Knowing Chaucer?

For the biographer, Geoffrey Chaucer is at best a conundrum and at worst a nightmare. On the surface there is much to recommend him as a subject. He is widely known (for many he is the only medieval author they can name) and, somewhat unusually for a medieval figure, there is a surprisingly large amount of documentary evidence about his life. Nearly 500 “life-records” survive, detailing his work as a page, a diplomat (he made fourteen trips abroad), a soldier, a tax collector and a clerk of works. They tell us that he was the victim of highway robbery in Kent in 1390, and that in his youth he was taken hostage in France. But not one of these rich and varied documents refers to his activities as a poet. His poetry only survives in manuscripts copied after his death, many of which contain incomplete texts that are hard to date.

Chaucer made it his habit to be unknowable, adopting in his work a playful, obfuscating persona. Several of his poems are dream visions operating in liminal fictive spaces, recounted by bleary-eyed narrators who don’t quite understand what it is they have witnessed. His masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, is about the drama of telling stories and the disjunction between the teller and the tale. In a great comic moment, one of the pilgrims, the Man of Law, refers to “Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly / On metres and on ryming craftily” (Chaucer, though he is ignorant / Of meter and of rhyming skilfully). It’s one of countless times that we feel Chaucer is winking at his audience. Often we come away with the feeling that the joke is on us.

Mary Flannery’s Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the merry bard deftly tackles the problems with its subject. The result is both scholarly and readable, a crisp and concise addition to the long line of Chaucer biographies. Its focus is on the poet’s “life and work in relation to his reputation for mirth and merriment”. Not all of his writings conform to that reputation. He wrote sober works of religious instruction (“The Second Nun’s Tale”, “An ABC”), a piece of deeply uncomfortable antisemitism (“The Prioress’s Tale”) and a guide to using an astrolabe that is about as merry as a flat-pack furniture assembly manual. But the average reader is unlikely to have heard of these. They are more likely to remember the Chaucer who wrote about sexual penetration in a pear tree, how to divide a fart twelve ways and accidentally snogging a bumhole in the dark. Mirth, Flannery writes, has been one of his “most persistent trademarks”, one that “over time has become increasingly intertwined with his biography”.

Chaucer was born in London some time during the 1340s, the son of John Chaucer and Agnes Copton. He probably grew up in Vintry Ward – roughly the area between Cannon Street and the Thames. In his teens he entered the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, before holding various roles in the king’s service. He was sent to France to fight in the Hundred Years War, where, in 1359, he was taken hostage. The sum paid for his release, £16, was “somewhere in the bottom third of amounts paid”, more than the 40 shillings for an archer named Richard Dulle, but nowhere near the £50 for Richard Stury, the king’s squire. We know nothing about how Chaucer experienced these events, and it’s tempting to look to his verse for clues. Flannery points to a passage in “The Knight’s Tale” where two cousins of royal blood are hauled out of a heap of bodies on the battlefield. Was this something Chaucer saw himself? We cannot say – there is a constant tension between what the documentary record tells us and what the verse might suggest.

The case of a baker’s daughter named Cecily Chaumpaigne illustrates neatly how Chaucer’s image has been constructed from a selective reading of his poetry, given the gaps and ambiguities in the documentary record. The National Archives holds a legal document from May 4, 1380, in which Chaumpaigne releases Chaucer from the charge of raptus: a word with a variety of meanings, including abduction and rape. Huge amounts have been written about what this might mean – some of it unhelpfully speculative, some of it downright creepy. In a biography of Chaucer from 1977, John Gardner fantasized about a “pleasant encounter” between Chaucer and “a soft and pretty baker’s daughter”. As Flannery notes, this effectively inserts Chaucer into the “plot of one of his own fabliaux”. In October 2022 two new documents came to light showing that Chaucer and Chaumpaigne were in fact co-defendants in a labour dispute. Chaumpaigne had been employed by a Thomas Staundon, but had left his service “before the end of the agreed term” and entered “the service of the said Geoffrey”. This suggests that raptus in this context referred simply to Chaucer taking Chaumpaigne into his employment when she was still “under contract” with Staundon.

Similar speculations appear in the discussion of Chaucer’s marriage to Philippa de Roet. Philippa was the sister of Katherine Swynford – the mistress, and later wife, of John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s patron and one of the most powerful nobles in the realm. The couple appear to have met when they were both youngsters in the household of the Countess of Ulster, and seem to have had four children, who are attested in a handful of documents. Philippa and Geoffrey lived apart for long periods, suggesting, perhaps, that the marriage was an unhappy one. Predictably, scholars have shoehorned aspects of Chaucer’s poetry into the holes in the records, inferring that Philippa was an overbearing figure. The reasoning seems to be that Chaucer wrote the straight-talking, oft-married and sexually voracious Wife of Bath, so must have had a tricky wife himself. Flannery quotes the scholar Samantha Katz Seal: “to have depicted marriage as a state of female domination and male disquiet, to have created a character like the Wife of Bath … Chaucer must have had a powerful experience of unnatural womanhood in his own life”. One wonders at the logic of this. If I were to write a novel about a woman whose husband always unloads the dishwasher, it does not, alas, follow that I have such a husband.

Flannery’s most thought-provoking chapter, “Conflict”, considers the political dimension of Chaucer’s verse. A key focus is on the events of 1381, when he was working as Controller of the Wool Custom, Wool Subsidy and Petty Custom for the Port of London, and living in lodgings above Aldgate – one of the main gates into the city. During the Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381 an army of rebels entered London through Aldgate and swept through the city, attacking people and buildings. The mob murdered a group of Flemings and piled up their bodies outside the Church of St Martin in Vintry Ward, near the house of Chaucer’s father. They also broke into the magnificent Savoy Palace – the home of John of Gaunt – and burnt it to the ground. What did Chaucer, a man “long … connected to the royal court”, make of this? We might, as Flannery argues, expect to find him addressing the revolt in his verse, but “it is difficult to detect much social or political commentary of any kind in Chaucer’s poetry”. She contrasts Chaucer’s verse with Piers Plowman, a biting medieval estates satire that was referenced by John Ball, one of the rebel leaders. Chaucer, by comparison, is “strangely detached from even the most tumultuous events of his day”.

Still, there are some clues to his feelings about the uprising. The first is that, after the events of 1381, he gave up his father’s house in Vintry Ward. Another is a brief reference to “Jakke Straw” – the name of another rebel leader – in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. In the poem a fox carries off the cockerel Chaunticleer. A group of humans and animals let out shouts of alarm on seeing the fox in action:

So hydous was the noyse – a, benedicitee! –
Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille
Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille,
As thilke day was maad upon the fox.

(So hideous was the noise – a, bless me! –
Truly, he Jack Straw and his company
Never made shouts half as shrill
When they wanted to kill any Fleming
As that same day was made about the fox.)

It’s only the slightest of acknowledgements; Flannery calls it a “scornful reference in passing”. The tentativeness might be attributed to Chaucer’s links to institutional and royal power. Flannery points out his “delicate position” as a servant of the crown and a tax official, noting that these kinds of officials were “universally mistrusted” and suspected of corruption and cronyism. That said, several of his texts are about the misuse of power. In “The Miller’s Tale”, his most mirthful work, the moral of the story seems to be that you should not use your superior power and learning to hoodwink others, at the risk of ending up with a red-hot agricultural implement in your anus. Or something along those lines. Perhaps all we can say is that Chaucer was “politically nimble”, and that, if he had any particular allegiance, he wasn’t keen to elucidate it too clearly.

Flannery’s view of Chaucer is different from that of Marion Turner, author of the magisterial Chaucer: A European life (2019) and The Wife of Bath: A biography (2023). In the latter Turner argues that TheCanterbury Tales is about “multiple voices and perspectives”, and asserts the importance of “marginal voices”. It’s an attractive view of Chaucer, and one we like as modern readers. I confess I like it too. I want to see the antisemitism of “The Prioress’s Tale” as a satire on its small-minded narrator. Flannery points out, however, that there is no evidence for this. More generally, she does not find evidence of “Chaucer’s optimistic interest in diversity and of his hope to end … conflict”, cautioning that “it is difficult to find concrete evidence of such optimism in the myriad conflicts in … [the] prologues and tales”.

That Chaucer’s work is so open to different readings is part of the joy of reading him. The Wife of Bath is a case in point. As a character she is a tissue of anti-feminist stereotypes, but she is also, as Turner has noted, “the first ordinary woman in English literature”. The Wife is an outspoken figure who tells her listeners that women desire mastery over men, questioning and misquoting the Fathers of the Church along the way. After a long and eyebrow-raising prologue, we expect her to tell a bawdy tale of romping peasants. Instead we get an Arthurian romance about class, sexual violence and consent. On the one hand it’s a story about a rapist being forced to confront his victim’s pain, but on the other the rapist is rewarded with a wife who is as hot as she is obedient. Who is the winner here? This complicated juxtaposition of teller and ambiguous tale is one of the reasons readers return again and again to this part of The Canterbury Tales.

Mary Flannery’s book is a brisk, elegant work that will serve as a great introduction for students and general readers alike. Its view of Chaucer might discomfit those who want to see the poet as a “genial man of the people”, but I suspect he would not have cared about these differing scholarly interpretations. He did, after all, write: “And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, / Turne over the leef and chese another tale” (“And therefore, whoever does not want to hear it, / Turn over the leaf and choose another tale”).

Mary Wellesley is the author of Hidden Hands: The lives of manuscripts and their makers, 2021

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