The Age of Chaucer, 1340 to 1400

Historical and Social Background

The fourteenth century in England was a century of disaster and of change, and the literature reflects both. War with France ran for most of it, plague halved the population, the church was in open crisis, and the labouring classes revolted for the first time in English history. Out of that upheaval came a new reading public: a prosperous, English-speaking middle class of merchants, lawyers and officials, which is precisely the class Chaucer was born into and wrote for.

• The Hundred Years War with France began in 1337 and made French the language of the enemy rather than of the ruling class.
• The Black Death struck in 1348 and 1349 and returned repeatedly. It killed perhaps a third of the population, created a shortage of labour, and broke the older feudal arrangements.
• The Statute of Pleading of 1362 required English to be used in the law courts, and Parliament was opened in English in the same year.
• The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler and encouraged by the preaching of John Ball, was the first great popular rising in England.
• The Great Schism from 1378, with rival popes at Rome and Avignon, discredited the church and gave force to the criticism of it found in Chaucer, Langland and Wycliffe alike.
• John Wycliffe and the Lollards attacked the wealth and doctrine of the church and promoted the first complete translation of the Bible into English. Wycliffe is called the Morning Star of the Reformation.
• Richard the Second was deposed in 1399 and Henry the Fourth took the throne. Chaucer died the following year.
• William Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster in 1476 and printed The Canterbury Tales soon after, which is why Chaucer's text was fixed and widely read from the very beginning of English printing.

Chaucer's Life and the Three Periods of His Work

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in about 1340 to a prosperous wine merchant's family, served as a page, a soldier, a diplomat, a customs official and a clerk of the king's works, and died on 25 October 1400. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his grave became the origin of Poets' Corner.

His work is conventionally divided into three periods according to the literature he was drawing on: a French period, an Italian period following his journeys to Italy where he encountered Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and a final English period in which he writes out of his own observation of English life.

• French period. The Romaunt of the Rose, a partial translation of the French Roman de la Rose. The Book of the Duchess, of about 1369, a dream elegy on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of Chaucer's patron John of Gaunt, written in octosyllabic couplets.
• Italian period. The House of Fame, an unfinished dream poem in octosyllabics. The Parliament of Fowls, a dream vision in which the birds choose their mates, traditionally associated with Saint Valentine's Day. Troilus and Criseyde, his greatest completed work, a love tragedy in five books written in rhyme royal and based on Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. The Legend of Good Women, a series of tales of women faithful in love, whose prologue contains the first sustained use of the heroic couplet in English.
• English period. The Canterbury Tales, begun about 1387 and left unfinished at his death.
• Prose and other works: a translation of Boethius on the consolation of philosophy, known as Boece, and A Treatise on the Astrolabe written for a boy named Lewis.
• Verse forms: Chaucer introduced the rhyme royal stanza, seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming a b a b b c c, and he was the first English poet to use the heroic couplet, the iambic pentameter couplet that would dominate English verse for the next four centuries.
• Language: Chaucer wrote in the East Midland dialect of London, which is why his English is far more readable today than that of his northern and western contemporaries, and why his choice helped to make that dialect standard.

The Canterbury Tales

A company of pilgrims gathers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to ride to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The host of the inn, Harry Bailly, proposes that each should tell tales on the road to pass the time, with a supper at his inn as the prize. The scheme as announced would have produced about a hundred and twenty tales; Chaucer completed twenty-four.

The greatness of the work lies less in the individual tales, most of which are adapted from earlier sources, than in the General Prologue, where some thirty pilgrims from almost every rank of English society are described in turn, and in the way each tale is fitted to the teller. It is the first great gallery of English social types and the beginning of English realism.

• The General Prologue runs to 858 lines and opens with the celebrated lines beginning Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote.
• Chaucer says there were well nine and twenty in the company, and with himself and the host the party comes to about thirty-one.
• The plan announced by the host was that each pilgrim should tell two tales going and two returning. Twenty-four tales survive, several of them incomplete.
• Pilgrims most often asked about: the Knight, the ideal of chivalry, who tells the first tale; the Prioress, worldly and delicately mannered; the Monk and the Friar, both worldly clerics; the Wife of Bath, five times married and the most fully realised character; the Clerk of Oxford, poor and devoted to books; the Parson, the one genuinely good churchman; the Pardoner and the Summoner, the two most corrupt; the Miller, the Reeve, the Merchant, the Franklin, the Squire and the Nun's Priest.
• Notable tales: the Knight's Tale, a chivalric romance drawn from Boccaccio's Teseida; the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale, fabliaux, that is coarse comic tales; the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale on what women most desire, namely sovereignty; the Pardoner's Tale, an exemplum on the theme that greed is the root of evil; the Nun's Priest's Tale, the mock-heroic beast fable of the cock Chauntecleer and the fox.
• Most of the tales are in heroic couplets, but the work is deliberately varied: the Man of Law's Tale and the Prioress's Tale are in rhyme royal, and Sir Thopas is a burlesque of the popular romances in tail-rhyme.
• Famous critical judgements: Dryden, in the preface to his Fables of 1700, called Chaucer the father of English poetry and said of the General Prologue that here is God's plenty. Spenser called him the well of English undefiled. Matthew Arnold admired him greatly but denied him the high seriousness of the very greatest poets.

Chaucer's Contemporaries

Chaucer was not alone. The same decades produced the last great flowering of alliterative poetry in the west and north of England, a movement usually called the Alliterative Revival, and two other poets of the first rank.

• William Langland, Piers Plowman. A long alliterative dream allegory beginning on the Malvern Hills, savage in its criticism of the corruption of church and state and passionate in its sympathy for the poor. It survives in three versions known as the A, B and C texts.
• John Gower, called moral Gower by Chaucer, who wrote one major work in each of the three languages of England: the Speculum Meditantis or Mirour de l'Omme in French, the Vox Clamantis in Latin, which describes the Peasants' Revolt, and the Confessio Amantis in English, a collection of tales of love framed as a lover's confession.
• The Gawain poet, also called the Pearl poet, unknown by name, author of the four poems preserved in a single manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Purity, also called Cleanness. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest English romance, written in alliterative stanzas each closed by a short rhymed unit called the bob and wheel.
• John Wycliffe, theologian and reformer, whose followers the Lollards produced the first complete English Bible.
• John Barbour, a Scottish poet, whose The Bruce celebrates Robert the Bruce and the Scottish war of independence.
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a popular and largely fictitious book of marvels, is the prose best-seller of the century.

Characteristics of the Age and Exam Pointers

For the concerned subject section of BPSC TRE 4.0, this period is worth a small but reliable number of marks, and they are cheap marks because the facts are few and stable. Fix the works, the forms and the dates and you can answer almost anything the paper asks.

• Characteristics of the age: the emergence of English as a literary language; realism and the observation of ordinary social types; humour and irony in place of the moral solemnity of earlier writing; strong Italian and French influence; open criticism of the church; and the coexistence of the new syllabic rhymed verse with the old alliterative line.
• Chaucer is called the father of English poetry, and also the first national poet, the first realist, the first great narrative artist and the first humorist in English.
• For a question on chronology, remember the order of Chaucer's major works: The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, The Canterbury Tales.
• For a question on verse form, remember two attributions to Chaucer: rhyme royal and the first English use of the heroic couplet.
• Trap: The Canterbury Tales has twenty-four tales, not thirty. The number of pilgrims is about thirty; the number of completed tales is twenty-four; the number planned was about one hundred and twenty.
• Trap: do not confuse Piers Plowman, which is alliterative and by Langland, with The Canterbury Tales, which is chiefly in heroic couplets and by Chaucer, or Confessio Amantis, which is in octosyllabics and by Gower.
• Trap: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is anonymous. Attributing it to Chaucer or Langland is a standard wrong option.
• Because the BPSC paper deducts one third of a mark for a wrong answer, attempt a literature question only when you can eliminate at least two of the four options.

Key Terms

Rhyme royal

A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhyming a b a b b c c, introduced into English by Chaucer and used in Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls and several of the Canterbury Tales.

Fabliau

A short comic tale in verse, usually coarse, realistic and set among ordinary townspeople, with a trick or a sexual intrigue at its centre. The Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale are the English examples.

Bob and wheel

The short rhymed unit that closes each alliterative stanza in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a very short line, the bob, followed by four short rhyming lines, the wheel.

Alliterative Revival

The renewed flourishing of unrhymed alliterative verse in the west and north of England in the second half of the fourteenth century, of which Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are the major products.

Practice Quiz — 20 Questions

1. The Age of Chaucer is conventionally dated:

   • A.1066 to 1340
   • B.1340 to 1400
   • C.1400 to 1500
   • D.1300 to 1350
   B. 1340 to 1400 — It runs from about 1340 to Chaucer's death in 1400, between the Anglo-Norman period and the fifteenth century.

2. Geoffrey Chaucer died in:

   • A.1381
   • B.1399
   • C.1400
   • D.1408
   C. 1400 — He died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his grave began Poets' Corner.

3. The Book of the Duchess was written as an elegy on the death of:

   • A.Blanche of Lancaster
   • B.Queen Philippa
   • C.Anne of Bohemia
   • D.Chaucer's wife
   A. Blanche of Lancaster — Blanche was the wife of John of Gaunt, Chaucer's patron.

4. Troilus and Criseyde is written in:

   • A.Heroic couplets
   • B.Rhyme royal
   • C.Blank verse
   • D.Alliterative long lines
   B. Rhyme royal — It is in the seven-line rhyme royal stanza, in five books, and is based on Boccaccio's Il Filostrato.

5. The first sustained use of the heroic couplet in English occurs in the prologue to:

   • A.The House of Fame
   • B.The Parliament of Fowls
   • C.The Legend of Good Women
   • D.The Book of the Duchess
   C. The Legend of Good Women — Chaucer used the iambic pentameter couplet there before employing it widely in The Canterbury Tales.

6. Which poem of Chaucer's is traditionally associated with Saint Valentine's Day?

   • A.The Parliament of Fowls
   • B.The House of Fame
   • C.The Legend of Good Women
   • D.Boece
   A. The Parliament of Fowls — The birds gather to choose their mates on Saint Valentine's Day in The Parliament of Fowls.

7. The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales assemble at:

   • A.The Tabard Inn in Southwark
   • B.Westminster Abbey
   • C.The shrine at Canterbury
   • D.The Mermaid Tavern
   A. The Tabard Inn in Southwark — They gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark before riding to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.

8. The host who proposes the tale-telling contest is named:

   • A.Harry Bailly
   • B.John of Gaunt
   • C.Nicholas
   • D.Chauntecleer
   A. Harry Bailly — Harry Bailly, the host of the Tabard, sets the scheme and judges it.

9. How many tales of The Canterbury Tales did Chaucer actually complete?

   • A.Twenty
   • B.Twenty-four
   • C.Twenty-nine
   • D.One hundred and twenty
   B. Twenty-four — Twenty-four survive, several unfinished, out of roughly one hundred and twenty planned.

10. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales runs to:

    • A.500 lines
    • B.858 lines
    • C.1200 lines
    • D.1794 lines
    B. 858 lines — It is 858 lines long and opens with Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote.

11. Who tells the first of The Canterbury Tales?

    • A.The Miller
    • B.The Knight
    • C.The Wife of Bath
    • D.The Pardoner
    B. The Knight — The Knight draws the shortest straw and tells a chivalric romance taken from Boccaccio's Teseida.

12. The Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale belong to which genre?

    • A.Romance
    • B.Fabliau
    • C.Exemplum
    • D.Beast fable
    B. Fabliau — Both are fabliaux, coarse comic tales of trickery among ordinary people.

13. In the Wife of Bath's Tale, the answer to the question of what women most desire is:

    • A.Wealth
    • B.Beauty
    • C.Sovereignty over their husbands
    • D.Flattery
    C. Sovereignty over their husbands — The knight saves his life by answering that women most desire sovereignty, or mastery, in marriage.

14. The Pardoner's Tale illustrates the moral that:

    • A.Pride goes before a fall
    • B.Greed is the root of all evil
    • C.Patience is a virtue
    • D.Flattery is dangerous
    B. Greed is the root of all evil — The tale of the three rioters who find gold and destroy one another is an exemplum on radix malorum est cupiditas.

15. Who called Chaucer the father of English poetry and said of the General Prologue that here is God's plenty?

    • A.Edmund Spenser
    • B.John Dryden
    • C.Samuel Johnson
    • D.Matthew Arnold
    B. John Dryden — Dryden made both remarks in the preface to his Fables Ancient and Modern of 1700.

16. The phrase the well of English undefiled, applied to Chaucer, is by:

    • A.Spenser
    • B.Dryden
    • C.Milton
    • D.Pope
    A. Spenser — Spenser so describes Dan Chaucer in The Faerie Queene.

17. Piers Plowman was written by:

    • A.John Gower
    • B.William Langland
    • C.The Gawain poet
    • D.John Wycliffe
    B. William Langland — Langland's alliterative dream allegory survives in the A, B and C texts.

18. John Gower's Confessio Amantis is written in:

    • A.Latin
    • B.French
    • C.English
    • D.Italian
    C. English — Gower wrote the Vox Clamantis in Latin, the Mirour de l'Omme in French and the Confessio Amantis in English.

19. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is:

    • A.By Chaucer
    • B.By Langland
    • C.Anonymous, preserved in the manuscript Cotton Nero A.x
    • D.By John Gower
    C. Anonymous, preserved in the manuscript Cotton Nero A.x — It is by the unknown Gawain or Pearl poet and survives with Pearl, Patience and Purity in a single manuscript.

20. John Wycliffe is known as the:

    • A.Father of English prose
    • B.Morning Star of the Reformation
    • C.Poet of the Peasants' Revolt
    • D.First English printer
    B. Morning Star of the Reformation — His attack on church wealth and doctrine and his promotion of an English Bible earned him the title.

References

• The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, Oxford University Press — https://global.oup.com/
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A, The Middle Ages — https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393603026
• British Library, The Canterbury Tales and Middle English manuscripts — https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
• Bihar Public Service Commission, official website and examination calendar — https://www.bpsc.bihar.gov.in/
• Harvard University, Geoffrey Chaucer website, texts and glossary — https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/