The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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status – as a supremely well-connected merchant, married to the daughter of a Flemish nob – and wondered whether this decision, to mould the language of the proletariat into a new pentameter verse, was some kind of political act.
Is he giving a clue, some historians have wondered, as to his own anti-clerical feelings? Is he a Lollard, like some of the knights he knew? And others have said, no, they can’t find any real evidence that he was anything but a good (if caustic) Catholic. One idea we can certainly rule out: even if it is true that there were people like Alderman Tonge, who were willing to collaborate with the peasants, Chaucer was surely not among them. What happened over the next three days was terrifying.
On Thursday 14 June, Londoners awoke to the Feast of Corpus Christi. But today there were no pageants or miracle plays; the streets were sunk in fear. On the outskirts of the city, houses were already burning. A mob under Wat Tyler swarmed up through Southwark and stormed the Marshalsea Prison. In Lambeth they burned all the records – hated symbol of the Latinate judgments of their superiors.
Tyler then led his men to London Bridge, where they broke down a brothel occupied by Flemish women and ‘farmed’ by the Mayor – not so much because they objected to the concept of a brothel, but because they disliked the Flemish. Then there was more treachery (and again, Alderman Tonge and his colleagues were suspected), as the keepers disobeyed the orders of Mayor Walworth and opened the chain and drawbridge of London Bridge.
Now the mob was getting into its stride. They broke open the Fleet Prison, attacked the Temple, to destroy more records, and then they set off down the Strand to what was the richest and most gorgeous residence in England, the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt. With great thoroughness they burned the fine linen and the hangings and the carvings, and then accidentally or not they finished the whole job off with three barrels of gunpowder. The next day the xenophobic murders began.
In the Vintry – where Chaucer had been brought up – thirty-five poor Flemings were dragged from a church and beheaded, by a mob led by one Jack Straw. Another group entered the Tower of London itself – again as a result of internal betrayal – and killed Archbishop Simon Sudbury and various other worthies and tax-collectors. They cut off their heads, and stuck them on poles on London Bridge. Then they announced that all Flemings should suffer the same fate, and then, for the sake of balance, they went to rough up the Italian bankers of Lombard Street. The next day, Saturday, the burnings and beheadings continued until the afternoon, when suddenly the boy king Richard II announced that all should go to Smithfield for a parley.
It was one of those coin-turn events that could so easily have gone the other way. Imagine the young King in his elegant armour, ranged against Wat Tyler and the angry bulbous-nosed peasants of Kent. We are told that Tyler treated the King of England with insolent familiarity. He wanted the abolition of villeinage (a kind of serfdom, where you were compelled to farm the lands of your lord); he wanted to abolish the process by which you could be outlawed for a crime, and he wanted an end to the new taxation and wage restraint. Then he repeated the demands of John Ball, the proto-communist preacher, that there should be no more lordship save that of the king, that the Church should be stripped of its possessions and that there should be only one bishop left.
The King is said to have behaved with remarkable coolness, and seemed even to agree to these outrageous demands. But a fracas somehow blew up between Tyler and Walworth; and Walworth, Mayor of London, pulled the rebel off his horse and ran Tyler through with his sword.
Others of the King’s retinue piled in and jabbed at the wounded man. There was a shout of anger from the crowd, and they might have shot the King with their arrows had the fourteen-year-old not spurred his horse to meet them and shouted, ‘Sirs, will you shoot your king? I am your captain! Follow me!’
Spellbound by royal charisma, they all went to Clerkenwell, a few hundred yards to the north. The wounded Tyler was rushed to A & E at St Barts, but Walworth wasn’t having any of it. He whisked him out and had him beheaded. Richard then stuck Tyler’s head on London Bridge, in place of Archbishop Sudbury, and told the peasants to go home – which, amazingly, they did.
In London, the peasants’ revolt was over. The King knighted Walworth on the spot.
It is surely impossible that Chaucer could have supported any aspect of what had happened. Even if he resented Gaunt’s supposed carrying-on with his wife, don’t forget that he had once written a poem for the great man, in memory of his dead wife Blanche. It must have been deeply shocking to learn – or even to see – that his house was burning. Chaucer was a well-travelled and cultivated man. He would have felt nothing but horror at the slaughter of innocent Flemings and the bashing-up of Italians.
How could he have sympathised with the rebels against the King and court on whom he depended? He didn’t. And yet his only reference to the Revolt – this national disaster – has a bizarre jocularity.
In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale he is casting around for a way to describe a bunch of people pursuing a fox.
So hydous was the noise, a benedicitee
Certes he Jakke Straw and his meynee
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrill
Whan that they wolden any Fleming kille
As thilke day was maad upon the fox.
Which means something like, so hideous was the noise, Lord have mercy on us, that Jack Straw and his mob never shouted so shrilly when they wanted to kill any Fleming they could find, as they shouted that day in pursuit of the fox.
It may seem a bit jaunty to compare Jack Straw’s vicious pogroms to a foxhunt. But that of course is Chaucer’s style: the deadpan detachment of the satirist. When old man January sees his wife being grossly embraced by a squire in a tree, Chaucer says; ‘And up he yaf a roryng and a cry, as dooth the mooder when the child shall dye.’
The heartlessness makes us snort with laughter. That is surely Chaucer’s motive: to amuse. Take Absolon, the ludicrous parish clerk in The Miller’s Tale, who conceives a lust for Alison, a married woman.
I suppose you could argue that this portrait of this silly, golden-haired, twinkletoed, lustful cleric is meant to be an attack on an unreformed church. The punchline of the Miller’s tale involves Absolon coming to Alison’s window in the dead of night, and asking for a kiss.
Dark was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the window out she put her hole,
And Absolon, hym fil ne bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers
Full savourly, er he wer war of this.
Aback he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,
For wel he wiste a woman hath no berd …
And so on. I am not going to put that into modern English. I think we all know the meaning of ers.
Call me juvenile, but even at a distance of 620 years I chuckle at Chaucer’s prep-school climax to this shaggy dog story … And now we are getting to the heart of the matter. That’s why Chaucer wrote in English – not because it was the language of revolt or of religious dissent. He didn’t deploy the people’s tongue because he wanted to make a political point, but because like all authors he wanted to reach the largest possible audience, and he wanted to make them laugh.
English was the language of bawdy, because it was by definition the vulgar language. It was the language of the people he wanted to amuse and it was the most amusing language to write in. All along the riverbank from Tower Bridge to the Fleet there were wharves where Londoners loaded and unloaded the goods that were making them rich. There was Galley quay where the Italian galleys arrived; then there was the Custom House, where Chaucer worked; then Billingsgate fish market; then the Steelyard, the walled enclosure of the merchants of the Hanseatic League who dominated the trade with Scandinavia and eastern Europe.
Those Germans spoke to the cockney stevedores in English, and English grew in importance with the rise of the merchant classes. By the end of the fourteenth century the aldermen of London