The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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last seven years to a pitcher of wine a day – about a gallon. Even if he didn’t quite drink it all himself, he knew, as the son of vintners, how to turn wine into money.
Geoffrey Chaucer was at the epicentre of fourteenth-century England, a merchant who had been a courtier since the age of fourteen, a trusted ambassador who knew the politicians as well as he knew the moneymen, a man of such tremendous bustle that he personally bridged the two cities, of London and Westminster. As he looked out of his apartment windows that summer evening, Chaucer saw events unfolding that threatened to turn his world upside down.
He lived in Aldgate, a curious castellated structure built above the old Roman gate at the north east of the ancient city. From one side of his pad, he gazed upon London, as it had grown under the French-speaking monarchs that had followed William the Conqueror; and in many ways there had been an embarrassing lack of technological progress since Norman times.
They might have had windows in their casements, but people still moved by horse and cart and used bows and arrows, and though they had knives and spoons, they had not yet got the hang of the fork. There was no plumbing, there was no hot water. It was still a universe of toothache and constipation. There was abject poverty and appalling infant mortality, and always the risk of plague, sent by heaven as a punishment for our sinful species. And yet the population was growing – up to as much as fifty thousand, though not yet back to Roman levels; and there was money in London, money on a scale never known before. For centuries the English had been trading with France and the Low Countries, and the money from wool had built great houses for the merchants in the fashionable village of Charing, between the Strand and Westminster.
Money gilded the tapestries of the merchants, and dressed their wives in silk, and the wealth of the mercantile class expressed itself in all the refinements of the age: the carvings on the headboards, the love poetry, the stained-glass windows with their etiolated bodies and their floppy slippers. In fact, some merchants became so rich that the nobility came to resent the signs of their wealth. In 1337 England’s first sumptuary laws were promulgated – a ban on the wearing of furs by certain categories of society.
Money encouraged thieves, prostitution and strange entertainments, like the podicinists, the professional farters whose skill Chaucer found so amusing, and the tournaments, where Chaucer and others of his class would put on finely wrought armour and play quintain, tilting at targets mounted on a rotating beam, always being careful not to be clonked on the back of their heads as the beam whirled round.
Now the governing class of Britain faced exactly that – a terrific clonk on the back of the head, caused by their failure to watch the growing gap between rich and poor. Through the other window, out of town, Chaucer looked out over Essex, at the countryside where the bulk of the population still lived. Life out there was not, as a rule, much fun.
A fourteenth-century alliterative poet describes a man hanging on his plough, his coat of coarse cloth, his hood torn, his shoes broken, his mittens only rags. His four scrawny heifers can hardly move the plough, and his wife walks beside him with ice-cut bare feet and a baby wailing for her at the end of the furrow. By 1381, the past decade had been rotten for harvests, and successive plagues had devastated the villages.
Time and again, in Chaucer’s lifetime, people were struck by a biblical horror, as buboes erupted in their armpits and groins. Children buried their parents with a regularity that almost matches sub-Saharan Aids. Over the period 1340–1400, roughly Chaucer’s lifespan, the Black Death cut the population of England in half. To cap it all, these God-cursed peasants were told they had the honour of paying yet another tax to the state, supposedly to finance yet another attempt by the King to gain kudos on the battlefield in France. It was a poll tax, meant to fall equally on every head in the country.
It was grossly unjust. Assuming our wretched ploughman had to pay for his wife as well, and assuming he earned twelve shillings a year, he would have had to pay the same amount as Chaucer, who earned a hundred times as much. In May that year, a spark had been lit in the village of Fobbing in Essex, where they refused to pay the tax collector (they fobbed him off); and now the gorse was crackling with popular indignation.
The Peasants’ Revolt was the first and in some ways the most important insurrection in English history. It was the first people’s movement with a recognisably left-wing and levelling agenda, and the first of the radical programmes that have been such a part of London history. As Chaucer sat in his flat and looked out towards the fields of Mile End, he could hear a noise that drowned the summer murmurings of the bees and the doves. He could hear the voices of thousands of peasants as they prepared to camp outside the city.
Darkness fell; traitors stole forth. The Mayor of London, William Walworth, had given instruction that all the gates of the city should be closed, especially Aldgate. In the middle of the night an alderman called William Tonge is supposed to have disobeyed the order and let them in. If Chaucer had stayed in his flat, he would have heard them padding through the ancient gate. He would have heard the muffled oaths of people who wanted to destroy the world that had fostered his genius. Chaucer had nothing to gain from this revolution, and everything to lose; and yet there is a sense in which he was himself a radical, if not a revolutionary. In one fundamental respect he stood shoulder to shoulder with the rebels. After three hundred years of French dominance, he elevated and glorified the language spoken by the people of England.
In the words of William Caxton, the pioneering London printer who kicked off his career with The Canterbury Tales, he was ‘the worshipful fader and first foundeur and embellisher of our Englissh’. It was now, in the later fourteenth century, that the bud unfurled to form the vast and intricate bloom of the English language.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in Thames Street under what is now Cannon Street station. Followers of this story will note that this is becoming a popular venue for key London events: Hadrian may well have stayed here on his trip in 122, in the governor’s house, and it is overwhelmingly likely – even if the area had been rebuilt dozens of times – that the scene of Chaucer’s nativity possessed at least some traces of Roman masonry.
He was educated in the shadow of St Paul’s, founded by Mellitus in 604 (and what a shadow it was by now, a colossal mediaeval cathedral, with a spire even taller than the building we see today). At the age of fourteen he entered the court of the Duchess of Ulster, as we can tell from an account book that records his uniform: short jacket, red and black stockings. He was only nineteen or twenty when he went campaigning in France, was captured at Reims, and was ransomed by Edward III for £16 – indicating that he was already a person of some consequence.
He went on to have a long career as a diplomat, an MP, a spy, a Clerk of the King’s Works and above all as a courtier; and in the court they did not, as a rule, speak English. They spoke French. His very name, Chaucer, probably comes from Chausseur – the French for a shoemaker. What did Edward II exclaim when he picked up the garter dropped by a lady of his court, and gallantly tied it around his own calf? He didn’t say, ‘never mind, darling’, or ‘there you go, sweetie’. He said, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ When John of Gaunt wanted to explain why he was giving a man and his wife an annuity, the record states that it was ‘pour mielx leur estat maintenir’, the better to maintain their estate. And yet French was emphatically not the language of the buzzing crowd that passed underneath his chambers.
Some of the vaguely educated may have attempted a bit of parley-vous, but even if they did they risked being mocked for their accents, like the pretentious Prioresse, the madame Eglantine. ‘French she spake full fair and fetisly, after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe’, says Chaucer urbanely. She spoke French with a fine East end accent.
The story of the fourteenth-century is to some extent a tale of revolt against these hieratic class-redolent languages, French and Latin. In 1362 an Act of Parliament decreed that all legal pleas would henceforward be heard in English, and by now the countryside was humming with Lollardy, inspired by John Wycliffe and his English Bible. The Lollards didn’t like prayers or sermons they couldn’t understand. In fact, they didn’t think much of any kind of clerical mediation between man and God.
When the fiery Lollard preacher John Ball was whipping up the peasants in Blackheath, he reached for rhyming English verse. ‘When Adam