inevitably result in destroying something of the charm and melody of the original. Readers whose eyes are not accustomed to the forms of Middle English will find practically all difficulty disappear if they read the passages aloud with modern pronunciation. With other Middle English and Scottish poets I have reluctantly taken greater liberties, since their language is often more remote from the speech of to-day. An example of the original Scottish forms will be found on p. 240.

G. E. H.

CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES

CHAPTER I

CHAUCER’S LIFE AND TIMES

“The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities” according to one of the most famous of Chaucer scholars, and the more carefully we consider the evidence upon which this statement is based, the more fully do we find it endorsed. The name Chaucer itself has been variously derived from the Latin calcearius, a shoemaker, the French chaussier, a maker of long hose, and the French chaufecire, chafe-wax (i. e. a clerk of the court of Chancery whose duty consisted in affixing seals to royal documents). The one point of agreement seems to be that the family was undoubtedly of French origin, though whether the founder of the English branch came over with the Conqueror or in Henry III’s reign, cannot be decided. Most scholars are now agreed that Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1340, and that his father was John Chaucer, a vintner of Thames Street, London, though at one time his birth was dated as early as 1328, and Mr. Snell, in his Age of Chaucer, endeavours further to darken counsel—already sufficiently obscure—by suggesting that there may have been two contemporary Geoffreys, and that the facts which are usually accepted as throwing light on the history of the poet may really apply to his unknown namesake. This theory, however, has at present no evidence to support it, and it is reasonable to assume that Chaucer was a native of London. Possibly it was his early association with the wine-trade that gave him such insight into its mysteries, and called forth the Pardoner’s warning:—

Now kepe yow fro the whyte and fro the rede,
And namely fro the whyte wyn of Lepe,
That is to selle in Fish-strete or in Chepe.
This wyn of Spayne crepeth subtilly
In othere wynes, growing faste by,
Of which there ryseth swich fumositee
That when a man hath dronken draughtes three
And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe,
He is in Spayne, right at the toune of Lepe.
(Pardoners Tale, l. 562, etc.)

And it is noteworthy that more than once Chaucer goes out of his way to inveigh against drunkenness:—

A lecherous thing is wyn, and dronkenesse
Is ful of stryving and of wrecchednesse
······
For dronkenesse is verray sepulture
Of mannes wit and his discrecioun.
(Pardoners Tale, l. 549-559.)

Of his early years we know nothing. Probably he lived the life of other boys of that time: Lydgate’s portrait of the mediæval school-boy may well stand for a type:—

I had in custom to come to school late
Not for to learn but for a countenance,
With my fellows ready to debate,
To jangle and jape was set all my pleasaunce.
Whereof rebuked was my Chevisaunce[1]
To forge a lesyng and thereupon to muse
When I trespassed myselfe to excuse.
······
Loth to rise, lother to bed at eve;
With unwashed handes ready aye to dinner;
My Paternoster, my Creed, or my Believe
Cast at the Cook; lo! this was my manner;
Waved with each wind, as doth a reede-spear;
Snibbed[2] of my friends such taches[3] for to amend
Made deaf eare list nat to them attend.
(Testament.)

Leland, with that sublime disregard for anything so prosaic as evidence which characterises sixteenth-century biographers, declares that “Geoffrey Chaucer, a youth of noble birth and highest promise, studied at Oxford University with all the earnestness of those who have applied themselves most diligently to learning.... He left the University an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician”; and to this list of accomplishments he afterwards adds, “and a devout theologian.” Fifty years later, Speght—to whom lovers of Chaucer are deeply indebted in other respects—equally authoritatively asserts that he was at Cambridge, but as he bases this assertion on a remark—

Philogenet I called am far and near
Of Cambridge clerk—

made by one of the characters in the Court of Love, a poem which scholars are now universally of opinion is not Chaucer’s work, it has little weight. As a matter of fact Chaucer’s name does not appear in the records of any college at either university, and, as Professor Lounsbury has conclusively shown, wide as are the poet’s interests, and great as his knowledge undoubtedly is, the scholarship shown by his works is not so remarkable as necessarily to imply close and protracted study. Classical legends were frequently embodied in the romances of an age in which, if we may believe Jean Bodel, himself a poet,

Ne sont que trois matières à nul homme entendant,
De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la grant,[4]

and the habit of treating Alexander the Great as if he were brother-in-arms to Roland and Oliver naturally opened the door to all sorts of embellishments and modifications. A veil of romance covers and colours the history of Greece and Rome. To Chaucer, Cleopatra is akin to the Lady of the Hideous Pass, or Morgan le Fay. The account of her death given in the Legend of Good Women (l. 671, etc.) is purely mediæval:—

(She) made her subtil workmen make a shryne
Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne
In all Egipte that she coude espye;
And putte ful the shryne of spycerye,
And leet the cors embaume;[5] and forth she fette
This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@36554@[email protected]#f_6" id="fna_6" class="pginternal"