Chaucer’s Canterbury Road

In 1386 Geoffrey Chaucer endured the worst year of his life, but he also made his best decision, or at least the decision for which we’re most grateful today. This was when, after experiencing every kind of worldly and professional reversal, he set out to write his Canterbury Tales.

That mysterious thing we now sometimes call the “creative process” eludes most attempts at explanation. The ambitious biographer can summon all kinds of life-details without coming much closer to the work itself, and how it came to be written. In Chaucer’s case, the division between life and art is especially glaring: 494 different “records” of his life survive, including matters such as courtly and civic posts he held, awards he received, and at least one place he lived … but not one of them mentions that he was a poet. Why, then, bother to look at these records? What had Chaucer’s busy London life and world of work to do with his poems, other than preventing their completion? Or with his decision to embark on his immortal collection of tales?

Poetry and wool

Although Chaucer spent most of his mature working life as a fully engaged and rather politically compromised customs inspector on the London wool wharf, we wouldn’t know it from his poems. Unlike his more “topical” contemporary John Gower, who routinely writes about matters such as the wool trade, Chaucer excludes the mundane details of his working life from his poetry altogether. The worlds of his poems are frankly fictionalised, ranging from an interstellar journey in The House of Fame to ancient Troy in Troilus and Criseyde, and even the more realistic Canterbury pilgrimage is converted in the end to a metaphoric quest for the heavenly Jerusalem.

Yet knowledge of Chaucer’s daily life can contribute to the interpretation of his poems. One crucial nudge came 100 years ago from a scholar named GL Kittredge. Until then, most people read Chaucer as a happy innocent, taking his self-portrayal at face value. Kittredge set the matter straight, observing that a naive controller of customs would be an impossible contradiction, “a monster indeed”. Others would have figured the same thing out, but this was the turning point; since then, prompted by an awareness of the worldly wisdom his life would have required, readers of Chaucer have gained a new appreciation of him as a wised-up, frequently ironical commentator on the people and events he describes.

For my Chaucer biography, I’ve peered further into the life records, seeking an understanding of the conditions under which he wrote. He was a prodigiously busy man, first as an esquire in service to Edward III, responsible for a variety of practical and ceremonial duties as well as for diplomatic travel. Then, at what appears the whim of his royal sponsors and their City counterparts, he was abruptly shifted to a nakedly partisan post in customs that entailed his daily presence on the waterfront, constant record-keeping and regular involvement with some of the shrewdest and most despised moneymen of the land.

The demanding character of his work meant that he accomplished most of his writing in his scant private time. If there’s any moment when the first-person protagonist of his poems might possess biographical content, it occurs in The House of Fame when his guide, a sceptical eagle, describes him completing his “reckonings” and returning to the solitude of his quarters to read (and presumably write) late into the night, in estrangement from his more sociable neighbours. During his 12 years in the customs office, and writing only in odd hours, Chaucer completed an amazing body of work: ambitious poems modelled on French love-visions, his heartrending tale of love gone awry in Troilus and Criseyde, a translation with interlinear commentary of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and more. It’s hard to imagine a taxing and time-consuming day job overseeing the Wool Custom as a foundation for the composition of the finest body of English writing before Shakespeare, but evidently it was. It provided him with important prerequisites for literary work: a stable (and rent-free) place of residence, an income-stream from his political allies in court and City, and – most importantly – a loyal audience for his poems.

Crisis

Chaucer’s London job was always a precarious one. The king’s own advisers and allies in the City of London colluded to put him there, as their fall guy in a major profiteering scheme. His job as controller of customs was to certify honesty of the powerful and influential customs collectors – including the wealthy and imperious Nicholas Brembre, long-term mayor of London – and to ensure the proper collection of duties on all outgoing wool shipments. This sounds routine enough, until we realise how much was at stake: in the 14th century, wool duties contributed one-third of the total revenues of the realm. What’s more, the collectors of customs whose activities Chaucer was expected to regulate were themselves wool shippers and wool profiteers on a grand scale, taking advantage of their positions to accumulate immense fortunes at public expense. Their wealth enabled them to become donors and lenders to the king, and to multiply their privileges and profits. As lone watchdog of customs revenues, Chaucer was hardly likely to bring them to heel. His job was, essentially, to look the other way.

Chaucer does not seem to have personally enriched himself in this post, even though fortunes were being amassed all around him, but passivity was not enough to save him. As 1386 came to an end, sentiment against his patron and ally Brembre swelled (leading to Brembre’s own execution two years later), and Chaucer appears to have been an early casualty of his king’s unpopularity and his associate’s impending fall. In October-November 1386 he was deprived of his City apartment, denounced – in his capacity, though not by name – in the parliament in which he was a sitting member, and pressed to resign his controllership. He chose several years of voluntary self-exile in Kent. In a short space of time, he found himself without a job, a city, a circle of friends, and a loyal audience for his poems.

Audience

The most wrenching adjustment of all would have been his separation from his customary audience. For a medieval poet, this matter of readers was far more important than it might now seem. In the middle ages, only a handful of highly ambitious and successful writers expected to circulate their works in manuscript form to absent readers. Most writers, including Chaucer, composed poetry privately, using wax tablets or such parchment as was available, and then read it aloud to a small and responsive and (above all) personally selected group. When, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, he realised that he had completed a masterwork that might eventually be circulated to unknown readers in manuscript form, the idea occasioned considerable unease. In his leave-taking to his own poem, he prays that it not be miscopied or mis-metered, and that:

Whether thou be read, or else sung,

That thou be understood, God I beseech!

The Canterbury Tales would be the first of his works aimed deliberately at an absent audience, circulation in manuscript form and eventual literary fame. Yet he would never consider an absent audience a sufficient substitute for the intimate and interactive presence of the smallish group of literature-loving friends and associates who had shared the experience of his early poems. This loss required remedy, although, in what must have seemed the rather desolate circumstances of Kentish exile, no satisfactory remedy was easily at hand.

No audience? Invent one. And a poem as well



There in Kent, in the closing days of 1386, Chaucer seized on – or was seized by – a brilliant idea. He would keep on writing, but for an audience of his own invention. This would be his audience of Canterbury pilgrims, and it would live within the boundaries of his work. It would be a diverse group of hearers and tellers, to whom he could assign all kinds of tales: religious and secular, serious and unserious, instructive and frivolous, devout and lewd. Its members would care, and care passionately, for tales and tale-telling, and would prove ready to embrace and reject, applaud and defame, and quarrel about literature and its effects. Above all else, it would be a portable and perennially available audience, immune to disruption and alteration of circumstance. Now his poetry could circulate in manuscript form, to an unknown readership, but always channelled through the words and varied perspectives of its own band of vociferous interpreters.

So Chaucer, with his bold conception of a vivid and socially diverse band of part-time literati, overcame the deprivations of his own uprooted circumstances. He had already written other great poetry. But it’s for the Canterbury pilgrims, in all their heady diversity, that he is mainly remembered today. It is thanks to them that he is regarded as a founding father of English letters.

Chaucer today

Only Chaucer (or only Chaucer or Shakespeare) could have dreamed up a group as socially diverse as Chaucer’s pilgrims – ranging from the virtuous Knight and the austerely devout Parson, to the hypocritical genteel Prioress, to a sharply-viewed collection of bureaucrats and vocationally ambitious bourgeoisie, down to outright scoundrels such as the false relic-selling Pardoner and the foul-mouthed Miller and the garlic-chomping Summoner.

What Chaucer could hardly have guessed is the affinity that readers today would feel with this wildly mixed band of tale-tellers; their stylistically varied stories seem tailor-made for the 21st century, given our impatience with literary formality and penchant for crossing boundaries between “high” and “low” cultures. Medieval readers were familiar with tale collections, but expected a certain consistency within any given collection: saints’ lives here, comic fables there. Even Boccaccio’s brilliant tales in The Decameron are pretty much of a piece, stylistically. But when Chaucer’s Miller comes barging into the order of tellers to follow the Knight’s sober romance with a bawdy tale of cuckoldry and riotous sexuality, the poet put English literature on a path that it still follows today.

No quiet hierarchies or false reverence for Chaucer. He knows, as we do, that societies are inherently contentious, and he finds a way to live with that knowledge. The pilgrims revel in their own constant quarrels. Not only does the pugnacious Miller mock the gentle Knight, but the Man of Law ridicules Chaucer, the Friar finds the Wife of Bath verbose, the Clerk satirises her assertiveness, the Merchant scoffs at his fellow pilgrims’ idealistic ignorance of marriage, Harry Bailly threatens the jeering Pardoner with castration, the austere Parson doesn’t like rhyme or made-up plots or tale-telling at all. Disputes roil up, with what seems like uncontrollable vehemence … and then they are always somehow controlled. The judicious Knight, the amiable Franklin and others serve as temporary peace-keepers, accomplish different provisional but serviceable responses to aggression and strong talk.

This might be Chaucer’s special relevance today. He discovers and experiments with a poetically open form, within which competition and disputation are fully acknowledged, but always with the promise that disputes can be conciliated and resolution can be achieved. He lived a fraught life, one overshadowed by the possibility of humiliation, but he also possessed crucial gifts of self-renewal. His favourite poetic sentiment involved making virtue of necessity – confronting difficult circumstances and making the best of them or even turning them to good. In keeping with this sentiment, even as he portrays a society given over to constant quarrels, personal insults and reckless social wounds, he endows it with gifts of regeneration and self-repair.

This is knowledge achieved in an atmosphere of social contention, not cloistered knowledge but the hard-won knowledge of a man in difficult and harrowing life-circumstances. Knowledge for which we honour him today.

• Paul Strohm’s The Poet’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury is out from Profile.