Amalgamation of the

Norman with the Saxon

race

culture. This is even more conspicuously the case with a yet more famous Oxonian, who makes no pretension to rank among men of letters, ROGER BACON (1214-1292.) Roger did not possess, or could find no field to employ, the literary genius of his more celebrated namesake, but seems to have had an equally firm hold upon the capital truth that knowledge comes of observation.

Towards the close of the fourteenth century the apparent amalgamation of Norman and Saxon was put to a rude test. A large proportion of the peasantry of the southern counties, goaded into revolt by oppression, rose against the aristocracy and the representatives of legal authority, and spread fire and pillage over the land. These men were almost all of Saxon descent. Had any race hatred survived, their animosity would have been directed against the Normans in particular, but of this there is no sign. Their enemies are the rich and powerful of whatever extraction. There are no longer Normans or Saxons, only Englishmen. They kill the Flemings indeed, but the Flemings are accounted foreigners. The two literatures stand on the brink of a similar amalgamation. The foreign speech has died out as a distinct language, but the foreign forms and ideals of which it was the vehicle remain, and will dominate English literature for the future. On the other hand, the plain robust vernacular of England, after exhibiting numerous dialectical variations, has at length won its way to a diction accepted by all south of the Tweed as the pure standard of English, yet needing a greatly enriched vocabulary, which, the power of evoking new words having departed from it, is obtainable only by recourse to French and Latin. This needful appropriation had already gone far; it was to go still farther, and to be in a manner consecrated by the example of the only writer of great literary genius that England had yet produced. In our next chapter we shall trace the confluence of the Norman and the Saxon literary currents in Geoffrey Chaucer, who not merely summed up in himself the literary influences already existing in his country, but brought in a new and important factor from another foreign literature, the youngest of any, and yet the only one that could claim to rank as classical-the literature of Italy.

CHAPTER V

CHAUCER

WE have thus far accompanied English literature through many phases of immaturity as the literature of a nation, and have reached the point where it first shows symptoms of becoming a chief literature of the world. The productions we have hitherto considered possess a deep national and historical interest for the Briton, and deserve, as they have received, the closest attention. from foreign scholars and philologists. They have contained, however, little that natives, and much less that foreigners, would read for the mere pleasure of perusal, apart from the subsidiary aims of information, linguistic research, or insight into the national character. The power of delighting for its own sake is the true test of literary merit, and rarely until the latter part of the fourteenth century is an English book able to sustain it. The appearance of Chaucer marks the admission of the English to rank among the literatures destined and deserving to be known beyond their national limits, and to influence the literature of foreign countries. The formal recognition of this eminence was, indeed, to be delayed for centuries, but no well-informed Frenchman or Italian or German now disputes that England took rank among the foremost literary countries when she produced GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

As we

Chaucer a personification of the union of

races and lan

guages in

Her intellectual reputation, indeed, already stood high. John of Salisbury, Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, were probably as greatly esteemed abroad as any foreign writers in their respective departments. Oxford and Cambridge, if not so influential as the more favourably situated University of Paris, were still England renowned and visited from afar. But no Englishman had gained a great name in elegant letters, and it was hardly possible that he should. have seen, our language consisted of two elements which must coalesce to make a fit vehicle for literature, and whose fusion must be a work of time. On one side the speech of Saxondom, the massive groundwork of the language, but which had lost the power of self-development, and could only enrich its inadequate vocabulary by appropriations from a foreign source; on the other this source itself, the Norman French, adequate for most literary needs, but which, without aid from the Saxon, could no more become national than without its aid the Saxon could become copious. The assimilation so essential to both had long been progressing, and the period of complete fusion was

Chaucer's family and youthful history

happily signalised by the birth of a poet not merely competent to use the newly moulded instrument as a language, but to enrich language by trophies won from foreign literature, and not only a poet and a scholar, but such an observer of human nature, such a depicter of characters and creator of types as no

Edward III

modern country but Italy had yet seen. All the chief elements both of the Anglo-Saxon and the AngloNorman characters which we have endeavoured to describe were represented in Chaucer's opulent nature, and the union of the races and the literatures was personified in him.

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born about 1340-the year before the formal recognition of literature as a matter of public concern by the coronation of Petrarch in the Capitol, and three years after the preferring of Edward III.'s claim to the crown of France, a step in itself neither just nor politic, but contributing more than anything else to make Saxon and Norman feel as one under the influence of a common cause and a common glory. In 1340 Edward for the first time assumed the title of King of France and quartered the French arms; and 1340 beheld the first considerable English naval victory; if it also saw the birth of the first English poet of European fame, it was indeed an epochmaking year.

Chaucer's father, John Chaucer, the son of one Robert Chaucer, who had been a collector of customs, was a vintner who also at one time held an appointment as deputy collector at Southampton, and must have been a man of substance, as in 1366 he is found disposing of a considerable property in Aldgate. He lived in Thames Street at the foot of Dowgate Hill, where, in all probability, the poet was born. The name connected with the French chaussier, a shoemaker, as Fletcher is with fléchier, but like this, far from implying French descent, was not uncommon at the time. A derivation from chaffuecire=chaffwax, or melter of wax for use in official documents, seems less probable. The family belonged to the Eastern counties, having property at Ipswich, and, as John Chaucer used armorial bearings, must have had pretensions to

gentle blood. John Chaucer is found in attendance upon Edward III. in his expedition to Flanders in 1338. This connection with the court might help him to obtain for his son a page's place in the household of Prince Lionel, Edward's third son, to which some fragments of an account-book discovered by Sir Edward Bond prove him to have belonged in 1357. In 1359 Chaucer took part in Edward's invasion of France, was made prisoner, and was ransomed by the King in March 1360. If the money came out of Edward's treasury, some value must have been attached to Chaucer's services. He soon afterwards, possibly upon occasion of his patron Lionel becoming in 1361 Viceroy of Ireland, whither Chaucer certainly did not accompany him, entered the King's household as " valettus" or yeoman of the chamber, and in 1367 is found receiving a special pension in addition to his salary. It seems reasonable to connect this grant with his marriage to Philippa, described as Philippa Chaucer in a list of the Queen's ladies in 1366. She may have been a kinswoman, but was more probably his wife, as he certainly was married to a lady named Philippa by 1374. Of her supposed connection with the Roes family we shall speak later. From the general tenour of his writings it must be feared that as a husband he was neither very constant nor very happy.

In November 1372 an event occurred which had the greatest influence on the His mission development of Chaucer's genius. This was a mission on which he was despatched to in Italy Italy, along with two Genoese merchants, to treat respecting the formation of a Genoese commercial establishment in England. His selection for such a commission shows that he must have been regarded as a competent man of business, and almost justifies the supposition that he was then acquainted with Italian, and already possessed some knowledge of Italy. Considering that his first master, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, had in 1367 married Violante, daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, it would appear highly probable that Chaucer had been brought into contact with Italians, and it would be in no respect surprising if he had formed one of the brilliant train which accompanied Lionel to Italy on occasion of his marriage. If this was the case, Chaucer may probably have met Petrarch, who is related to have been among the wedding guests, though the statement has been doubted from its not being confirmed by his own authority. If Chaucer was not already interested in Italian literature, he speedily became so. The Clerk of Oxford, who narrates the story of Griselda in The Canterbury Tales, says that he got it from "a worthy clerk at Padowe,"

Fraunceys Petrak, the laureate poete,

and in fact it is mainly a rendering from Petrarch's version.

In 1373, the year when Chaucer was in Italy, Petrarch translated the story into Latin from Boccaccio's Decameron, and sent the translation to Boccaccio, who then lived at Certaldo, near Florence, which city, as appears from an order for the payment of his expenses, Chaucer also visited upon the King's business. He would be very likely to make the acquaintance of Boccaccio, and may have seen the manuscript in his hands. If he had already met Petrarch at Prince Lionel's wedding, it is not impossible that he may have journeyed farther to visit him at Padua or Arquà, though the disturbed state of Italy might create difficulties which would not impede his meeting with Boccaccio. In any case Chaucer opens the list of illustrious English poets who have been deeply influenced by Italy. Few men of genius have had more in common than he and Boccaccio.1

1 Landor introduces Chaucer into the company of Petrarch and Boccaccio in one of his Imaginary Conversations, but, being under a wrong impression as to the English poet's age, sets chronology at defiance.

His various
Fortune

Chaucer's discharge of his mission must have given satisfaction, for after his return in the autumn of 1373 we find him in continual receipt of tokens of the royal benevolence. The most important is his appointment as comptroller of the customs duties on wools, skins, and leathers in the port of London; the most curious is the allotment for his consumption of a pitcher of wine a day, afterwards commuted into a pension of twenty marks. Both these were bestowed in 1374, in which year also he

entered on the leasehold occupation of the dwelling-house over Aldgate Gate, where he dwelt for twelve years. In 1376 and the three years following he is employed on a variety of foreign missions; one to Milan, which strengthens the probability that Lombardy was not strange to him. In 1380 he seems to have been concerned in some mysterious proceedings connected with the abduction of a lady; at all events, a document exists by which Cecilia Chaumpaigne discharges Galfridus Chaucer from all legal proceedings, "whether on account of my carrying off (raptu) or any other causes which I have or may have had from the beginning of the world until this