We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

on a Sunday she wore on her head.

      Her hose were of a fine scarlet red,

      And tightly tied: her shoes full soft and new.

      Bold was her face, and fair and red of hue.

      Had been a worthy woman all her life;

      Husbands at the church-door she had five,

      Besides other company in her youth –

      No need to speak of that just now, in truth.

      And thrice had she been to Jerusalem;

      She had crossed many a foreign stream.

      At Boulogne she had been, and Rome,

      St James of Compostella, and Cologne,

      And she knew much of wandering by the way,

      Gap toothed was she, truthfully to say.

      We remember the five husbands, the jolly clothing, even the gap in her teeth – she starts to feel almost like a female Falstaff – but how often do we remind ourselves that the wife of Bath spent so much time gallivanting across Europe?

      So why, some people will be wondering, is Chaucer still so vastly popular when so many medieval poets have faded from view? The great trick he pulls off in The Canterbury Tales is, as different characters tell different stories, discovering a multitude of voices. So the pious and learned Chaucer can mimic a foul-mouthed miller; and it’s through this ventriloquism that we hear (we hope) the voices of the ruder, cruder medieval British. We also get that wonderful, concrete description Chaucer is so famous for. ‘The Miller’s Tale’ starts with that oldest of stories – the foolish older man, in this case a carpenter, who has taken for his wife a much younger and sexier teenager called Alison. We know what’s going to happen next. A lecherous student called Nicholas becomes Alison’s lover, and persuades the carpenter that he has had a vision of the future. There is going to be a second flood, like Noah’s; to escape drowning, the carpenter agrees to be suspended in a tub, usefully well out of the way of the two lovers. But it turns out there is a third man, Absalon, who works for the parish priest and is also in love with Alison:

      Up rose this jolly lover, Absalon,

      And gaily dressed to perfection is,

      But first chews cardamom and liquorice,

      To smell sweet, before he combs his hair.

      Then he goes to Alison’s window and begs for a kiss. She, the minx, has other ideas. What follows is filthy, but is also one of the most famous scenes in Chaucer:

      Then Absalon first wiped his mouth full dry.

      Dark was the night like to pitch or coal,

      And at the window out she put her hole,

      And Absalon, had better nor worse than this,

      That with his mouth her naked arse he kissed

      Before he was aware, had savoured it.

      Back he started, something was amiss,

      For well he knew a woman has no beard.

      He felt something rough, and long-haired,

      And said: ‘Fie, alas, what have I done?’

      ‘Tee-hee!’ quoth she, and clapped the window shut,

      No waxing, it seems, in medieval London. But now the story takes a darker hue. Absalon vows to take his revenge. He heats up a poker red-hot and returns to the window. He begs Alison for another kiss, in return for which he will give her a present:

      First he coughed then he knocked withal

      On the window, as loud as he dared

      Then Alison answered: ‘Who’s there,

      That knocks so? I warrant it’s a thief!’

      ‘Why no’ quoth he, ‘Not so, by my faith;

      I am your Absalon, my sweet darling.

      Of gold,’ quoth he, ‘I’ve brought you a ring.

      My mother gave it me, so God me save.

      Full fine it is, and carefully engraved;

      This will I give you, if you will me kiss.’

      Now Nicholas had risen for a piss,

      And thought he would improve the jape:

      He should kiss his arse ere he escape.

      And he raised the window hastily,

      And put his arse outside covertly,

      Beyond the buttock, to the haunch-bone.

      And then spoke up the clerk, Absalon:

      ‘Speak, sweet bird; I know not where you art.’

      Then Nicholas at once let fly a fart,

      As great as if it were a thunder-clap,

      The clerk was nearly blinded with the blast;

      Yet he was ready with his iron hot,

      And Nicholas right in the arse he smote.

      Off went the skin a hand’s breadth round and some;

      The coulter had so burnt him on his bum,

      That for the pain he thought he would die.

      Could there be anything further from the bloodthirsty heroics of the alliterative poem about Arthur and his knights than this sordid tale of lower-class shenanigans? But there is an obvious connection which tells us another important truth about our forebears. It’s really rather cruel. The miller, and presumably his listeners, took great delight in the branding of Nicholas, who suffered huge pain, albeit on the backside. Just as the reality of medieval warfare was extremely brutal, and there must have been many hideously deformed and maimed ex-soldiers wandering London, so too ordinary civilian life was cruel. Children tormented animals; old women were publicly burned to death as witches; the decomposing bodies of executed criminals were left hanging in the streets. Despite the intense religiosity, despite hundreds of thousands of priests and monks, despite the noble promises of the chivalric cult, despite assumptions about the afterlife and eternal punishment for sin, this was simply a less civilised country than it is today.

      It may seem that I’m making far too much out of what was meant to be simply a coarse, funny poem, but there’s so little in medieval poetry that directly describes life at the time. To the medieval mind, poetry had many purposes. It existed to educate and amuse on long winter nights; to pass on beliefs about religion and courtly, educated behaviour; to build a bridge back to the world of the ancients. But the assumption that poetry should directly reflect the dirty, often cruel and dangerous state of daily life is something that most poets would reject. Their world, apart from relative rarities such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is an idealised and allegorical one: poets are forever falling into dreams in which they meet the Platonic representatives of honour, love, duty or whatever it might be.

      This dream world would remain hugely popular long after Chaucer died. English poetry directly after Chaucer goes into a bit of a lull. The greatest group of his followers were writing at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s in Scotland, and not surprisingly, the poetry of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians is full of dream and allegory, and translations from the classics. But Scotland, independent politically for almost two centuries, was becoming a distinctively different country: its court poets might ape and admire the culture of London, but the country itself was both rougher and more democratic. Scotland had its own chroniclers, and just like their English equivalents they tried to tie its history back to ancient days in the Mediterranean – we have already met Andrew of Wyntoun – but its epic poets emphasise something we don’t hear much of from English poets at this time – freedom.

      Since