We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while;

      And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end,

      That all hearing that horn held their nose after

      And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.

      It’s perhaps only the fact that the amount of time taken to piss out so much beer is measured not in minutes but by how long it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer that reminds us that this beery scene comes from a very different England.

      I hope by now I’ve convinced you that medieval poetry in English is a bigger and more exciting field than just Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet that portly, self-deprecating, white-bearded London civil servant is unavoidable, a mountain in our landscape – the man who transforms English poetry more than any other in the medieval period. His great contemporaries Gower and Lydgate have virtually disappeared from the common culture, but Chaucer is different, and always has been. He was published in Tudor times and appropriated, despite his Catholic world, by the new England of the Protestant reformers: Shakespeare certainly knew his work.

      And indeed, we all know our Chaucer, don’t we – jokes about farts and fat women, the long-winded knights, parsons and the other pilgrims as they jolt and bicker their way towards Canterbury, this Chaucer who is the essence of unabashed celebratory Englishness, and the father of English poetry. These days when we say ‘Chaucerian’ we seem to mean simply lecherous and drunk. But a prolonged swim in the ocean of English verse this extraordinary man produced reminds us that his world was much more European than simply English, and that he saw himself as the inheritor and passer-on of Latin, French and Italian culture. Indeed, everything in Chaucer looks not just south to Canterbury, but south to the Continent too. If the Gawain poet stands for the wintry north, and Langland with his crowd of folk sprawls across the Midlands, Chaucer is emphatically the poet of London. His victory is also the victory of London over the rest of Britain.

      London in Chaucer’s time, almost as much as London today, depended upon trade and intercourse with Europe. The courts of Chaucer’s three kings – the Plantagenets Edward III and Richard II, and the Lancastrian Henry IV – were all deeply intertwined with French affairs. The to and froing of clerics, official embassies, artisans, merchants and bankers made London feel different from (and superior to) anywhere else in Britain. Chaucer himself came from a family of merchant wine-sellers, and spent his life on the fringes of the court. He served in the army in France, and was ransomed; he was connected to John of Gaunt through marriage; he received money as the king’s valet and was sent abroad on royal commissions. He made repeated trips to France and Italy, where he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio; he worked as a civil servant, responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames, and received money from three different monarchs, neatly negotiating the complex and lethal politics of the medieval monarchy. Chaucer was, in short, what we would call a member of the London political establishment, as smoothly elite as Langland was rebelliously crude.

      His early poetry owes a lot to the traditions of French courtly romance; later he would pick up the newly fashionable poetry of Florence and northern Italy; and only in later life, when he was well established, would he turn to the stories and idioms of the urban English. It’s an unfair and ungenerous thought, but perhaps, along with his duller contemporary John Gower, he was simply too successful for the greater good of British poetry, helping push out the language and the alliterative techniques used further north.

      Chaucer’s earlier poetry, with strong French influences, isn’t much about the contemporary world of medieval England. These early poems are fun, and make light work of the heavy learning they are based on; but they’re not the Chaucer we know today. As he moves from French influence to Italian, with a longer, more flexible line, and steadily greater vocabulary, he comes more into focus. First in his almost novel-like poem of love betrayed, Troilus and Criseyde, and then in the Tales themselves, this small, sharp-eyed bureaucrat proves himself above all a brilliant observer – of everything from clothing to the twists and turns of how we fool ourselves.

      But the more you read of Chaucer, the more you realise that his medieval characters are not much like us. They experience a complicated, religion-saturated existence. Saints are real, and Purgatory looms for sinners. Daily life is governed by the movement of the planets, and explained by a complex web of folklore. Living so close to animals, birdlife and flora, the Chaucerian English find allegory in everything. As Chaucer shows us in his ‘Parliament of Fowls’, every bird has its own stories and its own meaning:

      The noble falcon, who with his feet will strain

      At the king’s glove; sparrow-hawk sharp-beaked,

      The quail’s foe; the merlin that will pain

      Himself full oft the lark for to seek;

      There was the dove with her eyes meek;

      The jealous swan, that at his death does sing;

      The owl too, that portent of death does bring;

      The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound;

      The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie;

      The mocking jay; the heron there is found;

      The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye;

      The starling that betrays secrets on high;

      The tame robin; and the cowardly kite;

      The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light;

      The sparrow, Venus’ son; the nightingale,

      That calls forth all the fresh leaves new;

The swallow, murderer of the bees.*

      And on and on … But it isn’t just birds that have special meanings in the medieval world. Almost everything carries a story, even – from the same poem – different kinds of wood:

      The builder’s oak, and then the sturdy ash;

      The elm, for pillars and for coffins meant;

      The piper’s box-tree; holly for whip’s lash;

      Fir for masts; cypress, death to lament;

      The ewe for bows; aspen for arrows sent;

      Olive for peace; and too the drunken vine;

      Victor’s palm; laurel for those who divine.

      However, as Chaucer’s other poems make clear, this is a world in which numerous divine influences, including the gods of ancient Rome and Greece, are still felt and thought to be potent. At a social level there is a huge, complicated and expensive hierarchy of priests, nuns and their servants, always present. For the upper classes there is of course a chivalric honour code which matters more than life itself.

      Yes, as every schoolchild knows – or used to know – Chaucer’s characters have bawdy appetites, are corrupt or cruel, and regularly fart. But as every student soon learns, this is a false familiarity. With its iron hierarchies of class and caste, its guilds, beggars, religious con-artists and its sense that allegory is ubiquitous, Chaucer’s England is closer to the more remote parts of Hindu India than to anywhere in today’s Britain. Far from being the rollicking essence of Englishness, his characters spent a great deal of their time overseas – as did Chaucer himself. His knight, for instance, has fought in Alexandria in Egypt, in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain and North Africa, as well as modern-day Turkey and Syria. For Chaucer’s religious characters, Rome is the real capital of the world. Or take that most famous and homely of the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury:

      A good WIFE was there from next to BATH,

      But pity was that she was somewhat deaf.

      In cloth-making she was excellent,

      Surpassing those of Ypres and of Ghent.

      … Her kerchiefs were finely wove I found;

      I