JOHN OF GAUNT EMBODIED the culmination of medieval chivalric culture. This cultural mode was put into verse in the Book of the Duchess, the elegy on Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, the White Duchess. The poem was written by Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), who wrote under Lancaster’s patronage.
Gaunt gave a pension to Chaucer early in the poet’s career and saw to it that important and remunerative government posts came Chaucer’s way: collector of customs in the port of London, and at least two embassies on the Continent, to France and northern Italy. Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, also received a small pension from Gaunt’s largesse.
Chaucer was born to a prosperous but not very wealthy London family. His father was a wine merchant. The Chaucers lived in the heart of bourgeois London. Close to their house was a prep school established by the Inns of Court, the training school for the legal profession. The prep schools run by the Inns of Court were for young students, as young as fourteen, who were chosen by their gentry and merchant families to be trained to become barristers. Lawyers did not attend a university; that was for future ecclesiastics.
It is possible that Chaucer received a humanistic education at a prep school run by one of these Inns of Court. And it was a sterling education. Chaucer could write poetry in either French or English; he almost single-handedly made English a literary language. He could read Latin and Italian and probably spoke Italian fluently.
Chaucer read Dante’s Divine Comedy closely, as he did the Romance of the Rose, the French chivalric poem. He was very much taken with Giovanni Boccaccio, the Florentine writer, whose narrative poems Chaucer translated and expanded upon. Chaucer was familiar with the work of Petrarch, the poet and ideologist of the Florentine humanistic Renaissance. On his embassy to northern Italy Chaucer may have sought out and conversed with Petrarch.
What drew Gaunt to Chaucer was first of all that the poet could write in English on courtly themes. Heretofore only French and Italian poets had expatiated on courtliness and chivalry. But Chaucer could do the same in an English language that was increasingly being given literary form and was becoming acceptable among the aristocracy not only in daily discourse but as a medium for expressing those literary themes that had been central to the mind-set of the aristocracy since the late twelfth century.
Chaucer had in fact a very competent competitor for the role of England’s preeminent poet. In the 1370s and ’80s an anonymous member of the gentry living a hundred miles north of Oxford wrote two remarkable poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The first was the elegy on the death of a young girl discussed earlier. The second was a French-style romantic epic. These poems were written in a provincial dialect different from Chaucer’s. It was Chaucer who prevailed in the public eye because he wrote in the London vernacular, he had access to the royal court to read his poems, and he had the patronage of John of Gaunt. The Gawain poet’s single manuscript containing the two poems (and two others) remained in obscurity until the twentieth century.
Another reason Gaunt was drawn to Chaucer was that the poet was working at the leading edge of European culture, drawing from Italian neoclassical humanistic genres as well as from French romance. Chaucer was an up-to-date metropolitan poet writing in the London dialect and reflecting the new literary and intellectual trends coming from northern Italy. If you were an aristocrat in late-fourteenth-century England, you would, like Gaunt, bet on supporting Chaucer. He had all the qualities needed to attract artistic patronage. Some critics today think that the Gawain poet was close to being Chaucer’s equal as a writer. But Chaucer, thanks in part to Gaunt, had the impact and visibility.
Chaucer imbibed the principles of the Florentine humanistic school, its devotion to the classics, its greater consciousness of the individual than was found in Anglo French romance. These Renaissance cultural trends were embedded in Chaucer’s first great masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde. He worked on this romantic narrative for six years, completing it in 1382.
It is the first great love poem in the English language. It tells the story of the love of Troilus and Criseyde, who live among the aristocratic class in Troy in its later days. Introduced by Criseyde’s uncle, they fall passionately in love, and the first part of the poem blazes with erotic love expressed in a frank and quite physical mode. But the wheel of fortune turns: family and politics intervene to interrupt their love, which ends in bitterness and tragedy.
Within the traditional framework of the chivalric romance, Chaucer created a psychological masterpiece, closely exploring the feelings and passions of the two lovers. Troilus and Criseyde exhibits a new humanistic realism and consciousness of the interior life of the individual. As one writer explains, “We read Chaucer’s masterpiece as a triumph over the medieval, a breakthrough into the literature of objective representation and ironic distancing, into the modern.” (D. R. Howard, Chaucer, His Life, His Works, His World.)
The last decade of Chaucer’s life and work was taken up with writing The Canterbury Tales. In contrast to Troilus and Criseyde, it was a sociological panorama rather than a psychological probing. Chaucer did not live to complete his most popular work, but he laid out the complex structure and built part of it before his death.
A group of pilgrims are going from a tavern in Southwark in London to Canterbury. To pass the time on the long trip, they decide that each of them will tell two stories on each leg of the trip. The stories are popular ones, expressed in the language of the commoners. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote … / Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,” from “The Prologue,” are some of the most recognizable lines in English literature.
Some stories in The Canterbury Tales are religious (including anti-Semitic tales); some are bawdy; some express the highest degree of chivalry. Chaucer creates a mosaic of middle-class people, carefully articulated by their language and favorite fictions. Among them is a great comic character, the Wife of Bath, who looked upon serial marriages as a natural right for survival and prosperity. She had had five husbands, and she wore a headdress that weighed a full ten pounds, red stockings, and spurs.
The Knight was a worthy man who loved high chivalry, truth, honor, freedom, and courtesy. He was a very perfect gentle knight.
The Nun (Prioress) was coy, liked to chant the Divine Services, spoke fair French, and wiped her upper lip so clean that not a speck of grease could be seen on the rim of her cup. She wore a brooch engraved Amor vincit omnia (Love conquers all).
The Monk rode a very expensive horse, wore fine boots, and had fur on the edge of his sleeves. He never understood why monks were supposed to stay in the cloister all day and do nothing but read. He had a stable full of greyhounds and rode to the hunt.
The Friar knew well the taverns in every shire. He thought that it wasn’t worth his time to worry about those who had to beg their bread. He kept in touch with richer folk and believed that the true sign of repentance was a gift to humble friars such as himself.
The Oxford Scholar spent his money on books rather than food. He was full of high ideals and virtue, and “gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”
The Lawyer knew all the laws and could pick flaws out of wills for a fee, but yet “he seemed busier than he was.”
The Physician was pompous, rich, and wise. He gave the druggist trade with his prescriptions, and “each brisk business for the other made.” He loved gold.
The Miller, a thickset lout, was a champion wrestler. His beard was fiery red and he had a wart with bristly hairs on his nose. He was vulgar and he told the bawdiest tale in the bunch.
The Summoner, whose duties were to search and bring to court offenders against the Church, had a red face and scared the children with his blotched and pimpled skin, little piglike eyes, and beardless chin. He smelled of garlic and onions. He shouted Latin phrases he didn’t understand. “For like a parrot he was really dense; / He’d learned the words, but could not grasp the sense.”
The Pardoner carried a wallet full of pardons hot from Rome, had stringy blond hair, and knew that he had to preach a fine sermon in order to get the silver to tinkle in the plate.
The Parson was learned, wise, and true. He was a gentle priest who paid the church taxes himself for the poor parishioners who couldn’t afford them. He traveled from one town to the next. As a minister, he felt he had to set an example for his flock. “No wonder that iron rots if gold should rust!” was one of his favorite lines. The Parson was one of Chaucer’s favorite characters. In “The Prologue,” Chaucer says he was “a Christian both in deed and thought. / He lived himself the Golden Rule he taught.” (Translated by J. S. P. Tatlock and Percy MacKay in The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.)
These are some of the pilgrims who set out on that fine April day to tell their stories between Southwark and Canterbury. The stories all fit the characters of their tellers, in theme, language, and substance. This represents the first great comedic work of literature in the English of the day, vastly changed from the English of Beowulf, written in the eighth century.
In the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer wrote fully in accordance with the chivalric tradition. He and Gaunt would have been at one on depicting the idealized persons and motifs of the culture of chivalry. Troilus and Criseyde retains the framework of chivalric romance but undermines courtly love conventions and aristocratic gestures by its cleverly articulated psychological realism. My guess is that Gaunt would have liked the highly charged eroticism of the first part of the poem, but would have been made uneasy by the psychological probing and sadness of the later sections.
Gaunt would probably have been dismayed that The Canterbury Tales dealt with the middle- and lower-class people whom he frequently encountered but never gave much thought to, but he undoubtedly would have enjoyed some of the stories, particularly “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Knight’s Tale,” for totally different reasons. They embodied the two facets of Gaunt’s character—his bawdiness and courtliness.
Chaucer’s pictures of his Canterbury pilgrims are obviously to be seen in a comedic light. Here Chaucer was much influenced by Giovanni Boccacio’s Decameron, which depicts middle-class Florentines in a similar risible manner.
But there is always a ribbon of sadness and pessimism running through comedy. Chaucer’s people are, for the most part, deeply flawed, and it is their flaws that make them interesting to us.
There is a sadness to all this. These middle-class people are immobile on the social scale. They will achieve nothing; they have no future different from the messy middle-class present. The Canterbury Tales can be taken as a picture of stagnant bourgeois behavior, corrupt and morally wretched, a world full of self-hatred and useless anxiety.
In this way, Chaucer presents an aristocratic view of his people. Gaunt would have agreed with the futility and damage described, except that, unlike Chaucer, he would never have bothered to contemplate these middle-class people close up. Nor would the Duke have considered them an appropriate subject for poetry.
George Williams in A New View of Chaucer (1965), has proposed that, at least in their earlier years, Philippa, John of Gaunt, and Catherine Swynford lived as a ménage à trois. Philippa had a daughter by John of Gaunt while Gaunt was at the same time involved with Catherine Swynford (fathering four children by her). Williams claims that Geoffrey Chaucer, who by his own testimony had an unhappy marriage, lived mostly separated from his wife, Philippa, John of Gaunt’s initial mistress. Williams also suggests that the mysterious Thomas Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer’s nominal son, was actually the product of a union between the Duke and Philippa Chaucer.
Williams proposes that in the poem Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer devised an allegory beseeching Gaunt not to desert his mistress Catherine by going to Spain for several years. (He did go.) What Chaucer got out of the arrangement was patronage, financial assistance, a sinecure in the customs administration, and for a decade or more a rent-free house in the center of London.
Williams has no proof of this lascivious conduct toward the two sisters, Philippa Chaucer and Catherine Swynford, but it does lie within the realm of possibility. Chaucer’s most recent biographer, Derek Pearsall, a strict constructionist, barely mentions Catherine Swynford. The thought of the Duke having his way with the two sisters is something Pearsall never suggests. It is, however, an interesting possible perspective on Gaunt’s behavior, and on Chaucer as the beneficiary of his wife’s indiscretions.
That Gaunt was much more lavish in his patronage of Chaucer in the poet’s earlier years than his later years indicates that Gaunt realized clearly that Chaucer had departed from traditional chivalric culture and courtly love toward new horizons of sensibility. The older Gaunt must have felt himself intellectually limited and psychologically superseded when he read about the Trojan lovers or the Canterbury pilgrims or listened as the poems were read after dinner in aristocratic circles.
In his lifetime, a long span by the standards of his age and class, John of Gaunt encountered three forces that loomed on the European horizon as the shape of the future. Rebellious peasants were one of these new forces; Gaunt was a bogeyman for them. Parliamentary institutions involving representation of the rural and urban upper middle class were another force, also for a time directed against Gaunt. Though he overcame this opposition by manipulating the election of the knights of the shire, he was not friendly with the more outspoken leaders of the Commons; intrinsically he had little respect for them.
The third force, religious reform, was initially more tempting to him, hence his early support for John Wyclif. But Gaunt backed off from his support for Wyclif. He sensed that Lancastrian alliance with the Lollards portended changes too drastic for state and society, as then constituted, to absorb. He quenched the spiritual thirst common in his generation in an entirely conventional manner, by giving his support to an austere order of monks.
Chaucer is somewhat like Wyclif in Gaunt’s life. Gaunt’s early patronage resulted in Chaucer’s first long poem, an elegy on Gaunt’s first wife. This energetic book remained entirely within the framework of traditional chivalric literature. When the psychological and sociological thrust of Chaucer’s later work seemed remote and unexpected to Gaunt, he reduced his support for the poet.
Gaunt was a man of the aristocratic Anglo-French Middle Ages. He did not feel comfortable in the new intellectual world of the Renaissance.
What brought about a cultural revolution in the fifteenth century was the extension of the privileged circumstances enjoyed by Gaunt and his peers to a wealthy middle class. From their ranks rose the new poets and philosophers—or the patrons of the new poets and philosophers.
“The urgency of examining the ideology sustaining individualism under conditions of generalized wealth and leisure in the West” (Ingrid Wassenaar) was to set the social and cultural foundations for the Renaissance. A similar social change was to make for the cultural revolution of modernism in the early years of the twentieth century. Proust’s world was fashioned out of an expansion of wealth and leisure similar to that which engendered Petrarch’s world.
This new individualism made its way into Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales and separated Chaucer from his patron John of Gaunt. Gaunt was the refined embodiment of the old knightly world that had prevailed since the twelfth century. Chaucer was looking to new horizons of humanism.
The development of consciousness and the arts and intellectual growth in general are dependent on the security and privilege accorded to certain individuals of extraordinary sensibility. This social crux is what marked the relationship between Gaunt and Chaucer. That is why Gaunt’s patronage of Chaucer was so important for the beginnings of Renaissance literature in England. The old aristocrat gave the poet the peace and leisure to express a new consciousness.
The first ingredient of the new consciousness was a changed and more intensive attitude to the classical heritage. There had been two previous eras of deep interest in the classical heritage in the Middle Ages. The first era was the Carolingian renaissance from 780 to 850. The second was the twelfth-century renaissance from about 1140 to 1240. But in both instances cultivation of the classical heritage was closely bound up with Christian ideas. Indeed, the leading exponents of classicism in the ninth and twelfth centuries were clerics.
The Renaissance that began in the late fourteenth century and in which Chaucer played a leading part was secular. Troilus and Criseyde takes place in ancient Troy and it does not involve Christianity. It is a humanistic—non-religious—probing of psychological and sexual relationships, free from Christian guilt and Christian comfort.
A second ingredient of the new consciousness was urbanism, an interest in town life and the characters that develop in an urban environment, their hopes, aspirations, limitations, and disappointments. The potential of urban middle-class culture and the strains upon it—this is expounded in The Canterbury Tales. Whatever else Chaucer had in mind in his great unfinished poem, the novel vistas of urban life and the strengths and weaknesses of middle-class living in towns was a prominent theme he was exploring.
“Chaucer’s commonwealth is implicitly utopian … in its opening of existing hierarchies to infiltration by new classes of people.” (Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer.) John of Gaunt was a good literary critic: he recognized the subversive implications of Chaucer’s later work.