest
in individualism. I won't pretend that this analysis will explain that
interest, but I can hope that it can clarify the conditions that made it
possible. And if you want a label to identify the kind of literary criticism
I'm going to practice, perhaps the most accurate is to call it materialist,
in that it focuses on the material
conditions within which art emerges. Now: let me sketch very briefly
the economic, social, and political conditions of Chaucer's world, and then
describe his relation to them. Chaucer was born in 1340 or so, and the most
important event that occurred during his lifetime was the plague of 1348-50. Known as the Black Death or just "the
Death," this was the highly infectious disease now known as the bubonic
plague; it's caused by a bacillus carried by fleas which infest certain kinds
of rodents -- including the prairie dogs of the American southwest. In its
first pass through Europe it killed about one-third of the population -- and
in some places as much as one-half; it returned to England, albeit in much
less devastating fashion, two or three other times in the fourteenth century,
and didn't finally disappear until after the so-called Great Plague that
devastated London in 1665. The demographic effects of the plague were
tremendous. Although exactness is difficult to achieve in this area, it is
generally agreed that England did not return to its pre- plague population
level until around the seventeenth century. The cultural effects of the
plague are much more very difficult to determine -- there is little in
English artistic or literary production of the second half of the century
that can be attributed with any confidence to the plague. There seems to have been nothing like the
immense psychic disruption that accompanied the two great plagues of our
century, the First and Second World Wars -- and especially the First,
which transformed the way in which Europeans thought about themselves and
their collective future. But
the economic and social consequences of the fourteenth-century plague were
enormous and well documented.
Prior to 1348 medieval Europe was beginning to suffer from a Malthusian
crisis -- an imbalance, that is, between population and food production.
There were recurrent famines in the first half of the century, especially in
1314-1320, there was little land available for new cultivation, and the
traditional feudal structures of lordship and obedience were under strain. The plague shifted the balance of power
dramatically and hastened the end of feudalism as a social and economic
system. Before the plague land and food were scarce while labor was abundant
and demand was voracious; after the plague the situation was exactly the
opposite: there was lots of land, far fewer mouths to feed with a now
plentiful agricultural crop, and a severe shortage of labor. This
situation empowered both the unlanded laborer and
the tenant, both of whom could now negotiate with their landlords for better
terms; and it threatened the incomes of those landlords, who were of course
the ruling class of medieval England. Their response was to pass
restrictive legislation. As early as 1349
Parliament enacted the Ordinance of Labourers, and followed it up in 1351 with the Statute of Labourers. This legislation restricted the right of a
tenant to leave his manor, compelled him to accept work when it was offered
to him, forbade employers from offering wages higher than those in force
before the plague, codified the wages of artisans in the towns, and fixed the
prices of agricultural goods. It is a matter of dispute among historians
whether these laws achieved their purpose; but everybody agrees that the
effort to enforce them resulted in exacerbating the social friction -- or
let's be blunt and call it by its rightful name, class warfare -- that had
always marked the relation of landlord to tenant under feudalism. Perhaps the
best way to describe the situation in England is
like this: the plague was a
demographic catastrophe but for the vast majority an economic bonanza; it
created bright prospects and rising expectations among the poorer and
especially middling members of society; the repressive legislation passed by
the ruling classes frustrated those expectations; and the result was an explosion.
This explosion occurred in 1381 with the so-called Peasants' Revolt, better known as the Rising of 1381 -- an extraordinary event that had little
lasting political effect but that traumatized the ruling class. The Rising
had a short but complex history. Its most intense moments were a march into
London by rebels from Essex and Kent on June 13 (which was, not
coincidentally, Corpus Christi Day -- a day usually set aside for processions
and rituals organized by the town's most powerful members in order to
celebrate the order of the community), the burning of the London palace of
the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt; and the beheading of (among others) the
Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels were also particularly concerned to burn
legal records that could be used to enforce serfdom and, where possible, to
kill lawyers. The best illustration I can give
of the flavor and meaning of this extraordinary event is a very brief account
of the events of the rising in St.
Albans, a huge and very prosperous manor just northwest of London owned
by the Benedictine abbey there. The relations between the monks and the
tenants of St. Albans had always been fractious, to say the least. One of the tenants' most bitter grievances had
to do with milling: like all feudal landlords, the Abbot of St. Albans
required his tenants to have their grain ground at large mills owned by the
abbey -- and to pay for the privilege (multure).
The tenants periodically circumvented this requirement by building their own handmills and hiding them in their houses. At least as
early as 1274 there are records of the Abbot seizing handmills. About fifty
years later, in 1327, the tenants laid siege to the Abbey and won the
concession to have their own mills. But over the next ten years this concession
was canceled, and the people were forced to surrender their millstones. The Abbot - - a man named Richard -- then
had these millstones cemented into the floor of his parlor -- a
peculiarly uncharitable and taunting way of commemorating his victory. But this isn't the end of the
story. For during the rising of 1381 -- in other words, another fifty years
later, which says something about the persistence of their sense of grievance
- - the tenants again laid siege to the Abbey and actually broke in. What
they then did was described by the abbey chronicler: Some
ribald people [he says], breaking their way into the Abbey cloisters, took up
from the floor of the parlour doorway the
millstones which had been put there in the time of Abbot Richard as a remembrance
and memorial of the ancient dispute between the Abbey and the townsmen. They
took the stones outside and handed them over to the commons, breaking them
into little pieces and giving a piece to each person, just as the consecrated
bread used to be broken and distributed on Sundays in the parish churches, so
that the people, seeing these pieces, would know themselves avenged against
the Abbey in that cause. In this extraordinary scene the
peasants create a political ritual that replaces and parodies the central
religious ritual -- the Mass -- enacted by the ecclesiastical establishment
that had so oppressed them. It is also relevant to note that the leader of
the rebels at St. Albans was a man named William
Grindcobbe, a name that implies -- even if it
cannot be used to prove -- that he was himself a miller. The chronicler also
records Grindcobbe's moving words when he was under
indictment for his part in the Rising: Fellow
citizens [he said], for whom a little liberty has now relieved the long years
of oppression, stand firm while you can and do not be afraid because of my
persecution. For if it should happen that I die in the cause of seeking to
acquire liberty, I will count myself happy to end my life as such a martyr.
What has this to do with Chaucer?
Probably nothing personally: he was living in London at the time, and
doubtless witnessed the invasion of the city by the rebels -- an event to
which he refers in the Nun's Priest's Tale in a tone that is pretty much
unreadable. But much more important is the role that he grants to his miller
in the Canterbury Tales. For Chaucer's Miller is not only allowed to interrupt a monk
without retribution -- unlike the martyred William Grindcobbe
-- but is also allowed to tell a tale that is a scathing and very funny
parody of the Knight's Tale. In other words, the Canterbury Tales seems to begin with a kind of literary Rising --
and it would be nice to know what this might mean. But before I offer you one
possible answer to that question I must first say a few more things about the
historical situation and Chaucer's place in it. The Rising of 1381 was part
of what we can appropriately call a crisis of governance that afflicted
England in the late fourteenth century. The trauma of the Rising made visible
even to the most complacent observer that profound changes were transforming
English society, but there are other
dimensions to the crisis as well. One was the dramatic decline in
England's fortunes in the war with France, the so-called Hundred Years War.
This war began in 1337 when Edward III asserted a claim to the throne of
France -- a highly dubious claim, incidentally. The early decades of the war
went brilliantly for the English: in 1346 Edward won a decisive victory over
the French at Crécy; then in 1356 his son, Edward,
the Black Prince, won an even more spectacular victory at Poitiers, capturing
not only many French nobles but even King John of France himself. Apart from
making the knighthood of England feel good about itself,
the effect of these successes was to provide them with very valuable
hostages. When King John was finally ransomed by his fellow citizens, it was
for the immense sum of 3,000,000 gold crowns. The French war, in other words,
was in its early years an economic success for the ruling class, and tended
to compensate them for the loss of revenues from their estates due to the
shift in economic power accomplished by the plague. But of course these
successes didn't continue. In 1367 the Black Prince invaded Spain and won a
victory over the French at Najera that was all too
costly. For the campaign ruined his health, he fell into a slow, agonizing
decline and died in 1376. Meanwhile his father, Edward III, had also fallen
into his dotage, and the French took advantage of this lack of leadership to reconquer virtually all the territory they had originally
lost. So when Edward III died in 1377,
the great victories in France were already long past; and he was succeeded
not by his heroic son the Black Prince, who was by then dead, but by his
grandson, Richard II, a boy of ten years old. There is a biblical verse that
medieval political theorists were fond of quoting: "Woe to the land that has a child as king." Certainly
the truth of this warning was demonstrated in England. For four years the
government was controlled by Richard's uncle, John of Gaunt, the Duke of
Lancaster, who was immensely unpopular and did nothing to revive English
fortunes in the war. Then when Richard himself took over -- right after the
Rising of 1381, when he was 15 -- he demonstrated even less capacity for the
chivalric leadership and military success that were so important to
legitimizing the authority of the medieval monarchy. We come now to a third aspect of
the crisis of governance, and the one that most affected Chaucer personally.
This was the struggle that went on
from 1384 to 1389 between Richard and the most powerful members of the
English nobility. It is important to realize that a medieval monarch, and
especially in England, could not rule without the support of the most
powerful magnates of his country. This fact had been vividly demonstrated in
England a half century earlier, in 1327, when Edward II had been deposed and
murdered. For a variety of reasons -- which I'm going to have skip over --
Richard quickly lost the support of the magnates: in 1387 he was virtually
deposed from the throne (with a warning that what had happened to his
great-grandfather Edward II was about to happen to him), and in 1388 several
of his servants and supporters were executed by what came to be known as the Merciless Parliament. Due to its
own ineptness, however, the cabal of nobles who led this revolt (a cabal
known as the Lords Appellant, and including Henry Bolingbroke) fell apart in
1389, and Richard regained power. Apparently peace was made among the feuding
parties, but in 1397 Richard struck back at his old enemies, executing and
murdering several of them -- with the ultimate result that in 1399 John of Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke, deposed and murdered
Richard and became Henry IV. These
Mafia-like machinations were immediately relevant to Chaucer. What was Chaucer's place in this world? He was the son of
a vintner, a wealthy wholesaler of wine in London. Like many wealthy
merchants, Chaucer's father sent his son to be brought up in a noble household
-- a kind of prep-school, a medieval version of Eton or Harrow. Chaucer was first a page in the household
of the countess of Ulster, and was then in the service of Edward III, John of
Gaunt, and finally Richard II. It is not easy to know exactly what
Chaucer's social position was, a social undefinability
that is itself interesting. He would certainly not have been considered a
member of the nobility, although he does seem to have had a coat of arms. In 1374 Edward appointed him Controller of the Customs. This was
an important job: he had to make sure that the huge customs duties levied on
the export of wool and cloth were accurately computed and honestly collected.
This was money that was crucial to the king, and that he could not afford to
be siphoned off in corruption. But important as the job may have been, it was
not of a high status: Chaucer was required to keep the records in his own
hand, and any form of manual labor was considered demeaning -- and certainly
beneath the dignity of an aristocrat. Indeed, prior to Chaucer all the
holders of this office had been clerics: he was the first layman to hold the
job. But it was, as one historian of the customs has rather woundingly put
it, a "modest office for modest men." Moreover, Chaucer lacked the
wealth -- and especially the landed wealth -- to be considered a member of
the ruling class. He married one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, who was a
foreigner and brought with her no significant dowry. Finally, the various
other tasks he performed for Edward and Richard, while by no means
unimportant, were exactly comparable to those provided by other merchant sons
who entered noble service; and his remuneration from the monarch -- the
various grants and annuities -- was also entirely typical for a person of his
background. In other words, there is
no evidence that Chaucer was particularly close to the centers of power, and
-- more striking -- no evidence that he was ever rewarded or even recognized
by the king for his literary work. We have about 100 documents that
pertain to Chaucer's official life -- a very large number -- and not one of
them mentions the fact that he was a poet. Having
said this, there is one moment when Chaucer's service to Richard was of
special importance. This was in 1386, when he was selected to represent Kent in Parliament. This
was a crucial Parliament, in which Richard was trying to head off the
magnates who were out to get him. Chaucer was almost certainly present in
this Parliament as an agent of the king: Richard was later accused of having
tried to pack this Parliament, and Chaucer seems to have been one of the men
he shoe-horned in. But Richard's strategy failed, his noble opponents took
control of the government and then instituted a purge. It was at this point
that Chaucer resigned from the Controllership -- and again, there is
considerable evidence to suggest that he resigned before he was fired, or
perhaps even that he was fired. There is also evidence that at this time
Chaucer was also engaged in diplomatic work for Richard -- specifically,
initiating secret peace negotiations with the French -- that would have made
him highly vulnerable to the king's opponents. Let me sum this up and try to draw
some conclusions. The first is about Chaucer's social position. He was the son of a merchant, lived most of
his life in London, and as Controller of Customs dealt with merchants and
trade every day. He was also, however, a
royal servant, a member of the households of Edward III and Richard II
(although he seems not to have lived for any extended period in the
household), was entrusted with important
diplomatic missions and put
himself in danger to serve the king in the prominent position of a member of
Parliament. Finally, he was a layman who nonetheless was capable of
performing tasks usually assigned to clerics, he knew Latin, French, and
Italian well, and he was widely if not very deeply read -- in
fourteenth-century terms, he would certainly have been considered as learned
as many clerks. This is what I mean by Chaucer's social undefinability:
to specify his social identity -- his precise status and role -- seems
impossible. For what the evidence reveals is a Chaucer on the boundary
between several distinctive social formations. He's not bourgeois, he's not noble, and he's not clerical -- yet he
participates in all three of these groupings. Perhaps this lack of precise
social definition can help us to understand -- although of course it cannot
be said to cause -- Chaucer's interest in individuality -- an interest in
what I would call a socially undetermined subjectivity, a concern with
psychological specificity and inwardness, that is everywhere present in his
poetry. My second conclusion is about the
genesis and meaning of the Canterbury
Tales. Prior to the writing of the Canterbury
Tales, all of Chaucer's poetry -- with one possible exception, the
strange and brilliant poem called the House of Fame -- all of Chaucer's
poetry can be accurately characterized as courtly. This is not to say that it
was written for the court, since we really know very little about his
audience. But it is certainly written within the ideological and cultural
context of the aristocratic world. This is, however, not true of the Canterbury Tales: in fact, the only
one of the 24 tales that is without question aristocratic is the Knight's
Tale. Now: what is interesting about the Knight's Tale is its context. First,
by being placed in the Canterbury Tales
at all it is defined not as a work by Geoffrey Chaucer but explicitly as
a tale told by a knight. Unlike all of his previous poetry, this poem is
presented not as Chaucer's view of the world but rather as that of a typical
member of the ruling class of fourteenth-century England. Second, the theme
of the Knight's Tale is precisely a crisis in governance: it tells the story
of how the Athenian man of reason -- Theseus --
tries to control and discipline -- to govern -- two Theban men of blood, Arcite and Palamon. More than
this, however, the Knight's Tale bespeaks a crisis of governance in the way
it is told: the Knight is continually anxious about organizing, controlling,
structuring, and disciplining -- about governing -- his own narrative. In my
view, both Theseus and the Knight fail in their
efforts: the tale does not in fact describe a world governed by a benign
rationality but one tormented by random accident and malignant vengefulness.
Third, as soon as the Knight tells his tale he is immediately challenged --
as I've already said -- by a drunken Miller, who has a very different view of
the world and insists that it be given attention. What does this mean? Does it mean
that the events of the late 1380s turned Chaucer into a political radical? I
don't think so, and the fact that the Miller's Tale opens the door to the
embittered and dangerous Reeve and then the disgusting Cook suggests that
Chaucer had second thoughts -- or at least that he wants us to. But I do
think that the events of the 1380s shook Chaucer loose from an aristocratic
culture that he was already finding less and less satisfactory as a context
for both artistic production and for life. And the result -- to our great
benefit -- was the Canterbury Tales.
But the Canterbury Tales are not a
radical political document; they promote no consistent political position,
nor do they comment in any direct way on any contemporary problems. Certainly
they are non-aristocratic, but they do not propose any alternative social
vision to that of the aristocratic world. On the contrary, they escape from
politics entirely by focusing their attention upon individuals, upon
character. The Canterbury Tales, in
other words, respond to their time largely by withdrawing from it. Whether
this represents political cowardice or simple prudence on Chaucer's part is
an open question. But what cannot be disputed is that Chaucer's response to
the material conditions of his life resulted in a work that twentieth-century
Americans have found both politically congenial and aesthetically
irresistible. |