The Rest Is History - 416. The Canterbury Tales (Part 4)

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Geoffrey Chaucer stands as a founding father of English literature, and ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is an enthralling account of his age, holding a mirror up to the traditional hierarchies of 14th century England. Chaucer’s own life was spent navigating the rapids of a particularly tumultuous period, from fighting in the Hundred Years’ War alongside Edward III, to working for the infamous John of Gaunt, becoming embroiled in London politics, and surviving the gruesome Black Death. Chaucer even lived through the explosive Peasants’ Revolt, during which his own life hung in the balance… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the turbulent life and seminal work of Geoffrey Chaucer, a titan of English history and trailblazer of social change. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. One that April, with his sure assault, the draught of March hath perished into the road, and bathed every vein, and switched liquor, of which virtue engendered is the floor. What is this accent? One Zephyrus Eke, with his sweet breath,

inspired hath in every halt and heath The tenderer croppers and the younger son, Hath in the ram his half a coarser run, And smaller fowlers make a melody That sleep in early night with open ye. So pricketh him that you're in here courages, That long on folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmers for the sake in stranger sons

To fern alvers, couther in sundry lawns And specially from every shire's end Of Angerland To counterbraid their wind The holy blissful matter of for to seek That hem hath holpen When the day worth seek That was brilliantly read dominic so as every british or english school child will know that is the opening the beautiful opening

to the canterbury tales by jeffrey chaucer and tom one of the great passages in english literature yeah and you did wonderful credit to it. And let's be honest, nobody knows what it means. Some people do. Well. So Neville Coghill did, who was the great scholar who translated it for the Penguin Classics. Yeah. Which I originally gave you to read. Yeah.

But you said, no, full in. No. Let's go for the Middle English. Yeah. You've got to do it properly. We don't mess around with modern translations. I mean, I've been criticized for weird accents, but I thought that was a very weird accent. Yeah, but I mean, you're dissing our predecessors.

You're dissing our ancestors with that. Is that what they sounded like? That is how they sounded. Brilliant. There's a bit of Scandinavian in there, which people may have picked up on. A sort of Germanic. Yeah. That is the purest and most unadulterated Middle English, Tom.

Well, that's wonderful. So, Tom. Okay. most unadulterated middle English, Tom. Well, that's wonderful. So Chaucer, who was born in around 1342 and dies in 1400, his life covers pretty much the span of all the episodes that we've been doing on the Hundred Years' War. So the reign of Edward III and Richard II. So I thought we couldn't really do the reign of Richard II and not talk about Chaucer because he's such a massively significant figure. So the Canterbury Tales, I love it. I'm not going to lie. I do love it for reasons that perhaps we'll come to in a few minutes. You said that

people study him in school. I mean, he's probably the one figure from the reigns of Edward III and Richard II who is still part of the curriculum, wouldn't you say? Well, he's the founding father of English literature. But he's also somebody, Tom, I think it's fair to say, and we might as well be honest with the listeners, the very mention of Chaucer's name generally leaves people pale with fear because he's got a formidable reputation. Basically, nobody knows what on earth it means. And people have been forced to do it in school. And they find it utterly intimidating and terrifying. But I'm confident that you're going to explain. I hope so. He is a fascinating person. The Canterbury

Tales is brilliant and really funny and exciting and interesting. And there is no better window onto medieval England than through Chaucer and his great poem. Is that right? So I think one thing just for people to kind of reset the gears in their head is that we think of him as being very old because he's kind of 14th century, so he is old. But he's also, in the context of the 14th century, very radical, very modern, very new. He is the guy who invents the word newfangledness. So he is newfangled. So just keep that in your mind. Try and think of him not as this venerable figure, but as someone who is at the absolute cutting edge of everything that is transformative in the 14th century, all the kind of the trends that we've been talking about. And so, as you

said, I mean, he is kind of enshrined as the father of English literature, which makes him sound very patriarchal and forbidding. Literally in Westminster Abbey. Absolutely. So his tomb in Westminster Abbey, it provides the kind of nucleus around which Poet's Corner has grown up. But he is also, I think, as you suggested, a fascinating window onto all the themes and episodes that we've been talking about.

And he's a poet who has an immense significance for me. He's one of those writers who I read at a very kind of formative time, which was actually, I mean, not long ago, it was in the pandemic. Because in April, 2020, I was meant to be walking with my brother across the North Downs in Kent. So pretty much along the route that the pilgrims would have taken from London to Canterbury. We should say, we haven't really said what the Canterbury Tales is about. Basically, it's about a group of pilgrims who are going from London to Canterbury. So we would have been following in their footsteps. And then of course, the lockdown, it didn't happen. And so I started reading the Canterbury Tales instead. Because the backdrop was the pandemic, I was alert to all

kinds of things that I hadn't really noticed before. So on the question of why the pilgrims are heading to Canterbury. Yeah, I think that was very clear from the readings, to be honest. Well, to Canterbury they went, the holy blissful martyr fought to seek, that hem hath holpen when that they were sick. So basically, the holy blissful martyr is Thomas Beckett and he's going to cure them. The shrine in Canterbury where he was murdered is celebrated for its miracles. And Chaucer actually had very good reason to hold Beckett in particular high regard. So he grew up in London in one of the parishes there of St. Martin Vintry that had an altar to St. Thomas.

And as an adult, he was always kind of going on business from London to Calais. So he would have passed through Canterbury. He would undoubtedly know the shrine very, very well. And I think that in April 2020, when everyone is thinking, when is this pandemic going to end? When are we going to get a vaccine? All that kind of stuff. the idea of people looking for cures seemed much more resonant than it might have done earlier before the pandemic right and chaucer of course had himself lived through a pandemic that made covid look like the mirror split the black death which was the black death and so you know he's born in 1342, and the Black Death arrives in England in the summer of 1348. So he would have remembered that, six years old.

Right. And notoriously, Chaucer is a Londoner, and it hits London very, very hard. So Chaucer's great-grandfather had kept a pub. His grandfather had been a wine merchant. His father was hugely significant in the London wine import business. In fact, so significant that he ends up doing it by appointment to the King. And it's because of that, that the Chaucer family dodge a bullet because they get sent to Southampton the year before the Black Death arrives. And even though obviously it's on the South Coast where the Black Death first appears and it definitely hits it, it doesn't hit Southampton and the towns along the South Coast as badly as London. And this may be what enables Chaucer to live, because pretty much all his relatives in London

are wiped out by the Black Death. And this, in fact, is the making of Chaucer, because his mother and his father both inherit substantial amounts of property as a result of all their relatives being killed and gives Chaucer a kind of a massive head start. So his parents end up very, very affluent. So that must be a scarring memory for him. And the Black Death keeps revisiting England throughout his life. And by the time, so in the reign of Richard II, that he comes to write the Canterbury Tales, it's endemic in London. I mean, London has kind of recovered. So we talked about this in the Peasants' Revolt episodes.

You've got cranes everywhere and high rises and it's a booming city. But the plague is endemic and it is a constant background presence. And you wouldn't actually be able to tell that from the Canterbury Tales unless you were looking for it. So there are very few references to it. So in a tale that is told by a knight, you have the terrifying figure of Saturn who boasts that his very gaze, my looking is the father of pestilence, he said. And then there's, have you read the Pardoner's Tale? I don't think I have, Tom. I'm ashamed to say. So the Pardoner's Tale, there are three riotous friends and they're told news of a guy who's been killed. And there came a privy thief, men clipeth death, that in

this country all the people slayeth. And with his spear he smote his herder too, and went his way without word is more. He hath a thousand slain this pestilence. So that's a description of one of the great cycles of the play coming. Yeah. I feel you're not leaning into the accent there, Tom, but apart from that, it's fine. I'm not. No, no. But I mean, if you want to redo it, maybe later. No, no, no. Okay. So the writers go in search of death to kill death and they get told that death is to be found under a tree and they go to this tree and there is a huge great chest of gold and they immediately forget about their search for death and they decide that one of them should go into town to get a cart so they can take away all the gold he goes into town decides that he's going to

poison his friends so get some wine put some poison and it goes back meanwhile the two friends have decided that they're going to kill the third guy and divide the money up between the two of them. They do that. They then drink the wine and they all die and death is found. So it's a brilliant story and made all the more kind of complex. And one of the reasons why Chaucer is a brilliant poet, that it teaches a tremendous moral. The partner is a kind of a preacher, but he's also a loathsome man. What he's doing is basically flogging off bogus relics. You know, He tells these stories and then he screws money out of people. Brilliant stuff. But it's also a story that is rooted in experience because this idea that people respond to plague by behaving in a riotous way, this is

absolutely a given. The idea that wild living is a response to death. English moralists look at London in particular and say that wild living has been a theme of how they respond to the plague. Thomas Walsingham, who we talked about, he's one of the chroniclers of the Peasants' Revolt. He says of Londoners, of all people, they were the proudest, the most arrogant, the most greedy. So that idea that you respond to plague by behaving in a wild way, this is kind of rooted in lived reality. But of course, wild living isn't the only response to plague. There is also pilgrimage. And I think that this is the context for the whole motif of the Canterbury Tales. Because what happens is that Chaucer describes himself going to Southwark to a pub

called the Tabard. And he's going on pilgrimage. And while he's there, he meets with nine and 20 people, so 29 people, and they all meet up and they all agree that Chaucer will go with them and they will head off to Canterbury together. And this is the basis for all the stories that then follow. And it struck me when I was reading this in April, 2020, that this is exactly what we couldn't do. We couldn't meet up with people. We couldn't meet up with strangers in pubs. All the pubs were shut.

You know, you had to socially distance. And that in a way, perhaps the Canterbury Tales is a celebration of getting out there and meeting new people and being able to travel. Because, you know, that famous, famous opening line, when thatil with his sure as zuta the sweet showers falling april is the month when the plague season ends in london so we know from the records of deathbed wills that january and february and march are the most lethal months for plague in london and in fact across northern europe and so april is when the plague ends. And even though people in the 14th century, they had no notion of germ theory, they absolutely had a sense that when plague hits, you should socially distance. So one of Chaucer's great inspirations for telling a series of short

stories is the Cameron by Boccaccio, the great Italian writer. And his kind of framing device is that the plague has hit Florence and people decide that they're going to retreat from Florence and kind of wall themselves up in a safe place in a garden where no one can get at them. So there is this sense that when plague hits, you isolate. I think the Canterbury Tales is the reverse of that. It's about saying, plague season is over. We can all meet up. Let's head out there. So in a sense, the Canterbury Tales is a great eulogy to the joys in a time of plague of meeting strangers and of not socially distancing. See, I actually enjoyed socially distancing and not meeting strangers, but that's by the

by. So you would have hated hanging out with the partner and the knight and everybody. I wouldn't have enjoyed that at all. Brilliant. But I think it's kind of interesting because it's one example of the way in which Chaucer's biography is repeatedly touching on all the great themes of the age.

Remind us again when he was born? 1342, did you say? Around 1342. So he's right there with the ringside seat and the high point for England of the Hundred Years' War, right? He is. And when you say ringside seat,

I mean, in some senses, literally, he's watching the great tournaments that Edward III is throwing to celebrate his victories because the wealth that his parents have accrued both by their own agency and because all their relatives have died and left them their property means that he is able to get social promotion. So as a young man, he is a page in the household of Lionel, who we mentioned in the previous episode. He's the third son of Edward III, the ancestor of Edmund of March, who should have legitimately succeeded Richard II. Chaucer is a page in his household, and he's, we know, tremendously stylish.

So he's a guy who wears a paltok, which is a very short garment, which moralists, again, are very opposed to. They fail to conceal the arse of the person who wears it or their private parts. Is that a quotation? That is indeed a quotation. Nice to think of Chaucer sporting that as a young lad. Right. He's a witness to the golden age of the court of Edward III, and he goes on war with Edward. In 1359, he accompanies him on one of his great chevauchées, the one that ends up before Paris, and they don't manage to capture the city.

So one of these raids, one of these kind of burning and pillaging raids. Yes. And in 1360, Chaucer is captured, and he ends up being ransomed for 15 pounds by Edward III himself. So he's witnessed the Hundred Years' War. He's witnessed both its glories and its horrors. And actually, the tale that is told by the knight, it's the first of the tales in the Canterbury Tales. There's a lot about captivity. There's a lot about the horrors of war. There's a lot about the kind of destruction and carnage that's inflicted about it. And I think that you get the sense both from Chaucer's poetry and from his career that he's not a great fan of fighting. He turns out to be a natural diplomat. So he goes on a lot of expeditions to places that, again, people who've listened to our series on the

Hundred Years' War will recognize. So he goes to Navarre, the home of Charles the Bad, brilliantly named Charles the Bad. And he goes to Italy a lot. Very, very influential on his development as a poet, because Italy at this point is a place where poets like Dante would be the most celebrated example, are starting to write in their own language rather than in Latin. And this, of course, is what Chaucer will do. So it's often said that Chaucer is writing in English, perhaps because he's hostile to foreign influences. He's a kind of literary Brexit or something like that. Yeah.

He's a literary Farageist. He's actually very Romain. Right. Because he's writing in English because he's being influenced by continental styles. So that's what he's trying to do. Yeah. Yeah.

He's a very cosmopolitan, very well connected man. So he's cosmopolitan both because he's traveled on the continent, but also the reason he's been sent on the continent is because he can speak Italian because he's grown up in one of the most cosmopolitan wards in London. It's full of Italian merchants, Flemish merchants. He's having daily dealings with them. So he speaks, you know, obviously he can speak French, he can speak Latin. He's very, very kind of sophisticated, but he's also well connected because, you know, he's been a page in. He's very, very sophisticated. But he's also well-connected because he's been a page in Lionel's court, but he also ends up amazingly with a family relationship to John

of Gaunt. So the most powerful magnate, yeah. Towering figure. So amazingly, his sister-in-law, who comes from Hainaut, like Philippa, who marries Edward III, his sister-in-law ends up marrying John of Gaunt and becoming the Duchess of Lancaster. So Chaucer, from this very humble background, has a kind of very distant family link to the great man. And when he's traveling to Italy, he's doing it as John of Gaunt's agent. And this is embroiling him in London politics, because again, I mean, looking back to the Peasants' Revolt episode, John of Gaunt is unpopular because he is basically hawking off licenses to Italian merchants and to

Lombard merchants and to Fleming merchants, allowing them to participate in the wool trade or whatever, because he's trying to raise money for the crown. And this is hugely opposed by monopolists in London who want to keep the wool trade entirely for themselves. So Chaucer is siding with John of Gaunt. And remember, Tom, in the President's Revolt, mobs attacking Lombards and stuff, Flemings. There was the sense of xenophobia. And he's on the wrong side of that from the point of view of the London mob, isn't he, Chaucer? Right. And in 1374, he is appointed controller of the wool custom, which basically means that,

you know, I mean, he's the man responsible for organizing the entire kind of wool trade from London to the continent. And he does it brilliantly. I mean, he's clearly an amazingly effective civil servant and kind of operator. So he holds the job for over a decade. And, you know, kind of reading about what his life, so there's a wonderful biography by Marian Turner, Chaucer, A European Life. She gives a brilliant portrait of Chaucer as in his role as controller of the wool custom. And there's kind of something weirdly modern about him. Again, this idea that Chaucer is a kind of hinge between the medieval and the modern. So he has this grace and favour apartment above Aldgate, which is literally one of the Roman gates in the city

walls. And he has this kind of flat basically above the gate. And his place of work is an office near the tower. And so he's walking to work. So he's commuting. And this is very, very unusual. People don't normally do this. So he's one of the very earliest London commuters that we know of. Did you not want to call this episode the first commuter? Well, I thought it might be. I think that it gives him a kind of vividness, a sense of the contemporaneous that perhaps otherwise he wouldn't have. I have to say that has gone on the honours board of mad Tom Holland ideas. But anyway, continue.

But it is a dangerous job because he is in the crosshairs of this venomous rivalry between the monopolists in London, between John of Gaunt. And also, it has to be said that he has some quite unsavoury associates. So one of his family associates is Sir Richard Lyons, again, who we mentioned in the Peasants' Revolt episode, who was a fabulously corrupt associate of John of Gaunt. He was a whiner rather than a wool monopolist. And he comes to a very, very sticky end in the Peasants' Revolt. So not only is Gaunt's sack, but Sir Richard Lyons is dragged out from his house and has his head chopped off by a mob on Cheapside in the heart of the city. And so you have to wonder, how close did Chaucer come

to being torn to pieces? Because he's absolutely in the eye of the city. And so you have to wonder, how close did Chaucer come to being torn to pieces? Because he's absolutely in the eye of the storm. So think about that flat above the Aldgate. The Aldgate is the gate through which the rebels from Essex and Suffolk come flooding into the city. So we don't know if Chaucer is there. Yeah, hiding in the back room. But if he was, I mean, it must the back room. by a fox and there's this great kind of turmoil all the hens kind of flying up startled so hideous was the noise god bless us all jack straw and all his followers in their brawl were never half so shrill for all their noise when they were murdering those flemish boys as that day's hue and cry upon

the fox so you have there both the din and a kind of sense of horror at the murder of the Flemings who were part of a basically a kind of mass lynching and it kind of sounds personal I mean it's kind of sounds like it's coming from maybe something he'd observed we don't know but what we do know for sure is that basically Chaucer survives it yeah and I think he is a survivor he's a man with a kind of a genius for negotiating the rapids of the age. And maybe something of Shakespeare in that, do you think? Shakespeare also, I mean, he seems to be a kind of smooth operator. Right.

Yeah. Well, I mean, to keep his head in turbulent times, I mean, not just the Black Death, but as you say, the Peasants' Revolt, he must have had something about him. But also the fact that he's taken up by powerful people. You would never thrive in medieval court if you were a kind of difficult, prickly, unimpressive person. Yeah. So I think he's very kind of emollient, very diplomatic.

He's clearly very charming, I guess. I mean, he keeps people on side. When he speaks foreign languages, he's used to dealing with foreign bigwigs, all of that sort of business. So you do get some sense of him, don't you? Yeah. But because he's been through the Hundred Years' War, the plague, peasants' revolt, all the convulsions of the age, he is very aware that he's living through effectively a period of

social and cultural transformation. And he himself is an embodiment of that because he's the grandson of a pub landlord who is now a relative of the Duke of Lancaster. So he's aware that it's a period where traditional hierarchies are being upended. And again, that idea of people meeting up from all walks of life in the Tabard Inn and preparing to go on pilgrimage, if this is signaling an escape from plague, from a period of social distancing through the winter, I think it is also signaling a society in flux. And I'm sure that that's why Chaucer chooses the framing device he does. It's an opportunity for bringing people from all different walks of life together. And this is also what is newfangled, to use Chaucer's own word, his own neologism. It's what's newfangled about

the Canterbury Tales, because it's a poem that is embracing multiple perspectives, men, women, from an incredible array of social backgrounds. And there's been nothing like it in English literature, in any kind of document or record that we have from medieval England before. So to quote Marian Turner, who's brilliant on this, characters from ordinary life who talk about themselves and their own experiences in detail, narrating personal histories and encouraging sympathetic responses and identifications. And I read her book very shortly, Dominic, after I read your book on the early 80s, Who Dares Wins. What I loved about Who Dares Wins, I loved loads about it, but I loved the social richness of it. Oh, that's nice.

The way in which people from every walk of life, you talk about the royal family and you talk about unemployed people and you talk about football and you talk about new romantics and you talk about snooker and everything is there. You love the snooker. And I was kind of thinking that the Canterbury Tales, basically, it's a prefiguring of that understanding of society as being inherently interesting in all its complexity and richness. Yeah. But he's not, you know, we're not the rest is literature, but he's significant, I think, because his poetry enables us for the first time, if you like, to write a kind of Sandbrookian history. So that comparison with Geoffrey Chaucer, Tom, has dogged me all my life, to be honest. But do you think, would you recognize? I hadn't thought of the comparison with myself, it's fair to say.

I'm not saying, just to be clear, I'm not comparing you as a literary figure with Chaucer. Oh, that's disappointing. But the reason the Canterbury Tales is fascinating from the historian's point of view, I think, is that you get ordinary people, you could call them ordinary people. Yeah. It's a panorama of a kind that has never previously existed, right? Yes. It's a social mosaic. And I'm just thinking whether there is any precedent for it,

whether there is anything like it. I don't think there is. Certainly not in English. And I don't really think in other literatures either. Okay. So that's Chaucer. And maybe in the second half, Tom, we can get into the Canterbury Tales a little bit. Because as you said, we're not the rest of literature. But the point of the Canterbury Tales is not just that it's a magnificent work of literary craftsmanship, but it's an incredible historical document. Yeah.

And so we'll tease out some of that after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Lordings, quoth he, now hearken for the best, but take it not, I pray you, in disdain. This is the point, to speak it blatant plain,

that each of you to shorten with your way in this voyage shall tellen tale as twa to Canterbury would, I mean it so, and home would he shall tell another two of adventurers that Willam have before, and which of you that beareth him best of all, that is to say, that telleth in this case tale as a best sentence, and most so lace shall have a supper at y'all a cost, here in this sitting by this post when that ye come again from Canterbury. Who knows what it means? Tom, you know what it means.

Well, what does it mean? You give the translation. So basically the deal is this. They've met in that Tabard, a pub, haven't they? Yeah, in Selak. And the guy who's the host has said to them you know you've got this pilgrimage you're going to go on this massive expedition to canterbury very tom holland behavior and each of you will tell stories to each isn't that right to each on the way out yeah to each on the way back

yeah and it'll pass the time but it's also a competition because when we all get back to canterbury the person who is told the best stories by sort of popular acclamation- Well, no, the host will decide. Yeah, but he'll presumably take the temperature of the company, Tom. Of course, of course, yes. Everybody, they will all contribute and they will buy dinner for the person who's done the best job. And that's the fun of it. It's a game. It's a contest. Exactly. And this idea of people speaking in succession from different walks of society,

I think someone in the late 14th century reading this would automatically assume that it would go on to express what is the absolutely traditional kind of medieval love of hierarchy and formality. The idea that everyone has his station, his or her station, and that therefore the ordering of the tales should reflect that. So the setup is given us, the pilgrims are going to Canterbury, they're accompanied by the host, there's a guy called Harry Bailey, and they draw lots. And the first person to tell a tale is the guy who is the most socially significant, who is the knight, who we've already mentioned. And he then tells a very traditional chivalric romance.

And I think that people would think, okay, we know where we're going with this. It's going to go from the highest to the lowest. But right from the beginning, everything is basically jumbled. And even before the knight starts his tale, you're aware that things aren't quite as you, if you're a guy in the 14th century, as you would expect. So first of all, the division between fiction and reality is being blurred. So Harry Bailey, the host, he actually exists. He's not a fictional character. We have over 20 contemporary records that name him. He's not specifically linked to the tabard, but we know that he was an austere, an innkeeper in Southwark. So he probably did

run and own the tabard. And he was also an MP. So he's a significant figure. And Chaucer knows him. Chaucer does know him. Yes. And this must be a tremendous joke. Yes. Maybe an in-joke between the two of them. Yes. And all their circle people in London. He's probably a well-known London character. I mean, he's an MP. He's a big landlord in in southwark and of course the other real person

who's in the poem is chaucer himself but it's kind of chaucer and it's kind of not because chaucer has to tell a tale and he's terrible his tale is so bad that the host stops it right yeah so he tells a tale of a knight called satopaz. So one of the descriptions of Sir Topaz, he had a seemly nose. Very good. And the host just said, this is terrible. Stop it. Right. And then Chaucer tells another story and it's incredibly boring. And it's that sense that

we're not just in a fictional world. We are in a world where a mirror is being held up to reality and distorting it. So Tom, it's like Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Chaucer is Larry David. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like. Brilliant comparison.

But of course, more significantly and intriguingly, the social hierarchy is blurred. So as I say, you begin with the knight and classically in the medieval understanding of society, it's tripartite. So you have those who fight, those who pray, those who labor. And in the Canterbury Tales, you do get kind of representative figures for those three classes of person. So of course you have the knight, you have a parson, and you have a ploughman. And the ploughman is the brother of the parson. And Chaucer seems to admire all three. Terry Jones famously wrote a book arguing that actually the knight was an evil mercenary, but I think that's generally not

accepted. The knight is a figure of chivalry and prowess. He's a very perfect, gentle knick, is the famous Chaucerian phrase. The parson is a person who is unlike a lot of the clerical figures. So like the partner, like the summoner, like the monk, all of whom are kind of corrupt in various ways. The prioress, who is a shocking anti-Semite. The parson is an admirable figure. And the ploughman, likewise, is a person who's very close to Christ. So he seems to respect all three. But he understands that that paradigm is inadequate to explain the complexities of the society in which he is living. He's a Londoner. He's witnessed how complex society is. He also has personal experience of the way in which attempts to impose traditional old-fashioned hierarchies on society simply don't work. So in the first episode, we talked about the statute of labourers.

Yes, trying to regulate labour and wages after the Black Death. Yes, introduced in 1351. And this is very important as an explanation for what, since the late 19th century, has been a very, very notorious episode in the life of Chaucer. So in 1873, documents were found that pointed to a case that had been brought against Chaucer by a guy called Thomas Staundon in 1379. And it recorded an agreement, what was called a quit claim, by a woman called Cecily Champagne. And Cecily agreed not to sue Chaucer over a case of what, in legal Latin, was referred to as a raptus. And a raptus can be translated as a rape. And so ever since then, there's been this kind of shadow over Chaucer's reputation. Was he a rapist?

Is this what the court case was about? But a couple of years ago, documents were found that showed that actually what the raptus referred to was a case that had been brought under the statute of laborers. Because Thomas Staunton, it turns out that had been brought under the statute of laborers because thomas staunton it turns out had been the employer of cecily and chaucer had offered her higher wages to work for him oh right and the quick claim cecily's quick claim basically i'm quoting here the scholars who discover the document offered the most expedient legal path under the statute of laborers for both chaucer andagne to demonstrate that she had left her employment with Staunton voluntarily, as opposed to being coerced or abducted before commencing work for Chaucer. So in other words, phew, Chaucer isn't

a rapist. He is a guy who is leaning into social and economic change, who is frustrating the statute of labourers, who is basically taking advantage of the fact that society has become much more mobile, and if you're a conservative, much more chaotic. I think you can look at the Canterbury Tales and see it as a kind of literary equivalent of what Chaucer is doing there, a refusal to be bound by a literary equivalent to the statute of labourers. So when the knight has finished telling his tale, the host turns to the person that the reader would expect, which is a figure from the church, because if you had a man who fights, then you expect to have a man who prays. So the host turns to the monk, but he gets interrupted. He gets interrupted by a miller. And the miller is

pissed. He's vulgar. He's low class. He's absolutely not the kind of person who should be following a knight and who should be interrupting a monk. But he's so drunk and he's so determined that he just carries on with his tale. And the miller's tale- It's very famous. Yeah. Very famous. Very famous. And the miller's tale famously quoted by Procol Horum in A White Shade of Pale, is very, very rude. Yeah. So there's a lot of... Buttocks.

People kissing arses, farting, buttocks being branded, all this kind of thing. It's the story that basically, if you do the Canterbury Tales at school, you hope this is the one the teacher's going to choose, and they never do. Because it is funny. Yeah. Definitely funny. But in its essentials, it's basically the same as The Knight's Tale. It's the same plot because The Knight's Tale had been all about two men competing for a lady. And The Miller's Tale is essentially the same.

And The Miller says that he is quieting the knight. So he's paying the knight back. And this is very disruptive. Right. You know, in the wake of the Great Rev revolt and the social turbulence of the age. I mean, it's a very, very bold thing for Chaucer to be doing. And from that point on, the hierarchy is completely disrupted. So the pilgrims are not bound by the traditional social classes. Not only do you have millers, you have merchant, a cook, a shipman, you have a lawyer, you have

various people from London guilds, you have a doctor, you have a yeoman who comes galloping up. All kinds of things are happening all the time. And I think that there is one of the pilgrims more than any other who embodies that sense of upheaval and novelty and I guess newfangledness, again, to use that Chaucerian word yeah and that's probably the most famous of all the pilgrims and that's the wife of Bath all right so the wife of Bath how many times has she been married five times she's been married five times and she tells the pilgrims that she's looking for a sixth husband terrifying describe her to the to the listeners Tom so she's very handsome.

She's very rosy-cheeked, although Chaucer specifies that she has a gap tooth. She's very broad-hipped. She wears bright red stockings. Scandalous. So very striking figure. She's a clothmaker. Yeah.

She is rich enough that she's a serial pilgrim. So she's been to Rome. She's been to Santiago de la Compostela. so those are the two great pilgrimage sites in Europe, and she's been to Jerusalem three times. Was it possible for people to have gone multiple times to Jerusalem? Yes, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. But it would be very expensive, surely? Very expensive, yes. So the wife of Bath is clearly quite a woman. Yeah.

And she tells a tremendous tale, which is about rape. This is why the idea that Chaucer himself was a rapist is so unsettling because the wife of Bath is a very, very, I think it's not too anachronistic to use the word, a very feminist figure. So her story is about a knight who has committed a rape. He's a rapist. He is threatened with execution. He's at the court of King Arthur, but Gwynevere intervenes and says that if he can find out what it is that women most desire within a set period of time, then he will be spared execution. The knight goes around trying to find it, can't find it. Then he meets a very ugly old woman who tells him the answer. The answer is that what women most desire is

sovereignty over their husbands. And the price she demands for revealing this is that the knight will marry her. And so the knight thinks, oh God, I've got to. So on their wedding night, they go to bed and the knight is appalled that he's in bed with this ugly old woman. And she's very upset. And she ends up offering him a choice. She says that he's in bed with this ugly old woman and she's very upset and she ends up offering him a choice she says that he can choose she has kind of magical powers he can choose to have an old and ugly wife who will be true and loyal to him so in other words she will remain as she is or she will change and become very very beautiful very youth, but she won't be faithful. So which would he rather have? And the knight kind of ponders it. And then he says, I can't decide. You decide. And his wife

is so delighted that he has surrendered sovereignty to her that she allows him to have his cake and eat it. So she turns into this kind of beautiful young woman and she's very faithful. So there you go. So this is the story that the wife of Bath tells. But the thing that makes it one of the greatest, greatest pieces of writing in the whole of English is the prologue. So the introduction to it, where the wife of Bath speaks in her own voice at twice the length that she devotes to her story. In here, she's telling the story of the five husbands that she's married. And on the one hand, she's kind of cheerfully admitting all the tricks that she's employed to kind of bend them to her will. But at the same time, she's

describing the domestic abuse that several of them have inflicted on her. So who would suppose the woe that in my heart was and pain. So that's, you know, you see into the kind of the depths of her misery when she's suffering abuse. But at the same time, she's very, very rebellious, witty, larger than life, celebrating sex, refusing to be cowed by the fact that she's kind of getting on in life and absolutely contemptuous of the arguments that men traditionally present saying that women should be subordinate to men and that wives should be subordinate to husbands. And she is kind of making the point, which is one that's absolute standard

now in feminist theory, that men can write misogynist texts because they're men. And because in the Middle Ages and back into late antiquity, her husbands are always quoting the church fathers and she's saying, well, they would say that, they're men. Yeah, of course. Exactly. Yeah. If lions were writing it, they would write it about lions. And again, to quote Marian Turner, who wrote a wonderful biography of the wife of Bath, she says of the wife of Bath that she is the first ordinary woman in English literature. By that, I mean the first mercantile, working, sexually active woman, not a virginal princess or queen, not a nun, a witch, not a damsel in distress, nor a functional servant character, not an allegory. Right. But a living, breathing flesh and blood woman with agency and with

desires and anxieties and all these things of her own i mean she's basically chaucer's full staff yeah and marion turner in her book suggests that actually she's a direct influence on full staff so she she is a literary figure but like so much in chaucer's poetry she tells us a lot about what is convulsive about society in England in the wake of the Black Death. Right. So why is she a wife of Bath? Well, Marian Turner in her book points out that there is a lot of cloth manufacturing going on around Bath. Bath is near the Cotswolds, the wool trade, the booming kind of wool villages and towns.

Absolutely. Yeah. So Tom, somebody listening to or reading the story in the 14th century, they would immediately say, oh, rich. Yeah. You know, an area where there's a lot of social economic change. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, it's like she's a tech entrepreneur, I guess would be the equivalent for us.

She's someone who is in a hot spot of the economy and one that explains how she's as rich as she is. And it's not surprising that she's a woman because what has also happened in the wake of the Black Death is that it has accentuated trends, not just within England, but across much of Northern Europe, say Flanders as well and Germany and Scandinavia, in which women can increasingly choose who they want to marry. They're maybe having fewer children compared, say, to women in the Mediterranean, and they can marry repeatedly. And this gains them capital,

which they can then kind of invest in things like, say, cloth manufacturer. And probably more women are involved in the economy in this period, in England, in the Netherlands, whatever, in the lowlands, than anywhere else in the world. They probably are exercising higher standards of numeracy, higher standards of literacy. So again, to quote Marian Turner, there is widespread agreement that in the second half of the 14th century, many English women had more choices and more autonomy than they had at other points in history or in other places. So the wife of Bath, her feminism is something that Chaucer is not inventing. Clearly, he recognizes that it's an expression of something that is distinctive about the society in which he's living. And the whole emphasis on the wife of Bath, she's a serial person who's

marrying. This is a trend in England at this time. The idea that widows marry is very, very disapproved by the church fathers. And this is what the wife of Bath is always complaining about. She's all in favor of it. And just as the church fathers cite scripture saying it's a sin, she cites and often misquotes scripture to say it's absolutely brilliant, absolutely fine. And what women can do in this period is that they marry very young. So 12 is when you basically, as a girl, you kind of enter the marriage economy. And girls will often be married to husbands who are much older than them. So The Merchant's Tale also is about this. It's about a very elderly man marrying a very young girl. And that means the husbands die.

The girl, she'd be quite young. She pockets a lot of the inheritance. So under the common law, widow can keep a third of the husband's property for life. And if your husband's dead when you're 18, you marry again. He dies, you're 25. And so it goes on. You can accrue quite a lot of property. So you build your fortune. Yeah. And this is particularly true of women who are involved in trade. So in London, a widow inherits the marital home for life. That's not the case under the common law, but it is for merchants in London. And in London, a widow can keep a third of all the movable goods that a husband has, again, for life. So it's possible for women to end up very, very wealthy. And the wife of Bath is, in that sense, the embodiment of that cultural trend.

And there is a real life example that parallels the wife of Bath that illustrates just how wealthy a woman could become by remarrying. And that is none other than Chaucer's own granddaughter. That's Alice, right? Yes. So Chaucer dies in 1400, shortly after Henry IV has come to the throne. And of course, Chaucer, he's been a loyal associate of John of Gaunt. So he survived Richard II's reign. And now that Henry has become king, probably the last poem that Chaucer writes is a poem asking him for a bit of money. He's done amazingly well for a person of his social background, but not as well as his granddaughter Alice does. So by the age of 24,

she's twice widowed, and both of them have left her with a lot of money. And she then goes on to marry William de la Pole, who will in due course become the Duke of Suffolk and who is the grandson of the Michael de la Pole, who was the Chancellor under Richard II and got attainted. Right. Who we talked about last time. Yeah. Wow. Right. So the Duke of Suffolk himself, the one that Alice has married, he also gets attainted and actually gets executed. But Alice keeps hold of all his lands and property. And she remains a widow for 25 years and she speculates and she increases her wealth. And she basically becomes one of the richest people in the whole kingdom, hugely respected,

massive, massive operator. And amazingly, her son, john de la pole ends up marrying elizabeth of york who is the younger sister of edward the fourth and richard the third yeah so she is the aunt of the princes in the tower right and she has a son yes and her son tom so the son of elizabeth of york and john de la pole this is very confusing that would make him chaucer's great great grandson he's also called john de la pole he is and he becomes the heir to richard the third so in 1484 yes richard the third names this john de la pole yeah cha-great-grandson, as his heir, which is incredible. And of course, Richard III gets defeated by Henry VII, who marries Elizabeth of York's niece, also called Elizabeth, very confusing.

And John de la Pole never ends up becoming king, but he's still very much on the scene. And two years after the Battle of Bosworth in 1487, Lambert Simnel, raising the banner of rebellion, John de la Pole is there and he dies at the Battle of Stoke, which Henry VII wins against Lambert Simnel. But I mean, amazing, amazing that Chaucer's heirs are that close to the throne. So Chaucer's great-great-grandson could have been king. Could have been king. Yeah.

Crikey. That's not bad for him. What was Chaucer's great-grandson or something? Of a pub landlord been king. Yeah. Crikey. That's not bad for... What was Chaucer, the great-grandson or something of a... Of a pub landlord, of Al Murray. That's amazing. Yeah. So I think that, I mean, Chaucer's life is fascinating as an illustration of the social turbulence of the age and of just how far people could rise. And it's not surprising that Chaucer himself, who's so socially mobile, should have been so interested in that as a theme. Of course, there's a sense in which that aspect of him gets buried because he very rapidly becomes the father of English literature, this great patriarchal figure.

Canterbury Tales gets famously printed by Caxton, one of the first books to be printed in England. He's the first English writer to have a complete works. So that happens in Henry VIII. And then the end of the 16th century, his tomb. So he's not buried in Westminster Abbey because he's a poet. He's buried in Westminster Abbey as a mark of respect from the monks who he'd associated with. But he gets put in a kind of improved tomb that suits his stature as the father of English literature. And Tom, we did say we're not the rest is literature, but he is the father of English literature, isn't he? did say we're not the rest is literature, but he is the father of English literature, isn't he? Because it's not just what he does with the language, inventing

all these words and phrases that we are so familiar with today, but he creates a way of writing, which as you said, is panoramic, is often very funny, is earthy, is sort of rooted in the concrete everyday realities of English life that so many writers, I mean, Shakespeare and Dickens would be two obvious examples, have kind of picked up. I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible that they would have done what they did without Chaucer, but Chaucer absolutely stands at the center of that tradition, doesn't he? He does. And I think his achievement is so great that it legitimizes for his literary heirs the idea that writing in English can be as prestigious as writing in Latin or French. So all the great poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries would kind of be unthinkable,

really, without Chaucer's inspiration. And the other purely literary way in which Chaucer is massively influential is that because he's writing in the London dialect, it cements the sense of Southeastern English as being, I mean, not received pronunciation, but being the model that various other English dialects will start to be shaped by over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. And so purely as a literary figure, I mean, he's the first great writer of the language that has become the global lingua franca. And he's a poet who, I mean, I know we've kind of made a joke about how he's impossible to understand, but actually he's not that hard to understand. He doesn't take that much of an effort and he is a great great poet whose achievements as i said i found them you know they gave me kind of great comfort and distraction in the first weeks of the lockdown yeah so i'm very happy to have done him

but i think you can also justify doing an episode of the rest is history on chaucer because he's so fascinating as a window onto the events that we've been describing. Right. Brilliant. Well, thank you, Tom. That was, it was not just a tour de force, actually. It was a tour d'horizon of medieval England. Now, the good news for listeners who've enjoyed this is that we are going to pause now,

as we often like to do, but we will be returning later in the year, won't we, to this period, and you'll be taking up the story of what happens next. Henry IV, parts one and two. And Henry V and Agincourt. And one of the most evil characters in history, Joan of Arc, will be making her debut on the rest of history.

And the good news for those of you who didn't enjoy this is that actually next week we'll be doing something different. But I don't believe such people exist, Tom, because everybody will have enjoyed this. There will definitely be no Middle English in the next episode. Oh, that is disappointing. So, on that bombshell, believe such people exist, Tom, because everybody will have enjoyed this. There will definitely be no Middle English in the next episode. Oh, that is disappointing. So on that bombshell,

thank you very much, Tom. Thank you, everybody. And we'll see you next week. Bye bye. Bye bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host

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