In Our Time - Chaucer

Episode Date: February 9, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Geoffrey Chaucer, often called the father of English literature."In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Canterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght was come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye Of sundry folk, by aventure yfalle In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, That toward Canterbury wolden ryde." Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of 14th century English society in his Canterbury Tales. As each pilgrim takes his, or her, turn to tell their tale on the road to Canterbury, Chaucer brings to life the voices of a knight, a miller, a Wife of Bath and many more besides. Chaucer was born the son of a London vintner, yet rose to high office in the court of Richard II. He travelled throughout France and Italy where he came into contact with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Machaut and Froissart. He translated Boethius, wrote dream poetry, a defence of women and composed the tragic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde. As well as the father of English literature, Chaucer was also a philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat.So what do we know of Chaucer? How did he introduce the themes of continental writing to an English speaking audience? And why does his poetry still seem to speak so directly to us today? With Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John's College, Oxford; Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge; Ardis Butterfield, Reader in English at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of 14th century English society in his Canterbury tales, never out of print since Caxston.

As each pilgrim takes his or her turn to tell their tale on the road to Canterbury, Chaucer brings to life the voices of the night, the miller, the wife of Bath, and many, many more. Chaucer was born the son of a London vittner and rose to high office in the court of Richard II. He travelled throughout France and Italy, where he came into contact with the works of Dante Baccio and Frossar. He translated Botheus, wrote dream poetry,

and composed the tragic masterbeast, Troilus and Cressida. Who then was the man, who some call the father in English literature? How did he introduce the themes of, French and Italian writing to an English-speaking audience. And why does this poetry still seem to speak so directly to us today? Join me to discuss the life and works of Jeffrey Chaucer are Caroline

Larrington, tutor in medieval English at St John's College, Oxford. Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and artist Butterfield, read it in English at UCL. Caroline Larrington, Chaucer lived through a particularly turbulent century, the Black Death, the Pousants' Revolt,

the impeachment of Richard II, the fallout of the 100 years war with France. What do we know, what do we really know of his life? Well, we're lucky with Chaucer in that we have more life records for him than most other 14th century poets because he was working in the civil service and therefore left a trace. He was born in the early 1340s to a relatively wealthy middle-class family. He may have been educated at St. Paul's School

and he went at the age of probably his early teens to be a page or a squire in the court of the Countess of Ulster. So he had early royal connections, if you like. He went to fight in France in 1360 or so, 359, 1360. We know he was captured and ransomed for £16 at that point. Returning to England, he married Philippa Roet, who was the daughter of a Flemish knight, who had probably come over from Flanders with Queen Philip.

the wife of Edward III. And Philippa was quite highly placed in the court. She was lady in waiting to successive royal ladies. Chaucer traveled quite often to the continent to Italy a couple of times, to Spain probably on one occasion, to France several times. Sometimes it looks as if it was on secret business for the king, sometimes in negotiations for various aspects of military strategy. He became a customs on.

officer, the controller of the customs of the wool hide and skins exports from the port of London. This is a very important job because wool was the chief export of London at the time, and the taxes raised from wool were essentially what was paying for the 100 years war. He had a very busy public life. He had a busy public life, but he was still writing at the same time. In the evenings, he tells us he went back to his apartment over Allgate and composed poetry, who read and composed poetry. Later in his life, he gave up the

the custom of the controller of the wool staple and became an MP in Kent, a justice of the peace. And towards the end of his life, he was the clerk of the king's works, a very important job, which involved a lot of travel and making sure that tournament sites

were built and so on. He seems to have given that up after a couple of highway robberies, which must have been a little bit much for a man of his age. And he dies in 1400. we're not quite sure when, but he disappears from the record at that point. So we're talking about a man who had a life involved in many aspects of society at the time,

and socially quite mobile, wasn't he? I mean, you've talked about a relatively humble background or middle class. His father was a vittner. We don't quite know what quality or status, but he ends up being a grandfather of one of the richest, or if not the richest woman in England. He's at the court of Richard II. He's related by marriage to John of Gaunt and so on. Yes, it's a time of great social mobility, I think particularly if you're in London,

that he can go from the son of a relatively wealthy vintner. His mother inherited 24 shops along with various other bits of property when her father died. But he was able to move between the world of the court, thanks to these connections with John of Gaunt, and the bourgeoisie of London as well, people he worked with in the Wool Customs House, people he knew from Parliament, aldermen of the city. So he moves between the kind of noble world and the bourgeois world, a great deal of ease. You've listed jobs which is to do with business, which is to do

diplomacy, which is due with being an MP, Justice of the Peace and so on. So he's covering a range of things that he eventually wrote about. Do you have any idea of how much time those jobs took? Because they would seem nowadays to be very demanding jobs. Were their jobs much less demanding then than they are now in time?

Because he wrote an enormous amount. Well, it seems clear that towards the end of his time, as the controller of customs, that he appointed a deputy that allowed him certainly to go off abroad on his various missions. And it seems as if increasingly he wasn't at the office. He was at home writing poetry perhaps because he was commissioned by patrons

who thought that was rather more important. And then eventually he gave up the office altogether. But I think in some ways we probably have to think of him as mostly working in the evenings perhaps in his free time because these were demanding and important jobs that he was doing. Helen Cooper, what were the cultural and political links between France and England at the time? We're at a time when in much of his life, much of Chaucer's life,

the court was still speaking French, Norman French. And French was the dominating language, excuse me, language in law, language in polite society, even it had been language of literature, the court of love poetry and so on. So very great links with France. Can you develop that? Very great links with France

that were encouraged indeed by the Hundred Years' War, partly because England in the 1350s was being particularly successful and finished up governing large swathes of France and therefore shipping quite a number of Englishmen over there to help run them. Partly because after the Battle of Poitiers, there were quite a number of very high-ranking French hostages at the court in England, initially indeed the King of France and then various princes after he went home.

Queen Philippa, as Caroline said, was French-speaking, and she brought in her entourage various secretaries' poets, including Jean Fouassar, who was living and writing in England for some years. The Great Chronicle. The Great Chronicle. He also wrote poetry. Some of his poetry influences Chaucer's, and indeed it looks as if some of Chaucer's poetry influenced one or two of his poems

as well. They certainly knew each other. So we're talking about an overwhelming French influence. An overwhelming French influence. Would you also have read most of his contemporary reading? Would that have been in French? Yes. French literature was what was being read at court. And indeed, French was the language for writing at court until Chaucer himself. There wasn't any English language literature. There was a lot. But the court was predominantly French.

speaking, all the sophisticated literature was in French. And so even if you were English, then if you wanted to write for the court, you wrote in French. And Chaucer's decision to write in English was really quite extraordinary. And probably couldn't have happened at an earlier date, indeed, partly because French is giving way to English in all kinds of areas in the law, in Parliament and so on. English is rising in status. But also because the qualities of the English language are changing radically at this period. Sorry, please, please finish and then I'll ask you to go back a little bit.

French and English have been spoken side by side ever since the Norman conquest, with words pouring through from French into English. So it's developing a quite extraordinarily rich vocabulary. by this date. Can I come back to that in one second? But just to thicken out the cultural influence from France, the language I'll come back to in a second, but it was the writers were coming over

and also the modes of address and the way what you wrote about, the way you wrote, the way you saw the world. We were seeing the world to the French cultural prism, weren't we? That's right. And French literature, especially quarterly literature, was very strongly interested in emotions, in love,

English poetry had tended to go more for action, especially narrative poetry. And lyric too, there are wonderful English lyrics. French lyric just spends longer analysing emotion and so on. And so Chaucer has two distinct traditions to draw on and he can take the best from both of them. So he decides to write in English, which is momentous as it turns up to be,

and quite radical because in the notes of one of you, I can't remember now. You said it was as if some today had decided, well, the next world language is going to be, although he's going to be Welsh, and I'll start with that. Welsh person's listening at the moment who believe that very thing, and they may well be right, unless we might be here to find out. But he did make that decision. Was this to do, it was quite a remarkable decision, wasn't it? It was, because nobody... Can you pin it down to any one thing? Do you have any evidence for any one thing? There's no evidence at all, sadly. The only evidence is, why he shouldn't have done it, that is, he complains about the lack of rhyme in English compared with French, which is true. And it cuts himself, it cuts him off largely from any kind of international readership. French literature was read all over Europe, and English literature could only be read in England. Well, it's very strange, isn't it, because he's massively

ambitious. At end of Troilus and Crestes, he's no problem about comparing himself with Homer and Virgil, there he is out there. He knows about Dante and Pacacho, and he's borrowing their Baccio's stories all over the place. And yet he determines the right in this hitherto, although it's on the rise, it's still basically suppressed, it's a second language in a certain country. The third, if you include Latin. What do you have to say about artists

Butterfield? What attracted Was it the language itself that attracted him? English language. I doubt it somehow. It seems to me that what's really fascinating about Chaucer is he obviously was utterly under the spell, as many people were, of French literature.

And maybe it was something to do with the sheer challenge of it. I mean, I think I'd probably take a slightly different view in the sense that I think retrospectively we see this as a very radical decision. I wonder at the time whether there was something more hesitant and accidental about this. And I suspect also he did write in French.

It just hasn't survived. He's apparently he was known for writing French songs and ditties and so on. and I'm sure... Yes, but the whole bulk of it is a massive bulk of work you have in front of your volume which is crushing both... And we're crushing this table. I mean, it's massive...

It's seen English. So he wrote a few... So we're still with this English thing, which was momentous, wasn't it? It was so probably I interrupted you. Well, no, it was a momentous decision. I think what I'm interested in is the very detailed way in which he creates an English literary language

that is deeply involved with and in a way subservient to the other literary languages that he knew French and Latin. So to say that it's English, in a sense, is our view of English as a sort of single, you know, pure and inverted commas, or at least, you know, widely spoken, commonly spoken language. And I think his sense of English, it's hard to prove this, but my sense of his English is that it was a very composite, language that was in the sway of other languages and that he was working with in those terms. Well, let's remember, I haven't got it in front of him like you three, but the very open of the Canterbury tales, one that I'll be sure. There are French words there, I mean, Italian words there, as well as English words. There's a great mix right from the beginning of that.

There's a great mix right from the beginning. One of the fascinating things is... But it's still in English, isn't it? I mean, he's coming through. Sorry, I'm... I'm... Horrible is sorry to be an outsider persisting in this, but you can't call it anything else. Yes, I can really. I mean, I'm going to try. Good for you. Well, no, there's a wonderful phrase, actually, later in the 60th century, someone talking about French English. And I would prefer to call it French English, actually, rather than English.

It seems to me that, again, we've given a term to this English. Actually, when you read about what other people were saying about English at the time, they were very rude about it. They call it a rude, boisterous language. that they're full of anxiety about English. Well, at the same time, Helen Cooper says that by doing this in English, he's cut himself off. So there's something to be discussed there in a moment. But I ask you another question.

Was he writing this to address it to a particular sort of listener or reader in London? Was that the impulse that drove him? Yes, it's surprisingly difficult to really to pin down the people that Chaucer was writing for. I mean, one interesting argument that people have started to wonder about is whether he gradually progressed towards us, as we're a more male audience in the Canterbury Tales. But in a sense, what we're doing is we're trying to gain hints from the poems themselves as to which kind of readers he's addressing.

There's still very little to go on in terms of people who we can say read or had contact with his poems directly. There's just one or two names, but in general we're still a bit in the dark in a way how public a poet he was. We've raised this earlier, but he wasn't a professional poet. I think that's quite important.

He was a sort of Sunday poet. And we don't really know how widely his poetry circulated, and it was probably on a much more private basis than... But we do know it was very popular. We'll come back that later, so we knew that much. So it must have circulated quite well. widely, to be very popular.

And so many manuscripts remaining, and then Caxner. Helen Cooper, back, the Book of the Duchess, has been claimed as the first original poem written in, dare I say it, after what has been said, English. What can you say about that work? And do you want to have a postscript to this English, English, non-English, French English, what we call the Ardis Amendment?

I suppose the postscript would be that he does cut himself from an international audience. and he massively increases his English audience because French was becoming more and more restricted outside the court and the court for the first time could universally understand English. So he does make the best of an English audience. I hate to be provocative and it far be probably the first time ever on this programme. But would you agree that it is not English, which Chaucer writes,

it is a sort of French English? It's what English is becoming. You can't find anything quite like Chaucer's English earlier, but then that's true of Shakespeare as well, and he certainly writes in English. And he's very different from the kind of poetry that's being written in English earlier. So you would just about creep towards the tentative conclusion

that give or take a singer to it just might be called English. Oh, I would say it could be called English. But again, it's an English that is changing so much. fast at this date and he does make maximum use of those changes a huge vocabulary and the hugeness comes from that mixing of French words

coming in through Anglo-Noy. Well, yes, the French infusion has been at least 12,000 words and English has changed in the 300 years and Italian and Latin has begun to come in, the trading nation aspect has taken over but Caroline Arlington, let's talk a little bit about the book of the Duchess. It's based on a dream vision

which is one of the ways that medieval writers used to get around narrative convention. Can you just tell us a little about that poem? The Book of the Duchess is a memorial poem composed in memory of Blanche, the Duchess of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife. She died in 1368, and it's hard to know whether the poem was composed for the first anniversary or some anniversary two, three, four years after her death. It's a very tactful poem in some ways. It depends on the narrator, who is a kind of version of Chaucer himself,

having a dream in which he's wafted into a landscape, which is surreal in some ways. He finds himself in the forest, and there is a black knight lamenting to himself about the loss of something. And it's fairly clear from what the black knight says in the complaint he's making in the first instance, that he's lost his lady. But the narrator asks him about his situation,

draws out of him in a way which almost seems therapeutic, the story of his love and how he fell in love with his lady, how he courted her, how he won her. And then suddenly at the end comes the shock revelation that she's dead. And after that there's nothing more to be said, and they return to the court, but in fact a bell at the castle rings and the dreamer wakes up. So it's a rather roundabout way in some ways of approaching the question of loss,

but it may speak to the fact that some years have passed now and perhaps John O'Gaunt is thinking of marrying again and therefore... Is this part of the sort of dream literature of Europe, a dream taking literature, that was going on at the time, particularly in France? Well, certainly the French tradition has dream visions in which the dream of fall asleep and learn something particular about love

and sometimes by encountering allegorical figures who explain that love has its good side and its bad side. The Roman de la Rose is the most... famous example of this which Chaucer himself translated parts of. But the great advantage of the dream vision, I think, particularly in Chaucer's hands, is that it comes with the kind of inbuilt authority. Nobody can argue with you about your dream, whether you had it or not. You're the only person who can say that it's true.

And because dreams in classical literature and in the Bible are thought to be sent by God, they carry some kind of meaning with them. They're not just sort of strange ramblings of a crazed brain. and so they allow the poet to make up things which is not normally allowed to do in medieval literary culture Why not? Because it doesn't have any moral value or any particular value. You can retell historical stories, you can tell moral tales.

You can tell perhaps fabliotype stories of the kind we find in the Canterbury tales. But simply making something up because it's right to as interesting is not really authorised by culture. Why should the things you did yesterday be particularly interesting, only if they come perhaps with a kind of encoded meaning which the dream carries with it. I just better feel. Continuing from that, taking up a what could be called a historical theme,

Chaucer wrote Troilus and Cressida, a love poem set in ancient Troy. Can you tell us about that and why you think it's significant in Chaucer's, so significant in Chaucer's work having trouble with the English here? Yes, I mean, it is one of the, I mean, perhaps the greatest love poem, in English. I will say in English this time. It's quite interesting because he tells us the plot right at the start. So there's no question of not knowing what happens in Troyes and Crusade. It's a plot easy to tell. Could you simply tell it?

Well, it's a Troilus falls in love with Crusade and before he died, she forsook him. And this is what Troilus tells us right at the start. It's the double woe of Troilus because he starts. in the miseries of love, he reaches the heights of passion with Crusade and then is cast down again into woe as she forsakes him, which he says quite plainly. The problem with that, or what complicates that,

is that the poem starts off with Crusade being described as a betrayer, and then the rest of the poem is an attempt really by the narrator to show how that's a sweeping crew judgment of crusade. And so we're left with a very agonising, as I say, deeply, deeply passionate story where we know the outcome is going to be tragic. And yet, and so we're asked really to think all the way through about our sense of judgment and why we think things happen turn out badly and whose fault it is. You were very emphatic at the beginning of your remarks there by saying

as the most passionate, I think that was the way you used it, a love poem in, English. Where is that... Can you give us some idea of the passion? I mean, it's a heck of a claim, given what's happened, since 1390. So, as it were, is there a time for a touch of evidence? A touch of evidence? Well, I think, I think Carolyn is going to read out one of the moments of passion. All right, then, Carolyn, you read out a moment of passion. Just to say, we embrace ourselves with this. Sorry, I'm not a big... Well, this is the moment at which Troilus has finally got into bed with Crusader after, it's now the middle of book three, so it's over halfway through the poem.

And in some ways he can't believe his luck at actually finally getting to this intimate stage with her. And this is what the poet tells us about his first physical approach to her. Here armes smile, here strata back and softer, here cedars longer, fleshly smother than whiter, he gant astrog.

And good thrift, bad feel ofter, his snowish throat, her breasters run than litre thus in this heaven he gan him to deleter and therewithal a thousand team here kisseda that what to do for joy oneth he wister Maybe if I can come in there I mean Okay that that was passion I think one of the brilliant things about the poem Is that it recognises that passion is all about timing And the extraordinary way in which we are led through Troilus's agony

as to whether this moment is ever going to happen. We reach these sort of heights in book three that's in five books, and then in a kind of perfect arc, there's a decline after book three. They realise they're going to have to part, and the last stages of the poem are unraveling the pain of that separation. And her betrayal, I think. And her betrayal, which is something that the poems that were only gradually admits to. So it's passion in the context,

of the kind of the height to which love can reach and the depth to which it is forced to go. Inside this poem, Helen Cooper, is also something of Boethius philosophy, the Roman philosopher. Can you tell us what that is and how it is included in the poem? Yes, Boetheus was a late classical philosopher writing after the barbarian invasions of Rome.

And he wrote the consolation of philosophy when he was under sentence of death. was executed very nastily. And the consolation is a dialogue really between his own emotions and his reason as to whether there's any justice in the universe, because it certainly doesn't look as if there is. And Troilus finds himself faced with the same kind of problem. It is what happens fated. Do you have any free will?

And so on, because he feels himself in the grip of fate. And indeed, we know what happened to Troy Lus and Crusade right from the start. We're told, and of course the very fact that it's set in Troy, which is a doomed city, means that things aren't going to turn out well. And using Boethius, in a way, imposes something of a sense of what Chaucer himself, what we know about what happened, directly on the characters, even though they don't quite know what's going to happen, but they rather suspect it's going to be something pretty nasty.

And it is. But it helps to make it the way Chaucer combines his Italian source for the story with the Latin philosophy gives the poem a quite remarkable depth. It makes you think as well as giving you a good story and wonderful poetry. And indeed some of the philosophy is combined with the wonderful poetry. It's almost like an opera in places where Troilus himself has a wonderful poetry. all the good arias about love, his love for crusade, the love that binds the universe and everything else. And when his love for crusade collapses, he can't unloven her, he says, but there's no longer

that stability there. Then the whole universe threatens to go into a wobble as well. And he enters into fierce fighting and his guilt. But when he goes to heaven, as it were, well, it's called an artist, there's a vault fast there. And he looks down on us, and he looks down on us, and he disassociates himself from the passions that have been described there. Yes, it's a very disturbing moment in the poem because he actually laughs and despises the vanity that he sees from this great height. And it's very, again, it's sort of chalked a sort of final twist, if you like, in our hearts or in the pain of reading this,

because we can't believe that we've gone through, this emotional turmoil, and then right at the end, we're being made to laugh at it and despise it and move on. And I suppose this is a very characteristic Chaucerian move. He seems quite determined to turn back on, to almost to turn against his own writing, in these sort of quite sharp, difficult manoeuvres. Can you place, Caroline, can you place, Trilicet, before we move on to Canterbury tells, in the context of European literature at the time, was this considered to be a great work?

Did he go to classical literature to sort of enhance a classical reputation? At the end of it, he does, as I said earlier in the programme, say words to the effect, this is alongside Homer and Virgil and so on. Is this his big push? Well, as Helen said, of course, his readership is going to be limited because it's in English. But I think one of the most interesting things about Troilus is that he's taken a story immediately.

taken it from Baccio, an Italian writer who's writing in the vernacular and of course not writing in Latin. I think probably the Italian influence is something which reinforced that decision to write in the English vernacular for him later on. But he's gone, he's taken the story perhaps because it has that classical grandeur, but it's not a particularly well-known story. It's not as if he's treating Helen or the whole Oristair story or something like that. But inside Troy, isn't it? The battles are larums off. Yes, he's very clearly not interested. in the battles and says if you want that kind of thing then you have to read other authors. He's interested

in the emotions within this little pressure cooker of Troy, which is a city that looks very much like medieval London, except obviously medieval London doesn't have a Greek army besieging it. It becomes very claustrophobic in some ways. He did have a rebel army from Kent besieging it. Briefly, yes, not for ten years, luckily. Halland Goeber, can we move on to the Canterburybury which listeners will know about it? And it's his most

famous work, a collection of unfinished stories, the pilgrimage to Beckett Shrine in Canterbury and so on? This was a huge project. Can you give us some idea of how he set about it? And do we have an idea of him sitting down and saying, now I will do this and outlining what he would do? As always, we're very short of hard knowledge about how Chaucer wrote his poetry.

Probably, I think he started with the idea of writing a story collection. A lot of people were doing that. It was almost the fashionable form across Europe. Boccaccio had written the Decameran not long before and Chaucer had pretty certainly come across that in Italy though he probably didn't actually have a copy but everyone was writing story collections and the great advantage of that

is that it gives you a lot of scope and the Canterbury Tales together are the most ambitious, most wide-ranging work in English before the complete works of Shakespeare and therefore perhaps still. only second to the complete works of Shakespeare. Because what...

Some Shakespeare scholars, they're one of the few books that could be said have directly influenced Shakespeare. That's right. Shakespeare writes a close adaptation of the Knight's Tale with Fletcher in the two noble kinsmen. The Knight's tale is also the main source for Midsummer Night's Dream

insofar as that has a source at all. And Troilus and Crusade provides half of Troilus and Crescent Crescent. So he uses Chaucer a lot. But big as it is the Canterbury does, that the initial project was even bigger, wasn't it? The idea was to, he puts together 30 pilgrims, give or take, and the host of the Tabardin in Southwark,

where they stay overnight before they set off, suggests that they should each tell two tales out on the journey out and two on the way back. That will give 120 all told, which would over go Boccacchus de Cameron. That perhaps was excessive, excessively ambitious. We only have 24. The whole work isn't finished and some of the individual tales aren't finished either. But already we've got enough very clearly to know what Chaucer is up to.

The host invites the pilgrims to tell the tales as a story competition. And that could cause problems because it might suggest that some stories ought to be worse than others. But the way Chaucer sets it up with a whole range of different tellers, telling a whole range of different sorts of kinds of story, means that they can tell the best romance, the best saints' life, the best beast fable, and so on. And so they're all wonderful in their own particular kind. Caroline Larrington, the character is introduced in the general prologue,

which will be very, the knight and so on and so forth. What do we learn about, why do you think he laid it out that way? And what does the prologue itself tell us about Chaucer's humour, is learning, what is setting? How does it set up the tale? Could you set up the counterfeitails through his setting of it up in the prologue? Well, in some ways I think it makes a marvellous introduction to the variety of tales that's coming because it has a conspectus of society almost from the very highest to the very lowest. Clearly the lowest peasants weren't going to be able to leave the land and go on a pilgrimage.

so the lowest social character is the ploughman, who in fact doesn't tell a tale. And the highest social character is the knight. We don't have members of the royal family rubbing shoulders with these people. But each person is described in terms of the work that they do, in terms of their job. And there's a representative of each of the three major estates, the knight, the parson and the plowman, his brother, who are exemplary. And everybody else has some little dodge or little twist that they're up to. And Chaucer presents himself.

as a wide-eyed narrator who listens to people describing themselves and allows them to give away in some ways what it is that they're up to, whether it's foreign exchange fiddles or skimming off your landlord's money when you're administering his estate or perhaps getting married five times, which perhaps isn't a fiddle, but just a kind of unusual pastime maybe. And so there's a kind of slyness, there's very little denunciation that's direct. The narrator just lets people tell their stories, and you gauge from them what kind of characters you have?

We have here. Caroline said at the very beginning of the program, she outlined Chaucer's life, and we had a man in the world in many different ways. And I get the impression of the kind of rhetoric which I read at school and Sun, since, and so on, that it is a man who is very worldly wise. These characters, even when they're mocked and there's irony and so on,

he knows about the whole range. I mean, it was a page boy, a page at one stage. in a small London, I imagine him going around London, just going through from the sort of the gutters to the grandeur day after day and seeing everything and taking it all in. There's a feeling of knowledge of the outside world, isn't there? Which gives it its great strength. And he was a customs officer too.

Yes, he must have seen an awful lot of cheating and conniving in his professional life. But it's very clear that he, I mean, he presents himself as his observer. and he's inside other people's tricks. I mean, that's the disconcerting thing about the way that these stories are told, that we don't just hear them. We find ourselves inside some of the grubier mentalities. I suppose the other interesting thing about the way that the country tales is triggered as a storytelling contest is in that first group of tales.

The host is very pleased with himself because he engineers that the knight should start because he picks the right length of straw to start the whole thing off and then his planning for the next most noble pilgrim who happens to be the monk to come in next and addresses him. But the monk is rudely interrupted by the miller. And the miller is described as very drunk and obnoxious and loud. And he roars apparently his voices. is very penetrating.

And so it threatens the whole stability and indeed the whole plot of the enterprise. I always think it's rather like, you know, you're planning a conference and you've got all the speakers organised and then someone drunk in the audience barges in and says, I'm going to speak now and it must have been a rather sort of awkward moment.

I mean, it's given that kind of dramatic flair. And of course it's very skillful because then the Miller does indeed disrupt the night. but beats him at his own game by telling a brilliantly crafted story, especially for a drunkard, but also a brilliantly obscene story. So he's disrupting the courtesy, the decorum in all sorts of ways. And that's something that Chaw says it were dares to do right at the start.

It is what was remarked on, first of all, at his time by Shakespeare, later on very emphatically by Johnson, and the delicacy of the night, and the high-mindedness, and then instantly the sort of bawdy low-life together, banged against it, which became quite an English thing, didn't it, at that? And it's interesting that it seemed to start in, sure, sir. Yes.

It didn't follow the classical route, is what I'm saying. Didn't follow the one line? Absolutely not, no. And if you compare that, or you contrast it with the decamerin, the decamerin, all the storytellers are of the same class. They're all sort of quite young, wealthy, treasured

sort of aristocrats and Chaucer is very keen to present a, not just a diverse group from society but people in society

who are at odds with one another and he wants to show those professional and social rivalries. And very rude as well. And very rude. Very good, you know, very good for adolescence really.

Yes. Helen Cook, can we talk about We have not talked about what his relationship was with Christianity. I've all turned up at the 14th century and so on. How Christian, do we see it in the Canterbury tales? They're going to Canterbury after all. So the action is a Christian act. But in the writing, do you find it has an influence on him as a writer? Yes, but it's evident fairly intermittently.

There are some religious tales. The second nun tells St. life that as its prologue has a wonderful invocation to the Virgin, for instance. The longest Christian tale is the Parsons' diatribe against sins, a kind of penitential treatise, which isn't going to warm anyone's heart towards God, I think. And he doesn't tell of the arrival in Canterbury, so we never get that great arrival at the shrine. Chaucer's great religious poetry is fairly breaches. and you have to look elsewhere for it,

well, apart from the second nun's prologue, but the end of Troilus, for instance, with its prayer to the Trinity is wonderful, but that's lifted out of Dante. And his most sublime religious poetry does tend to draw pretty directly on other sources. His interest, his great interest, is in being a poet of this world.

Yes. Caroline Larrington, the wife of Bath is a very powerful figure, and he has been praised for the way in which he treats women in the Canterbury Tales. You're going, there's a bit of the head wagging once in. I've read it in the notes anyway, so maybe it wasn't you who praised it. Let us say the wife of Bath and other women. Can you tell us about the wife of Bath and the significance that women have in the Canterbury Tales? Well, broadly speaking, I think it would be fair to say that Chaucer thinks that women are capable of offering wise counsel,

that they're a great restraining force on the kind of energies and excesses, perhaps, of male figures. But I think the wife of Bath is really quite a contested figure, and every year I change my mind as whether she's a kind of feisty proto-feminist who's sticking up for women's rights and expressing women's opinions or whether she's a kind of misogynist nightmare of exactly the kind of wife you would not want to be married to, though you might admire her spirit.

but she does bring forward something which is missing, which is the secular woman's point of view of what it's like being married, what the marriage market is like. Kind of contradictory view of sexuality in some ways. Her first three husbands seem to die and was worn out by her sexual demands, but at the same time she doesn't particularly enjoy sleeping with them because they're like smoked flesh, she said, and she was never very fond of bacon.

And then her last two husbands, particularly the last husband, seems to have been more satisfying in every way, even though he passed the time by reading misogynist stories to her. And it ended up with a fight and conceding authority in the household to her. So she's a contradictory figure in many ways. And her tale is surprising, perhaps, because in some ways you expect more of the same, more of the kind of vigour that you have in the prologue,

you expect perhaps a Fablio rather like the Millers tell, something which is going to be vulgar. And in fact, what you have is a rather delicate romance, which starts startlingly with a knight raping a maiden. And his sentence is to find out what it is that women want. And after a lot of roaming about the countryside, he finds an old hag who is able to tell him that what women want is their own way.

They want mystery. Sovereignty. Exactly. But the price is he has to marry her. And at the end of the story, he's extremely unhappy about this, but he's somehow learnt from his experience. And so when she says, you can choose to have me beautiful, and faithless or ugly and faithful,

he knows enough to say, you decide my dear, and she chooses to be beautiful and faithful, which in some ways I think is, I'm not sure he's deserved that yet, but I think that's something that people very about. It's a classic male fantasy fulfilled, isn't it? You get everything in the end.

You start with a rape and you end with a beautiful, faithful and obedient women. But it's also rather wonderfully the classic female fantasy fulfilled in that the old woman becomes young, again, that is the wife who's telling it. Though it has to be said that she, or if you prefer Chaucer, spends a full quarter of the tale on her pillow talk to him about the nature of true virtue and how it's gender-free

and you ought to follow Christ's example and so on. So if he were listening properly, perhaps he took that on board and he did learn. Perhaps there really is a sort of redemptive moment for him at the end. I sometimes wonder. I don't think so, because I think the only redemptive moment would have been if he had been brave enough to choose her ugly. Well, on that, I'm afraid we have to leave, so sadly, thanks to Ardis Butterfield, Caroline Larrington and Helen Cooper.

Next week we will be talking about human evolution from the earliest hominids to Homo sapiens. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4