TO A.D. 1397] GOWER'S TRIPARTITE CHRONICLE 161 last years peacefully, a clerk among clerks, within shadow of the church of which he was an honoured benefactor. Gower's faith in Richard was gone, and the public events which immediately followed his retirement caused the old poet to write in Latin leonine hexameter his Tripartite Chronicle. This is the sequel to his "Vox Clamantis," since it tells the issue of the misgovernment against which that earlier work had been a note of warning. The Chronicle was called “Tripartite" because it told the story of Richard's ruin in three parts, of which the first, said Gower, related human work, the second hellish work, the third a work in Christ. Human work was the control of Richard by his uncle Gloucester when the Commission of Regency was established; hellish work was the coup d'état; the work in Christ was the consequent dethronement of King Richard. In July, 1397, having secured the French alliance, the king invited the Earl of Warwick (the Bear) to dine with him, and by a treacherous breach of hospitality arrested him, seized his lands, and made him prisoner in the Isle of Man. The Earl of Arundel (the Horse) was invited to a conference, assured by the king's oath that he should not be injured in person or property. He was seized at the conference, sent to prison in the Isle of Wight, and afterwards beheaded. By treachery as false, the Duke of Gloucester (the Swan) was seized, imprisoned, and, Gower says, smothered at Calais with a feather bed, by murderers whom his nephew had sent over for the purpose. Gloucester was murdered in September, 1397. At the same time there was obtained from a servile parliament a statute (of the twenty-first year of Richard II.) which was virtually abnegation of the power of the Lords and Commons, and its transfer to a junta of the creatures of the king. Richard was during the next year (1398) supreme, for there was no immediate resistance to his personal government. In that year Chaucer was very poor. In January of the same year John Gower had been married in his own chapel under his rooms in the priory. He doubtless felt need of a kindly woman's care in his old age, and married to obtain good nursing, for his health was weak, and two years later he entirely lost his sight. While the rich Gower was thus housed, and spending liberally on the building-works of the priory in which he lodged, his friend Chaucer obtained, in May, 1398, the king's letters of protection from arrest, on any plea except it were connected with land, for the next two years, on the ground of "various arduous and urgent duties in divers parts of the G realm of England." After this Chaucer, on account either of sickness or occupation, did not apply for money personally; but in July, 1398, within three months of his obtaining letters of exemption from arrest, he sent to the exchequer for a loan of 6s. 8d.-say £3 6s. 8d. present value. In the following September lists were set at Coventry for combat between John of Gaunt's son, Henry, and the Duke of Norfolk. Richard, staying the combat, banished both. John of Gaunt survived his son's banishment but a few months, and, dying in 1399, was buried near the high altar in St. Paul's, by the side of his first wife, the Duchess Blanche. Then King Richard added to all other acts of rapacity, by which he was making his name daily more infamous, the seizure of the large In the summer inheritance of John of Gaunt's son Henry. Richard spent in Ireland upon war against the Irish some of the wealth he had wrung by acts of tyranny out of the English. The new Duke of Lancaster was then summoned by his friends from France, and John of Gaunt's son, to whom Chaucer was as an old household friend, landed at Grimsby to claim his inheritance. He had taken to himself the well-known badge of his murdered uncle Gloucester, the Swan. The end soon followed. In September, 1397, the Duke of Gloucester was murdered; in September, 1398, John of Gaunt's son was banished; in September, 1399, Richard II. publicly surrendered his crown to the returned exile. The Act of the Deposition of Richard II. was read in Westminster Hall on the last day of September, and on the 3rd of October the new king granted to Chaucer forty marks a year, in addition to the smaller annuity that King Richard had given him. The old poet had then only a year to live, but his last year At Christmas he took the lease of a house was freed from care. in the garden of the chapel of St. Mary, Westminster, and there he died, advanced in years, on the 25th of October, 1400. John Gower, who needed no money, received from the new king recognition of his hearty sympathy with what he looked upon as Christ's work in the overthrow of tyranny. In the year of Chaucer's death Gower became blind; but he lived on in the priory till 1408, and after his death in that year, considering his liberal aid to their building-works, his brethren there honoured his memory with a painted window and a tomb upon which his effigy is still to be seen lying, adorned with the Lancastrian collar of SS, with an appended badge of the Swan. This was the TO A.D. 1400] CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES 163 valued gift of the new king, Henry IV. When in his blindness his hand touched it, the moralist might now and then recall the past, and blend hope for the future with abiding faith that "often where the people cries there is God." 46. Such work as that upon the unfinished Canterbury Tales could not have been laid aside by Chaucer for work of less account. This must have been the main occupation of the poet's latter days, and the last words of the last tale in the papers gathered together by the hand of his son Thomas may have been the last words from his pen. They look up to heaven where "the body of man, that whilom was sick and frail, feeble and mortal, is immortal, and so strong and so whole that there may no thing impair it: there is neither hunger, nor thirst, nor cold, but every soul replenished with the sight of the perfect knowing of God. This blissful reign may men purchase by poverty spiritual, and the glory by lowness, the plenty of joy by hunger and thirst, and rest by travail, and the life by death and mortification of sin. To this life He us bring that bought us with His precious blood. Amen." Chaucer was one of the few greatest poets of the world who rise to a perception of its harmonies and have a faith in God forbidding all despair of man. No troubles could extort from him a fretful note. Wisely, kindly, with shrewd humour and scorn only of hypocrisy, he read the characters of men, and seeing far into their hearts was, in his "Canterbury Tales," a dramatist before there was a drama, a poet who set the life of his own England to its proper music. In this complete work, had it been completed, the whole character of England would have been expressed, as it is already expressed or implied in the great fragment left to us. Boccaccio, who died twenty-five years before Chaucer, placed the scene of his “Decameron" (§ 14) in a garden, to which seven fashionable ladies had retired with three fashionable gentlemen during the plague that devasted Florence in 1348. They told one another stories, usually dissolute, often witty, sometimes exquisitely poetical, and always in simple charming prose. The purpose of these people was to forget the duties on which they had turned their backs, and stifle any sympathies they might have had for the terrible grief of their friends and neighbours who were dying a few miles away. For these fine ladies and gentlemen, equal in rank and insignificance, Chaucer gave us a group of about thirty English people, of ranks widely different, in hearty human fellowship together. Instead of setting them down to lounge in 2 garden, he mounted them on horseback, set them on the high road, and gave them somewhere to go and something to do. The bond of fellowship was not a common selfishness. It was religion; not, indeed, in a form so solemn as to make laughter and jest unseemly, yet, according to the custom of his day, a popular form of religion-the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket (ch. iii. § 11)—into which men entered with much heartiness. It happened to be a custom which had one of the best uses of religion, in serving as a bond of fellowship wherein conventional divisions of rank were for a time disregarded; partly because of the sense, more or less joined to religious exercise of any sort, that men are equal before God, and also, in no slight degree, because men of all ranks, trotting upon the high road with chance companions, whom they might never see again, have been in all generations disposed to put off restraint and enjoy such intercourse as will relieve the tediousness of travel. Boccaccio could produce nothing of mark in description of his ten fine gentlemen and ladies. The procession of Chaucer's Pilgrims is the very march of man on the high road of life. From different parts of London or the surrounding country Canterbury pilgrims met in one of the inns on the Southwark side of London Bridge, to set forth together upon the Kent road. Chaucer's Pilgrims started from the "Tabard,” an inn named after the sleeveless coat once worn by labourers, now worn only in a glorified form by heralds. Chaucer feigns that he was at the "Tabard” ready to make his own pilgrimage, when he found a company of nine-and-twenty on the point of starting, and joined them, so making the number thirty. Harry Bailly, the host of the "Tabard," also joined the party, so making thirty-one. When Chaucer describes the pilgrims in his Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," his list contains thirty-one without reckoning the host. This little discrepancy is one of many reminders in the work itself that Chaucer died while it was incomplete. As ne proceeded with his story-telling he probably was modifying, to suit the development of his plan, several of the first written details of his Prologue. The Pilgrims were: 1, 2, 3, a knight, his son, and an attendant yeoman; 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, a prioress, another nun, who was her chaplain, and three priests; 9, 10, a monk and a friar; 11, a merchant; 12, a clerk of Oxford; 13, a serjeant-at-law; 14, a franklin, that is, a landholder free of feudal service, holding immediately from the king; 15, 16, 17, TO A.D. 1400] THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 165 18, 19, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, and a tapestry maker; 20, Roger, or Hodge, of Ware, a London cook; 21, a sailor from the West country; 22, a doctor of physic; 23, Alisoun, a wife of Bath; 24, 25, two brothers: a poor town parson and a ploughman; 26, a reeve, or lord's servant as steward or overseer; 27, a miller; 28, a sompnour, or summoner of delinquents to the ecclesiastical courts; 29, a pardoner, who dealt in pardons from the pope; 30, a manciple of a lawyer's Inn of Court (a manciple was a buyer of victuals for a corporation); 31, Chaucer himself, who is described by 32, Harry Bailly, the host, as one who looked on the ground as he would find a hare, seemed elvish by his countenance, for he did unto no wight dalliance, yet was stout; for, says the host," he in the waist is shape as well as I." Harry Bailly, large, bright-eyed, bold of speech, shrewd, manly, well-informed, had a shrew of a wife. He gave his guests a good supper, and jested merrily when they had paid their reckonings. It was the best company of pilgrims that had been at his inn that year, he said, and he should like to secure them mirth upon the way. They were all ready for his counsel; and it was that each of them should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two other tales on the way home. The one whose tales proved to be " of best sentence and of solas" should have a supper in that room at the cost of all when they came back from Canterbury. He was to be their guide; and whoever gainsaid his judgment was to pay for all they spent upon the way. All agreed, and appointed the host governor, judge, and reporter of the tales. Then wine was fetched, they drank, and went to bed. The host roused them at dawn next morning, the 28th of April (our 7th of May), when the length of day was a few minutes over fifteen hours. The company rode slowly to the watering of St. Thomas-that is to say, of the Hospital of St. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark, which may be called, in the series of Church stations, the London terminus of the line of pilgrimage to St. Thomas the Martyr's shrine at Canterbury. Here the host reminded the companions of their undertaking; and all, at his bidding, drew out slips by way of lot. Whoever had the shortest should begin. This wholesome device excluded all questions of precedence of rank among the fellow-pilgrims. The lot fell to the knight, whereat all were glad; and with the courtesy of prompt assent he began. 47. The knight's tale is the tale of "Palamon and Arcite," |