CHAPTER IX

TOWN AND COUNTRY

"For never to my mind was evening yet But was far beautifuller than its day." BROWNING

"Wherefore is the sun red at even? For he goeth toward hell." ("The Master of Oxford's Catechism" (XV. cent.); "Reliquiæ Antiquæ," i., 232.)

That which in Chaucer's day passed for rank "sluggardy a-night" might yet be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he needed Philippa's shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, "that he had seen the sun rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together." It is indeed startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night's dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner's mood: "the sun, my dear, that's God!" In the days when a tallow candle cost four times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his "Playground of Europe," has brought a wealth of illustration and penetrating comment to show how strictly men's ideas of the picturesque are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sülte, for instance, in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, "who oft-times affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the air." The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so that "many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the Bürgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity to a herring-barrel." What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or Tintern was not the beauty of "these steep woods and lofty cliffs," but their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks' own labours and those of their servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to listen how "the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of birds," then they felt their forefathers to have been right in "noting fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds."[118] After all, the earth was cursed for Adam's sake, and even its apparent beauty was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists--

"The world is fair to gaze on, white and green and red, But inly foul and black of hue, and dismal as the dead."

Ruskin's famous passage on this subject ("M. P.," iii., 14, 15) is, on the whole, even too favourable to the Middle Ages; but he fails to note two remarkable exceptions. The poet of "Pearl," who probably knew Wales well, describes the mountains with real pleasure; and Gawin Douglas anticipated Burns by venturing to describe winter not only at some length but also with apparent sympathy.[119] Moreover, Douglas describes a sunset in its different stages with great minuteness of detail and the most evident delight. Dante does indeed once trace in far briefer words the fading of daylight from the sky; but in his two unapproachable sunsets he turns our eyes eastwards rather than westwards, as we listen to the vesper bell, or think of the last quiet rays lingering on Virgil's tomb.[120] The scenic splendour of a wild twilight seems hardly to have touched him; his soul turns to rest here, while the hardy Scot is still abroad to watch the broken storm-clouds and the afterglow. And if Douglas thus outranges even Dante, he leaves Chaucer and Boccaccio far behind. The freshness and variety of the sunrises in the "Decameron" is equalled only by the bald brevity with which the author despatches eventide, which he connects mainly with supper, a little dancing or music, and bed. It would be equally impossible, I believe, to find a real sunset in Chaucer; Criseyde's "Ywis, it will be night as fast," is quite a characteristic epitaph for the dying day.

On the other hand, however, the medieval sunrise is delightful in its sincerity and variety, even under the disadvantage of constant conventional repetition; and here Chaucer is at his best. He may well have been too bookish to please either his neighbours or her whom Richard de Bury calls "a two-footed beast, more to be shunned (as we have ever taught our disciples) than the asp and the basilisk," yet no poet was ever farther removed from the bookworm. Art he loved, but only next to Nature--

On bookës for to read I me delight, And to them give I faith and full credence, And in mine heart have them in reverence So heartily, that there is gamë none That from my bookës maketh me to go'n But it be seldom on the holyday; Save, certainly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I hear the fowlës sing, And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring, Farewell my book and my devotion![121]

Not only was the May-day haunt of Bishop's wood within a mile's walk of Aldgate; but behind, almost under his eyes, stood the "Great Shaft of Cornhill," the tallest of all the city maypoles, which was yearly reared at the junction of Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, and St. Mary Axe, and which gave its name to the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, whose steeple it overtopped. How it hung all year under the pentices of a neighbouring row of houses until the Reformation, and what happened to it then, the reader must find in the pages of Stow.[122] These May-day festivities, which outdid even the Midsummer bonfires and the Christmas mummings in popularity, were a Christianized survival of ancient Nature-worship. When we remember the cold, the smoke, the crowding and general discomfort of winter days and nights in those picturesque timber houses; when we consider that even in castles and manor-houses men's lives differed from this less in quality than in degree; when we try to imagine especially the monotony of woman's life under these conditions, doubly bound as she was to the housework and to the eternal spinning-wheel or embroidery-frame, with scarcely any interruptions but the morning Mass and gossip with a few neighbours--only then can we even dimly realize what spring and May-day meant. There was no chance of forgetting, in those days, how directly the brown earth is our foster-mother. Men who had fed on salt meat for three or four months, while even the narrow choice of autumn vegetables had long failed almost altogether, and a few shrivelled apples were alone left of last year's fruit--in that position, men watched the first green buds with the eagerness of a convalescent; and the riot out of doors was proportionate to the constraint of home life. Those antiquaries have recorded only half the truth who wrote regretfully of these dying sports under the growing severity of Puritanism, and they forgot that Puritanism itself was a too successful attempt to realize a thoroughly medieval ideal. Fénelon broke with a tradition of at least four centuries when he protested against the repression of country dances in the so-called interests of religion.[123] It would be difficult to find a single great preacher or moralist of the later Middle Ages who has a frank word to say in favour of popular dances and similar public merry-makings. Even the parish clergy took part in them only by disobeying the decrees of synods and councils, which they disregarded just as they disregarded similar attempts to regulate their dress, their earnings, and their relations with women. Much excuse can indeed be found for this intolerance in the roughness and licence of medieval popular revels. Not only the Church, but even the civic authorities found themselves obliged to regulate the disorders common at London weddings, while Italian town councils attempted to put down the practice of throwing on these occasions snow, sawdust, and street-sweepings, which sometimes did duty for the modern rice and old shoes; and members of the Third Order of St. Francis were strictly forbidden to attend either weddings or dances.[124] These and other similar considerations, which the reader will supply for himself, explain the otherwise inexplicable severity of all rules for female deportment in the streets. "If any man speak to thee," writes the Good Wife for her Daughter, "swiftly thou him greet; let him go by the way"; and again--

"Go not to the wrestling, nor to shooting at the cock As it were a strumpet, or a giggëlot, Stay at home, daughter."

"When thou goest into town or to church," says the author of the "Ménagier de Paris" to his young wife, "walk with thine head high, thine eyelids lowered and fixed on the ground at four fathoms distance straight in front of thee, without looking or glancing sideways at either man or woman to the right hand or the left, nor looking upwards." Even Chaucer tells us of his Virginia--

She hath full oftentimës sick her feigned, For that she wouldë flee the companye Where likely was to treaten of follye-- As is at feastës, revels, and at dances, That be occasions of dalliances.[125]

These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a series of Christmastide proclamations "that no one shall go in the streets of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of imprisonment." Similarly severe measures were threatened against football in the streets, against the game of "taking off the hoods of people, or laying hands on them," and against "hocking" or extorting violent contributions from passers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter. But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly "charging on the King's behalf and his City, that no man or person ... during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen."[126] Much of this mumming was not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to suppress all natural enjoyment of life--even Madame Eglantyne's lapdogs were definitely contraband--but the girls were trammelled at every turn with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and unreal "other-worldliness" of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best explain certain of Chaucer's least edifying tales by referring, on the other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his "A. B. C."

But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the elvish and retiring poet of the "Canterbury Tales" mentions the sports of the townsfolk only with gentle irony. "Merry Absolon," the parish clerk, who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well "after the school of Oxenford ... and with his leggës casten to and fro," and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the 'prentice class to which he essentially belonged--all these small perfections are enumerated only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought by woman's guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggëlots, around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields--young men and maidens, old men and children--but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun--

Upon the smallë softë sweetë grass, That was with flowrës sweet embroidered all.

At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone with the birds--

A wind, so small it scarcely might be less, Made in the leavës green a noisë soft, Accordant to the fowlës' song aloft.

Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun--

Right as the freshë, reddë rosë new Against the Summer sunnë coloured is!

But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh and blood--

... of all the flowers in the mead Then love I most these flowers white and red Such as men callen daisies in our town. To them I have so great affectioun, As I said erst, when comen is the May, That in my bed there dawneth me no day But I am up and walking in the mead, To see this flower against the sunnë spread; ... As she that is of allë flowers flower, Fulfillèd of all virtue and honour, And ever y-like fair and fresh of hue. And I love it, and ever y-like new, And ever shall, till that mine heartë die.... I fell asleep; within an hour or two Me dreamèd how I lay in the meadow tho [then To see this flower that I love so and dread; And from afar came walking in the mead The God of Love, and in his hand a Queen, And she was clad in royal habit green; A fret of gold she haddë next her hair, And upon that a whitë crown she bare With fleurons smallë, and I shall not lie, For all the world right as a daÿsye Y-crowned is with whitë leavës lite, So were the fleurons of her coroune white; For of one pearlë, fine, oriental Her whitë coroune was y-maked all.

Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that Chaucer's sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises, than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, "Canterbury Tales," A., 1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and "Book of Duchess," 291, where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens, though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed inferiority. Chaucer's triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun's Priest's tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with Chanticleer--all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how glorious a part of God's creation is even a barn-door cock?

His voice was merrier than the merry orgon On massë-days that in the churchë go'n ... His comb was redder than the fine coral, Embattled as it were a castle wall; His bill was black, and like the jet it shone, Like azure were his leggës and his toen; His nailës whiter than the lily flower, And like the burnished gold was his colour!

Nothing but Chaucer's directness of observation and truth of colouring could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.

In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was already becoming in a manner cockneyfied; although she already imported sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food, and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life. Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded quarters, the mass of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul's was plainly set on a hill, and nobody could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn down the present Gray's Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued) Boadicea's chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames, though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only "in parts," still ran at low tide over native shingle and mud; the Southwark shore was green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country. Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as two miles from the walls, "but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On all sides," he continues, "without the houses of the suburb, are the citizens' gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly, and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows, with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise. Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear. Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement's Well are most famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer evenings, when they walk forth to take the air." No doubt in Chaucer's time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop's Wood in Stepney parish and the fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the "Great Forest" of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley's "Memorials" contain frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, "a little herber[129] that I have," in which Chaucer laid the scene of his "Legend of Good Women." These gardens seem to have made a fairly continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer home, however, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street, Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln's twenty carefully-tilled acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages which clustered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence in which Becket's chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the city. "Many citizens," writes Fitzstephen, "do delight themselves in hawks and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray." The city huntsman was, in those days, a salaried official of some dignity.

So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a company of nature-poets unsurpassed in any language. May we not hope that his companions in the "little herber," or on his wider excursions, were sometimes "the moral Gower" or "the philosophical Strode?" And may we not picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer's friend was probably the Ralph Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability as the author of "Pearl" and other 14th-century poems second only to Chaucer's. However that may be, "the philosophical Strode" must unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his "Troilus," and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer's own reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter--

O youngë freshë folkës, he or she, In which that love upgroweth with your age, Repair ye home from worldly vanitie, And of your heart upcast ye the visage To that same God that after His image You made; and think that all is but a fair, This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair.

But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the long day wanes at last; and now--

When that the sun out of the south 'gan west And that this flower 'gan close, and go to rest, For darkness of the night, the which she dread, Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped To go to rest, and early for to rise.

The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he must surely have read: "The only pests of London are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires."