Chaucer’s Retraction, or Retracciouns, is appended to The Parson’s Tale, the final text in The Canterbury Tales. Immediately before the Retraction, the scribe tells the reader-listener that Chaucer has finished his Tales: ‘Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve.’ Chaucer then talks directly to his audience, advising them that if there is anything among his writings that they like, they should thank the Lord Jesus, but that if there is something that displeases them or that might be considered offensive, they attribute it to Chaucer’s lack of knowledge, not his deliberate intent:
And if ther be any thyng that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrete it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge. For oure book seith, ‘Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine’, and that is myn entente … Lord Jhesu Crist … sende me grace to biwayle my giltes and to studie to the salvacioun of my soule …
And if there’s anything that displeases them, I pray also that they’ll attribute it to the fault of my ignorance and not to my will, and that I’d have said better if I had had the ability. For our book says, ‘All that is written is written for our doctrine’, and that is my intention … Lord Jesus Christ … send me grace to lament my sins and to meditate upon the salvation of my soul …
The Retraction actually names books that Chaucer seeks to revoke, among them the romance Troilus and Criseyde, the Book of the Duchess, and those of the Canterbury Tales ‘that sownen into synne’ (‘that tend toward sin’). The translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (the Boece), the hagiographies, sermons, moral, and devotional writings that Chaucer wrote should, he tells us, be considered as lending him grace to hope for the salvation of his soul.
Importantly, this confessional statement immediately follows the moral and penitential Parson’s Tale. The Parson delivers this long prose tale just outside Canterbury at the end of the pilgrims’ journey from London during which many of the varied and lively pilgrims have told their tales. Chaucer has taken pains to narrate all the tales of the pilgrims precisely, according to the exact words they used. Since they are from many different classes and walks of life (from the Knight to the Ploughman, Wife of Bath to the Prioress, Squire to Summoner), his audience has been entertained with tales appropriate to the tellers: bawdy fabliaux juxtaposed with romance; saints’ lives; beast fables; sermons; and moral exempla. Now, it appears in the Retraction that Chaucer worries for his soul, though given how naive and tongue-in-cheek Chaucer’s narrator-persona has been in the course of The Canterbury Tales, many scholars doubt the earnestness of this short coda.
It is difficult to tell whether or not Chaucer was genuine in his stated desire for salvation and his concern about his work’s potential for leading audiences into sin. Many other authors in the medieval period intervened in their texts to request forgiveness or beseech their audience’s prayers (Augustine, Bede, Denis Piramus in his 12th-century French Life of St Edmund, Gerald of Wales), suggesting that this act was something of a literary device. But, while at the least such an action might be authors hedging their bets, it seems equally possible that a summative statement asking for grace and salvation would be genuine, given how pervasive Christianity was in the British Isles throughout this period, and how immersed in it individuals were.
Centuries earlier, Cynewulf, the 9th- or 10th-century author of Old English religious and hagiographic poetry, gave his name in runes towards the end of his Fates of the Apostles. By doing this, he writes himself into the poem about the acts of Christ’s disciples, and becomes the last name in the catalogue of apostles. He also makes himself known to his audience, and explicitly seeks his audience’s assistance in finding comfort and salvation, just as Chaucer seeks grace and the hope of salvation from Christ, Mary, and the saints.
Similarly, the Welsh author Meilyr Brydydd who was poet to Gruffydd ap Cynan, the prince of Gwynedd, begins his beautiful thirty-eight-line Marwysgafn Feilyr Brydydd (‘Deathbed Song’) with a Latin exhortation to God beseeching the recognition of his true Lord:
Rex Regum, rhebydd rhwydd Ei foli,
King of kings, lord easy to praise,
I’m arglwydd uchaf archaf weddi:
I ask this prayer of my highest lord:
Gwledig gwlad orfod goruchel wenrod,
Country-conquering ruler of the best and holy land,
Gwrda, gwna gymod rhyngod a mi.
Noble lord, make peace between you and me.
These declarations suggest that a lifetime’s writing, and especially the very act of writing deeply religious works, could be sufficient to inspire the writer spiritually. Writing and its performance—as in the mystical corpus of texts—could transform the individual from a state of sinfulness to a state of grace.
From the earliest days of the church in the 1st century, teaching the basic tenets of belief and preaching God’s word to the assembled were the fundamental responsibilities of those in religious orders. Indeed, the success of Christianity in the conversion period and later (6th century onwards) depended on the provision of books and texts from which preachers and teachers could instruct and evangelize. As such, religious poetry and prose, including materials specifically designed for use in church services, dominate all other kinds of textual production through the first sixteen or seventeen centuries of Christianity.
Most ecclesiastical institutions with access to a scribe, even indirectly (and many had whole teams of scribes), had copies of liturgical books used by bishops, monks, nuns, and priests to assist them in officiating services and sacraments; and patristic writings from which those in holy orders studied and drew inspiration. Abbots, abbesses, bishops, and priors delivered sermons to the brothers and sisters in the abbey or convent, sometimes in Latin; or, at other times, in one of the vernaculars. Ralph D’Escures, early 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, reveals that he delivered sermons to his monks in French first, before having them transcribed into Latin for a more public delivery.
The majority of texts that survive, then, are sermons and saints’ lives, composed, copied, adapted, and sometimes memorized to be delivered in the language or dialect appropriate to the specific part of the British Isles, or specific institutional context. Writers often used and reused parts of earlier existing works, and cited (or mis-cited) authoritative sources, like Augustine, Bede, or Gregory the Great, to validate and elevate their work among fellow religious and parishioners.
Within the many hundreds of parishes, everyone was supposed to attend church, though perhaps many were not as regular in their churchgoing as the church wished. At many points in their lives, the average parishioner would hear the homiletic and hagiographic literature produced for Sundays and feast-days, and this could be poetry, as well as prose. Here, one thinks particularly of the work of a writer like the Augustinian canon Orm, who wrote the Ormulum, a 19,000-line English cycle of verse homilies (a homily explains a scriptural verse, whereas a sermon instructs or admonishes), in the last third of the 12th century; or, arguably, William Langland, whose great 14th-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, exemplifies, in brilliant alliterative verse, many homiletic characteristics, and includes within its narrative sermons delivered by allegorical characters trying to teach the assembled crowds.
The writer-speaker sought to bring the faithful to a greater grace; or to convince the sinner to repent; or to encourage the doubtful and exhausted member of the congregation to hope and strive harder for God in their thoughts, words, and deeds. Many collections of sermons survive from the earlier medieval period, testifying to the essential requirement for these texts. They survive particularly in Latin, but also in nearly all other languages of the period; and extant books of sermons increase dramatically from the 13th century.
By the 13th century, preaching was just one tool in a renewed programme of religious instruction initiated by the Catholic church at the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils in 1179 and 1215 that focused on tackling sin, encouraging confession and penitence, and enhancing Christian education. The Fourth Lateran Council, in particular, tried to improve education within the church. In its Clause 22, the Council made the annual confession and taking of communion mandatory for every Christian. As we shall see, this inspired the most prolific composition and dissemination of confessional manuals and pastoral guides for centuries to come and this literature was often then adapted into the form of sermons.
Sermons might not appear to be the most engaging of literature, but a great sermon writer entertained, educated, and motivated his audience. A host of rhetorical devices was used to organize and elucidate essential doctrine, and useful exempla were employed to make the teaching memorable. Poetry in the vernacular could appear in the middle of Latin instruction; handbooks teaching preachers how to write circulated widely; artes praedicandi—the art of preaching—was a major concern for clerical writers. New religious orders, like the Friars—both Franciscan and Dominican (founded in 1209 and 1214, respectively)—engaged in pastoral work in Britain and Ireland from the 13th century onwards.
Friars were particularly renowned for the excellence and variety of their mandated preaching, and many small multilingual books survive that seem to have been made for and used by Franciscan friars, particularly; one such manuscript, London, British Library, Harley 913, produced in Ireland in the first half of the 14th century, contains verse sermons, didactic poems and lyrics, and The Land of Cockayne, an English poem that satirizes the monastic life through its depiction of a topsy-turvy world. And Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson poet. 241, a later 13th-century anthology is typical of many manuscripts of this period that contain Latin and French sermons and poems, with the odd smattering of English verse. In medieval books, then, genre was not always as clearly categorized as it tends to be nowadays. Scribes and editors of texts often brought together all the kinds of materials that were needed for the books’ users to go about their work in the community.
… wearð þes þeodscipe swyþe forsyngod þurh mænigfealde synna and þurh fela misdæda: þurh morðdæda and þurh mandæda, þurh gitsunga and þurh gifernessa, þurh stala and þurh strudunga …
… this nation has become very sinful through various sins and through many misdeeds: through deadly sins and through crimes, through avarice and through greediness, through theft and pillaging …
So Wulfstan of York, contemporary of Ælfric, thundered in his 1014 Sermo lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English) to an assembled congregation of nobles and prelates: ‘the nation has become sinful’, ‘let us often consider the great judgement to which we must all come, and eagerly defend ourselves against the boiling fire of hell-torment’.
The idea of perpetual torment in hell was a real fear, confirmed for congregations throughout the Middle Ages by the fist-banging exhortatory sermons they would have heard on occasion, and by the images of suffering souls painted onto church walls. The Fourth Lateran Council’s insistence on confession made the emphasis on sinfulness and repentance particularly notable. God’s anger at the sins of the nation became evident at times of famine, plague, civil war, illness, and obvious social injustice; these terrible events were present throughout the medieval period, and none more so than in the 13th to 15th centuries.
Fear of death and what would come afterwards, especially for the sinner, haunted writers throughout this period. In sermons, preachers dwelled on the horrors of hell. Certain categories of hell were especially reserved for particular sins: liars are told they will stand for all eternity up to their necks in excrement while chewing off their own tongues which are regurgitated whole, and so it goes on. Murderers, gluttons, and fornicators have pertinent punishments. All will be dragged by demons into the mouth of hell on Judgement Day. On the pageant-wagons of later medieval and early modern drama, hellmouth (through which all sinners entered hell) appeared as a monstrous face entertainingly accompanied by smoke and flames and deliberate chaos, and through which devils poured out uproariously into the attendant crowd.
In Body and Soul texts (sometimes depicted as dreams experienced by a living narrator), which exist in all languages in this period, the Soul—knowing that Judgement Day will not go well for it—berates the dead Body for its lack of restraint in life. The Body for its part blames the failures of the Soul as the superior spiritual authority. The 15th-century Leabhar Breac (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 23 P 16) contains such a debate in Middle Irish, exemplifying an Irish tradition that was highly influential. In a lively encounter between the distressed Soul (who has seen what its eternal punishment will be) and the Body, the Soul shrieks:
‘A choland chruaid, a thempuil diabuil, a tégdais dub dorcha dona diabulda, a thopur brén, a chuli chrum, a chiste comthinoil cech pheccaid.’
‘O stubborn body, temple of the devil, black, black, miserable, devilish abode, stinking well, nest of worms, treasure of the collection of every sin.’
This extraordinary attack goes on to detail the decay of the body, ‘abode of the black-blue beetles’, the soul berating the body for the torture it now receives among the devils. The Body fights back, excoriating the Soul (‘you stinking puddle, you noose leading captive the body at the instigation of the devil’) for not receiving God’s word. The preacher, presumably revelling in this brilliant, dramatic dialogue, makes sharp the contrast between the dark hellish eternity of the damned, and the ‘melody of song, with quiring of angels’ that will meet the saved.
Such dynamic depiction of the effects of sin extended to the dramatization of the sins themselves, which in sermons and poems were often personified to tremendous effect. In Piers Plowman, Passus V (the fifth part of Langland’s 14th-century dream vision sequence), the audience is shown the most magnificent procession of the Seven Deadly Sins, each portrayed satirically as if a member of contemporary society. Sir Gluttony is shown with Clement the Cobbler and Betty the Butcher in the pub eating, drinking, laughing, and singing:
And seten so til evensong, and songen umwhile
And they sat like that until it was time for Evensong, and they sung for a while
Til Gloton hadde glubbed a galon and a gille.
Until Glutton had glugged a gallon and a gill.
His guttes bigonne to goþelen as two gredy sowes;
His guts began to rumble like two greedy sows’;
He pissed a potel in a Paternoster-while,
And he pissed a pot-full in the time it takes to say the ‘Our Father’
And blew his rounde ruwet at his ruggebones ende…
And he blew his round trumpet at his arse end …
… And whan he drouƺ to þe dore, þanne dymmed hise eiƺen;
And when he got close to the door, then his eyes dimmed;
He thrumbled on þe þresshfold and þrew to þe erþe.
He stumbled on the threshold and fell to the ground.
Clement þe Cobelere kauƺte hym by þe myddel
Clement the Cobbler caught him by the middle
For to liften hym olofte, and leyde hym on his knowes.
And lifted him up, and laid him on this knees,
Ac Gloton was a gret cherl and a grym in þe liftyng,
But Gluttony was a huge churl and a grim thing in lifting,
And kouƺed up a cawdel in Clementes lappe.
And he threw up a mess in Clement’s lap.
On the one hand, this is hilarious; on the other, it is disgusting and repellent, wasteful and careless. The hilarity, though, is sharply undercut by the reminders of what these Sins should be doing: attending Evensong service at church, instead of sitting in the pub all day into the evening; and saying the Pater Noster in search for forgiveness, rather than pissing and farting grotesquely. Moreover, gluttony was widely regarded as a cause of the Fall of Man, when Eve greedily took the apple in Eden. Even Chaucer’s corrupt Pardoner begins his sermon-tale with the exclamation ‘O glotonye, full of cursedness! | O cause first of our confusion!’
In addition to the use of sermons and didactic poetry for teaching, terrifying, and offering the means of salvation for audiences, the church and secular state sought to suppress sinful and anti-social behaviour through lawcodes, lay and ecclesiastical, and by confession to a priest followed by instruction. Confessionals and Penitentials that detailed sins and penances circulated in the early medieval period, and Irish influence on these tracts was particularly significant. Penitential acts from prayer to pilgrimage were always important, but after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, greater efforts were made to educate the laity to ensure at least they know their Pater noster, Ave Maria, and Creed. Manuscripts throughout the High Middle Ages contain these texts, often written as marginal additions to major texts in order to prompt the pastor in his work.
Numerous treatises in the later 12th and 13th centuries were written, too, that helped churchmen perform confession and teach their parishioners. These were widely circulated throughout the country. Gerald of Wales’s Gemma ecclesiastica helped rural churchmen in their duties. Thomas of Chobham’s Summa confessorum and William de Montibus’ poetic Peniteas cito peccator are early examples of how to understand and conduct confession, and ensure its efficacy. St Edmund of Abingdon’s French Le Merure de Seinte Eglise had a big impact, as did William of Pagula’s Oculum sacerdotis; Guillaume Peyraut’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus; and another Dominican, Lorens D’Orléans’s French Somme le roi, written in 1279. Many of these Latin and French treatises were subsequently translated into English and other languages. The 14th-century Book of Vices and Virtues derived from Somme le roi; and Dan Michael’s prose Ayenbit of Inwit (Remorse of Conscience), written in 1340 also used the French treatise as its main source. Dan Michael reveals
Þet þis boc is ywrite mid Engliss of Kent;
That this book is written with English of Kent;
Þis boc is ymad vor lewede men,
This book is made for unlearned people,
Vor vader and vor moder and vor oþer ken.
For a father and a mother and for other kin.
By making Latin confessional and penitential literature available in French, English, and, to a lesser extent, the other British and Irish vernaculars, the ‘lewed’, the non-clerical Christian would be encouraged to help themselves: to learn how to reflect on and repent for their sins; and how to engage with basic doctrine. Dan Michael’s Ayenbit might not have been as popular as he intended, given that it only survives in one manuscript copy, but other works survive in multiple copies, attesting to their wide dissemination.
A late 14th-century manual of basic doctrinal instruction, The Lay Folks’ Catechism, exists in almost thirty manuscript versions with a wide geographical spread. It is associated with the instructional programme of Archbishop Thoresby of York, which itself built on earlier similar injunctions and helped pave the way for a sustained vernacular theology. Certainly, the translation into English meant a broader audience could access the learning it contains. The Catechism, in its many forms, and like so many other works in Latin and French in the 13th to 15th centuries, seeks to enumerate the most elementary parts of the Christian faith: the Ten Commandments; the Seven Deadly Sins; the Seven Acts of Mercy; the Seven Virtues; the Seven Sacraments; and the Fourteen Articles of Faith. These fundamental aspects of religious practice were reinforced by whole cycles of wall paintings, such as that in Hoxne Church in Suffolk, which dynamically illustrates the Seven Sins and Seven Acts of Mercy in adjacent paintings on the wall of the nave. This made religious learning, in essence at least, accessible to all in ways that Latin services and priestly mediation did not always facilitate.
Not all religious or religious-like practice was condoned by the Catholic church; not all converts to Christianity in the early period were thoroughly convinced. The wonderful Old English heroic poem The Wanderer details the lonely existence of a warrior without a lord, a man without friends or family. It is focused on the inexorability of fate, the capriciousness of fortune, expressing loss and nostalgia in an apparently unremittingly hopeless monologue until its final line and a half, where the poet suddenly recognizes that his hope lies in focusing on the stability of heaven and the grace of God. Good outcomes could often be attributed to fate, or to the intercession of a saint, but were also assisted by charms or textual amulets. Charms exist to ward off dwarfs, infection, and cysts. Protection was sought when setting out on a journey, and to assist against the loss of property. These charms are often copied into manuscripts that probably have an ecclesiastical origin, and it is difficult for modern scholars to determine what might have been the relationship between orthodox religious practices and what we’d commonly regard as ‘superstition’ now.
There existed in popular religion a kind of authorized superstition that amounted to promulgating a knowledge of good and bad omens; or using days of the week or patterns of weather to forecast the future (‘prognostications’ that had a lengthy and established textual tradition); or warding off a potentially terrible childbirth by wearing an amulet with a bit of the Passion of St Margaret in it. There was, though, a thin line between this and practices that were outrightly condemned by the church to the point of persecution and attempts at eradication. Even fiction-writing could be regarded suspiciously (which might have contributed towards Chaucer’s Retraction). The noise of minstrelsy could, according to Robert Mannyng of Brunne in his 14th-century manual, Handlyng Synne, result in the minstrel’s death through divine retribution, if the minstrel ‘desturbled the bensoun | And the gode mannys devocyoun’ (disturbed the prayers and the good man’s devotions’). Tournaments, miracle plays, and frivolous things were also breeding grounds for sin, and warned against by instructional texts. But the greatest danger was not to be a Christian at all, or to be a Christian with beliefs and practices that differed from those propagated by the central channels of the church.
In fictional romances which idealized the chivalric code and the love of the knight for his lady, the stereotypical antagonist was often the Saracen, the Muslim. This figure was sometimes depicted as noble, able to be converted to Christianity; sometimes depicted as demonic, bestialized, orientalized, and overcome by the hero. Most vitriol in all texts—religious or secular—was saved for the heretic and the Jew. In Ælfric’s 10th-century Passion of St Edmund, based on Abbo of Fleury’s Latin Passio Sancti Edmundi, Ælfric specifically condemns the wolf-like, slaughterous Viking killers of Edmund, claiming that they are ‘united with the devil’, and deliberately associating them with the Jews who killed Jesus.
This idea of the Jews as killers of Christ led to increasing levels of persecution as the Middle Ages progressed, culminating in their expulsion from England in 1290 by royal edict. Allied to this terrible act, the frequent anti-Semitism of medieval writers extended to narrating stories of the Jews as killers of Christian children: the ‘blood libel’. The monk Thomas of Norwich wrote a large Latin Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, completed in the 1170s, and told the story of a young boy who, it was alleged, was ritually murdered by the Jews of the city. A similar story appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, when the Prioress tells a tale that is unremittingly anti-Semitic, reflecting a very problematic aspect of medieval culture that demands a modern audience’s judicious scrutiny and thoughtful approach.
The Jews, then, were expelled in 1290, but the powerful church and state did not only persecute those of a different religion. In the later 14th and 15th centuries, more than a hundred years prior to the Reformation, John Wycliffe (c.1324–84) and his followers, the Wycliffites or Lollards, caused immense concern to the established church. Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian, held many views at odds with then-contemporary church practice; he argued that priests (like Chaucer’s Parson in The Canterbury Tales) should live simple lives and own no property.
The corruption of the church was at the forefront of social concerns at that time; the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 argued for some of the reforms Wycliffe had in mind. He maintained that there was no need for the church to control and mediate people’s spiritual lives in the ways it did and that a lay priesthood should be permitted. He particularly advocated access to the Bible in the vernaculars of the people. Wycliffe found support among the nobility, including John of Gaunt—a patron of Chaucer’s—some writers, and many ordinary Christians, who, after 1382, became known as Lollards. They began to be actively persecuted by anxious church authorities in the early 1400s. Wycliffite writings survive in Latin and in English, and include texts like Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, translations of the Bible, and many sets of sermons. Other writings, like the dialogue Dives et pauper, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and, indeed, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, have come under scholarly scrutiny in trying to detect Lollard sympathies.