Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis (Costerus NS 167)

Venus’ Owne Clerk Chaucer’s Debt to the Confessio Amantis COSTERUS NEW SERIES 167 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D...

Author: B.W. Lindeboom

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Venus’ Owne Clerk Chaucer’s Debt to the Confessio Amantis

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 167 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

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Venus’ Owne Clerk Chaucer’s Debt to the Confessio Amantis

B.W. Lindeboom

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2150-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgement Introduction One

Chaucer’s Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales

3

Two

Towards Composing a Testament of Love

45

Three

The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower

123

Four

The Testament of Love

147

Five

Confession, Sin and the Wife of Bath

227

Six

The Pardoner’s Confession of Sin

295

Seven

The Wife of Bath’s Sermon

319

Eight

The Pardoner’s Double Sermon

395

Conclusion

437

Reference

461

Register

475


Acknowledgement I should like to express my thanks to all those who have helped to bring this book to a successful end. My great debts of gratitude are to my wife Mieke as a modern-day Griselda, to Roderick J. Lyall, by whose guidance my theory has greatly benefited, to Jeremy J. Smith, who has been a pillar of support throughout, and to Erik Kooper, who has graciously helped me to prepare this study for wider publication. The cover of this book is based on a drawing by my daughter Edwina Lindeboom. Finally, I owe many thanks to my good nephew Harmen for all his computer-related assistance.


Introduction If I were asked to define within the space of a single paragraph what this book is all about, my answer would be twofold. One part explores, often in great detail, the curious composition of the prologues and tales told by the Wife of Bath and Pardoner. Both go in for a confession that is not just a literary one but also of a religious nature, easily encompassing all the Seven Deadly Sins. This can be demonstrated at the hand of the Parson’s discussion of the subject. The correspondences do no stop here, as it is also demonstrable that, contrary to general opinion, the Wife and the Pardoner are each engaged in preaching a sermon that closely follows the rules of the so-called modern university type which was the standard form in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day. The other part seeks to pin down the reasons why Chaucer went in for such a tour de force, why these two characters, only peripherally linked in the Canterbury Tales as we know them, were selected for this and why, having produced these two clever and intricate nar-ratives, he then failed to put them to any special joint use. Frustratingly, it has proved impossible to deal with matters in the order that I have just presented them. So much is interconnected that this would involve an excess of forward reference and advance explanation. For this reason and to my regret, I have been obliged to turn things around and deal with the much trickier why and wherefore before tackling the easy part of demonstrating the confessional and homiletic aspects involved. It is something that my readers may bear in mind when turning the pages below, much of the credibility of my argument being based on what are now my four final chapters. At the centre of all my problems resides the incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales, a fact that registers only dimly with the majority of its readers. This is understandable, since the work has a very distinct beginning and an equally distinct ending and thus conveys a sense of completeness. Even among the experts the inclination to treat the Tales as a whole work is considerable and lies in wait at unexpected moments, when in fact the work is seriously incomplete. To further complicate matters, there is good evidence that at some time during the writing of the Canterbury Tales Chaucer radically altered his narrative design. The original idea, as outlined in the General

2 | Introduction

Prologue, was for an extensive work of estates satire in which each pilgrim was to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and another two on the way home. This appears to have been replaced by a strictly linear pilgrimage, beginning in Southwark and ending in Canterbury. In the process, Chaucer reduced the tales to be told from four to one for every pilgrim and included the Parson’s Tale, thus adding a spiritual dimension. It is the chief aim of this study to unravel the causes which led Chaucer to go in for such a sweeping change. The change as such is easily demonstrated and has in fact been widely accepted, even if its exact contours appear to have escaped close investigation. What motivated it, however, has never been seriously addressed. It is my contention that the explanation lies in Gower’s Confessio Amantis whose 1390 version includes a brief address to Chaucer at its conclusion. Traditionally interpreted as an accolade, its seventeen lines are analysed here as a less accommodating invitation to a literary contest. In the chapters to come it is the outlines of this contest and its repercussions that I seek to trace. Hilversum, November 2006

1. Chaucer’s Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales The Original Plan of the Canterbury Tales When Chaucer began work on the Canterbury Tales, the book that he seems to have had in mind was a vast volume of stories. The General Prologue, “generally put in or about 1387”,1 mentions in line 24 the figure of 29 pilgrims, to whom we must add Chaucer himself and the Host. Each of these is invited by the latter to join in a storytelling scheme. This scheme is drawn quite explicitly. Each pilgrim is to tell two tales on the outward journey and two more on the way home. The one who comes up with the tale “of best sentence and moost solaas”, in the Host’s judgement, will get a free meal upon the pilgrims’ return to Southwark: … ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye, In this viage shal telle tales tweye To Caunterbury-ward, I mene it so, And homward he shal tellen othere two, 1 F.N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1933; London: OUP, 1957 2nd ed.), p 650. Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (1987; Oxford etc: OUP, 1991 3rd ed), also includes 1388 as a possibility (p 798). N.F. Blake, on the other hand, not only avers that “the usual chronology suggests a date about 1385” (which rather misrepresents the true state of affairs) and even goes on to suggest, at p 51, that the “Canterbury Tales could have been embarked upon long before the accepted date of 1385”. The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (London/Victoria/Baltimore: Arnold, 1985). A different note has been sounded by Dolores Warwick Frese, An Ars Legendi for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1991), pp 90-193. On the basis of the correspondence of some of the tales, particularly the Pardoner’s and the Summoner’s, with their portraits in the General Prologue, she argues, within a wider argument in favour of 24 tales as the complete work and a body count of 29 pilgrims, that the General Prologue is Chaucer’s final piece of writing on the Canterbury Tales. As far as I can make out, this view stems from Charles A. Owen Jr, ‘The Alternative Reading of The Canterbury Tales’, PMLA 97 (1982): 237-50. Its unlikelihood is discussed later in this chapter. Nor is she accurate on the total number of pilgrims, which is claimed to range from 28 to 31, all well-suited to an astronomical reading whereby the pilgrims equal the number of days of the month. The actual number is 33, with the evidence indicating that this was one point on which Chaucer had not yet reached any definite decision.

4 | Chaucer’s Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales Of aventures that whilom han bifalle. And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas Tales of best sentence and moost solaas Shal have a soper at oure aller cost Heere in this place, sittynge by this post, Whan that we come agayn fro Caunterbury. [GenProl, 791/801]

This is the main idea, though the Host has his own particular contribution to make. He is made “oure governour” and “of oure tales juge and reportour”, while the pilgrims … wol reuled been at his devys In heigh and lough; and thus by oon assent We been acorded to his juggement. [GenProl, 816/18]

If it should be felt that the four-tale plan is merely the Host’s pet project and that the pilgrims themselves have something far simpler in mind, such as just a single tale each, the passages just cited make it abundantly clear that this is not the case. One wonders whether the Host was also meant to be manoeuvred into producing a tale at some moment, by the pilgrims’ general acclaim or some such device – surely a good Chaucerian twist – or, in his role of the company’s self-appointed judge, remain as exempt from any narrative obligations as he plainly considers himself to be. What this leaves us with is a basic plan for the originally conceived Canterbury Tales of about 30 pilgrims telling twice two tales each, seemingly promising us something in the order of 120 tales – a very ambitious plan indeed. To judge by most of the portraits that we find in the General Prologue, they were conceived in terms of estate satire in a scheme whereby each pilgrim is given a role in highlighting some particular foible associated with his or her station in society.2 Naturally, we ought to be glad at Chaucer’s outline of this design. It is not every author who provides such insights in the way he intends to go about his business. The snag is that, beyond the evident fact of a substantial set of pilgrim-narrators, the Canterbury Tales as they have come down to us hardly reflect this scheme. 2

This subject is covered extensively by Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973).

Chaucer’s Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales | 5

A Change of Heart and a New Plan The Canterbury Tales that we are familiar with constitutes not even a fifth of what Chaucer promises us in the General Prologue. Only 23 pilgrims tell a tale and sometimes not even that much, as in the Squire’s and Cook’s cases. None of them get to narrate more than one.3 At the time of his death Chaucer evidently left an unfinished work, as attested, among other things, by the absentee tales and “the apparent fact that he left behind all sorts of incomplete changes and passages requiring revision”.4 Actually, as has been editorially recognized ever since the time of his death, the evidence points to a major change of conception. The situation is nicely illustrated by the following test. Suppose the Canterbury Tales had come down to us with lines 790/801 of the General Prologue missing, which is where he describes his narrative design, what would we assume his plan for them to have been? The answer is obvious. The Canterbury Tales which this leaves us are structured along these simple lines: 1) each pilgrim tells one tale only 2) journey’s end is at Canterbury 3) the Parson’s Tale adds a spiritual dimension The first consideration is self-evident. This is the way the actual work is constructed. It is not only what anyone can see for themselves but also a deduction to be drawn straight from the prologue to what is undeniably the final tale – the Parson’s Tale. Or so we judge it to be in the light of what Chaucer postscripted to it: “Heere is ended the book of the tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer, of whose soule Jhesu Crist have mercy. Amen”.5 This basically reiterates 3

Benson, p 796. The objection that comes to mind, of course, is Chaucer the pilgrim with his Sir Thopas and his subsequent telling of the Melibee. This, however, cannot be taken as a case of someone telling two tales in terms of the original arrangement. 4 Benson, p 796. 5 Modern scholarship is largely satisfied that the Retraction is authentic (Benson, p 965). As Benson adds (p 955), “there is no question that [the] three component parts [of Fragment X], the Parson’s Prologue, Parson’s Tale, and the Retraction are firmly linked together by speaker and repeated theme [...]. Nor is there any doubt that the fragment was intended as the final section of the Tales, a position it indeed holds in all the manuscripts. The length, prose form, dullness, and somber tone of The Parson’s Tale, leading to a statement of authorial remorse and the retraction of what gener-

6 | Chaucer’s Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales

what the Host says in the Parson’s Prologue. There is just one more tale to be told and then his part will be over, as he makes clear in the lines below: Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon. Fulfilled is my sentence and my decree; I trowe that we han herd of ech degree; Almoost fulfild is al myn ordinaunce. [ParsProl, 16/19]

The words he now addresses to the Parson are well worth noting: “Sire preest,” quod he, “artow a vicary? Or arte a person? Sey sooth, by thy fey! Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley; For every man, save thou, hath toold his tale”. [ParsProl, 22/25]

This is all very clear. There can be no doubt: every man (or woman, for that matter) has told his tale – singular. The very phrasing of the Host’s invitation here is significant. No one has been telling more than a single tale and there is not the faintest whiff of anything further to be told but the Parson’s present tale and when that is done the Host’s ordinaunce, the assignment that he has set himself and the pilgrims, will have been fulfilled. The notion of a single tale also fits the Parson. This final tale of his is plainly the first that he gets to tell. This is also the inference to be drawn from the total ignorance about him that the Host displays here. This Parson is an unknown factor, and this again is borne out by his Tale, which reveals him to be the very sort of spoil-sport the Host has been hoping he is not. He certainly has not been telling any earlier tales.6 ations of readers have experienced as the best of Chaucer’s poetry, all pose the most serious questions about the relation of Fragment X to the preceding tales, its function in the Tales, and the unity of the entire poem. The view that the Parson’s is only accidentally the last tale in an unfinished work cannot be seriously held in light of the carefully crafted Parson’s Prologue, with its repeated stress that The Parson’s Tale is to be the last on the fictional pilgrimage and with its seemingly deliberate use of verbal echoes and of literary motifs”. A similar position is taken by Rodney Delasanta, ‘Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales’, PMLA 93 (1978): 240-47, who sees the Parson’s Tale as a well-fitting and intentional ending of the Canterbury Tales, not to be taken ironically, which agrees well with the pattern of penitential and eschatological allusion that we come across throughout the Tales. ‘Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales’, PMLA 93 (1978): 240-47 6 The Parson’s Prologue here provides a good illustration of Chaucer changing his


Also, as Helen Phillips points out, the pilgrims’ approach to Canterbury at the end of the day carries a distinct sense of closure, as do the “verbal suggestions of approaching mortality”: the end of the day, the speaker’s “shadwe” (X,7), entry into the “ende” of a village (X,11), and the end of the Canterbury journey and its story-telling.7 This means two things. One is that Chaucer reduced his plan of four tales per pilgrim to just one. Every pilgrim tells a single tale, the Parson being the last to do so at journey’s end. The other thing the Host’s words mean, without a shadow of doubt, is that, with just one last tale – the Parson’s – requiring his “sentence” and his “decree” and his “ordinaunce” (all easily associated with a last judgement in the biblical sense and with confession as a reflection of this), it is indeed journey’s end that they have all come to. So what we must decide on is whether this is Southwark, as per original agreement, or Canterbury. Naturally, this is not a question that has gone unrecognized.8 As Robinson says, noncommittally, “Whatever tales were still to be written, Chaucer apparently intended the Parson’s to be either the last on the journey to Canterbury, or the last on the return to Southwark”.9 Unlike the question of how many tales each pilgrim tells, whereby the Host’s final words leave little doubt on the matter, there is no clear statement about the exact venue of journey’s end. Still, the reduction of tales from four to one is a substantial clue. Any decision on Chaucer’s part to scrap the return journey would have automatically resulted in a halving of tales. This would account for two out of every three tales that are wanting for every pilgrim and may indeed mind on the Parson’s role in the Canterbury Tales, since in the Man of Law’s Epilogue – a piece of good Chaucerian quality, but of uncertain status and in clear need of revision (Robinson, p 696) or cancellation (Robinson, p 6) – the Host, upon being lectured about his swearing, shows himself well able to deduce what sort of person he is talking to. Here he has no idea what sort of man he is dealing with. 7 Helen Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context (Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, 2000), pp 219-20. 8 I rather like Elizabeth A. Dobbs’ article on this, arguing that the legalistic terms of the Host’s contract with the pilgrims, which ironically show him up as a most astute businessman, preclude the possibility of an ending at Canterbury (Literary, Legal, and Last Judgments in The Canterbury Tales’, SAC 17 (1995): 31-52). What she overlooks, besides the simple fact that contracts can be broken, is that the entire Parson’s Prologue and other evidence make it plain that the original design was abandoned in due course. 9 Robinson, p 765; Benson, p 796. A contrary view is found in Owen, ‘Alternative Reading’: 237. See also note 1 and below.


have been the impetus for the further scrapping of all second tales on the remaining outward leg of the journey. Furthermore, even if an explicit statement is lacking, where else can we be but Canterbury when the Parson announces: I wol yow telle a myrie tale in prose To knytte up al this feeste and make an ende. And Jhesu, for his grace, wit me sende To shewe yow the wey, in this viage, Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage That highte Jerusalem celestial. [ParsProl, 46/51]

Clearly, as Ralph Baldwin pointed out half a century ago,10 he is thinking of pilgrimage to Canterbury as a reflection of Jerusalem celestial or, conversely, of Jerusalem celestial as a glorious version of Canterbury. This view has become a commonly accepted one and it is often assumed, without further argument, that the pilgrims are indeed drawing near to Canterbury.11 This is quite logical. The Parson is not talking about inglorious Southwark, a medieval den of iniquity and London’s red-light district, and in biblical terms easily equated to the city of Babylon, holy Jerusalem’s antipole. The appropriateness of the Parson’s Tale is best understood when we take it as the final touchstone for all, pilgrims and tales alike, in a religious context whereby Canterbury approximates their heavenly destination. It is a moralitas that is fittingly applied to the totality of the Canterbury Tales in their Easter context of redemption through Christ’s passion and resurrection, as channelled through every Christian’s annual duty of confession at this time. The Parson’s words about knitting up “al this feeste” imply the same thing. Chaucer’s pilgrims are a quarrelsome lot but now that they are entering Canterbury the time has come to put an end to their disputes. True, the pilgrims’ squabbling looks like a reflection of Chaucer’s own unmistakable liking for retaliation as a narrative de10

Ralph Baldwin, ‘The Unity of the Canterbury Tales’, in Schoeck & Taylor: 14-51, at 39-41. 11 Among others, Rodney Delasanta, Penance & Poetry. His discussion of how the pilgrims’ approach of Canterbury is set to an eschatological theme of penance and redemption is fully in line with my own view. For an opposing view, cf Charles A. Owen Jr. Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the“Canterbury Tales”: The Dialectic of ‘Ernest’ and ‘Game’ (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1977).


vice and perhaps also as something of a literary signature. Yet here at this place and time the Parson, in referring to “feeste”, “glorious pilgrimage” and “Jerusalem celestial”, is evidently anticipating his subsequent description of Heaven as “ther as is the blisful compaignye that rejoysen hem everemo, everich of others joye”[1077]. Something very much like this line must have been in Chaucer’s mind when he undertook to paint his “compaignye” as largely rooted in the here-andnow and falling all over themselves to get entangled in petty quarrels, yet caused them end up in Canterbury on a more elevated note. Assuming the day of their arrival to be the Thursday before Easter,12 sometimes known as Maundy Thursday, what moment could be more appropriate than the beginning of “God’s Truce” in the Easter days when from Thursday evening to Monday morning all private feuding was forbidden on pain of excommunication? The presence of the Parson’s Tale at the end is no accident, nor is its appropriateness. It has already been referred to it as the final touchstone of the Canterbury Tales and that is exactly what it is. As a sermon on penitence and a treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and their remedies it represents salvation, grace, redemption. It is the yardstick whereby the entire Canterbury fellowship is meant to be measured, the mirror held up to each and every pilgrim as well as the readers and listeners who accompanied them in their minds. This is why Chaucer emphasizes that the “myrie tale” (a bit of dark humour, considering the ominous and ponderous nature of the tale, or a clerical pun on the joys of heaven?) is to be told for the sake of “the sentence”, thus reiterating the pilgrims’ desire “to enden in som vertuous sentence”. This is well-suited to the occasion, as we are speaking of Easter with its annual obligation of taking confession. But there is more. Careful readers cannot fail to be reminded here of the original terms of the entire storytelling enterprise, which was to award the laurels to the one who came up with the “best sentence” and “moost solaas”. The Parson’s Tale provides exactly this, even though its “solaas” or consolation is something other than the sense in which the Host uses the word. Morally and spiritually, it is the pilgrimage’s winner and it is an 12

The Canterbury pilgrims are on a Lent pilgrimage, in the days just before Easter. It is a plausible thought, therefore, that they must be read as intending to combine their annual duty of confession at Easter (whence, on one level, the Parson’s Tale) with a visit to St Thomas’ shrine. Chaucer would have been thinking here of them as heading towards all the important religious celebrations from Good Friday onward.


attractive thought, in the light of the echoes of the original enterprise, that Chaucer may still have adhered to his idea of a winner’s “soper” at the time of writing the Parson’s Prologue, this time as a reflection of Christ’s Last Supper, and had the Parson in mind as the victor who would doubtless have opted for a wafer and a glass of wine. What Chaucer means by the Host’s reference to “sentence” is not hard to see, particularly in the light of the Parson's sermon to follow: sententia, the exegetical meaning of things or, if one wishes, what things come down to in terms of sin and redemption. This explains what the Parson’s Tale is for. It stands at the end of the Canterbury Tales as an eschatological key to all that has come before. Or, as Baldwin has it, Canterbury approximates the celestial city and the Parson’s Tale provides the unifying factor of the Canterbury Tales as “implicitly it recapitulates and musters into dramatic unity all the silent symmetries of the other tales and the viage as such”. This is because “each pilgrim and his [sic] story combine with the Parson’s homily to make a momentary – and moving – diptych, a story and a gloss, action and passion. This confers a sense of completeness which such episodic fictions often lack”.13 Derek Pearsall calls it Chaucer’s “groundplan of salvation”.14 Thus, this study’s position is an instance of what David Lawton calls the “absolute” approach, a definition that is taken from Lee Patterson15: “(1) the moral absolutism of the Par13 Baldwin, Schoeck & Taylor: 39-41. I realize that the present interpretation, seconded by such students of patristic influences as Robert P. Miller, is not welcome in some sections of Chaucer criticism. Siegfried Wenzel, who gives a summary of the criticism on the Parson’s Tale, rejects it as a yardstick to judge the other tales by, in ‘Every Tales Strengthe’, Europäische Lehrdichtung, Festschrift für Walter Naumann zum 70. Gebürtstag, eds Hans Gerd Rotzer and Herbert Waltz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981): 86-98. A similar view is found with Lee Patterson, ‘The Parson’s Tale and the Quitting of the Canterbury Tales’, Traditio 34 (1978): 331-80; Jerry Root, ‘“Space to Speke”: The Wife of Bath and the Discourse of Confession’, ChauR 28 (1994): 253-74, at 269 note 6; and Beverly Boyd, Chaucer and the Liturgy (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967), arguing that, though familiar with sacramental and canonical liturgies, Chaucer is essentially uninterested in either. 14 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p 269. 15 David Lawton, ‘ Chaucer’s Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales’, SAC 9 (1987): 3-40, at 4. Such a reading runs counter to Lawton’s preferred alternative of attributing the placement of the Parson’s Tale at the end of the Tales to a compiler who is not Chaucer. However, the matter is more or less resolved in favour of the “absolute” reading when at the end of his article he considers that “the religious nature of pilgrimage is conspicuously begged in The General Prologue and cries out for a penitential correction” (36) and concludes a few pages later (40) that the “com-


son’s Tale has been implicit throughout the tales, guiding our judgment as we read them and now receiving its full expression and authority; (2) the Parson’s Tale provides a retrospective commentary on all that has gone before, and our understanding of the tales should now (but only now) be revised in the direction of its moral judgment. Lawton presents these two as alternatives but they are in fact complementary, at least so far as this study is concerned. The presence of the Parson’s Tale suggests that every tale is, or was duly intended to be, an implicit vehicle for either virtue or vice. The insightful medieval person would have had little trouble in unravelling their spiritual message. For the unwary and the less discerning there was the Parson’s combined manual of confession and treatise on penitence as a deliberate marker. This notion finds its ultimate corroboration in the shape of Chaucer’s Retraction, which follows the Parson’s Tale and lists the works that Chaucer revokes as representing “worldly vanitees”. Even though at first sight the Retraction is a bit of a puzzle as to which of Chaucer’s personae is speaking – is this the author or perhaps the pilgrim or even a deathbed Chaucer? – it does represent a statement of contrition by one of the Canterbury participants and thus, implicitly, affirms the confessional import of the Parson’s Tale for all the company. As Pearsall puts it, “the Retraction, in which he begs forgiveness for and formally revokes all his ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’, is Chaucer’s own historical response to the call for penitence, and penitence now, which is the imperative logic of the closing paragraphs of the Parson’s treatise. […] It is Chaucer’s own act of satisfaction”.16 Even more to the point, perhaps, is Larry Scanpiler’s reading is eminently persuasive. The compiler, I think, understood the text he had. […] Such a compiler need not have been Chaucer. In this case, however, he might just as well have been.” When one gets this far, why not go all the way and simply accept that Chaucer himself was the arranger? 16 Pearsall, p 269. The traditional view discerns a deathbed retraction: John M. Manly and Edith Rickert eds, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1940), vol.ii, pp 471-72. The innocent view is found with Donald R. Howard, who regards the Retraction as a genuine and personal expression of repentance: ‘Chaucer the Man’, PMLA 80 (1985): 337-43. The other possibilities are largely explored by Benson (p 965), who writes: “The alternatives to reading the Retraction as an expression of the poet’s personal remorse are: either to see it as an application to the poetnarrator of the Parson’s call to penitence, the concluding step in a poem on the theme of the pilgrimage of life [...] or to see it as Chaucer’s utilization of the retractio as a literary convention that includes establishing a canon of his authentic works”. I do not


lon who points out that the Retraction is solely a literary device: “The autobiography Chaucer presents here is entirely textual. It consists not of his actions generally, but only of his writings. What is at stake, then, is not his sins, but his claim to auctoritas”.17 So, in a nutshell, what have we got? We have compelling evidence, both in writing and in the actual composition of the Tales, that in due course Chaucer threw out his original plan of four tales for each pilgrim in favour of a one-man one-tale scheme. In addition, it is obvious that within this new scheme Southwark was replaced by Canterbury as journey’s end and that the estates satire concept was at least partially modified. Together, this indicates that at some time during their composition the Canterbury Tales were aligned along more emphatically spiritual lines than the original plan. In its turn, this dimension is directly linked up with the presence of the Parson’s Prologue, the Parson’s Tale and Chaucer’s Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales, whose inclusion at a Southwark ending would be most inappropriate. In fact, it is the inclusion of these three that transforms the Tales from a compilation of pieces of estate satire into something superior, a spiritually unified whole. The Manuscript Evidence Since the nineteenth century, critics have pointed out aspects of this evident change of plan and there is general agreement that, give or take one or two Fragments shifted backward or forward, this is the best order that we can come up with, yet can never be sure of. We find ourselves in this situation because obviously, when Chaucer died in 1400, he left the Canterbury Tales in an unfinished and at least partially unrevised condition and possibly in a state of disarray. This holds good in particular for the General Prologue, which is both early believe that any “either/or” approach brings clarity here and regard the ambiguity of the Retraction as intentional. Perhaps it is worth noting here that Boccaccio also indicated that he “regretted having written and would willingly have destroyed” his Decamerone. Calvin S. Brown ed., The Reader’s Companion to World Literature (New York: Dryden, 1956). Also see Olive Sayce, ‘Chaucer’s Retractions: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition’, MA 40 (1971): 230-48. She cites various similar constructions in French, German and Latin. For a discussion of Chaucer’s personae, cf Benson, p 798. 17 Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, Power (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p 23.


and late, in the sense that it appears to record his original conception of a huge work of estates satire but also must be understood to include later additions and occasional rewrites. As far we can judge, he left no final ordinatio for his tales, which is easily understandable given the many absentee tales, nor was there anything in the nature of a definitive revision. This, too, is understandable. Why revise when there is still so much to be added that may in its turn call for further revision? Thus, his early fifteenth-century editors were left to determine to the best of their ability what order, if any had at all been arrived at, Chaucer had had in mind. Ever since Tyrwhitt’s edition, the first to be based on any serious comparison of manuscripts, most editors have favoured the socalled Ellesmere order, a sequence as found in the Ellesmere MS, an elaborately prepared manuscript dating, we now think, on Kathleen Scott’s authority, from “in or just after 1400 and ending no later than 1405. Textually, however, another and earlier manuscript, Hengwrt, deemed by her to be “so early as the late 1390s” is adjudged to be closest to Chaucer’s original and may even have been prepared under Chaucer’s own guidance.18 If in the past decades the debate was in terms of Norman F. Blake vs Manly/Rickert on pre-view circulation of some of the tales, by way of explaining some of the differences between Hengwert and Ellesmere, this is one issue that has been temporarily laid to rest, more or less settled in Blake’s favour.19 Thanks to Linne Mooney’s identification of Chaucer’s Scribe B, who prepared both the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, as Adam Pynkhurst, the one and only Adam Scriveyn whom he addresses satirically in one of his shorter poems but who appears to have been a favourite scribe nevertheless, we now have a strong suggestion of someone well-acquainted with Chaucer’s writings and possibly also with his plans for the Canterbury Tales.20 Certainly, the Ellesmere manuscript looks like the best that he or anyone else could have come up with. Where Hengwrt exhibits all the 18 Kathleen Scott, “An Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators”, in: Woodward & Stevens, pp 187-121, at 106. Scott’s dates are, of course, informed guesses but cannot pinpoint anything with absolute precision. I am in Norman Blake’s debt for pointing out her paper and its implications. 19 Norman F. Blake, The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (London/Victoria/ Baltimore: Arnold , 1985). 20 Linne Mooney, in a presentation to the 14th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society in Glasgow (July 2004); The Guardian, July 20 2004, p 3.


signs of a makeshift production, the Ellesmere manuscript is the evident outcome of careful planning. The tale order, insofar as not indicated by the tales or links themselves, follows the internal clues that Chaucer inserted, wide margins were provided for glossing, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale are included and the manuscript’s links, almost complete, are in what we would be inclined to regard as the proper places.21 If, from our point of view or at least Manly/Rickert’s,22 some of the constituent manuscript choices that he made were inferior to those of Hengwrt, if only slightly so, such a verdict need not reflect medieval taste or even Chaucer’s. Alternatively, it may simply be that our scribe never went in for any such close comparative reading as Manly/Rickert and simply selected those quires that he took to be the most up-to-date ones. With the Ellesmere manuscript probably belonging to the first few years after Chaucer’s death, there is a good chance that the earlier Hengwrt stems from his own life-time. Rather problematically, however, Hengwrt is not complete (and never was) and its tale order is a mess. This makes it improbable that the manuscript was assembled under Chaucer’s own supervision. It is certainly clear that it was put together in something of a hurry, on sometimes inferior material, and with Pynkhurst rather uncertain about the occasional tale, such as the Cook’s (to which he added in a different pen, hence presumably at a later time, “Of this Cokes Tale maked Chaucer na moore”),23 and 21

Manly/Rickert, vol ii, p 479; Blake, p 55; Doyle & Parkes: 185-90; Ralph Hanna III, ‘(The) Editing (of) the Ellesmere Text’, in: Woodward & Stevens: 225-43, at 23132; and, of course, A.I. Doyle, ‘The Copyist of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales’, in: Woodward & Stevens: 49-67, passim. Hanna provides an excellent overview here, even if he is somewhat vague on the “production teams” that he envisions for the early manuscripts. 22 Germaine Dempster, ‘Manly’s Conception of the Early History of the Canterbury Tales’,PMLA 64 (1949): 379-415, at 394-95. Here a note of caution may be inserted. With the passing of some six decades our manuscript knowledge of the Canterbury Tales has increased in an amazing fashion and it seems to me that the time is nigh for some brave team of Chaucer scholars to come up with a thorough reassessment of Manly/Rickert’s work. 23 Blake, p 61ff, p 84 (recap); Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1996), p 142ff. As for the Hengwrt scribe’s comment on the Cook’s Tale, Chaucer scholarship has on the whole seen fit to follow his lead. There are of course several possibilities here, briefly discussed by Benson (p 853). John H. Fisher, no mean voice, suggests that Chaucer broke off the tale because Gower was unhappy with it (Fisher, p 207).


missing out on the Canon Yeoman’s altogether as well as the Nun’s Priest’s Epilogue.24 The hurry itself could be related to Chaucer’s condition, the master at death’s door desiring to leave as complete a Canterbury Tales as possible but not being able to instruct his scribe in any clear fashion, but just as well – and financially more likely25 – to some patron wishing to preserve this wonderful collection of tales before it was lost forever. An attendant consideration is that the hurry may have been related to the repressive character of Henry IV’s new regime, in particular its intolerance of religious criticism and the use of English in all sort religious writings. Much of what Chaucer had written for the Canterbury Tales may have become risky overnight, if not on the count of heresy then at least because it would have been seen as lacking in a proper respect for the authority of the Church and its orders.26 So what if Chaucer’s Canterbury writings were bundled together quickly and stowed away in one or more safe places – preferably more, in order to spread the risk of confiscation or being mislaid? That this is not such a far-fetched scenario may be seen in the condition of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. In the case of Hengwrt some leaves were gnawed by rats before they were bound, in that of Ellesmere some of the illustrations were altered, the most interesting of which is the Knight’s. The sleeve of his dress was painted over, in conformity with the fashion of 1407.27 In either case, the explanation may be that the manuscripts had been laid up for a considerable time before being put in circulation. The scribe’s uncertainty about the Cook’s Tale is an interesting point. In Hengwrt the Cook’s Tale and Pynkhurst’s postscript about its unfinished condition are followed by a partially blank page, attesting, 24 Blake, pp 58-64; Hanna, ch 9 passim; A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in: M.B.Parkes and Andrew G. Watson eds, Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker (London: Scolar, 1978): 163-210, at 186. 25 If we take his Complaint unto His Purse literally, together with what the records tell us about the slow pace at which grants and back payments reached him, he was in considerable money trouble. This agrees well with the meagre material quality of the Hengwrt manuscript but would have put the production of such a de luxe MS as Ellesmere beyond contemplation. 26 Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, Juliette Dor, Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (London: Methuen, 2003), pp 137ff. 27 Jones, pp 247-53, 274-75.


as Blake points out, to the scribe’s initial expectation of the rest to turn up.28 Elsewhere in the manuscript similar spaces were left open and filled in later, but not so in the Cook’s case. Blake suggests (though he might retract this now, in the light of these new developments) that the rest of the Cook’s Tale was actually written but went missing somehow. My own guess is rather that Pynkhurst did not truly come into his own as Chaucer’s scribe until the 1390s, which would mean that the early Fragment I and its abrupt ending may have been something that he was not familiar with as a copyist and left him in a bit of a quandary. What this leaves unaddressed is what spurred his remark about the Cook’s Tale. Was it added after consulting Chaucer in his final days or the result of a posthumous search among his papers? In the light of Pynkhurst’s phrasing (past tense instead of present perfect) the latter option seems the likelier one. It is certainly not something that he could have included if he had been working here under Chaucer’s personal supervision, in which case it would surely have been thrown out altogether. Another point is the status of Gamelyn and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale. Gamelyn crops up in some twenty-odd manuscripts but is clearly not by Chaucer. So far as I can judge, however, scholarly opinion is in favour of assuming its manuscript to have been among Chaucer’s Nachlass, duly awaiting a rewriting and inclusion in the Canterbury effort that never took place. It is certainly wellsuited as a tale dealing with Deadly Sin, with its theme of premeditated vengeance. How it got into currency in so many manuscripts while absent in Hengwrt and Ellesmere and clearly not edited by Chaucer in any way is less easily explained. BL MS Harley 7334, one of the early manuscripts and perhaps like others also earlier than has been supposed so far (1410), includes it to disguise the fragmentary nature of the Cook’s Tale. Harley’s scribe D, as he is so far known, also applied (independently, one should think) Pynkhurst’s tactic of leaving blank spaces to deal with missing parts turning up.29 28 Blake, pp 58-64; Hanna, ch 9 passim; A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in: M.B.Parkes and Andrew G. Watson eds, Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker (London: Scolar, 1978): 163-210, at 186. Also, M.B. Parkes, ‘The Planning and Construction of the Ellesmere Manuscript’, in: Woodward & Stevens, 41-47, passim; Doyle & Parkes: 185-91. 29 John M. Bowers, Two Professional Readers of Chaucer and Langland, SAC 26 (2004): 113-146, at 122-24.


This practice suggests not only an early assemblage date but also an awareness on the scribes’/arrangers’ part of some sort of manuscript dispersal. This indicates that Blake’s rejection of preview circulation may be too absolute. Perhaps there was the occasionale tale, one or two, that was in other people’s hands, for such presumable purposes as readership response. However, this would imply a surrendering of unique manuscripts, as in the Canon Yeoman’s case below, that is difficult to countenance. A better way to deal with the problem may be by assuming Chaucer’s literary estate to have been housed in a variety of places, as I have suggested before. There was at least a deputy forestership that he held in the ’nineties and this may well have involved a lodge or such where he would have spent some of his time writing and kept a number of manuscripts. There may have been further places for him to write in peace and quiet and store his papers, such as some of John of Gaunt’s demesnes. Or his manuscripts may have gone underground in several locations for a large part of Henry IV’s reign, in order to prevent their confiscation or even destruction. At any rate, one is irresistibly reminded of his pen friend Deschamps, whose poetic legacy was retrieved from as many as four main locations and even then later added unto from further sources. Such a dispersal is made the more likely by the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, absent in Hengwrt but all there in Ellesmere. What with Pynkhurst’s implicit authorization of it by dint of its inclusion there, we can only conclude that it was either mislaid or retrieved from some place that was out of reach at the time when Hengwrt was put together. Either possibility suffices and plausibly accounts for the matter at hand, without any need of recourse to Manly/ Rickert’s notion of preview circulation. Worth noting here, by the way, is Blake’s rejection of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale as being uninspired verse possibly produced by a Chaucer imitator. Apart from the sheer genius of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue allowing the flow of tales to be interrupted by the arrival of two late-comers, which surely is Chaucer at his inventive best, the suggestion that the tale to follow is an imitation is a self-defeating one. By analogy, since there are enough places in the Canterbury Tales that are equally mediocre, he might as well call into question the authenticity of the entire work. On the whole, it looks unlikely that the Hengwrt and Ellesmere arrangements were ultimately suggested by Chaucer himself during


his lifetime. Hengwrt is certainly too untidy to represent Chaucer’s final wishes for the Tales, whereas Ellesmere has the earmarks of a carefully prepared posthumous homage. Thus, I am inclined to think that both manuscripts postdate Chaucer’s death or were at least prepared without his personal supervision. This is further related to the fact that, unlike Manly/Rickert, I am unconvinced that no ordinatio was indicated. Chaucer may well have left instructions, while alternatively his filing system for his tales and/or quires may have been reasonably clear on the order which he had in mind. A complication may have been, as I have said, the chance that Chaucer’s copies were stored at more than one location and that this caused considerable confusion as to the exact number of tales produced by him and, whenever there was more than one copy of the same tale, to the superiority of one over another. Fifteenth-Century Editors and the New Plan Though the editorial art of inclusion and exclusion is a matter of due importance to what this study is all about with respect to the Canterbury Tales, our present interest resides chiefly in its tale order. A point that ought to strike us is that our modern sequence of tales does not differ substantially from early fifteenth-century attempts at establishing a “best order” Canterbury Tales.30 From the first efforts at arranging the Tales its editors seem to have felt that there was no authoritative tale order, which may reflect a tradition that all arrangements are unauthorized ones and stem from after his death, and evidently decided that the vital clues to Chaucer’s intended arrangement lay in its head-body-tail distribution. As we have seen, the various tales were generally transmitted in com-binations of one or more quires usually containing two or more tales. Such codicological combinations are referred to as booklets or fascicles (meaning small bundles) and are composed of a certain number of leaves folded through the middle and sewn together. They are also known as quires. Some of these we practically always find in fixed combinations with others, for which the editorial term is Fragments or Groups. They are stable groupings that go back to the earliest known manuscripts. Such modern editions as the Riverside Chaucer, 30

For a good overview of this, see Helen Cooper, ‘The Order of the Tales in the Ellesmere Manuscript’, in: Woodward & Stevens: 245-61.


for instance, distinguish ten such blocks. Because they have not all shown themselves to be equally stable in the course of their transmission, there is some argument as to their exact original number. There may have been as few as eight of them or as many as fourteen to begin with, as Skeat believed.31 There is an unmistakable beginning in the shape of the General Prologue. This belongs to a very stable block of tales including the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale and the abortive Cook’s Tale. Then there is a considerable body of intermediate tales permitting a rough ordering on the basis of quires, links and internal indications, and a very definitive concluding block in the shape of the Parson’s Tale whose final standing is underscored by both its Prologue and the subsequent Retraction. Hengwrt and Ellesmere already exhibit this unidirectional ordering, the Retraction having gone missing in Hengwrt, probably because it was worn to pieces, as happened in so many of the other manuscripts as well. Clearly there must have been a major editorial decision involved here for the early arrangers. Which represents the authoritative voice – the General Prologue or the Parson? The internal contradiction as such would not have been cause for any great worry. The Canterbury Tales are full of places containing evident authorial afterthoughts and instances of recognizably insufficient revision. Nor would Chaucer’s “announcement” of the revised plan in the second best place rather than the General Prologue itself have been a problem. It could have been considered due to any of a number of reasons, as we have seen. The persistent acceptance of the finality of the Parson’s Tale must largely be attributed to a recognition on the part of the arrangers (whether scribe, editor or commissioning party) of the implications of the Parson’s Prologue and perhaps even more of what Chaucer’s affixation of his Retraction in this place stands for. With its double finality, as his last word on the Canterbury Tales and literary testament at the same time – his last will – how can or could anybody mistake the conclusiveness of at least this part of the Canterbury Tales? It is the closest that we can come to any definitive statement and, as such, a major consideration for anyone desiring to arrange the tales into something approaching consistency. 31

For the eight groups, cf Helen Cooper, ‘Order’: 253; for the fourteen, cf Blake, p 29. Blake himself favours twelve (pp 45-46).


There were, plainly, further good reasons why the Parson carried the day. Coming at the conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, his tale may have been regarded as the later piece of writing. The Retraction, which is so closely associated with it, has been traditionally viewed as a deathbed addition.32 The contents of the Parson’s Tale as a manifestly authoritative pronouncement on the human condition may have contributed their share, especially if the Canterbury Tales were seen as a movement away from frivolity and toward final things. This links up well with the greater religious slant of the Tales that is discernible in the second block of tales following upon the General Prologue and its immediately associated tales. Such added religiosity goes together well with the spiritual emphasis of the Parson’s Tale. If the Tales open on a worldly footing, well in tune with an estates satire set-up, much less so those that come directly after the first block, like the Man of Law, the Wife of Bath (where appearances are decidedly deceptive) and the tales discussing marriage which she sets into motion. An awareness of this is seen in the extensive marginal glossing, practically all of a theological nature, that we find with both the Man of Law and the Wife.33 The choice must further have been facilitated by the various indications in the links and other passages as to time, place and sequence, which suggested to the arrangers a one-way order of tales. It is unmistakable that they were so used by the early arrangers and understandably so, for they are an obvious and useful handle: these are the Fragments or Groups that we distinguish to this very day. Yet, as Manly/Rickert point out, there are inconsistencies in the resulting travelling scheme. They feel that Chaucer may “not have considered carefully whether [his] allusions [to time] would fit into his general plan or would harmonize with one another” and that “there is no evidence that he was so literal-minded as to attempt to harmonize the amount of story-telling with the distances travelled”.34 It is something that I have some trouble with: surely Chaucer’s combination of topographical and astronomical references may be taken to point in exactly the opposite direction. 32

Manly/Rickert, vol ii, pp 471-72. The Man of Law’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue are two of the most heavily glossed parts of the Canterbury Tales in terms of religious comment: Owen, ‘Alternative Reading’: 238 ff.; Graham D. Caie, ‘The Significance of the Early Manuscript Glosses’, ChauR 10 (1975-76): 350-360, at 355. 34 Manly/Rickert, vol. ii, p 491. 33


All the same, let us keep in mind that the unidirectional reference to time and place, as a reflection of Chaucer’s ultimate Canterbury Tales, remains a flawed effort whose inconsistencies we must probably attribute to his untimely death. We cannot know what he might have inserted by way of tales and links nor what he might have altered and excluded if he had had a chance of a truly final revision. The Tales that we know are a construct linking together parts of a seriously incomplete work. Thus, there is always a chance that some of the topographical and astronomical references preserved in them were originally intended for the return journey and remain, as it were, frozen in their unrevised status, and have consequently always been interpreted incorrectly. Four, Three, Two, One Besides the evidence of the Parson’s Prologue and Tale and the Retraction, there are two considerations which markedly tip the balance in favour of the outward journey and may have helped to make up the early editors’minds. One is that the elimination of the return journey would have reduced the originally announced number of tales per pilgrim from four to two. This requirement is fully complied with. No one tells a third or fourth tale. The other is that, in point of fact, no one even tells a second tale so that we must suppose that Chaucer simply switched to a one-way one-tale system. This is not to say that there are no echoes of the old scheme around. There are a few instances serving to remind us of the original obligation of two tales for each leg of the journey, which probably indicate a lack of careful redaction or, less likely, a temporarily entertained but never effectuated option of a two-tale scheme. What we are talking about here are: the Manciple’s Prologue, the Wordes of the Hoost to the Frankeleyn at the end of the Squire’s Tale, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Sir Thopas. In the Manciple’s Prologue the two tales are just a matter of inference. The hungover Cook is given to understand by the Host that it is his turn for a new tale, in evident disregard of his earlier one, and is graciously rescued by the Manciple. This is not a clear-cut case, obviously, and could be attributed to the Host’s own hung-over state, with the Manciple’s intervention serving as a subtle reminder that a single tale is sufficient, or to the possibility – on the assumption that its incomplete


state lies with Chaucer – that the original Cook’s Tale was meant to be cancelled. The Franklin’s case and that of the Canon’s Yeoman hinge upon the Host’s words to them: “a tale or two” [SqT, 698] and “a myrie tale or tweye” [CYP, 597].35 Neither is transparent and there is a good chance that we are just dealing with stock formulaic metrical fillers here. Finally there is Chaucer himself with his Sir Thopas, but he clearly does not count: he does not get to tell two tales, he is mockhumiliatingly obliged to start anew. This leads us back to the one-way one-tale distribution that we are familiar with. Clearly, this is not a matter of chance. Not only does the Parson implicitly inform us so, but there is mathematical corroboration. Within a four-tale-per-pilgrim scheme the odds against any accidental single-tale configuration must be accounted very high. There ought to have been the incidental narrator with two, three or even four tales if the old plan was still operative or just two for a design limited to the outward journey only. Yet on a basis of a random distribution from zero to four, the odds compute as 0,000053254 or, more simply, about 1 in 20,000 for the one-tale situation to be due to chance.36 35 Benson (p 796) disregards the phrase “a myrie tale or tweye” in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and writes that “by the time of the Parson’s Prologue another polgrim has been added, the Canon’s Yeoman, and the plan now calls for but one tale each”. The absence of the Canon’s Yeoman from the General Prologue is often taken to mean that he is an afterthought. Strictly speaking this is a bit of illogic. The fashion in which he is made to join the fellowship – overtaking them while they are already well under way – precludes any writing up in the General Prologue. Moreover, his description of his master’s superior powers is in itself suggestive of a late inclusion, as he not only implies that Canterbury is journey’s end but also conveys a suggestion of its equalling world’s end, with a hint even of the New Jerusalem to come, all well in keeping with the new plan: … al this ground on which we been ridyng, Til that we come to Caunterbury toun, He koude al clene turne it up-so-down, And pave it al of silver and of gold. [CYP, 623-26] 36 The computation for this runs as follows. Assume 30 narrators, each telling 4 tales = 120 tales. On a basis of 23 actual tales, what is the chance that they represent a random distribution among the various narrators? Imagine a pile of 120 tales from which we take a random sample of 23 tales. On this basis we compute the odds in favour of all 23 belonging to different narrators. Tale 1 is no problem: its chance is 1 = 120/ 120. There are now 119 tales left, 116 of which belong to other narrators. Hence, the chance that the second tale that we pick belongs to a different narrator is 116/119. Once this is done, there are 118 tales left, 112 of which cannot belong to narrators One or Two. So the chance that we draw a new narrator is 112/118. This sequence continues with 108/117, 104/116 etc. until we arrive at 32/98. The denomin-


To clinch matters, there is the telling fact that in cases where Chaucer did come up with another tale, which appears to have happened with the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath, he consistently reassigned the original tale to another pilgrim, even if this was wellsuited to the original narrator and meant a hopeless fit on the other side (Shipman). Within a four-tale system, or even a two-tale one, any such reassignation of a well-fitting tale is incomprehensible. Instead, it suggests an underlying methodology affirming that Chaucer was indeed thinking in terms of a single tale for each pilgrim. To be fair, let us note that Blake rejects the attribution of the Shipman’s Tale to an earlier stage when it was the Wife of Bath’s. He dismisses, rather summarily, the much-quoted passage about husbands and wives early in the tale whose best-known part reads: The sely housbonde, algate he moot paye, He moot us clothe, and he moot us arraye, Al for his owene worshipe richely, In which array we daunce jolily. [Shipman’s Tale, 11-14]

Blake sees this as “a rhetorical dramatization of a set situation”.37 It “happens to be put into the Shipman’s mouth, but has no bearing on the gender of the narrator. The hypothesis that this tale was intended for the Wife of Bath lacks firm support and may be discounted”. But in fact that the heroine of the Shipman’s Tale is altogether reminiscent of the Wife of Bath: she speaks just like her, swears just like her and acts just like her, in much the same way that the Loathly Lady of the Wife of Bath’s Tale figures as a persona of the Wife. Also, he conveniently forgets that the Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale figures the same gender switch, this time impossible to mistake for a rhetorical dramatization of a set situation, when the Shipman speaks of “my joly body”, a phrase that is repeated in the Shipman’s Tale in a purely feminine setting.38 Blake also disregards the fact that the Epilogue Shipman is an editorial construct and his presence not in any way supported by the manuscript evidence. ators of the fractions 120, 119, 118, … 98 result in exactly 23 numbers (take care: 120 minus 98 equals 22, but these 22 are the intervals). Now multiply all these fractions: 120/120 x 116/119 x 112/118 x 108/117…x 40/100 x 36/99 x 32/98 = 0.00053254 or approximately 1: 20,000. 37 Blake, p 49. 38 Shipman’s Tale, line 423. Also cf Benson, pp 910-11 and notes 4-19.


What moved Chaucer to go in for all this is a matter for later consideration. The question that concerns us here is the radical switch from four to one. Accepting that for a variety of reasons Chaucer had a change of heart on the composition of the Canterbury Tales, why is it that we find the obvious consequence of a two-tale scheme rejected in favour of a single-tale one? A prime reason may have been his realization that the effort which he originally envisaged was far too comprehensive and time-consuming to be workable. Another factor must have been the virtue-vice stamp that the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction set upon everything. From the time that these two were included the Canterbury Tales were implicitly and explicitly turned into a group of tales governed by the themes of virtue and vice within the frame of a manual of confession, for this is what the Parson’s Tale is all about and what is underscored by what Chaucer has to say about the Canterbury Tales in the Retraction. It is not the Tales as such which he disowns but only “thilke that sownen into synne”, thus confirming a division into good and bad, virtue and vice. This consideration points a plausible way to at least a partial explanation of the dramatic reduction of tales. Within a virtue-vice scheme of tales neither the repetitiousness of sin nor the fine distinction of its many variations can be adjudged to be a literary asset. What author in his right mind would be so blind as to make his creations dance to the same tune again and again? Just for the sake of argument, let us assume thirty-five pilgrims as Chaucer’s desired optimum and fit them into a vice-and-virtue framework, on – say – a four to one distribution, in a two-tale scheme for each. That is twenty-eight times two tales set to deal with the various branches of the Seven Sins. That way lie dullness and ineffectiveness, for why should a point already belaboured be dealt with all over again, even if the emphasis should be on a variant aspect? Nor can assigning distinctly different sins in the second telling been a serious option. Though theologically feasible in the light of the great overlappingness of all sin, the result would have been chaotic and in flagrant contradiction of the literary direction in which Chaucer was inexorably moving – a growing inclination to join his narrators’ characters to their tales. In point of fact, any such second tales may be argued to have seriously detracted from the effect of the first. It is difficult to imagine the Miller and the Reeve coming up with new tales or the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner switching to a sideline of


the subjects on which they have already performed so superbly. While the latter two are perfectly employable for every sin in the book, any second deployment would have been a literary mistake in the light of the monolithic nature of the fusion that was effected between their prologues and tales Something similar may be claimed for our hypothetical seven virtuous story-tellers in such a two-tale scheme. To begin with, Chaucer’s tales of virtuousness tend to be all-inclusive (compare, for instance, the Man of Law’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Melibee, and the Second Nun’s Tale) – meaning that the presence of one virtue automatically implies that of all the others and such tales consequently tend to be rather repetitious. Then there is the observable fact that virtue is in itself much less spicy than sin, which means that something like fourteen tales dealing with the seven virtues would have contributed to a much less inspiring and inspired Canterbury Tales. Even when we take into account the medieval liking for a good moral tale, so different from our modern taste, their number and their contents would have made the book much less tantalizing. We are, after all, talking about a sophisticated and doubtless pampered public. The remaining alternative, a virtue-vice mixture of tales for each of the various narrators, would have been inconsistent and wide open to the charge of hypocrisy, and would have controverted the message of both the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction. This leads us to assume that it may have been the spectre of repetitiousness and the demands of literary common sense, as well as a matter of workload, that led Chaucer to reject the four-tale scheme in favour of just one tale for every pilgrim. It is something that works well. It allows him to pick a small but distinctive number of sins typical of every Deadly Sin and adapt them to specifically delineated pilgrims. There are – vide the Parson’s Tale – enough of them to serve for good number of tales by a good number of pilgrims. On a more limited basis, there is room for seven virtues, too. A final important reason why Chaucer should have discarded his old scheme in favour of a linear sequence of tales is to be found in the next chapters. There I shall argue that his change of plan was motivated and given shape by Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which is a similarly linearly-constructed work. If some of us should feel that not enough of the tales conform to the broad outline of this picture, this ought to be no particular cause


for worry in an unfinished work in a state of permanent flux and frequently postponed revision. Besides, let us note that our automatic assumption that a tale’s theme and the virtue or vice discussed ought to coincide is not necessarily shared by the fourteenth century. Thus, Chaucer’s tale of Custance adheres faithfully to its basic theme of steadfastness, yet in the Confessio Amantis Gower uses the same tale to illustrate the sin of detraction, which is nowhere near its central theme. This should caution us. While Chaucer appears to take our view of things, there is no saying what departures he was willing to entertain in order to get everything into line. Indeed, on this basis (and, once again, the Confessio is a good illustration) almost every tale can be shown to deal with either virtue or vice. All the same, what we ought to find – if this theory is correct – is signs of this scheme in formation. So we shall, for this is what much of this study is all about. What remains to be added here, to be addressed below, is that there is a good chance that the final scrapping of tales, for the reasons sketched just now, left so severely reduced a groundplan that it moved Chaucer to flesh out the number of narrators by way of compensation. Much of what has been said here is, at heart, a return to Tupper’s old theory of the Canterbury Tales as an exposition of the Seven Deadly Sins and Robertson’s cupiditas/caritas discussion. So it is, but the point to be noted here is that it has been arrived at by a different route and train of argument, which indicates that there may be more to the patristic approach than the Chaucer field has been willing to allow in the past few decades. It is certainly true that the association is not particularly felicitous, for Tupper’s theory was savaged rather severely at the time and Robertson is seen as passé. In the light of what is argued here and confirmed in the chapters to come, it would seem that the essence of their theories still holds. This is not truly surprising. There was something of a glut of patristic exegesis in the latter half of the past century which served to inure the Chaucer field against its omnipresence and set into motion all sort of counter-mechanisms. It nevertheless is rather difficult to believe that the looming presence of the Parson’s Tale at the end of the work, carrying untold exegetical implications with respect to everything that precedes, should have been so marginalized. Certainly, Robertson is ripe for a reappreciation of his ideas on the Canterbury Tales. Likewise, Tupper’s general idea on the involvement of Deadly Sin and remedial Grace as a guiding theme has much


to commend it. What he was undone by was the fact that he failed to provide a thorough grounding for his theory, was careless in identifying the Deadly Sins involved, and does not seem to have taken the unfinished and unrevised condition of the Tales into sufficient account. Where we further differ from Tupper is in rejecting that “once in the grip of the Parson’s penitential” Chaucer, during the latter half of the collection, “blends dexterously sins and social types by making the representative of each class the exponent of the very Vice that he explicitly and implicitly condemns in his tale”.39 It may have been an idea that Chaucer explored for a while, but this was not followed up in any clear fashion. A modified version, however, allowing each pilgrim to tell a tale of vice or virtue and doing so (or being ultimately meant to do so) according to some measure of interplay between character and narrative seems eminently tenable.40 A Final Body Count For indications of what Chaucer had in mind, the General Prologue is the natural place to try and do some archeological spadework. Here he expressly informs us about 29 pilgrims, “wel nyne and twenty” (line 24), exclusive of the Host and Chaucer the pilgrim himself. With “wel” signifying “as many as”, this gives us a fellowship of 31 setting out from Southwark. When we start counting the persons that he mentions, however, there is an extra pilgrim, for Chaucer’s list adds up to 32 and this is not counting the Canon’s Yeoman or the elusive Canon himself. To confuse matters even further, there is Manly/Rickert’s contention that line 164 was never finished by Chaucer and that its inclusion of the words “and preestes thre” is self-contra39

‘The Quarrels of the Canterbury Pilgrims’, JEGP 14 (1915): 256-70, at 256-57. If I understand Tupper correctly, this is more or less what he argues in his ‘Chaucer and the Cambridge Edition’, JEGP 39 (1940): 502-26, at 513. His identification of the tales involved as the Pardoner’s, the Wife of Bath’s and those she sets into motion accords well with my own ideas. As for Tupper’s identification, in the same article, of the sins in the Marriage Group, this is somewhat shaky. The Pardoner’s stock sin is clearly avarice in the light of his own insistence and certainly not gluttony, as Tupper argues with reference to Owst (also, cf Chapter Six on this subject, which shows that gluttony and lechery are the most marginal of sins in the Pardoner’s make-up). In much the same way, for all her sins of pride, the Wife of Bath’s continuous emphasis on her lusty sexuality must mean that basically she stands for something like Voluptas and hence for lechery, or rather lechery and gluttony combined. 40


dictory and extraneous.41 This is not so much an argument as a personal sentiment and we would do well to accept our “preestes thre” as fully intentional on Chaucer’s part. They fit in well with the notion argued in these pages that the incisive four-to-one reduction of tales is likely to have moved Chaucer to pad out the remaining company by way of compensation. When one of the three priests does crop up later as the Nun’s Priest and with a tale of his own, this is a good indication that the half-line in question may be authentic after all, the more so as editors have, from the very first, declined to excise it and replace it with some alternative. Yet evidently, whatever way we turn, the numbers remain intractable – a situation that puts paid to some of the more esoteric interpretations of the number of pilgrims.42 What this situation means is that the General Prologue, which must have been among the earliest parts of the Canterbury Tales in progress, remained in a state of revision up to the end.43 In this connection Manly notes that its copytext for the early manuscripts cannot have been Chaucer’s archetype, which would have been full of “additions, changes, cancellations, and all the various incidents of composition” nor his “final copy, perfected and ready for issuing to the public”. It “seems rather to have been a fair copy, representing – with some slight scribal errors – the stage of development the text had then [i.e. the time of his death] reached, and intended to serve as a basis for further work”.44 I am not so sure about this. As long as the archetype was amended in a legible and transparent fashion, it could have been made to serve very well. And there are plainly several ways imagin41

Manly/Rickert, vol ii, p 95. Cf note 1. Also Caroline Eckhardt, who argues in favour of the number 33 as being symbolically meaningful and sees Chaucer’s reference to 29 as a redactional oversight. Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘The Number of Chaucer’s Pilgrims: A Review and Reappraisal’, Yearbook of English Studies 5 (1975): 1-18. Given the permanent state of flux that seems to characterize the development of the Tales, I think it doubtful that the tales which we possess represent Chaucer’s targeted number. On the other hand, the number 33 , which gives us the years of Christ’s ministry, goes together well with my feeling that the pilgrims are meant to enter Canterbury on either Maundy Thursday, the day commemorating the Last Supper (remember the Host’s supper), or perhaps Easter Sunday, the day of the Resurrection. The oversight notion – respectively, editorial laxity on Chaucer’s part – is quite popular and probably not too far from the truth, even if it becomes ever clearer to us in the course of this study that there may have been good reasons for him to put off all sorts of minor revision. 43 Benson, pp 797-98. 44 Manly/Rickert, vol ii, p 95. 42


able of how Chaucer could have dealt with the problem of doing this, such as erasures (as sketched in his poem to Adam Scriveyn), sidenotes, the pasting in of corrections and new ideas or the insertion of loose leaves. It is certainly unlikely for him to have gone in for a new and fair copy whenever changes were needed, particularly as the evidence is that quite a few alterations were effectuated and there were still a lot of them to come as well. What this does not tell us is how the General Prologue was composed. Was the outline that we are familiar with largely conceived in one piece, at an early date, with the pilgrims as convenient pegs to hang incoming tales on,45 was it compiled in the wake of suitable tales coming in on whose basis the appropriate pegs were invented, or should we take an intermediate view? In the light of what we will find, we should be inclined to favour the first option as representative of the original state of the General Prologue, yet accept that in due course additions and changes were effected in a number of places. The nonexistence of variant versions, by the way, is an important consideration in support of Blake’s rejection of pre-view circulation. The unsatisfactory pilgrim count is evidently related to Chaucer’s change of plan. It is an entirely plausible thought that the original idea for the Canterbury Tales should have been on a somewhat less grandiose scale than the present condition of the General Prologue suggests and that the drastic four-to-one reduction led Chaucer to decide and flesh out the remainder. It explains why his figures do not match and fits in easily with the notion of an expanded number of pilgrims within an over-all virtue-vice scheme. For us to accept this, we must of course also be prepared to accept that the figure of 29 which he himself mentions may itself be a midway correction and need not be the number that he set out with or was seeking to arrive at. Such a view carries the attractive implication that Chaucer’s old plan was never as disproportionate as it has always looked. Boccaccio’s Decamerone could have served as model for the framework of the Canterbury Tales, so that Chaucer may have set out with a similar number of tales in mind. Thus, for Boccaccio’s one hundred tales the original design of the Canterbury Tales could have been for a similar number, distributed over a maximum of 25 pilgrims. An even more attractive option, given nearness in time and place as well as what I 45

Brewer, p 280.


shall argue in the next chapter, is that Chaucer originally sought to make the extent of his book coincide with the eighty-odd tales of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. It is tempting to think that this should be testable by taking the various detailed portraits of the pilgrims as roughly representative of the initial state of the General Prologue and the sketchy remainder as later additions. Admittedly, there is only incidental corroboration of this, as we shall see below, yet as a hypothesis is has the virtue of combining clarity and common sense. As it is, there are exactly 20 detailed portraits. Well within the margin of 25, the result is worth weighing. Assuming that no pilgrim was ever cancelled, this may mean once again that the original idea was for as “few” as eighty tales and that it was indeed John Gower’s Confessio with which Chaucer sought to synchronize his own effort. What we also find is that the one-line reference to the Second Nun and and the “preestes thre”, among whom the Nun’s Priest, indicate a later, makeshift inclusion, probably resulting from a desire on Chaucer’s part to record the addition of new tales or his intention to do so, without bothering to provide, for the time being, a complementary portrait. Much the same can be said for the Five Guildsmen: the Haberdasher, Dyer, Carpenter, Weaver and Carpet-Maker. Their portrayal is too brief to be satisfactory and suggests a quick insertion at some later date. They evidently serve to herald a set of planned tales, four of which never achieved realization. I say four, for it is rather obvious that the presence here of a Carpenter indicates the author’s intention to correct the Miller-Reeve conflict with its flimsy and unsatisfactory representation of the Reeve as a carpenter by trade. Why on earth should he have wished to include another carpenter, if not for this reason? This is made the more likely as the Carpenter is also the odd man out in this company, the other four fitting into a broad definition as members of the Drapers’ Guild. In fact, in turning the Reeve into a carpenter in order to make the Miller’s Tale fit Chaucer shows us not only that the Reeve’s portrait in the General Prologue came before his tale but also how he dealt with the discrepancy problems resulting from a tale that was not quite fitted for its slot. When he decided to use this “churl’s tale” (fabliau) about the cuckolding of an old carpenter for the MillerReeve tiff, he simply included a few lines in the links to iron out the inconsistency of making it bear on a reeve. This can hardly have been


a final solution and it stands to reason that it was to be addressed more satisfactorily at some later date. It is another case of Chaucer recording a departure from the original plan in the nearest available location. A subsequent step, given time and opportunity, would have been to adapt the General Prologue to the new situation. This stage is one which he reached, though only marginally, which is why we find a Carpenter included in his all too sketchy portrait of the Five Guildsmen. The final stage, one presumes, would have been one in which the General Prologue figured a more extensively portrayed Carpenter to replace the Reeve in his quarrel with the Miller. The Reeve/Carpenter case is not an isolated one. Something similar is found with the Sergeant of the Law. Such sergeants were the aristocrats of the legal profession. There were twenty-one of them in the entire realm, ranking as social equals with the pinnacle of the knighthood.46 Thus the Ellesmere order’s awarding of the second place to this important official, rudely but entertainingly interrupted by a spate of churls’ tales, is entirely in line with his high status. What is remarkable is that by the time that he gets to tell his tale, his Introduction reveals his stature to have dropped by several degrees to a mere “Man of Law”, which, as far as one can discern, simply defines him as a lawyer. What should concern us here is that this change of emphasis is something that actually took place, thus corroborating the notion of a continuing process of reviewing and revision. Of further interest is the apparent fact that the Man of Law’s portrait did not get rewritten in the General Prologue and thus – as one more instance – appears to confirm Chaucer’s evident penchant for an on-the-spot effectuation of new directions and only cursory attention to revision. Another addition, already familiar to us, is of course the Canon’s Yeoman. Chaucer may have toyed with the idea of a tardy joiner-up from the very first – there is after all a full portrait involved here, even if this is the Canon’s whose departure is as hurried as his arrival. The Host’s reference to “a myrie tale or tweye”, combined with the Yeoman’s implied statement that they are Canterbury-bound [line 624], may indicate that his Tale was included when Chaucer was still contemplating his old plan, even if this is somewhat counter-indicated by the absence of a portrait of the man. 46

Benson, p 811.


A complementary consideration here is the matter of the absentee links, links that we would expect but do not get in the Canterbury Tales as they have come down to us. It is a reasonable assumption that Chaucer was working towards a system of tale links serving both as epilogue to the preceding tale and introduction to the next. In spite of editorial intervention this is the observable situation in the actual work. So why not also assume that the absentee links are, by and large, a matter of absentee tales? Surely it would have been sensible for Chaucer to put off writing such links until he knew what two tales he was going to connect them with. There may have been the occasional link that he could have written but left until another time, but in general it seems logical to attribute both types of absence to uneffectuated writing plans. The Alternative Reading This may be as good a place as any to pay some attention to Charles Owen’s “alternative reading” of the Canterbury Tales.47 This sees the text of Chaucer’s masterpiece as a collection of fragments reflecting different stages of his plan for the work as a whole. One stage of the plan, probably the earliest, called for a collection of tales ending with one introduced by the Parson’s Prologue. This tale would complete an over-all design prepared for in the Man of Law’s End-link. The Parson, avoided by the Host after their early encounter until there are no other pilgrims to call on, would use his turn at storytelling to remind the pilgrims of the religious meaning of their journey, thus effecting a startling reversal and showing the efficacy of penitence at the end. A second stage involved the detachment of the Wife of Bath from her position of interrupter in the Man of Law’s End-link and from her original tale, the Shipman’s Tale; the development of the two big series of tales, B2 on the one hand and DCEF on the other; and the inclusion of a series of geographic clues, including the references to the area near Canterbury in G and H, that tie the storytelling more closely to the progress of the journey. A third stage multiplied the number of tales, made the storytelling a contest, and arranged a new ending, the supper at the Tabard with the Host choosing the pilgrim who has told the best stories and the other pilgrims paying for the winner’s meal.

For this third stage to be effective, Owen must of course also include a homeward journey. This is why he claims that “the text of 47

Owen, ‘Alternative Reading’: 237-50, esp 246-47.


The Canterbury Tales nowhere supports the theory so popular with critics that Chaucer abandoned the homeward journey. Even the original ending, prepared for in the Parson’s Prologue, gives no indication that the pilgrims are completing a one-way journey”. This view is supported by Dolores Frese, while Derek Pearsall says this:48 The four-tale plan was a late addition to the General Prologue, designed to extend the tale-telling possibilities of The Canterbury Tales almost indefinitely, meanwhile postponing the bringing to an end of a project that had become coterminous for Chaucer with life itself”. In her view “the ‘ending’ of The Canterbury Tales, with the Parson’s ringing words comparing the pilgrimage, as the pilgrims prepare to enter Canterbury, with the pilgrimage of every man’s life to ‘Jerusalem celestial’ (X.51), thus becomes the conclusion of a plan that had been superseded. Chaucer’s characteristic aversion to closure could hardly be more neatly expressed.

This curious compilation of claims is characterized by Derek Brewer as “over-ingenious”, to which he adds that “the sympathetic speculation that the project ‘had become coterminous for Chaucer with life itself’ agrees much better with the ending as we have it when the Parson sees the pilgrimage as a model of the way to the celestial Jerusalem. To think otherwise requires a rewriting of The General Prologue later than the The Parson’s Prologue and Tale for which there is no evidence. To devise a new plan of some 120 tales when only 24 had been completed [sic] by perhaps 1395 is to exaggerate even Chaucer’s optimism, when by the normal standards of the time he was getting old. It also exaggerates his reluctance to close.”49 More specifically, Owen’s picture is full of inconsistencies. To mention a few, he is not very precise about the Parson’s Prologue, which does indicate that there is just a one-way journey. He cannot account for the function of the Parson’s Tale and therefore simply leaves out any good discussion of it. The suggestion that the General Prologue is one of Chaucer’s late pieces of writing does not hold water: it is contradicted by the presence of the unportrayed pilgrims and the faulty number of 29, neither of which ought to be there if he were right. The definition of B2 as “the development of [a] big series of tales” is too much honour for a Fragment that lacks a clear guiding theme and rather looks as if it served, at least partially, as a file in 48

Pearsall, p 233. For Frese, see note 1. Derek Brewer, A New Introduction to Chaucer (New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2nd edition 1998), pp 274-75. 49


which to park tales awaiting a subsequent assignation. Similarly, his notion of a late inclusion of geographic clues is not credible. Chaucer’s topographical data are largely consonant with a one-way pilgrimage, with the occasional badly fitting watering place easily attributed to his elimination of the homeward leg of the journey and to postponed revision. If they were added in Owen’s third and final stage, why is it that there is no clarity in this matter and not a single backward reference to Canterbury or, alternatively, any anticipatory remark about the pilgrims’ return to London with the exception of the initial announcement in the General Prologue? Most of all, Owen is mistaken about Chaucer’s multiplication of tales. All the indications are that Chaucer’s great headache was the finding of adequate narrative material. From my point of view, it is not only suggested by his glad embrace of the much less expansive new plan but even more so by the lack of headway that he made once he had taken this up. Even the Tales as we have them show through the absentee tales how little progress he actually made in the course of fourteen years, a fact that is underlined by the consideration that a good many of the tales that he did include had already been written at an earlier date. The very idea of Chaucer experimenting with the Canterbury Tales for, say, four or five years and at best arriving at a dozen tales and then deciding to extend them along the lines of the General Prologue’s plan of four tales per pilgrim and an approximate total of 120 tales beggars belief. When even his optimistic inclusion of some nine unportrayed pilgrims appears to have run into serious trouble, with only the Nun’s Priest and the Second Nun coming up with a tale but not even as much as a portrait in the General Prologue, the notion of a late quadrupling of tales cannot be regarded as anything but a fallacy. Even when arguing from Owen’s point of view, we cannot fail to note that the idea of Chaucer switching to a more grandiose scheme is negated by the observable fact that this never got him beyond a meagre and incomplete two dozen of tales. The Chaucer Public Accustomed as we are to printed books flooding the market in steady streams and huge quantities, we often forget how entirely different the book market was in the age of Chaucer and the same thing goes for those for whom manuscripts were produced. Predating the


fifteenth-century paper revolution and the growth of commercialized copying ventures, book production in the second half of Chaucer’s century was, partly on account of the pestilences, considerably limited both on the supply side of things and in its output. Books were still reproduced along traditional lines, that is, by scribes – such as Chaucer’s Adam Pynkhurst “Scriveyn” – and at considerable cost. Apart from the occasional presentation copy to an important patron, copies were generally commissioned by the interested parties. In general, books were produced, in all sort of overlapping fashion, for the clergy, the universities, governmental institutions, commercial interests, rich collectors and, finally, for entertainment, which is where the Host’s “solaas” comes in. Such entertainment, we may assume, was never intended for any general public in the modern sense but for a very private audience instead. In their case, this was the London court and those more or less narrowly associated with it: a diminutive coterie, by the looks of it. We are all familiar with the well-known Troilus depiction of Chaucer reading to a courtly audience and its equally romantic preRaphaelite successor by Ford Madox Brown, and what tends to stick in our memory is an image of him as a court poet par excellence. The plain fact, however, is that the records that we have on him paint no such picture. What we find is that Chaucer was a courtier active in the Ricardian court, closely allied to John of Gaunt, and capable enough to be entrusted with diplomatic missions and other tasks and functions. He began his service as a page in the Ulster household and so ended up closely connected to the Lancastrian side of politics, among other things through his marriage to Philippa, daughter of Sir Payne [or Paon] Roet and sister to Katherine Swynford. The latter was John of Gaunt’s mistress who later, in 1396, became his third wife, thus ultimately making Chaucer brother-in-law to one of the mightiest men in the land. Ironically, his connection with Gaunt provides the only clear evidence, in the shape of the Book of the Duchess, that we have of any overlapping functions as both courtier and poet. With its lament on the passing of Gaunt’s first wife Blanche, the White Lady, it is the closest that we come to a suggestion of Chaucer courting patronage. Yet this is thought to be a mistaken construction to put on things: supposedly, he was commissioned to write something commemorative in his known capacity as a person with a knack for poetry, rather than a poet actively engaged in seeking patronage. The person doing this


commissioning is identified by the Fairfax MS as Gaunt himself “pitiously complaynynge the deathe of the sayd dutchesse blanche”.50 Be this as it may, as it seems strange for Gaunt to have left the venting of his grief to someone who, by the implication of this view, was an amateur versifier, Chaucer’s further writings exhibit no great desire for either royal or aristocratic patronage.51 His continuing Lancastrian connection may well have contributed to this, in the light of the growing animosity against John of Gaunt and his part in late fourteenth-century politics, as well as the domestic political troubles that beset Richard throughhout the two final decades of the century. The early Prologue to the Legend of Good Women includes a reference to Queen Anne, wife to Richard II, and its King and Queen of Love may well be the royal couple but the work as such is not dedicated with the fawning and servility that are so often associated with this. His other major writings, such as the Canterbury Tales, are barren of elements to suggest a desire on Chaucer’s part to court the rulers’ good will, although some of his short poems do point in such a direction.52 Friends rather than anyone else, to the exclusion of the royal circle, are the ones to whom Chaucer addresses his writings and even here a specific mention – as found in Troilus and Criseyde – is a bit of a rarity. This is how modern criticism looks upon the patronage matter. It is way of looking at things that is less substantial than it seems, if only because it so strongly urges us to see Chaucer as the independent mind that we wish him to be, as a reflection of modern ideas on a writer’s role in society. While we have no sure way of deciding the issue, it is plainly one which obliges us to tread warily. Thus, when we look back on the evidence, the Book of the Duchess can hardly fail to be a commissioned piece, with Chaucer figuring not as a lay rhymer but as an acknowledged poet. This strongly implies patronage, just as does the early Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Poems that point in the same direction are: An ABC, written for Blanche when she was still alive; Fortune, addressed to either John of Gaunt, King Richard or even Henry of Derby, also known as Lancaster and immortalized by Shakespeare as Bolingbroke. And then there is the Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, which is addressed to the latter as the newly installed Henry IV, which dates 50

Benson, p 966. See also Pearsall in the next two notes. Pearsall, pp 198-202, 271-73. 52 Pearsall, pp 178-81. 51


the poem at 1399 or rather early 1400, as Robert F. Yeager has proposed.53 While outwardly an uncommissioned effusion on Chaucer’s part, it is plainly concerned with Henry’s patronage. The fact that it has been cast in the shape of something courtly and ends upon a note of apparent flattery seems significant, for surely Chaucer could have approached the King’s Treasury along more commonplace routes. Hailing Henry as his new overlord, the poem may be as much inspired by Gaunt’s death as Richard’s deposition and thus implicitly, through reference to his poor purse, been intended to remind Henry of his service to the House. This would account for Henry’s royal gesture of doubling Chaucer’s stipend soon after. Also, the new regime’s lasting concern with legitimizing its rule could well have led to the commissioning of some supportive writing, such as found in the shape of Gower’s Cronica tripertita. Chaucer’s clever poem with its contrasting of a personal complaint and the national weal and the interlaced courtly puns likewise seems to fit the bill. Nor should the absence of a dedication of the Canterbury Tales be taken as an argument against the possibility of patronage, as this is easily accounted for by, first of all, the unfinished state of the work and, secondly, the persistently uncertain political condition of the land. Chaucer’s tardiness in coming to grips with his reduced Canterbury Tales could point in this direction as well, suggesting someone temporizing while awaiting political matters to come to a head before offering his prospectus of the work to a sympathetic patron. What is unmistakable is that it is precisely among court circles where, as modern commentators point out, we must look for Chaucer’s public in the final two decades of the century and by “public” we ought to think primarily of a listening public. “Presentation to a living audience of friends and patrons” is how Charles Koban defines it, thereby echoing the findings of Bronson, Coleman, Crosby and Giffin.54 This accords well with observations on public reading in Eng53

Robert F. Yeager, ‘Chaucer’s “To His Purse”: Begging, or Begging Off?’, Viator 36 (2005): 373-414. 54 Charles Koban, ‘Hearing Chaucer Out: the Art of Persuasion in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’, ChauR 5 (1971): 225-239, at 225; Bertrand H. Bronson, ‘Chaucer’s Art in Relation to his Audience’, in Five Studies in Literature (Berkeley: U of California Publications, vol 8, 1940): 1-53; Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); Ruth Crosby, ‘Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery’, Spec 13 (1938): 413-32; Mary Giffin, Studies on Chaucer and His Audience (Hull/Québec: les Editions


land made by such contemporary French men of letters as Guillaume Machaut and David Aubert.55 I use the term primarily advisedly, as it is difficult to accept that the entirety of the Canterbury Tales was meant to be so presented. The dividing line between reading and being read to is rather fuzzy in several places. A forbidding piece like the Parson’s Tale can hardly have been intended for an audience and this also goes for some of the other tales. For instance, if we are to believe what Chaucer himself writes in the Second Nun’s Prologue, the tale to follow was for a readership and not any listeners attending a speaker.56 Our next question is who exactly the people were to whom Chaucer addressed his writings. Naturally, there were the royals and their entourage. John of Gaunt must have figured large, as patron, employer and ultimately brother-in-law. Plainly “moral Gower” was one and so was “philosophical” Ralph Strode, poet and philosopher, the two men to whom he dedicated his Troilus. For all the praise, finding Gower here is a bit of a surprise, probably reflecting the mild early ’eighties. Politically at least, Chaucer and Gower were no apparent soulmates through much of the final decade of the century. Chaucer was deeply embedded in the Ricardian court. However, being allied to the unpopular Gaunt and possibly for this reason, he seems seldom given to taking political sides. Gower, on the other hand, moved away from adulation of the young King, as expressed in his Vox clamantis, to turn to his greatest rival, Gaunt’s son Henry of Derby. Whether by temperament or choice, Chaucer, as we get to know him from his writings, seems to have preferred to stand in the wings and provide ironical commentary rather than enter into the internecine lists of court, while Gower was much more politically engaged and outspokenly so, if we are to accept his address to Henry in his Confessio as genuinely belonging to the early ’nineties rather than what it more probably is: an interpolation dating from after Henry’s coup.57 Thus, when for all their differences, John Hurt Fisher paints a picture of two friends, united by a common interest in religion, literature and l’Eclair, 1956), passim. 55 James J. Murphy, Medium Aevum LXVL.2 (1997): 328-29, reviewing Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). Also Jones, pp 21-25. 56 Second Nun’s Prologue, lines 24-25 and 77-84. Chaucer speaks of translation, reading and writing in this place. 57 Jones, pp 96-103.


an ordered society governed by good rulers,58 this looks somewhat naive vis-à-vis the deeply divisive political and religious currents which swept the country at this time. Others who played their parts in Chaucer’s literary milieu (and Gower’s, no doubt) must have been Sir Peter – or is it Robert? – Bukton and Henry Scogan, whom we come across in his short poems, and not to forget Sir Philippe de la Vache, to whom his Truth is addressed.59 They were part of a wider set of some dozen or so likeminded nobles known as the “Lollard knights”, a name indicating a shared view on theological reform and stemming from a happier time predating the later repression of Lollardry.60 No doubt several people belonging to their households should be included among Chaucer’s following. Actual names have been retrieved from fourteenth-century obscurity. These include: Sir Richard Sturry, Sir Lewis Clifford, who served as go-between in Chaucer’s correspondence with Deschamps, Sir Thomas Latimer, Sir William Neville, Sir John Montagu, the later Earl of Salisbury, and Sir John Clanvowe. Most of these were longtime acquaintances whom Chaucer knew from the time of Edward III. Further powerful associates included Sir William de Beauchamp and the already signalled De la Vache, son-in-law to Clifford. All of these were men of consequence as well as friends.61 On a somewhat less exalted scale but still part of “the court” in a wider sense, there were important men with whom Chaucer associated. Among these we should note merchant barons such as Sir William Walworth, Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir John Philipot; ambassadors and city officials like Sir Guichard d’Angle, Sir John Burley, Sir Peter Courtenay, Walter Skirley, bishop of Durham, and John Hend, sometime mayor of London. Besides Gower, there were other writers: Thomas Hoccleve, scribe, writer, high official-to-be, who was a generation or two younger than Chaucer, and Thomas Usk whose Testament of Love was at the time of Henry VIII mistakenly regarded as a work by Chaucer – to which we owe its survival, however corrupt. 58 Fisher, pp 204-302. In the course of this study, however, we shall find that their relationship may have been at a low ebb in the period when Chaucer composed the Canterbury Tales. 59 Benson, pp 17, 636, 1085. 60 Pearsall, pp 181-84; Robinson, p xxvii. 61 J.W. Sherborne, ‘Aspects of English Court Culture’ in: English Court Culture in the Late Middle Ages, eds V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), p 23; Pearsall, pp 181-84; Robinson, p xxvii.


It is often suggested that the royals and their close following were little interested in literature but this looks suspiciously like postRicardian propaganda. The cultural atmosphere of Richard’s court was certainly a receptive place for all sort of writing, both religious and secular, particularly when this was in English as the popular new means of disseminating ideas quickly and widely.62 In official historiography this goes largely unrecognized, exception being made for Richard’s Queen Anne, who imported a huge library when she came to live in England. Yet here, too, there is usually a “Lancastrian” reservation. She is regarded as having been insufficiently versed in everyday English to have made a mark on the Chaucerian scene.63 What about Richard’s nemesis, Henry of Derby, in this context? Where did he stand with respect to Chaucer? This is not an easy question, nor are there, I regret to say, any easy answers. As one of the Lords Appellant who were briefly in power in 1388, he is unlikely to have belonged to anything even distantly resembling a “Chaucer set”. Yet he is irrevocably linked to Chaucer through the latter’s extensive service to the House of Lancaster. This link is extended further through his father’s marriage to his erstwhile mistress, Chaucer’s sister-in-law Katherine Swynford, which effectively makes Chaucer his stepuncle. Ay, and there’s the rub. It is doubtful that an aristocrat like Henry, the flower of England’s knighthood, would have taken kindly to this. If his father in his dotage wished to marry his floozy, this was bad enough but having to defer to her upstart commoner brother-inlaw with his literary ways may have been a bridge too far. Of course, it is impossible to say if this is a true picture. Henry may have liked and appreciated Katherine, but human psychology suggest the reverse. She and her entourage may well have been the object of Henry’s most devout dislike, if not worse. On the whole then, Chaucer’s public belonged to the upper layers of London society, roughly defined as the chivalrous class64 or, if one wishes, the aristocracy and the “middle strata” that Strohm dis-

62

Jones, pp 60-87. Pearsall, p 180. This picture is contested by Sherborne, who argues in favour of a general cultural interest on Richard and Anne’s parts and cites Thomas Arundel’s funeral speech for Anne’s (possible) familiarity with vernacular English. 64 This definition is taken from Lee Patterson’s review of Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer in Speculum 67 (1992:2): 485-88, at 486. 63


cerns.65 More specifically, they probably included “the entourage of king and nobility [but also a] multitude of household knights and officials, career diplomats and civil servants”,66 affluent London merchants and, no doubt, their hangers-on. Not all of these, it should be recognized, would have been part of Chaucer’s literary coterie. Nor did all of those who presumably were necessarily belong to the same side of the political spectrum. Several friends who supported Richard, including Brembre and Usk, were brutally victimized when in 1388 the opposition was in full power,67 while Gower was an increasingly outspoken voice in favour of Henry of Derby or so he wants us to believe. When applied to a wider audience, this is one consideration that helps to explain why, if not by natural inclination, Chaucer is so perennially evasive on the great political issues of his day. A Wider Audience? Derek Pearsall paints Troilus as a landmark in Chaucer’s popularity, making a name for him at court, but discerns a turning-away in the Legend of Good Women and a final choice of going his own way, without any patronage whatsoever, in the shape of the Canterbury Tales.68 It is a view that is difficult to share. There is ample reason to doubt his notion that the matter of patronage and short-lived fads, such as the Daisy or Marguerite cult and its passing that we come across in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, were not Chaucer’s thing.69 What evidence there is points in another direction. A further problem lies in the premise that Chaucer commanded none too large a public during his lifetime and actually preferred this, in order to make his own voice heard among an intimate circle and to the exclusion of the command of those in power. If this is correct, how are we to account for Chaucer’s huge popularity in the next century? The first attempts at producing a more or less complete Canterbury Tales stem from immediately before or after his death and the century’s total of texts that have survived is 85 65

Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge MA/London: Harvard UP, 1989), passim. Scanlon, p 144, narrows down these “strata” to no more than five per cent of the [presumably London] population. Even this looks like a rather high estimate. 66 Derek Pearsall, as cited by Strohm: 6. 67 Jones, pp 57-59 and passim; Pearsall, p 201; Fisher, p 62 68 Pearsall, pp 178-81. 69 Fisher, pp 240-41; Pearsall, pp 191-93.


(including the early printed editions), an unheard-of figure for any medieval English manuscript and outdone only by the Prick of Conscience.70 Also, Caxton’s printed versions were themselves no doubt based upon the fact that the Tales were one of the most popular collections around and thus likely to help him meet printing expenses and make a profit into the bargain. One would therefore be inclined to think that there must have been a broad basis for Chaucer to have become so well-liked in the near-century after his death. To a considerable degree, these two views are mutually exclusive and it may be that the truth resides somewhere in the middle. Doubtless there was something like a trusted and intimate Chaucer set. One might even suppose that in the early years of Henry IV’s reign, when its repressive nature was not too marked yet or precisely because its first signs were making itself felt, loyal Chaucer afficionados sought to preserve and distribute the Canterbury Tales before ecclesiastical and secular authorities could crack down upon the book for good. Yet also, contrary to some of the critics, why should we refuse to accept the implications of the old picture of Chaucer giving recitations, as illustrated in the well-known Troilus frontispiece (Cambridge MS 61, roughly dated at 1420), and accept the simultaneous existence of a wider and perhaps somewhat less intimate audience? Surely it is not too bad an idea to suppose the picture to be a memory of earlier days when Chaucer made well-attended appearances to read to assembled courtiers or court-associated households. He is, after all, entertaining enough (hugely so for his time, one would think) to have inspired any number of people and acquired a quickly spreading reputation and attendance through word-of-mouth recommendation. Pearsall comes up with the reservation that the Troilus portrait shows Chaucer without a book and cannot therefore be taken to be reading from his Tales.71 If not simply the artist’s omission, this can be countered by pointing out that, as a well-schooled person, he may well have had several of his tales by heart and been able to duly recite these, a feat not at all uncommon for those living in his day and age.72 70

Pearsall, p 231. Pearsall, pp 179-80. 72 Brewer, p 15; Nevill Coghill, editor of Geoffrey Chaucer:The Canterbury Tales (1951; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), actually claims a prodigious memory on Chaucer’s part (p 13). D. S. Brewer, in Chaucer (1953; London: Longman, 1973), p 7, does much the same. 71


In fact, the early Chaucer portraits never show any book. They usually represent him in the act of speaking, while underlining a point with his forefinger. Obviously, also, most of them are of derivative nature and the impression that one gets is that they all stem from two exemplars. Thus, the Ellesmere picture of Chaucer on horseback is anatomically correct from the waist up but too large for either his horse or his dwarfish and underdeveloped lower body. This can hardly reflect the true Chaucer, who by his own admission was tubby but not stubby. Rather, it shows that his portrait was based on an earlier one that stopped at the waist. A better rendition of this same portrait or one very much like it is found later in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principium (1411) but this time as a mirror image. Thus there was probably an early portrait on which both were based and, as mirror images are involved, this may well have been a woodcut, which would have provided both a positive and a negative image. At the same time, there was another picture about, this time viewing him from a different angle (“trois quarts”) and slightly from above, which has given us the Troilus portrait as well as the “1402” one that was popularized in the Penguin edition of the Canterbury Tales and which, in view of its ostensible date, may have been the original. There are two interesting observations to be made here. One is that at some time or other both portrayal traditions coalesced and produced the rosary that he sometimes holds in one hand, as an emblem to underscore that he stands there as a preacher of sententious matter – which seems to me an appropriate note. The other is the remarkable decoration in the top right hand corner of the 1402 portrait: a daisy flowering in three directions. On the left there is a coat of arms. The latter is clear, as it plainly serves to underline Chaucer’s successful station in life, but what about the flowers on the right? Both emblems must stand for the man in a notable fashion, interpretable for his contemporaries without the aid of further comment, much in the way that we understand modern signposts. So what do the daisies signify and why are they so specifically Chaucerian? Here I must ask my readers to forbear and wait until we get to deal with them in the next chapter. There are two or three final curiosities to be added to this overview. One is the fact, as pointed out by Strohm, that appreciation of Chaucer’s writing broadened notably in the half century after his death yet failed to result in an English “Chaucer tradition” of writers following his example. He attributes this to a mixture of old age and


Lancastrian politics. Thus, the “Chaucer set” of important associates, many of whom were in possession of copies of the Canterbury Tales, did not survive Chaucer by many years. This is a point that we had best discount. Surely Chaucer must have appealed to all ages and not just a “set” of elderly admirers. The other point seems better taken. This is that Henry IV’s rule, always rather indigent and a far cry from the opulence of Richard’s reign, went together with a thoroughly moralistic reaction.73 This explains well why there was never any vogue of Chaucer-oriented writing in these years. Here was a barren place where there was no patronage for the sort of writing popular during Richard’s reign nor any promise of remuneration for those willing to take up Chaucer’s banner. It was not until the later Henry V came to make his mark in the closing years of his father’s reign that Chaucer’s work and ideas were given any prominence again.74 The next curious fact, no doubt related to these changes of moral climate, is that once the Tales were more widely disseminated in the fifteenth century we find that their individual popularity differs greatly from what one would expect. Fifteenth-century anthologies that include tales from the Canterbury collection display a marked preference for moral tales or, perhaps more correctly, for tales whose naming suggests a moral content and an affirmation of current social values.75 Thus, the Wife of Bath, one of Chaucer’s most consummate creations, gets little or no appreciation at all in the collections inspected by Charles Owen and D.S. Silvia.76 Yet, most interesting perhaps of all, is the observable fact that in spite of the repressive climate, both politically and in terms of the Church seeking to clamp down on vernicularity in religious matters, those who could hear and read continued to turn to an author who, in terms of early fifteenth-century England, was at least close to being something of a subversive. Perhaps it was this whiff of illicitness – much like the Russian samizdat in the late twentieth century – that kept up Chaucer’s popularity.

73

Strohm: 18; Jones, pp 118. Jones, pp 258-75. 75 Strohm: 24. The remark about moral content is my own inference. 76 Strohm: 24. Strohm does not discuss the Wife of Bath, but his various enumerations make clear that she was never a favourite in this period. 74

2. Towards Composing a Testament of Love Gower’s Challenge Having come so far, we now return to Chaucer’s changing design of the Canterbury Tales and put the vital question of what it was that caused him to decide upon this radical change of plan and when approximately this was. It cannot have been boredom with the Tales as such, for the post-1390 years show an upswing in his interest,1 though dissatisfaction with the way things were going in the early years and the sheer endlessness of the job undertaken may have played their part. This is where this study comes in, but before going into it we had better have a brief look at some background. What we shall be discussing is the proposition that Chaucer’s remake of the Canterbury Tales was directly inspired by John Gower, and that this was probably the outcome of a challenge to literary combat that was issued in the first version of the Confessio Amantis. It is a striking fact that in 1390, a mere three or four years after the inception of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s presumable friend and man about court John Gower should have successfully completed the first version of a markedly similar work, the Confessio Amantis, particularly when we keep in mind that it was probably begun at the same approximate date.2 If this should be a matter of simple coincidence, how do we account for the obvious similarities that link the works even when we dismiss the unusual and innovative link-andframe structure that they share? Gower’s dual theme of temporal and spiritual love is repeated throughout the Canterbury Tales. Both books 1

To judge by Benson’s Explanatory Notes, pp 795-965, the majority of tales are at present considered to have been incorporated between 1390 and 1395. 2 Gower may not have been employed as a courtier in the strict sense of the word. This is a matter of some difficulty, given the dearth of information that we have, particularly in the shape of the non-survival of many of the Year-Books of Richard’s reign, but such factors as his attorneyship for Chaucer in 1378, Richard II’s ‘commissioning’ of the Confessio Amantis and Henry of Derby’s gift of a collar in 1393 attest to a close connection with court circles. See also John Hines, Nathalie Cohen and Simon Roffey, ‘Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta’, in Siân Echard ed. A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp 23-47, at 25-26.

46 | Towards Composing a Testament of Love

are certifiable as exemplum collections, even if this is not their prime function. Their discussion of sin and virtue has its plain parallels. And there are even tales, such as the Man of Law’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, which are close renditions of tales that are also found in Gower. Two others point in the same direction: the Manciple’s Tale, arguably satirizing Gower’s Phebus and Coronis (Book III),3 and the Physician’s Tale of Apius and Virginia (Book VII). If we were to eliminate all the stories that we suppose Chaucer to have written or included from 1390, would there still be such a marked correspondence with the Confessio Amantis? The answer must be negative. True, there remains the signal link-and-frame structure, but many other points of correspondence would be obscure or simply absent. At the time of the first Confessio (1390) there was, for instance, no Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as we know them nor, as far as we can see, most of the other tales that so specifically discuss love, sin and marriage that we call them by the separate name of Marriage Group, all of them presumably dating from the later years of the Canterbury Tales. The very same thing goes for the other tales shared with Gower, with the possible exception of the Man of Law’s Tale and Physician’s Tale. And, very importantly, if there was no new plan yet, there would have been no common linear structure for the Confessio and the Canterbury Tales to share nor anything like the spiritual emphasis that is provided by the Parson. So how do we account for their remarkable subsequent coalescence or, rather, the remarkable Gowerization of the Canterbury Tales? Recognizing that the two authors were familiar with one another and possibly friends at one time, which seems verifiable through the fact that as fellow-authors they paid one another public compliments (Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde and Gower in his first version of the Confessio Amantis), and Gower acted as Chaucer’s attorney when the latter went to Italy in 1378,4 we may assume that their use of the link-and-frame structure to experiment upon concurrently was a matter of collusion, of some sort of mutual arrangement. It would be foolish to assume that the two, while moving in the same circles and presumably belonging to the same coterie of literarily 3

Richard Hazelton,‘The “Manciple’s Tale”: Parody and Critique’, JEGP 62 (1963): 1-31. 4 Peter Nicholson, ‘ The Man of Law’s Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower’, ChauR 26 (1991): 153-73.

Towards Composing a Testament of Love | 47

interested courtiers and court associates, could have been engaged on two equally ambitious undertakings of a similar nature at approximately the same time as a matter of coincidence. There must have been something to set both of them going in the same direction. As for the borrowing of tales, it is Chaucer who in the light of the Confessio Amantis’ completion in 1390 is the likely borrower, though there may have been some mutual give-and-take of manuscripts in the run-up (the Man of Law’s Tale looks like an instance), while the link-andframe idea itself is often associated with his Italian travels and may have been his contribution.5 Now before we go on, let us have a closer look at the Confessio Amantis. Its basic framework is an exposition of the Seven Deadly Sins, each with various branchings. They are all illustrated by one or more stories, some eighty altogether. All this is fitted into the Confessio thus. In a love vision Amans, the Lover, who expressly serves as a Gower persona6 and is pining for love, encounters Venus who takes pity on him and sets him the task of confessing his sins against her rule. For this she lends him Genius, her Priest, in order to take his shrift, in the course of which it is ever clearer that the Lover is really a senex amans and past competing, until finally he reveals himself as none other than John Gower.7 The Priest “with elaborate subdivisions worthy of Dante […] treats each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, first from the purely Christian standpoint, then from that of the Courts of Love; and he illustrates most points with at least one story. When Gower’s shrift is done, a Parliament of Love is assembled and his case discussed. He is absolved by Venus but also dismissed for good as being past active service in the lists of love”.8 5

Benson, p 3; Robinson, p 1. If both Gower and Chaucer began work around 1386 or 1387, there is some flexibility as to who may have been borrowing from whom up to the date of 1390, when the first version of the Confessio was completed. 6 Gower himself explains in a gloss: “Quasi in persona aliorum, quos amor alligat, fingens se auctor esse Amantem, varias eorum passiones … scribere proponit” [Here, as it were in the person of other people who are held captive by love, the author pretending to be the Lover - proposes to write about their various passions]. 7 John Lawlor, “Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Gower’s Honeste Love” in: Essays in Memory of C.S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1966), pp 107121, at p 118. Also Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion – A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992), pp 38-51. 8 Terence Tiller ed. John Gower: Confessio Amantis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p 11.


This is the ostensible Confessio Amantis, which looks dauntingly artificial. But beyond this exterior a different debate is discernible. As Larry Scanlon and others point out, the discourse on fin’ amour is hardly a homage to the conventions of courtly love, of which Gower is quite critical, but rather a convenient peg for him on which to hang his political and moral views.9 Thus much of the book deals with the abuses of the age. He is greatly concerned with the decay of the exemplarity which should reside in the wielding of royal power, especially with respect to the upholding of the law and the dispensing of justice, and similarly that of the Church, which, with profound anti-clericalism, he sees as deeply compromised by its pursuit of worldly aims. There is every reason to believe that Chaucer was acquainted with the 1390 redaction of the Confessio Amantis. At the end of this work, he himself is mentioned in a salutation that has often been interpreted to be on a par with and perhaps in reply to the Troilus dedication and is regarded to take the edge off the old rumour of a quarrel between Chaucer and Gower. We can hardly suppose Chaucer to have been unaware of this passage and may therefore enter as a safe piece of information his awareness of the book and its reference to him. From this it is a small step to accepting that he was also familiar with its contents. Whether he was aware of the subsequent disappearance of the accolade in the later redactions is another matter. Still, once we allow, as we must, that Chaucer was familiar with the 1390 version of the Confessio Amantis or at least parts of it, we must also allow for the possibility that he used it as a model for imitation, in good keeping with general medieval usage. There is no need to belabour Chaucer’s attitude towards this practice. The great majority of his writings attest to wide and enthusiastic borrowing, often through translation, which makes it hard to see how he could have not availed himself of the opportunity presented by the Confessio Amantis. Here is a wealth of tales not unlike the Canterbury Tales, both available for imitation and, by virtue of its similarity, suggestive of this. Add to this that, in the light of the meagre 23 tales that we possess as his final production, out of an intended minimum of at least 33, not to mention the 80-odd tales that he may originally have meant to write, he is likely to have been rather desperate for further material. All the same, let us not put too great a 9

Scanlon, pp 245-297.


premium on medieval borrowing practice. As the Man of Law indicates in the Pierides passage of his Introduction, to be discussed later, there are limits to this, beyond which one becomes a cheap imitator. These theoretical considerations are borne out by the facts. Chaucer makes demonstrable use of the Confessio Amantis, even if in our perception he does so in a restrained and unobtrusive fashion. It has recently been shown that the Man of Law’s Tale is primarily based upon its parallel tale in the Confessio, even if it also draws substantially upon their common source, Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle. Gower’s tale of Florent is the nearest extant analogue for the Wife of Bath’s Tale and close enough to have been Chaucer’s direct source, as we shall find in the appropriate chapter. There is, as we have seen, the Manciple’s Tale as a possible satire on Gower’s tale of Phebus and Coronis. The argument that it is actually based on the latter is not truly convincing, but the naked fact of a shared tale is incontrovertible. Finally there is the Physician’s Tale, which parallels Gower’s Apius and Virginia but is not supposed to have been influenced by him. To complement this, there is of course the increased thematic and structural coalescence of the Confessio Amantis and the Canterbury Tales that we noted a while ago. If this were a crime novel, the sleuth would point out that the suspect, Geoffrey Chaucer, had not only ample opportunity for imitation but a clear motive to boot. It is here that John Gower enters the stage himself, being the very one to point out what a golden chance the Confessio Amantis affords Chaucer and blithely going on to press him to come up with a Testament of Love along the lines of the Confessio Amantis. We find this in Gower’s 1390 accolade, or dedication, at the end of the work, though these terms are somewhat misleading. The seventeen lines involved are hardly the fulsome praise or flattering reference that Chaucer scholarship makes it out to be. They are full of barbs, smack of rivalry more than anything else and have all the characteristics of a literary challenge. Something like this has also been noted by Paul Strohm. If we eliminate his choice of slightly in the following quotation, he comes very close to what I argue: “Moral Gower” and Chaucer may not have quarreled, as an earlier generation of critics supposed, but they certainly interacted. […] The slightly competitive currents running through Gower’s admonition to Chaucer at the end of the 1392-93 [sic] version of the Confessio and Chaucer’s attribution to the Man of Law of mock dismay at the “un-

50 | Towards Composing a Testament of Love kynde abhomynacions” inherent in subjects treated by Gower are not exactly friendly in the easy vein of Chaucer’s poems to Scogan and Bukton…10

Here are Gower’s words to Chaucer as pronounced by Venus: And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete, As mi disciple and mi poete: For in the floures of his youthe In sondri wise, as he wel couthe, Of ditees and of songes glade, The whiche he for mi sake made, The lond fulfild is overal: Wherof to him in special Above alle othre I am most holde. For thi now in hise daies olde Thou schalt him telle this message, That he upon his latere age, To sette an ende of alle his werk, As he which is myn owne clerk, Do make his testament of love, As thou hast do thi schrifte above, So that mi Court it mai recorde. [ConfAm, Book VIII, 2941* - 2957*]

The trouble with a text like this is that, from our perspective, we must tread warily when reading between fourteenth-century lines, even if such reading or, rather, listening was an evident medieval pastime. We are, after all, dealing with a set of mind and frame of reference that are different from ours in many respects. What we should also guard against is the automatic assumption that the “I” of this passage is Gower. It is Venus who speaks here, Gower – or rather the Gower persona whom we get to know as Amans – is the “thou” to whom she directs her words. Thus, such expressions as “mi disciple and mi poete” and “myn owne clerk” should basically be read as a definition of Chaucer’s role as a servant of Venus. Yet, inevitably, everything that she says also represents a statement by Gower, the author this time, and it is difficult in this confusion of personae not to come away with the idea that in this place he is implicitly defining his relationship with Chaucer as he sees it. Unlike Chaucer's remark about “moral Gower” at the conclusion of his Troilus and Criseyde, which looks entirely straightforward, 10

Strohm: 13. Of course, he means to say the 1390 version.


the passage is not so innocent. Despite its apparent warmth, which has seduced most readers into taking it for a compliment, there is a dig at advancing years and virility when Venus, immediately upon declaring Gower unfit for an active love life, conveys the message that Chaucer is a similar reject. Besides, there is a slightly malicious slant to everything. This applies especially to the phrase “testament of love” which cannot fail to be a reference to Thomas Usk. The remark about Chaucer’s song-writing days looks rather tongue-in-cheek, “damning with faint praise”, just like the one about Chaucer growing old, coming as it does from someone presumably ten years his senior. Nor is the invitation for Chaucer to write his Testament of Love very kind, when, snidely echoing Chaucer’s own frequent poetic pretence to be unfit for love, it rubs in the import of such an attitude by implying that, like the Lover in the Confessio Amantis, he is past active love-making or even an active life (ripe for a testament), let alone the writing of a vast volume on the subject. If in jest, the remark was public all the same, which may have rankled. And there is of course always a chance that Gower was hinting at either physical or literary impotency. Another possibility is that the reference is to Chaucer’s declining health, which finds some support in the near-total absence of official functions that he seems to have fulfilled in the final decade of his life and his inability to make real headway with the completion of the Canterbury Tales. Still, it may all have been good fun, for either of them, to make amical snide remarks about one another at this stage of their writing careers. Such sparring could have been stimulating and would have added spice to their dealings with their literary entourage, who may well have been the ultimate inspiration for it all. Whatever the exact situation or the exact stimulus, there evidently was, as we shall see borne out in the following chapters, a moment when Gower managed to really spur Chaucer into action. One of the pinpricks contributing to this is found in the remark about Chaucer’s “songs and ditties”. In its true perspective this is comparable to, say, praising Shakespeare for producing some interesting light verse in total disregard of his dramatic oeuvre. Once we are prepared to recognize this note of disparagement, we have a good key to the entire vein of the accolade. Gower is implicitly exalting his own achievement at Chaucer’s expense, though his motive is not necessarily a selfish or nasty one. He effects this by creating a negative contrast along classically simple lines. Chaucer is made out to be the pro-


verbial grasshopper. All songs and merry tunes “in the floures of his youthe”, he has failed to prepare for the winter of his years. Now that he is growing old, the only monument to his genius are the charming trifles that he wrote when he was young and foolish. For all their quality and quantity they lack body. Gower, as the industrious one, warns him of the winter ahead and holds himself up as the proper example. It is high time for Chaucer to leave frivolity behind and make amends by turning to something more lasting and better befitting his age. How he should go about this is kindly shown by Gower. He need only let himself be guided by the Confessio Amantis, which happens to possess the very substance that is wanting in his songs and ditties and is the exact sort of mature work that is required. Upon reflection, the thing that stands out particularly is Gower’s implicit claim to have surpassed his rival as the poet of love par excellence. Nothing in Chaucer’s prolific oeuvre can compete with the Confessio Amantis. Whereas Gower has passed his master test, Chaucer must still come up with his. This reduces him to little more than an apprentice, one whose task of producing a masterpiece is bound to the rules and the example set by his taskmaster Gower. Thus, what Gower’s accolade really comes down to is a provocation or, better, a challenge to a literary combat. Having outdone Chaucer with a huge link-andframe story (some 30,000 lines!), he invites his friend and rival to improve upon this – on his terms and on his speciality. Gower’s Challenge and the Legend of Good Women It is plain from the way things are phrased that Gower calls for Chaucer to come up with a final work that is not only comparable to his but also something along the same basic lines. This is the inference to be drawn from the fact that Gower equates the testament of love with a schrift (= Lover’s Shrift = Confessio Amantis) like his own. As these terms are reversible, Amans’ confession also being Gower’s courtly testament in the final reckoning, even if this is literary pretence, we cannot fail to conclude that the work which he is stipulating paraphrases the title of his own work. That this is truly a call for something imitative is also suggested by his use of testament of love. As I have indicated, the name is taken from a contemporary work by Thomas Usk, which unfortunately has come down to us in a single and very corrupt version, ironically owing its survival to Gower’s use


of this very title. Yet not only does this book lean heavily on Chaucer as a source but it is also imitative in the sense that, as Allen Shoaf writes, it is in a great many ways an extension of the argument in Chaucer’s House of Fame.11 Nor are Gower’s words innocuous in any sense. Usk, as one of the Brembre faction, was indicted of treason by the Merciless Parliament of 1388.12 He was executed with stunning barbarity: “After being drawn and quartered, he was cut down while still alive and beheaded with agonizing slowness; records show that it took nearly thirty strokes of the sword”.13 In this connection, it should be re-emphasized that it is generally accepted that Usk moved in circles close to Chaucer. In fact, Pynkhurst’s involvement in the Mercers’ petition may mean that Chaucer’s office was closer to Brembre and Usk than it is often assumed.14 Thus – and this is significant – Gower’s choice of words, coming little more than a year after the event and perhaps not even that,15 is not to be dismissed as a light-hearted little quip or mere slip of the pen. It is a calculated remark, with nasty overtones. It not only reminds Chaucer of the nearness of death but also of the fate of writers with a dangerous allegiance to a weak King, for Usk and the circle to which he belonged were staunch supporters of Richard II.16 At the same time it is implied that, so far, he has not even come up to the standard of his feeblest imitators, let alone Gower and his Confessio. And perhaps worth noting most of all is the competitive spirit which speaks from this, thus leaving little doubt that this is truly an invitation to literary combat. What we should also keep in mind is that we virtually catch Gower here in the act of transferring his allegiance from Richard to Gaunt’s son Henry, the later Henry IV. The testament of love remark shows in what direction he was leaning, as does the Latin dedication to Henry in eight of the early manuscripts belonging to the first redac11 R. Allen Shoaf, ed. Thomas Usk. The Testament of Love (Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), p 25 note 44. 12 Pearsall, p 201; Fisher, p 62. 13 John Leyerle, “Thomas Usk”, in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1982-89), vol 12, pp 333-35, at 334. 14 I owe this observation to a remark by Jeremy Smith. 15 There is no saying when exactly Gower composed the seventeen lines of his challenge. Our terminus a quo is 1388, the time of Usk’s death, while at the latest they were included at the approximate time when the first version was finished in 1390. 16 Pearsall, p 201.


tion. Just a few months after this, or at most a year, all lines to Richard and Chaucer were removed, soon to be replaced by a glowing address to Henry, though this may be an interpolation stemming from the time of the latter’s seizure of the Crown, as Terry Jones cum suis propose in “Who Murdered Chaucer?”17 From Gower’s juxtaposition of his own Confessio and Chaucer’s confession-to-be it is a likely notion that, assuming that he knew on what writing Chaucer was engaged, the work he had in mind was the Legend of Good Women rather than the Canterbury Tales. It is the obvious choice. Here we have a love vision much reminiscent of Gower’s and leading up to a similar string of tales. As Fisher sums up: The points of direct similarity […] are 1) the appearance of the king and queen of love; 2) general details of setting and dress such as the “swote pleine”, the fiery darts, the pearl crowns, the company of lovers; 3) the displeasure of the king of love with the poets; 4) the intercession of the queen of love; and 5) her assignment of a confession or penance which provides motivation for a collection of stories.18

To this he adds, a few pages later, that “the love vision as the starting point for a collection of tales remains unique [and] so does also the religious framework for a collection of secular love stories”.19 What he fails to say is that the two works also share seven heroines dealt with in the shape of actual tales. He further points out that the two works were begun at the same time of 1386/87 and feels that they were both suggested by Richard and Anne during a boating party.20 If this sounds a bit fanciful, let it be noted that, while history is silent upon Chaucer here, this is what Gower does record for himself: In Temse whan it was flowende As I be bote cam rowende, So as fortune hir tyme sette, My liege lord par chaunce I mette; And so befel, as I cam nyh, Out of my bot, whan he me syh, He bad me come in to his barge. And whan I was with him at large, 17

Jones, pp 98-103. Fisher, p 240. 19 Fisher, p 242. 20 Fisher, p 240. He actually says “written”, but this is plainly a slip of the pen. 18

Towards Composing a Testament of Love | 55 Amonges othre thinges seid He hath this charge upon me leid, And bad me doo my besynesse That to his hihe worthinesse Som newe thing I sholde boke, That he himself it mihte loke After the forme of my writynge. And thus upon his comandynge Myn herte is wel the more glad To write so as he me bad. [ConfAm, 39-56]

On Chaucer’s part, it may be added that, beyond the love vision, the Legend is regarded as being none too clear as to the number of good women whom it is supposed to be about. Its alternative title, as found in Benson’s edition of the Retraction, is “the book of the xxv. Ladies”, but, to judge by the text of its G-Prologue (line 186), which specifically mentions the figure “nynteen”, and Lydgate’s remark on the subject, this is probably a scribal misreading of “xix. Ladies”.21 Similarly, when Fisher writes, “Alceste and the god of love are followed at once by nineteen women, presumably intended to be the women in the balade Hyd, Absalon, although the figures do not work out”,22 he slightly misrepresents things. It is the god of love, not Alceste and the god of love, who is followed by nineteen ladies. Thus the figures do work out all right. It is the exact ladies involved who pose a problem, not their number: while the balade includes Alceste, it excludes Philomela, who is one of the nine to actually have a tale of their own in the uncompleted Legend. Several of these exemplary women are ones whom we also come across in Gower’s book and who, like Gower’s ladies, are chiefly based on Ovid’s Heroides.23 Chaucer does not seem to have done much – if any – work on them after his initial efforts. Gower’s admonition that it is high time for Chaucer to come up with his testament of 21 Benson, pp 965 and especially 1179. Various numbers occur in the manuscripts, but the figure 19 seems most likely, both on the authority of Chaucer’s disciple Lydgate who says that the plan was for 19 ladies (Benson, p 1060), of the Prologue (F: 283, G:186) and that of the actual number of ladies referred to in the balade Hyd, Absalon. Benson’s retention of XXV in the Retraction is an editorial choice, evidently stemming from his conviction that Chaucer meant to expand the Legend rather than shelve it (Benson, p 1060). In the light of what we know of Chaucer’s efforts on the Legend this is not very plausible and is further contradicted by our findings below. 22 Fisher, p 239. 23 Benson, p 1059; Fisher, p 285.


love may well be taken to refer to the latter’s flagging efforts on the Legend. This is at least what Fisher concludes, and it is difficult not to agree with him: “What is important about these lines [i.e. the admonition], however, is that they imply that Chaucer was still supposed to get on with his task” – the task, that is, of completing the Legend.24 If we, from our distant perspective, see in what direction Gower’s words may be taken to point, can we suppose Chaucer to have missed out on this? The answer is, of course, that we cannot and that he did not. It is a subject that he addresses in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale. What is more, Lady Fortune has been gracious here and bequeathed us a single surviving manuscript, now Cambridge UL MS Gg.iv.27, which shows that Chaucer did actually pick up work on the Legend some years after the original bout of writing. Its Prologue, generally accepted as a later rewriting and known as the GPrologue, the original one being the so-called F-Prologue, shows the tidying hand of Chaucer weeding out some of the too flowery and courtly passages. The evidence is, however, that beyond the rewriting which this involved he desisted and let the Legend rest. In fact, it is even supposed that he used it as a mining source and that tales originally planned for it, such as the Physician’s Tale, were later shifted to the Canterbury effort. The date for this rewriting is given as 1394 or possibly later, by dint of its exclusion of the earlier reference to Queen Anne, who died in that year.25 There are grounds for doubting this dating, to which we shall turn later. Briefly, what is at issue here is that datings in the Canterbury field tend to be conjectural and shaky. To base one upon the failure to mention Anne is quite acceptable. The inference that this is due to her death is not. There are other reasons imaginable, as good or better, for Chaucer to have left out the reference. It is important here to recognize this element of uncertainty, as it crops up in many places where Chaucer scholarship has attempted and is still attempting to pin down specific dates. Be this as it may, the rewriting itself – whatever its exact date – allows itself to be read as good evidence that Chaucer had understood the direction of Gower’s challenge and actually made a serious attempt to adapt the Legend to Gower’s suggestion. The link with Gower is generally accepted by the critics, who feel that the G-Pro24 25

Fisher, p 250. Benson, p 1060.


logue’s replacement of “other wrecches” by “olde foles” is intended as a friendly dig at Gower in reply to his remark about Chaucer’s age at the end of the Confessio. This is an attractive notion, particularly as the senex amans seems to make his appearance here. Further reference to Gower may reside in the “Som men wolde seyn” remarks in lines 1009 and 1086, as pointed out long ago by Thomas Tyrwhitt.26 Chaucer’s use of “men” may well be taken to point to Gower and Trevet alike, since the matters referred to are treated by both. However, as “Som men sein” and like formulations are characteristically Gowerian nonce phrases that are found all over the Confessio, Robinson is probably right when he remarks that “there seems to be more point in an allusion to Gower, particularly in view of the supposed fling at him in the Introduction”.27 Something else to be noted here is the fact that, in full compliance with Gower’s reference to Chaucer’s advanced age and Venus’ judgement of Gower, Chaucer eliminated the conventional love poses that are found in the F-Prologue and replaced them by remarks about his own age and unsuitedness for love.28 Also, in keeping with Gower’s challenge and echoing it, the G-Prologue includes a revised listing of his literary work, both major works and light verse, to which he added the new lines Whil he was yong, he kepte youre [i.e. Amor’s] estat; I not [know not] wher he be now a renegat. [G-Prol, 400-01]

It is not difficult to read this interpolation as a reaction to Gower’s reference to his production of love songs “in the floures of his youthe” and the need to come up with a shrift now that he is old. The original love vision in the Prologue is a piece of writing that is well-suited for a reaction to Gower’s challenge and the inclusion of the above two lines appears to indicate that Chaucer was aware of this. The god of love’s misdirected anger at Chaucer’s love writings provides an ironical counterpoint to Venus’ discharge of the prolific Gower, just as Alceste’s defence of Chaucer’s productivity in the field of love is readable as a subtle correction of Venus’ judgement. Note, 26

Benson, p 1064 note G 315. Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon P, 1798), p 91. 27 Robinson, p 696 note 1009. 28 Fisher, p 240; Tyrwhitt, p 91; Robinson, p 696 note 1009.


too, how in a direct reversal of Venus’ words it is Chaucer’s major work that gets dealt with first before allowing the existence of “many an ympne for your halydayes,/ That highten balades, roundeles, vyrelayes” [F-Prol, 422-23; G-Prol, 410-11]. A notable point is also that it is not his conduct as a courtly lover, which is the case with Gower in his Amans persona, but as a love writer which is called into question. We find this same switch from the personal to the professional when next we turn to the Canterbury Tales. If it should be felt that the fit with Gower’s salutation is rather uncanny for at least the earlier F-Prologue and much too good for coincidence, this is something that allows itself to be resolved by recourse to Fisher’s proposal that the poets were each asked by the royal couple to come up with a similar pentitential work of courtly love. If so, this could well have included a special set of rules. Alternatively, Chaucer may have been forewarned by Gower as to what to expect and taken his measures accordingly. The rewriting of the Legend itself was evidently not fed by any new inspiration and work was soon stopped. Chaucer’s discontinuation of further revision suggests that this was a route which he decided to discard as insufficiently viable and challenging. We find this in Robinson.29 Benson, however, appears to feel that Chaucer intended to continue work on it,30 even if this is not borne out by any fact. To judge by the evidence, no work was done on it from about the time of the Man of Law’s Prologue. Fisher considers it easily understood that, for all the brilliancy of the revised Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer “should tire, and his critical sense should rebel, at the thought of plodding through all the monotonously similar series he had been assigned”.31 He is overstating if not misreading things here: the medieval public appears to have been quite appreciative of moral tales.32 Good religious stories were widely appreciated. In fact, Robert Worth Frank’s excursus makes short shrift of the dullness notion and convincingly demonstrates that whatever caused Chaucer to put aside the Legend it was not boredom.33 29

Robinson, p 482. Benson, pp 587-88, 1059-60. 31 Fisher, p 250. 32 Benson, p 1060. The great popularity of the Prick of Conscience is a case in point. 33 Robert Worth Frank Jr, Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1972), pp 189-210. 30


The really interesting aspect, however, is the implication of the rewriting as such and his abandonment of it in favour of an entirely new direction, which is that Chaucer had actually fallen in with Gower’s invitation to a literary duel. In fact, all the evidence to come is that he must have been much taken with the idea and hugely enjoyed himself constructing a counter-Confessio, including a reply to the seventeen-line challenge which he uses to put paid to Gower on all the major points of his vaunted achievement. For this he now turned to the Canterbury Tales, the work on which he was engaged at the time of the challenge, as far more interesting and worthy of his capacities than the Legend. This was, after all, in the light of its announced design in the General Prologue, to be his magnum opus and a repository of as many tales as Gower’s Confessio. What better place than this, then, to repay Gower, particularly as the phrasing of the challenge had failed to preclude a countermove from this direction? Note the mischievous irony of this step. Instead of getting back at Gower through the medium of a similar courtly dream vision, as in the Legend, he opted for its utter antithesis: the tales of the raucous Canterbury pilgrims, almost all of them realistically rooted in the experience of the late fourteenth-century here-and-now. A greater contrast is hardly thinkable. Note, too, that the device to set the Canterbury Tales going is a story-telling contest, thus ironically reflecting Chaucer’s personal situation. Here, too, may lie a reason contributing to the state of the Legend: what if Chaucer had decided to shelve it, not just because his attention was now focused on the Canterbury Tales but because he saw it as a potential source of tales for future use in this writing venture? We have good reason to believe that it was so used in at least one case. Also, as the outcome shows, the Tales were a much more amenable vehicle for adapting his writings to Gower’s terms. A factor adding to this, no doubt, is the attraction of a counter-attack coming from a totally unexpected direction. What could be further from anyone’s mind than a down-to-earth collection of estates satire to deal with such exalted matters as a courtly love debate? And there were further advantages. Among other things, just the addition of a simple literary device in the shape of the Retraction would be enough to turn them formally into the testament that he had been asked to produce.


The Background of the Challenge At this point, it is a fair question to ask what should have moved Gower to come up with a challenge in the first place. Superficially, he may simply have been motivated by a sense of his own superior achievement. After all, he had outdone a Chaucer who may well have been bogged down by his daunting task of producing a collection of at least eighty tales or more and who was similarly wrestling with his Legend. This suggests self-satisfaction and a whiff of malice as his motive which makes him altogether human yet sits uneasily with the familiar notion of a “moral Gower” friendly to Chaucer. Fisher, who does not find any challenge here, reads Gower’s words as a warm admonition. As he sees it, Chaucer shocked Gower with his first draft of the Canterbury Tales (Fragment I/Group A) and that, out of deference, he broke off the Cook’s Tale and switched to something more to his friend’s liking.34 What ought to be specially worth noting here is that, like me, Fisher identifies the Legend of Good Women as the work that Gower drives at but the Canterbury Tales as the one that Chaucer ultimately picked for his answer. Fisher’s interpretation of Venus’ words – the challenge – is too kind on Gower. Rather, they read as a matter of self-congratulation and deliberate contrast to Chaucer’s so far unfelicitous Legend and perhaps his Canterbury Tales as well. Admittedly, this may all have been a matter of posturing in a context whereby he sought to get Chaucer back on the right track. In fact, it would not come as a surprise if this were all relatable to audience pressure and expectations or even set into motion by the royals themselves, as we have seen. Conversely, this could be a matter of audience manipulation on the part of two authors who knew their business and were intent upon keeping their following properly entertained. There is, however, no suggestion of a scandalized Gower to be found in any of the lines referring to Chaucer, whereas, in most curious contrast, we find the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, as Chaucer’s rebuttal, to be quite vocal about Gower’s alleged immorality.35 Where Fisher argues deference to Gower’s objections, my Chaucer is not such a compliant type. Retaliation is a recurrent motif 34

Fisher, pp 6, 207. An excellent motive for the challenge crops up in Chapter Three, where we discuss Chaucer’s portrayal of the Sergeant of the Law. 35


in his tales, a device that he applies again and again, to his own evident satisfaction. It must certainly be obvious to anyone that Chaucer’s reply to Gower in his Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, what with its condemnation of certain tales, even if garbled by the Man of Law, cannot by any count be considered to be the act of deference that Fisher claims it to be. A considerable element of competitiveness seems to have slipped in. Yet to read the situation as a fallingout, as earlier scholars used to do, is a matter that is difficult to resolve at present.36 Meanwhile and in the absence of any significant selfcongratulatory passage, which may be related to all sort of factors ranging from the incomplete state of the Tales to a later stage of revision, the safest course is to assume for the time being that what we are basically dealing with here is a battle of writing wits, a crossing of rival pens that took place at Gower’s instigation. As such, it may well have been a mock battle, a literary game fought at the instigation of a court audience in perennial search of new entertainment. The type of court game that is proposed here would have come close to what is found a century or so later in Scotland: the “noble” art of flyting. The OED defines this as “a kind of contest practised by the Scottish poets of the sixteenth century, in which two persons assailed each other alternately with tirades of abusive”.37 Best known, perhaps, is Dunbar’s Flyting with his compatriot Walter Kennedy. It is basically understood that such literary play was “a collaborative game between two poets”, but, as in the case of Dunbar and Kennedy, “strong animosities, cultural and personal” could also be involved. Also, while many flyting poems “openly name names […], others produce a similar impression of attacking specific individuals, even though no names occur”.38 With one important exception, all of these elements are also found in the Chaucer-Gower situation. What is wanting is the actual abuse, for their tone is courtly, yet the snide efforts at undercutting one another, in word and in actual demonstration, qualify as an excellent forerunner of the type, conforming well with Bawcutt’s comparison of the genre with “the tournament [as] a good contemporary example of such aggressive play”.39 The origin of such invective verse and contests is not clear, at least where the Scottish literary scene is 36

Fisher, pp 1-36, passim; Benson, p 854. The association with flyting was pointed out to me by Roderick Lyall. 38 Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992), pp 226, 241. 39 Bawcutt, p 226. 37


concerned, but there are early models in areas as distant as Iceland, Provence and even the Arab world. Yet to find something similar so close to home and near in time is obviously food for thought. It could be argued that Chaucer never went so far as to announce publicly that he had fallen in with Gower’s challenge, being satisfied to come up with his own improvement of Gower in a purely private contest and simply leaving any recognition of what he had been doing up to his public’s power of discernment. Upon consideration, however, this seems rather shortsighted. It is a reader’s argument but not something that is applicable to an audience – and I mean this literally, as a listening public – familiar with such performers as Chaucer and Gower and their ways of sly innuendo. There is just a hair’s breadth difference between a court game and a private contest which was nevertheless fought out in the open. Neither of these would have escaped their public, so far as it is possible for anyone to judge. For this reason I shall make no difference between these two options in the pages to come, unless there should be some special argument or evidence in favour of one or the other. Yet, if there was a court game, its actual context must remain speculation. My best guess is that Gower, being first to complete his work, was given pride of place and allowed to inititate the contest, meaning that he needed do no more than present his Confessio. This could have taken the shape of a presentation to a listening public. Given the great length of the book, this may have been toned down to a selection of highlights, which is arguably supported by the fact that Chaucer’s prime response is similarly limited to just a few tales. Then it would have been Chaucer’s turn to produce in, say, twelve-monthand-a-day a proper response, which may have been in the shape of instalments but could also have been done in a single session. Of course this also calls for a listening public, even if it seems to me that as a courtier Chaucer may have had some advantages that Gower wanted. One thing that has crossed my mind is that a fourteenthcentury court may not have lacked something like a bulletin board (or is this too anachronistic a thought?) and that this would have enabled him to keep people entertainingly posted on the progress of his duel. Before going on, it may be a good idea to try and define what Gower’s call for a Testament of Love comes down to. Since he makes it clear that it should be a shrift like his own Confessio, it should include such characteristic elements as confession and sins confessed to,


as well as sermonizing supported by remedial sermon exempla, preferably with both a secular and a spiritual application – as is the observable situation in the Confessio Amantis. All this should be set to a theme of love. And, of course, it ought to be a testament of sorts. In a stricter interpretation, whereby the challenge is read as an invitation to come up with a literal improvement, the sins involved should be extended to include all the Seven Deadly ones, there should be figurants similar to Amans (and a senex Amans, at that), Genius and Venus, and the love theme ought to include courtly love. Subjects which should perhaps also be involved are natural law – kinde – vs reason, the “honeste love” of chaste marriage, clerical abuses, and the just wielding of power and application of the law by royal authority, for these are important threads running through much of Gower’s book.40 Direct borrowing would be a natural thing to expect, as would be a linear structure to underlie the various tales. This should basically suffice, however many further sophisticated points it is possible to make on the design and contents of the Confessio. The Retraction and the Parson’s Tale In order to turn the Canterbury Tales into the required testament, a little sleight of hand may have served as Chaucer’s immediate, formal notice of engagement and delineation of his chosen battleground. This was the affixation of an actual literary testament, the Retraction(s) or Retractation(s), which constitutes a literal compliance with Gower’s call for a testament. Strictly speaking, the love element is outwardly lacking, but we know that this crops up in several places in the Canterbury Tales. Yet, demonstrably, the Retraction follows the familiar antithesis of sin and virtue or cupiditas vs caritas, the latter of which may surely be accounted love in its optimal form: from actual retraction [1084-87] to positive affirmation of Christian love [108891]. As such, it may easily be qualified as a testamentum caritatis – a testament of love, and love of a type superior to Gower’s amor. What the Retraction also demonstrates is the very sort of retaliatory literalness which Chaucer also applies in his pilgrims’ quarrels. 40

Denise N. Baker, ‘The Priesthood of Genius: A Study in the Medieval Tradition’ in: Peter Nicholson ed. Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991): 143-57, at 153-57; John Lawlor, ‘Gower’s Honeste Love’ in: Lawlor, 107-21, at 115ff.


In this respect, a particularly telling little detail is the mischievous presence in the Retraction of the line and many a song and many a leccherous lay,

recalling Gower’s jibe at his early verses in celebration of Venus.41 With its sudden recurrence of Chaucer’s wonted pentameter and its ironical echo of Gower’s deprecation of his early poetry, this is a piece of levity that can hardly be taken as a serious reference to his past work. It is a typically Chaucerian signature, showing that, deathbed or not, neither his capacity for self-depreciating irony nor his liking for a bit of knuckle-rapping ever flagged. Appropriately, the line further looks like a direct echo from Chaucer’s listing of his works in the Legend’s Prologue, a passage whose easy referability to Gower we have already noted: He hath mad many a lay and many a thyng. [G-Prol, 420]42

In fact, if we accept this echo as underlying the present line in the Retraction, which seems unescapable to me, the implication is that it was written very soon after his latest work on the Legend, as it seems to be a golden rule with Chaucer for echoes from his most recent work to crop up in his new writings. This is something well in line with the argument of this study. Let us further recognize that the Retraction ends upon a note whereby Christ, Mary and all the saints are asked to grant Chaucer the “grace of verray penitence, confessioun and satisfaccioun to doon in this present lyf”. While naturally referring back to the application of the Parson’s Tale, these three equally naturally call to mind what the Confessio Amantis is all about. The deathbed notion – even though traditionally entertained – is probably a fiction. There is no evidence to support it. If anything, the Retraction is a rather conventional, formal revocation of a kind that we find with various contemporary writers, among whom Boccaccio is perhaps the most noteworthy instance. It is late, in the sense that it 41

Pearsall, p 269, is the one to point out this sudden incursion of Chaucer’s metre. The F-Prologue also has this line at 430, with two slight spelling differences. However, as this prologue probably dates from around the same time as the inception of the Canterbury Tales, it is a virtual impossibility that its writing inspired the Retraction, there being no Tales to retract yet. Hence, my choice for the G-Prologue. 42


probably belongs to the early ’nineties rather than the ’eighties but there is certainly no reason to regard it as Chaucer’s ultimate piece of writing.43 No doubt it is seriously meant to serve its ostensible purpose. When, at the same time, it includes room for a little joke at both Gower’s expense and his own, with a suggestion of a writing date around 1390, the implication is that these lines were not written at any time of spiritual extremity. Significantly, the Retraction is inseparably linked in the manuscripts to the Parson’s Tale, with the exception of those cases where final leaves are absent as a result of the wear and tear of intensive handling. Doubtless they were jointly added to the Canterbury Tales and the reason for this is easily understood in the light of Gower’s challenge. Together they introduce three of its essential elements, to wit, the formal presence of a testament and of a treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins which is combined with a manual of confession and turns the Parson into a father confessor to the entire Canterbury fellowship. Though differently incorporated, they correspond remarkably well with the Confessio and its basic framework. Scholars have commented on the Parson’s ideosyncratic combination of a treatise on sin and a manual of confession but this is merely a matter of their unfamiliarity with its theological dimension, for such combinations were actually quite common at the time.44 What is ideosyncratic is their literary application: at this time and place this is found with Gower and Chaucer only, a point that should weigh heavily in favour of my argument. Interestingly, David Lawton, who attributes the placement of the Parson’s Tale to a compiler who may or may not have been Chaucer, specifically mentions the Confessio as its prime model and draws a conclusion at this point that provides a telling parallel with Chaucer: 43 Benson takes the Retraction to mean, without any doubt, “that, unfinished, unpolished and incomplete as The Canterbury Tales may be, Chaucer is finished with it” (Benson, p 22). I do not think that it means anything of the kind. Its presence is the natural application of the Parson’s Tale. As Pearsall says, it “is Chaucer’s own historical response to the call for penitence, and penitence now, which is the imperative logic of the Parson’s treatise. […] It is Chaucer’s own act of satisfaction” (p 269). Benson’s assumption here is that in writing the concluding pieces for the Canterbury Tales Chaucer had effectively concluded work on the whole venture, while in actual fact the sole conclusion to be drawn here is that he had simply come up with a good ending. It presupposes that Chaucer went about his business on an A-to-Z basis, never looking back, which seems open to serious doubt to me. 44 Benson, pp 956-57; Robinson, pp 765-66.

66 | Towards Composing a Testament of Love Of course, the confession is a confession to Genius, priest of Venus; but the lover’s realization, at the end of the Confessio, that he is too old for carnal love and should turn his thoughts to love of (the Christian) God means that, in the long run, the mock penitential structure of the work leads to a genuine Christian act of penance.45

This is not to say that I accept Lawton’s conclusion. Amans’ final turn to love of God as the better choice is not only clichéd but facile and opportunistic, having been arrived at only after his rejection by Venus and not as the outcome of any soul-searching. We should also note, as a fourth element and one that again mirrors the Confessio, that the Parson’s Tale is fundamentally an extended, non-standard sermon that gathers in all the themes of the Canterbury Tales within one “sentence” [ParsProl, 58, 63]. Also, as Chauncey Wood pointed out not so long ago, the Parson’s emphasis on sin and penitence in what he himself twice refers to as a “meditacioun” very much calls to mind Gower’s Mirour de l’omme.46 “The name given the Mirour on Gower’s tombstone [sic], Speculum meditationis [sic], similarly reminds us that sin, its consequences and its cures, is an appropriate subject for meditation”. His contention that the Parson’s Tale is the closest that Chaucer comes to Gower in the Canterbury Tales is excellent support of the present argument.47 A fifth and final point is the Parson’s discussion, not always strictly necessary in terms of his subject matter, of the abuses of the age. Chief among these is his reproof of the “harde lordshipes” [752] and the thraldom that they impose - a subject dear to Gower’s heart. As an answer to Gower’s challenge, the Parson’s Tale is of course far less exciting than the Confessio. But it is superior in the sense that it joins a real treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins to a real manual of confession in order to provide Chaucer’s answer. The Confessio Amantis is a work that, in a theological sense, deals with the matter of sin on the basis of a greatly condensed scheme and, at least 45

Lawton: 18. Chauncey Wood, ‘Chaucer’s Most “Gowerian” Tale’ in R.F. Yeager ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1991): 75-84. The sics refer to the fact that there is no tombstone but a wooden effigy instead, which lies in state in a richly-decorated niche of one of the walls of Southwark Cathedral, and the book’s title there reads Speculum Meditantis. 47 Wood also finds (81), citing Fisher (p 131), that the Parson’s Tale is least Gowerian in its “treatment of sacramental confession as a major theme”. In answer to this, the reader is referred to Chapters 5 and 7. 46


outwardly, a predominantly courtly reading at that, which leaves it open to doubts on its sincerity. Technically, too, the inclusion of the Parson’s Tale is a felicitous step. A sin-and-confession rewriting of the collection along Gower’s lines might have been a feasible undertaking (allowing that all this happened in the early years of the Canterbury Tales), yet hardly the demonstration of writing superiority that Chaucer must been aiming at. The obvious weak point of the frame of the Confessio and works like it, as Strohm notes, is that they “depend either on single tellers or a group of tellers from a single station of life, leaving us with an impression of stylistic evenness and homogeneity of voice and content”.48 This even holds good for Boccaccio’s Decamerone and it is also something that we see at work in the Legend of Good Women. The set-up of the Canterbury Tales, on the other hand, offers room for a wide range of voices and social perspectives49 and Chaucer would have been ill-advised to give up such a formula for success. The solution provided by the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction, on the other hand, is economical along a wide range. It keeps alive the many voices that come before, reflecting and illuminating the multiple facets of late fourteenth-century life, which, to a large extent, is the essence of Chaucer’s effort. At the same time it is an effective way of dealing with the subject of confession, the Deadly Sins and their remedies. In some measure, the friction between the Confessio and the Canterbury Tales is also related to what we must suppose, either by reference to records or deduction from what they wrote, to have been Gower’s and Chaucer’s social stance on the condition of England in their time, which – in a word – was appalling. Gower’s choice was always a thoroughly conservative one, in favour of strong and effective government as his solution to the growing problems in the land. We hear this repeated time and again in his writings. Chaucer, on the other hand, may have been like-minded in many respects, but is generally more indirect. Also, as Strohm notes, Chaucer’s representation of his world is rather more centrifugal, both in his awareness of a society on the brink of new developments and the reflection of this in the Tales.50 A further difference that is at the same time indicative of very similar 48

Paul Strohm, ‘Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales’, SAC 1 (1979): 17-40, at 33-34. 49 Something similar is pointed out by Strohm, ‘Form’: 34. 50 Strohm, ‘Form’: 32.


interests has been remarked upon by Larry Scanlon. He argues forcefully that both Chaucer and Gower were seeking to establish themselves as lay auctoritates on their own chosen ground: Chaucer on ecclesiastical matters and Gower on political ones.51 To return to the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction: it is perfectly possible to see them as a skeleton key to the Tales at large, applicable in theory to all of the pilgrims and the tales that they tell. The qualification “in theory” is used advisedly. It is all very well to add such a key but this can only be effective as long as the preceding tales and their tellers are capable of being unlocked by it. More simply, the tales needed to fit or be made to fit into the Parson’s salvational scheme in order to be worthy of rivalling the Confessio on the subjects of confession, virtue and vice. Now this cannot in itself have been a great problem: all of life is subject to virtue and vice in the medieval view as we find it with the Parson, and literature has always been attracted to its more risqué aspects. While Chaucer is generally quite direct on this point, in the sense that the sin or virtue involved is thematically relevant, Gower’s exempla in the Confessio show from what unexpected angles in his tales the moral could be drawn: anything goes. Also, much of the estates satire in the General Prologue is in the direction of human weaknesses and sin and likely to have been so from the very first. In the final analysis, where and whenever change was called for, there were always the links – the introductions, prologues and epilogues to the tales – which could be adapted without too much of a problem and serve up the necessary solutions. A different point is the question whether Chaucer’s public would have been able to appreciate that the Parson’s sermon served such a function. On the whole, the answer ought to be affirmative. “Chaucer always wrote for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear”, Rodney Delasanta notes. “Medieval readers were in the habit of reading intertextually”, Helen Cooper adds, a remark that also ought to apply to a listening public.52 Of course, there must have been those who missed the Parson’s sentence entirely, but we must deem a large part of Chaucer’s readers/listeners to have been among the better51

Scanlon, pp 3-26, 137-45, 245-297. Rodney Delasanta, ‘And of Great Reverence: Chaucer’s Man of Law’, ChauR 7 (1971): 288-310, at 288. Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983), p 3.

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educated. Also, we must assume them to have been more deeply steeped and better versed and – most of all – more interested in religious matters than we generally are. This is still the Age of Belief that we are dealing with and we should not underestimate the pervasiveness of religion as it was experienced at the time, particularly in the light of the terrible blights of the latter half of the century. Then, it was an accepted requirement in the ars, or artes, praedicandi for sermons to be so constructed that they targeted both the simple and the learned and provided multiple levels “based on individual ability to fathom the speaker’s message”.53 While actual practice will often have been different, the composition of Chaucer’s public ought to be sufficient guarantee that the Parson’s emphasis on the application of his tale to the pilgrims’ “feeste” would not have escaped them. A mistake not to be made is to take the Parson’s Tale for Chaucer’s answer. Its identification as a skeleton key largely captures its function. It is the means of unlocking the true meaning – sentence, in Chaucer’s terms – of the Tales. Cornerstone of his true reply would be another good definition. This is also why the tale lacks any sense of Chaucer outdoing Gower, even if its placement is a neater solution than the rigid corset of confession alternating with remedial tales that somewhat stifles the overall effect of the Confessio. It represents, as it were, Chaucer’s equivalent of the Confessio’s structure rather than its tale contents. Thus, if the Canterbury Tales or at least some of them were to be a properly effective answer, surpassing Gower on his own chosen ground, he needed to come up with something clever that referred to the Confessio in an unmistakable fashion. For this reason and on the basis of the chapters to come, we ought to take the Parson’s Tale as, probably, Chaucer’s prime reaction to Gower’s challenge. This is well-borne out by the fact that two of the three tales which make up his basic Testament of Love, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, are textually indebted to it in a fashion not shared by any of the other tales. It is a recurrent phenomenon in Chaucer that echoes from recent work on philosophical and religious tracts crop up in texts written soon after. Yet it is also plausible that at an early stage Chaucer must have realized that the Parson’s Tale was unsuited for presentation to a live audience, which may be part of the reason why it was relegated to 53

Robert L. Kindrick, Henryson and the Medieval Arts of Rhetoric (New York/London: Garland, 1993), p 21,and pp 20-27 generally.


its final position and may also account for the inclusion of the Man of Law’s Tale, to serve as a substitute for the Parson’s remedia against sin. All the same, it remains a practical key to unriddling the three tales which make up the Testament of Love and this is a part that it fulfils admirably. Yet by dint of its inclusion it serves the same function with respect to all the other tales as well. It seems to me, therefore, that its concluding role in the Canterbury Tales, as emphasized by the Retraction’s presence, indicates that it was not included until Chaucer was satisfied with his answer. This is not to say that the nature of the Parson’s Tale is without puzzling aspects of its own. As Larry Scanlon points out, the narrative voice is thoroughly conservative, supportive of the status quo along institutional lines and nowhere approaches interpretations of Chaucer as a religious liberal, let be an innovative thinker.54 This may be partly because the Parson’s Tale serves as Chaucer’s reaction to Gower and thus may have been meant to outdo the latter in morality, which goes some way to account for its stuffy nature. While this leaves some room for assuming a privately milder Chaucer, it nevertheless looks as if Scanlon is largely right about this. It seems to me that, wherever one wishes to place Chaucer in the ecclesiastical spectrum, the voice of the Parson’s Tale bears the stamp of his approval. To our best knowledge this tale is his own composite creation, with parts drawn from various sources, and it would be naive to assume that this does not reflect a general sense of his own belief. Whether this makes Chaucer somewhat of a religious conservative or progressive I am less sure than Scanlon, who places him in the former camp. What I do see is that the affixation of the Parson’s Tale implicitly places all of fourteenth-century life in a framework seeking to show Chaucer’s public what lies ahead of them through their own actions in much the same way that has been enacted by the pilgrims and implied by their author – eternal bliss or damnation everlasting. In support of this it may be added that as a religious text the Parson’s Tale is remarkable for its early vernacularity, perhaps even more so than his other writings, and closely skirts religious controversy and heresy, as defined by 1409 in Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions.55 Even Gower, more conservative than Chaucer, opts in 54

Scanlon: 26. Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), pp 3-21, at 10-11.

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favour of English in his last major work with its analogous concern with sin and confession. Doubtless this was in order to reach a wider, lay audience who were not sufficiently versed in either French or Latin, and probably also in compliance with Richard II’s policy of stimulating the use of the English tongue. Chaucer Answers Gower The ostensible moment of Chaucer’s reply comes with the Man of Law. We deduce this from the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale and from several considerations based on the complex status of both this and the other links to the Man of Law’s Tale. It is here that we find Chaucer’s sole recorded reaction to Gower’s remarks and we must clearly take its presence to mean that this was the place and time from which he publicly set out upon putting paid to Gower. If neither his reaction nor the tale which it introduces seems to effect any great display of superiority, this is more likely to be related to how, in our times, we view his writings than to any failure on his part. There are several points involved upon which Chaucer scores with great effect and there may be others whose applicability we simply fail to recognize from our great remove.56 At this juncture, it may be a bit of a shock for some to find this study’s argument so radically confirmed, in the sense that we should actually find a recorded reaction to Gower’s challenge and find it laid down in the Canterbury Tales at that. This is the plainest sort of evidence as to the reality of both the challenge and the Canterbury Tales as the battleground selected by Chaucer. Where else but in Chaucer’s Testament of Love should we hope to expect both a reaction to and compliance with Gower’s terms? The passage where we come across this has, ever since Tyrwhitt identified it as such,57 been almost universally accepted as referring to the Confessio Amantis. With typically Chaucerian indirectness or, perhaps, deprecation of his opponent, Gower remains unmentioned, yet there is no mistaking this piece of writing as a serious rebuttal:

56

For Chaucer’s improved treatment of the tale, cf Rosemary Woolf, ‘Moral Chaucer and Kindly Gower’, in: Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell eds, J.J.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, (New York: Cornell UP, 1979): 221-45. 57 Benson, p 854; Fisher, pp 27-30. Robinson, p 690.

72 | Towards Composing a Testament of Love … But nathelees, certeyn, I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly On metres and on rymyng craftily, Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man; And if he have noght seyd hem, leve brother, In o book, he hath seyd hem in another. For he hath toold of loveris up and doun Mo than Ovide made of mencioun In his Episteles, that been ful olde. What sholde I telle hem, syn they been tolde? In youthe he made of Ceys and Alcione, And sitthen hath he spoken of everichone, Thise noble wyves and thise loveris eke. Whoso that wole his large volume seke, Cleped the Seintes Legende of Cupide, Ther may he seen the large woundes wyde Of Lucresse, and of Babilan Tesbee; The swerd of Dido for the false Enee; The tree of Phillis for hire Demophon; The pleinte of Dianire and of Hermyon, Of Adriane, and of Isiphilee The bareyne yle stondynge in the see The dreynte Leandre for his Erro; The teeris of Eleyne, and eek the wo Of Brixseyde, and of the, Ladomya; The crueltee of the, queene Medea, Thy litel children hangynge by the hals, For thy Jason, that was of love so fals! O Ypermystra, Penelopee, Alceste, Youre wifhood he comendeth with the beste! But certeinly no word ne writeth he Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee, That loved hir owene brother synfully Of swiche cursed stories I sey fy! Or ellis of Tyro Appollonius, How that the cursed kyng Antiochus Birafte his doghter of hir maydenhede, That is so horrible a tale for to rede, Whan he hir threw upon the pavement. And therfore he, of ful avysement, Nolde nevere write in none of his sermons Of swiche unkynde abhomynacions, Ne I wol noon reherce, if that I may.” [IntroMLT, 45-89]


Though wordier than Gower’s challenge this reply is constructed in much the same way, of which we should take note as it confirms our earlier reading of Gower’s words. Even the clipped lines are reminiscent of the Confessio. Complementing this, Chaucer follows him here by using one of his literary creations as his mouthpiece. For Gower’s Venus we have the Man of Law: kinde replaced by resoun, law being one of the instruments through which the rational mind curbs the urges of nature. As these two constitute a major theme of the Confessio their presence here can hardly a matter of chance. The acknowledgement follows Gower by being in two parts. The first and greater part is in praise of Chaucer’s productivity “in youthe […] and sitthen”, belittling at the same time the achievement of the Confessio Amantis. Then comes the next part with its sting: 13 lines of criticism levelled at Gower’s “bad” tales, which are rejected out of hand by the Man of Law as unfit for imitation. More specifically, Chaucer begins by having the Man of Law correct, in paraphrase almost, the foundations of Gower’s challenge. According to the Man of Law there is not a tale in the land that is not included in Chaucer’s various works, “thogh he kan but lewedly/On metres and on rymyng craftily”, with its interesting echo of the Legend’s “Al be hit that he kan nat wel endite/Yet hath he maked lewed folk delyte” [F-Prol, 41415]. This impossible claim is easily read as an ironical reflection of Gower’s own statement that “the lond fulfild is overal” with Chaucer’s songs and ditties. Nor is it difficult to see that his classification of Chaucer’s work as simple verse stands corrected here, once again in conformity with the Legend’s listing of his works. After favourably comparing the extent of Chaucer’s writings to Ovid’s Epistolae (generally known as Heroides), the Man of Law goes on to name some seventeen literary heroines of whom Chaucer wrote “in youthe [...] and sitthen”. They are to be found in the Seintes Legende of Cupide, which is an alternative designation for the Legend of Good Women. “In youthe” carries a distinct echo of Gower’s “in the floures of his youthe”, just as the device of referring to a work by an alternative name repeats what Gower does in his challenge. What Chaucer is saying here in effect is that in the heady days of his youth and in the years to follow he had anticipated and outdone all that Gower was to attempt with his Confessio Amantis. The special barb here is that we should associate the Epistolae with Gower rather than Chaucer, for they are a major source and model for the Confessio.


It is difficult therefore not to read the above passage as an implicit claim of victory avant la lettre over John Gower. It was Chaucer who was the ant, Gower the grasshopper. We deduce this from his remark about outproducing Ovid and his Epistolae. Ovid being the poet of love par excellence, Chaucer here claims for himself the old master’s laurels, thus ironically affirming that Venus “to him in special/Above alle othre [is] most holde”. Needless to say, his reference to the Legend confirms our earlier assumption that Gower was targeting this work and that Chaucer was well aware of this and busy evolving a proper response. In fact, it shows that this poem was still very much on Chaucer’s mind, implying that the writing of the Introduction followed very closely upon his abortive work on the G-Prologue. A like inference is there to be drawn from the inclusion of the Man of Law’s Tale, whose heroine is very much a soul-sister to those of the Legend. A closer look at the Man of Law’s reference to the contents of the Seintes Legende of Cupide reveals the extent to which matters are turned upside down. Nineteen ladies are announced in the Legend’s Prologue, F as well as G,58 and this is also the number that we find in the so-called Balade, known as Hyd, Absalon (or Absolon), that is sung there. The Man of Law’s list gamely comes up with the same number. However, one of the ladies does not belong there: this is Alcyone, who figures in Chaucer’s earlier Book of the Duchess). Another two, Cleopatra and Philomela, are left out and for the final two tales, Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre, he claims that Chaucer never stooped to anything so objectionable. Instead of letting ourselves be drawn into the Man of Law’s web of words, where lies confusion, let us try some graphic sense. The graph below shows Hyd, Absalon, the Legend itself, the Man of Law’s list, the corresponding tales in the Confessio, and Ovid’s Heroides side by side. Roman type indicates heroines mentioned, bold face represents tales actually written. Alcyone is excluded, since she is so clearly referred to as an early work not really belonging here.

58

F-Prologue line 283, G-Prologue line 186.

Towards Composing a Testament of Love | 75 Hyd, Absalon Ester

Legend

Penelope

Man of Law

Gower

Heroides

Penelopee

Penelopee

Penelope

Marcia Catoun Ysoude

Yseult

Eleyne

Eleyne

Eleine

Alceste

Alceste

Alceste

Lucresse

Lucresse

Tesbee

Tesbee

Helen

Laveyne Lucresse

Lucrece

Polixene Cleopatre

Cleopatra

Tysbe

Thisbe

Herro Dido

Erro Dido

Laodomya Phillis

Dido

Dido

Ladomya Phyllis

Canace

Thisbe Hero Dido Laodomya

Phillis

Phillis

Phyllis

[Canacee]

Canacee

Canace

Isiphilee

Isiphilee

Hypsipyle

Ysiphile

Hypsipyle

Ypermystre

Hypermnestra Ypermystra

Adriane

Ariadne

Adriane

Adriane

Hypermne stra Ariadne

Medea

Medea

Medea

Medea

Philomela

Philomela Dianyre

Dianyre

Dianyre

Brixseyde

Brixseyde

Brixseyde

Apollonius of Tyre

Apollonius of Tyre

Hermyon

Hermyon

One good diagram is worth a thousand words. The Man of Law’s list, which claims to sum up actual writings with the exception of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre, badly corresponds with the left side, whereas it tallies remarkably well with the right. Plainly, this is not a somewhat disjointed reference to the Legend of Good Women or a prospectus of tales to expect for it, which, anyway, ought to reside under the balade and not be presented in this Prologue. As an account


of Chaucer’s productivity the list is a somewhat bogus one. What we have here is a demonstration that it is basically a selection from the Confessio or, better yet, a selection of Heroides-based tales found in it. The correspondences with Gower and Ovid are unmistakable. Fourteen tales that he mentions figure in the Confessio Amantis and another two ladies are alluded to, while a mere eight have a Chaucerian counterpart in the Legend of Good Women.59 If the Balade scores slightly better, this is for the simple reason that it mentions (which is all) six more heroines that figure in the Man of Law’s list and in the actual tales that are found in Gower. The fact that Ovid is explicitly referred to twice by the Man of Law suggests that we may read this as an intentional pointer on how to interpret the list. All of this links up with another consideration, which is that this list must have come close upon Chaucer’s most recent work on the Legend. Yet the G-Prologue exhibits not the slightest indication as to any major new directions for the various tales. Hyd, Absalon announces Alceste’s coming instead of that of “my lady” (presumably Queen Anne, though this is contested) – a switch of heroine that is repeated by the Man of Law, thus confirming the close association of his list and the rewriting of the Legend’s prologue – but, barring some slight textual changes, this is all. The inference therefore is that it is improbable that the list should be any kind of projected itinerary for new work to be done on the Legend. Rather, what we have got here is a major clue, outlined carefully and at length for those among Chaucer’s audience who were/are a bit slow on the uptake and meant to make them to sit up and wonder who the Man of Law is really talking about, Chaucer or Gower. Though outwardly referring to the Legend up to the moment when the Man of Law bears down upon the two “wikked” tales, the list is plainly tailored to the Confessio. 59

This has also been pointed out by Elizabeth Scala, who notes that the Confessio contains, “directly or by allusion”, all the stories referred to by the Man of Law. She attributes the coalescence of his list with the Confessio to the Man of Law’s misidentification of the Legend as being the Confessio, which seems to me a position well taken. ‘Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables’, ChauR 30 (1995): 15-39, at 18. All the same, I find no allusions to Hero, Laodomya, Hypermnestra or Hermione in either Gower’s tales or in the long list of love’s heroines included in Book VIII of the Confessio (lines 2500-2650). A further point to note is that most of these good ladies also figure in Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, which is regarded as a possible source of the Legend’s Cleopatra and was certainly used for the portrait of Zenobia in the Monk’s Tale.


Basically, this is Chaucer making off with Gower’s laurels in a rather sly fashion. What he says here – as we have noted – that, well before Gower came up with his Confessio Amantis, he had already fulfilled the terms of the challenge, give or take a tale and anticipation rather than imitation being the name of the game here. But there is an attendant irony to these lines, what with his own praise being sung by the Man of Law in a passage that is effectively a literary review of Gower’s latest work. Once again, this is a neat reversal of what Gower does with respect to Chaucer. Somewhat maliciously, in the light of his spurious claim for the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer drives home his last shaft when he levels his criticism at the immorality of tales in the Confessio Amantis like those of Canacee or Apollonius of Tyre. He, on the other hand, “no word ne writeth […]/Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee” nor “nolde nevere write in none of his sermons/Of swiche unkynde abhomynacions”. As the incest matter is solely a side-issue in Gower, this is much out of proportion and therefore, with its inflation and deflation, well-suited to the notion of a court game.60 In fact, Chaucer himself is not at all averse to such sensationalism. There is attempted rape in the Man of Law’s Tale, murder in the Prioress’s Tale, rape in the Wife of Bath’s Tale – to mention a random few – while Gower is the one to deal with such subject matter in a very down-toned fashion. All the same, it is true that Gower, drawing on the implications of Genesis, takes incest to be a natural thing and introduces an incestuous frisson, though happily resolved, in Apollonius’ reunion with his lost daughter Thaise. The Man of Law’s choice of word – unkynde [unnatural] – looks therefore as if it was inserted with special reference to Gower. The assertion is slightly mendacious also, as Chaucer does mention Canacee in his Balade but lets the Man of Law safeguard him here in an appropriately legalistic fashion by qualifying his “no word” to refer to the “unkynde abhomynacions” rather than Canacee herself. Surely, too, there is a mean bit of irony involved here when with a pious air he goes so far as to include in his sketch of Antiochus’ rape of his daughter the very sort of salacious detail that is absent in Gower. The same note of ironical dissembling may be drawn from a comparison with the Legend’s tale of Philomela, just such an incest victim on whose fate he spends a good deal of words. Note, by 60

Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp 93-101.


the way, his use of “sermons” in line 87, which rather stretches its meaning when applied to the Legend but is quite appropriate to the tales of the Confessio.61 It is these final two, coming directly upon the Man of Law’s extensive listing of heroines drawn straight from the Confessio, that affirm that the barbs which Chaucer transmits via the Man of Law are truly directed at Gower. Even though he misrepresents the latter’s account of Apollonius with a faulty reference to its Latin original, it is clear that his remark is a pointed one, singling out the way in which Gower dealt with the theme of incest as something unsuited to the Confessio “as a genuinely penitential work”.62 This applies especially to Canacee’s love for her brother, which is is all about true love and fails to come down against incest, the moral of the story being directed at the cruel father who demands her death. Reference to Book VIII of the Confessio would have provided similar fuel, Gower’s position on incest being that it is not so much unnatural as proscribed by ecclesiastical authority.63 Worth noting here is that Chaucer’s remarks seem to indicate that his differences with Gower are thus primarily a matter of morality. What remains to be looked into is the Man of Law’s confusion of Chaucer and Gower, of the Legend and the Confessio Amantis. The mix-up appears to serve a double purpose. On the one hand, it is an effective device enabling Chaucer to claim that his youthful “lyrics” were more numerous and in better taste than what the Confessio Amantis comes up with, for all Gower’s efforts to plagiarize Ovid’s entire oeuvre. On the other, it is generally realized that the Man of Law is sketched as a pretentious man, laying claim to a wide erudition without really knowing too well what he is talking about. In this role, his intimacy with recent literature is shown up as shallow, at best. He has evidently heard of Chaucer and Gower and their writings, but while he seems to be rather familiar with the contents of the Confessio he apparently thinks that they belong to the Legend of Good Women. Of course, we are aware that there is some common meeting ground 61

The “sermon” suggestion is from Fisher (p 289), who points out the word. Benson, p 856 note 77-89; Fisher, p 289. Larry D. Benson, ‘Incest and Moral Poetry in Gower’s Confessio Amantis’, ChauR 19 (1984): 100-09. But, then, there is every reason to distrust the Confessio as genuinely penitential. 63 Benson, p 856; Russell A. Peck ed. John Gower: Confessio Amantis, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp xxiii-xxiv. 62


between these works, just as there is between their authors. Yet to mix them up in the Man of Law’s fashion is rather too much. The man is a bit of a poseur whose literary knowledge is somewhat confused and it is clear that much would be explained if there were some contemporary joke involved here, which, in the light of its context, is played on Gower – a matter that is discussed in the next chapter. Battle is Joined Earlier we concluded that the Legend of Good Women was the obvious target of Gower’s barbs but that, after briefly considering a reply from this direction, Chaucer opted in favour of the Canterbury Tales. We have found good confirmation of these considerations and conclusions, as it is plain that Chaucer recognized the direction of Gower’s remarks. Hence his counterclaim that his Legend has long outdone geriatric Gower in terms of good ladies without lapsing into the abominably bad taste of some of the latter’s tales. The attendant inflation of the Legend is in full accord with the huffing and puffing that goes with any good duel and provides an excellent counterpoint to Gower’s definition of Chaucer as an immature poet of predominantly light verse. Implicitly, what he is saying is that, having improved on Gower well beforehand, any Testament of Love in the shape of the Legend is out of the question and that, as signalled by the inclusion of his acknowledgment of the challenge here, it is the Canterbury Tales that one should look to for his answer. In terms of dating, this implies that the Man of Law’s Introduction must be later than the G-Prologue, though, as indicated by its echoes from the Balade, probably only marginally so. We find much the same reading of the evidence in Fisher, who be lieves that it was Chaucer’s growing dissatisfaction with the Legend that made him turn elsewhere and try his hand at something new in the Canterbury Tales.64 For this he turned to the tale of Custance. One of the obvious reasons why this tale should have been selected is that its heroine is one of the good women that Chaucer had not yet dealt with so far. It is full of the “moralitee” that he claims to be so sadly lacking in Gower’s Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre.65 Also, Chaucer’s choice of tale confirms that he had not yet moved 64 65

Fisher, p 287. To my best knowledge I am quoting someone here, but cannot trace my source.


significantly away from the Legend as the sort of answer required by the challenge, for he was evidently still thinking in terms of Ovidian heroines. It is, at any rate, a reaction which is entirely in line with Gower’s implicit call for something Legend-like. In fact, one is tempted to consider whether Custance was not, if only briefly, intended for the Legend as part of his answer there to the challenge but was shifted to the Canterbury Tales when he saw how much better she could be applied in a Testament of Love. She is very much like the Legend heroines, ladies typified by Helen Cooper as “noted more for being deserted than for being good”, though Custance qualifies on both counts.66 What argues against this, but need not weigh heavily, is that neither the Man of Law’s Tale nor Gower’s version is in any way indebted, as are most of the Legend’s stories and so many of those in the Confessio, to Ovid’s Heroides nor does she, as a Christian heroine, belong to his more distant and mythological past. Chaucer’s use of the story of Custance also confirms the virtuevice direction that ought to be the evident characteristic of a tale intended for his Testament. In fact, his heroine is so virtuous that she incorporates not just constancy but all the other virtues, so that it is a tempting thought that her tale may have been meant to complement a tale of all-encompassing vice and that these two, together with the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction were somehow to be a miniature yet superior Testament of Love. A crucial point is the matter of sources. The Man of Law’s Tale is a story that we also find in Gower. While both versions are based upon the Anglo-Norman Chronicle by the Dominican Friar Nicholas Trevet (or Trivet), one’s natural expectation is that, in so obvious a Gowerian context as provided by the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale and given Chaucer’s presumable liking for a bit of literary retaliation, this should be a demonstration how as a writer of “minor verse” he could effortlessly outdo Gower at his own game by using one of his own tales. So it is, but recognition of this has been forthcoming only reluctantly. The reason for this is an essay by Edward Block in 1953, which concluded that there were “some nine passages, totalling some forty words, in which the close verbal resemblance made Chaucer’s borrowing from Gower unmistakable”. Though this shows that Chaucer wrote his own tale with a knowledge of Gower’s, 66

Cooper, Structure, p 3.


the effect of Block’s study was to create “the impression that has remained the last word in most reader’s minds, that Gower’s influence on Chaucer, while demonstrable, was almost entirely negligible”.67 More recently, however, this matter has been re-addressed in an article by Peter Nicholson. While Trevet remains the basis for Chaucer’s tale, Nicholson shows through such characteristics as shared passages, shared additions and shared omissions of many kinds, and a shared basic plot that Gower’s version, rather than Trevet’s, was the major influence on the shaping of the Man of Law’s Tale.68 As he writes in another article written in the same year, a close look at what Chaucer borrowed reveals a number of passages in which he interwove details from his two sources, indicating that he was equally familiar with each and that he may well have had copies of both before him as he worked. And a more general comparison turns up some particularly significant similarities between Chaucer’s version and Gower’s.69

This is illuminating, for such a debt to Gower contributes a further and major point of compliance with the requirements of a Testament of Love. Whether the result is a real improvement on Gower is another matter. Most of us will probably agree that it is superior to Gower’s version, though one is inclined to heave a sigh upon finishing it and wish that here at least Chaucer had been a bit more like Gower 67

Peter Nicholson, ‘ The Man of Law’s Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower’, ChauR 26 (1991): 153-73. 68 Nicholson: 153-73 (for his conclusions: 171). At this point, it could well be asked if things are not the other way around. Is the assumption that Chaucer follows Gower correct and could not Gower have been the borrower here? The tale of Custance is presumably one of Chaucer’s early products, possibly stemming from the late ’eighties when Gower was still working on his first draft of the Confessio. I think it probable that the Man of Law’s Tale and its Prologue were integrally lifted from another Canterbury narrator when the demands of Gower’s challenge made this necessary, indicating that his tale was there all along. If Gower could be shown to have based his version on a pre-view reading of Chaucer’s, this would contribute a superior reason why it was precisely this tale that was picked to deal with Gower’s challenge. As it is, this fails to work. Chaucer’s version was touched up with details from Innocent III’s De miseria, which are wanting in Gower’s tale. As it is hardly credible that Gower should have consistently scrapped all of the contributions from Innocent, we deduce that his tale cannot have been a reduced version of Chaucer’s. 69 Peter Nicholson, ‘Chaucer Borrows From Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law’s Tale’, in Yeager: 85-99, at 85.


in terms of coming to a conclusion. But then our literary judgement in his favour does not necessarily reflect fourteenth-century taste. The story has been turned into what may be termed a lay saint’s life, with some additional religious sentiment thrown in from Innocent III’s De miseria humane condicionis, especially on the subject of deadly sin.70 Furthermore, as Robert Enzer Lewis notes, Chaucer is more emphatic than his sources on the subject of good and evil. Custance, who is persistently likened to the Virgin, is inspired by God and Christ, the evil-doers by “Sathanas”.71 Why this should be so is difficult to understand, unless we take it to be related to the Testament of Love, with whose requirements it complies in an obvious fashion. In this connection, we may also note that the Man of Law’s Tale, like the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, stands out among the Tales for its extensive glossing. There is admittedly no sure way of deciding whether these are authorial or scribal, but if the former were to be the case, as proposed by several scholars,72 this would provide another link with the Confessio Amantis. There one finds a sizeable framework of glosses that were expressly inserted by its author, so that the signal presence of a similar apparatus in these tales by Chaucer would serve to underline their connection with Gower. Perhaps, the Tale is superior most of all because, as Chaucer has taken care to suggest in his Introduction, it is not disfigured by any lapses in moral good taste like some of Gower’s products. It has been pointed out that the tale as such closely skirts the incest issue which the Man of Law broaches in his Introduction but then so do Gower’s and Trevet’s versions. Fisher, who sees no challenge here,73 nevertheless recognizes its spirit of rivalry and sees it as an attempt on Chaucer’s part to outdo Gower in sanctimoniousness. If we allow that the Man of Law’s Tale corroborates the Goweroriented direction of Chaucer’s writing in this place, which is basically a matter of record, this also implies that it is used to score a point in a typically Chaucerian fashion, whereby Gower’s own tale is 70

Fisher, p 292; Benson, p 9. Robert Enzer Lewis, ‘Chaucer’s Artistic Use of Pope Innocent III’s De Miseria Humane Conditionis in the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale’, PMLA 81 (1966): 485-92. 71 Lewis, pp 490-92. 72 Benson, p 857. 73 Fisher, p 292. Why Chaucer should have done so is a matter upon which Fisher is silent.


brought to bear against him. I am talking here of his liking for literary tit-for-tat retribution. An indication of the direction in which we should perhaps look is the fact, noted before, that Gower’s version deals with the sin of Detraction as a variety of Envy. His tangential use of the tale stands corrected here by Chaucer, who uses it for its natural theme of Steadfastness or, as the heroine’s name indicates, Constancy. Could this perhaps be a comment on Gower’s leanings toward Henry? Alternatively, it may simply be that the Tale functions, among other things, to alert his public to the Gowerian nature of this tale and the one to follow, which, like John Fisher, I firmly believe to be the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. With this we come to the matter of the tale shifts involved here, which turn out to be a source of rare information. In the Man of Law’s case a full shifting of two or more tales was probably involved, while the links attest to several stages of development and consequently prove to be most interesting and informative. Worth noting, too, is that all of this fits very well into the notion of a new plan. A telling instance is provided by the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale. This is when in announcing his tale, the Man of Law promises to “speke in prose” and then, as Robinson expresses it, “proceeds to relate the story of Custance in seven-line stanzas! Doubtless when Chaucer wrote the headlink, he meant to assign a prose tale to the Man of Law”. This is evidently true, just as it is clear that, as Derek Brewer observes, “the whole Introduction cries aloud the lack of revision”.74 If Robinson awkwardly writes that Chaucer meant to include a prose tale, we must nevertheless suppose that he wishes to say that such a prose tale had been assigned to the Man of Law (or, rather, the Sergeant of the Law) at an earlier date, before he came up with the idea of switching to the tale of Custance, and that this was the one that he is referring to. There is some slight chance that, with Trevet’s history of Custance in mind, Chaucer intended to come up with a prose version of his own but had a subsequent change of heart. Less probable but still within the realm of reasonable conjecture is the notion that the mention of prose is an anticipatory remark, referring to an intented replacement of Custance by a tale in prose. Yet the likely view is that the Man of Law was originally assigned a prose tale, usually taken to 74

Robinson, p 6. Brewer, p 293.


be the Melibee, which is a similarly sententious tale and in prose at that, and that this was later shifted (to himself, rather ironically, and implying that he was willing to admit to an ostensible self-picture that came close to this) in order to make room for the present tale. The remark about prose provides an interesting insight: But of my tale how shal I doon this day? Me were looth be likned, doutelees, To Muses that men clepe Pierides – Metamorphosios woot what I mene; But nathelees, I recche noght a bene Though I come after hym with hawebake, I speke in prose, and lat hym rhymes make. [IntroMLT, 90-96]

In referring back to the Man of Law’s lengthy list of Chaucer’s poetry the announcement of a tale in prose shows itself to be inseparable from the rest of the Introduction. From this we infer that at the time of its writing the Introduction was probably still followed by the Melibee. Only later – slightly later – did he think of replacing it with the tale of Custance, for reasons to be discussed below. When effectuating this, he neglected to adapt the reference to prose, which may have been carelessness but just as well a matter of intentionally delayed revision. Oversights such as this, if oversights they are, constitute a familiar aspect of some of the Canterbury Tales, just like the tale shifts which they sometimes involve. We have come across them before and shall do so again. Here the tale shift is particularly significant. It shows that a tale not associated with the Confessio Amantis yet well-suited to a Gowerian virtue-vice scheme was discarded in favour of one that was distinctly indebted to the Confessio. This gives us a markedly Gowerian tale as a follow-up of what can only be interpreted as a Gowerdirected passage. A rephrasing may be necessary here, as this is an important moment for the theory that is being outlined here. There is no discernible reason why the Melibee should have been shifted away from the Man of Law in terms of Gower’s challenge, as it is just as much about virtue as the tale of Custance and pompous enough to have been preserved in its original place. Nor is the Man of Law’s Tale particularly suited to its narrator’s profession, even if – much like the Melibee – its sententious tone is, as we shall discuss below. Then, the Melibee is clearly a Fürstenspiegel type of tale, a didactic and


moralizing discourse on good and wise governance. Given Gower’s own treatment of the subject in Book VII of the Confessio and given the importance of the concept of maistrie here, Chaucer’s shifting of the Melibee becomes rather puzzling even, for there is ample material here to link it both to Gower and to the Wife of Bath, next in line in his response to the challenge. Thus, as the choice of Custance strongly implies, as do the Man of Law’s introductory words, that her tale was inserted at this point because Chaucer needed something that unmistakably referred to Gower, this can hardly have been because the Melibee did not fit the bill. The chief reason that I can think of is that Custance provides a better black-and-white alternative to the Wife of Bath and a shift of emphasis. The juxtapostion of the Melibee and the Wife’s Tale sets off Dame Prudence’s wisdom against the Wife’s foolish pursuits, whereas Custance turns this contrast into one virtue and vice, constancy and inconstancy. Also, the Melibee could have been seen as a mirror for Richard II and, at this time and place, Chaucer may not have felt it proper to associate it with Gower and assigned its telling to himself in his pilgrim persona. If this is the case, a possible reason for this could have been Gower’s self-distancing from Richard in the Latin address to Henry of Derby which he added to the Confessio at some moment between the middle of 1390 and 1391. In its turn, this may be further connected with the possibility that the Man of Law may have been interpreted by Chaucer’s public as being Gower in disguise. However correct the notion of a tale shift may be, this does not ease our problems with the Introduction. Is it the original preface to the Melibee or a later interpolation by Chaucer? The fact that it is in severe need of revision is not really helpful, since this is probably bound up with the replacement of the Melibee by the tale of Custance. As it is, there are indications that the Canterbury Tales had already progressed well beyond the Melibee at the time of Chaucer including his answer to Gower in the Introduction. This suggests that we are dealing with a remake of an earlier version. The opening lines and their astronomical information may have been present already but the rest, running from lines 33 to 93, is consistently Gower-directed.75 Its 75

Another possibility is that the entire opening running from lines 1 to 32, with its astronomical inconsistencies (see Benson, p 854), was taken from elsewhere and moved to its present place in order to set the Man of Law into motion. It has also been pointed out that it constitutes a fresh start, recalling the General Prologue with its


ending effortlessly moves from the Pierides remark to the announcement of a tale in prose. The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale One is tempted to think that the inconsistency of the Man of Law’s announcement of a tale in prose which turns out to be rhyme royal instead might also be attributable to his demonstrable gift for garbling things. This, however, proves to be untenable. There is no room for construing any mix-up of poetry and prose in these lines: But nathelees, I recche noght a bene Though I come after hym with hawebake [poor fare]. I speke in prose, and lat hym rymes make.” And with that word he, with a sobre cheere, Bigan his tale, as ye shal after heere. [IntroMLT, 94-98]

Instead, these lines strongly suggest that the first version of the Man of Law’s response must have been in the shape of the Introduction followed by the Melibee, whereby it is a reasonable assumption that the latter was the original tale assigned to the Sergeant, as a sop to Gower perhaps in the shape of something wise-sounding for what may have been a rather cutting piece of satire in the General Prologue, as we discussed in the previous chapter, and was temporarily left as it was, though awaiting something better suited to Chaucer’s duel with Gower. The Man of Law’s Tale is unusual in possessing not just one introductory link but two. The second, which we know as the the Man of Law’s Prologue, not to be confused with the Introduction, is a passage of uncertain status whose applicability has left generations of scholars guessing.76 It is in no manner adapted to the Man of Law and looks redundant. While this would lead us to assume that its verses were meant to be cancelled, this notion runs into the problem that it fails to explain why they were included in the first place, the more so as they have not the slightest bearing on the Melibee, which we as-

astronomical reference and restatement of the story-telling conditions (Fisher, p 286). This is not quite correct. There is just one condition that is rehearsed or rather redefined: the agreed-upon obligation of producing a tale (and not tales, we should note). 76 Benson, p 856.


sume to have been the original and supplanted tale.77 The Prologue is a sardonic outburst, directed at the poor and at rich merchants alike, and therefore seems hardly relevant to either a lawyer or his tale, but neither does it fit any previous situation involving the Melibee. On the other hand, its persistent inclusion from very early collections onward suggests that it was, editorially at least, interpreted to be consonant with either the Man of Law’s portrait in the General Prologue and the Introduction or his Tale. Its chief link with the Tale lies in the presence of passages drawn from Innocent III’s De miseria humane condicionis78 but the thematic connection is thin and solely resides in the mercantile setting of the Tale’s first eight stanzas. The basic suggestion that we derive from this is that prior to their assignment to the Man of Law they were both already combined in a context somehow involving the subject of merchants. A good guess here is that the Prologue represents a retained introduction – one that belonged with the tale of Custance from the start and was, together with this, originally assigned to another pilgrim. Their mutual reference to Innocent III’s De miseria is a good indication that their writing is closely associated, though it also indicates that this was done only shortly before their shift to their present place. The mercantile setting of the opening stanzas of the Man of Law’s Tale further corroborates the association. Also, to judge by the somewhat theatrical manner of its telling, its narrator was a bit of a kindred spirit to the Man of Law, with a liking for bathos and not too firmly grounded in historical and biblical detail. A closer inspection tells us that the Prologue is greatly reminiscent of the Clerk’s Lenvoy de Chaucer and its thickly laid-on irony. Its five stanzas are decidedly similar in length and composition and, most notably, written in a very similar voice. Comparison with the Envoy strongly suggests that we have someone speaking for Chaucer here who is not the Man of Law. As the three final lines show, this is not Chaucer himself, but there is no mistaking the sardonic slant. If the Envoy urges women not to stint their efforts to turn the world upside down, so the present stanzas urge, with equally overt and unmistakable irony, the poor to stop whining and rich merchants to persist in their perennial quest for more – all this, of course, from the perspective of a sardonic outsider. 77 78

Benson, p 856. Benson, pp 856-57.


The final stanza looks like a possible key to its preservation at the head of the Man of Law’s Tale. Its first four lines are perfectly applicable to lawyers as a class in search of wealth and profit, and so to John Gower himself, and nicely complements Tupper’s observation that lawyers as a class “were traditionally associated with grumbling against poverty”.79 Keeping Gower in mind as a clever land speculator and much given to discoursing broadly on the state of the country and the world beyond are not the next lines very apt? Ye seken lond and see for yowre wynnynges; As wise folk ye knowen al th’estaat Of regnes; ye been fadres of tidynges And tales, bothe of pees and of debaat. [IntroMLT, 127-30]

Yet the simplest explanation of the Prologue’s inclusion is probably that this is a simple matter of inertia. We are so conditioned to regard links as individual and occasionally roving parts that we tend to overlook the fact that some of them are codicologically inseparable from their tales. Unlike the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, which is plainly a link apart, the primal Prologue and the tale of Custance may well have constituted a single booklet or fascicle. They are, after all, in the same voice, richly larded with apostrophe and high-flown sentiment, and in the same rime royal throughout, unlike either the Introduction or the Epilogue. It is not difficult to see that if the Prologue was followed by the Tale on the same leaf, this would have made it difficult for Chaucer to detach it without having the quire’s first and last leaves copied out anew. As, however, there was to be a final revision of the entire quire and indeed many of the other quires still to come – something that is strongly suggested by the actual state of the Canterbury Tales – the natural thing would have been to let the matter rest. Later, without sufficient indication in his Nachlass as to its desired removal, editors would have chosen to sail with the wind and leave matters as they found them. Conversely, the unrevised state of the Prologue strongly suggests that the Tale, too, must have been reassigned to the Man of Law without any notable revision. Of course, Chaucer could have inserted directions here and there as to changes that he wished to be effected in the manuscript, but if so why was no such effort expended on the Prologue? 79

Benson, p 856.


In point of fact, the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale are found in the early manuscripts (Hengwrt, Corpus, Harley 7334, Lansdowne, Dd 4.24 and Gg 4.27) as a single document and it is only in Ellesmere that the two are separated.80 From this we may deduce that there was probably nothing in their copytext to suggest any differentiation between the two, so that it must have been Ellesmere’s clever arranger Adam who first came up with the notion of splitting off the first five stanzas as a separate Prologue, perhaps as lines that he had serious doubts about but dared not simply throw out. This makes them an editorial construct. While this confirms our basic stance, it is also a reason to tread warily on how we deal with the Man of Law’s Tale. If the evidence suggests that, together with the Prologue, it was transferred bodily from its original narrator to the Man of Law without any attention to revision, which is markedly true of the Prologue and the beginning of the Tale, any narrative peculiarities in the latter that we come across ought to belong to its previous situation. It would be most unlikely for Chaucer to have inserted detailed jabs at the Man of Law in various places without at all addressing such major inconsistencies as the Prologue or the Tale’s opening stanzas. What necessitates this caution is Rodney Delasanta’s article “Of Great Reverence” on the Man of Law’s slip-ups. It is easy enough to agree with him that a passage like the Introduction is an attempt to show up the Man of Law as a bit of a fool. We shall be doing quite a bit in the same vein in the next chapter. However, it is a very different matter when Delasanta argues that at various points in the Tale, too, malapropisms (excusez l’anachronisme) were inserted in order to show up the Man of Law as a “not-quite scholar”, because “it is inconceivable that [in view of Chaucer’s evident dislike] he would have allowed the Man of Law to shine in a story chosen for him without the attendant Chaucerian undercuttings”.81 Much as I would like to agree, as his argument is well in line with mine, there was probably no revision with respect to the Man of Law within the confines of his Tale. 80

Blake, p 144. It seems to me that Chaucer’s “oversight” of the reference to a tale in prose in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale could also have been related to the manuscript situation. If the Introduction was written on a loose leaf or had to be detached from the quire for the Melibee and added to the Man of Law’s quire at a later date, this could explain why it was overlooked, particularly if the text should have briefly continued on the reverse side. 81 Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 290.


Delasanta comes up with half a dozen instances where biblical and historical accuracy is violated. None of these are found in Trevet or Gower. He takes this to mean that the Tale serves as a continued demonstration of the Man of Law’s pretentiousness and defective learning. It is true that the pompous voice and the pious sentiment – the presumable reasons why the Tale was seen as suitable for a reassignation to the Man of Law – suggest an undercurrent of irony. Yet it is improbable, on the one hand for Chaucer to have upgraded the tale with material from De miseria82 and, on the other, deliberately inserted biblical errors. One of the problems, Delasanta’s as well as mine, is that it is next to impossible to say with any certainty that lines found in the Man of Law’s Tale do not occur in Trevet. Chaucer studies are still awaiting a definitive study and text for the Trevet manuscript that Chaucer used. As Benson reports, “Robert M. Correale is preparing an edition of a text of Trevet for the Chaucer Library that is closer to Chaucer’s version at many points than any previous edition” [italics mine].83 In other words, there is a chance that Delasanta’s instances do come from Trevet after all. This is underscored by the error that Benson notes concerning Lucan boasting about “the triumphe of Julius” [MLT, 401], when Caesar never held any triumph. While no such statement is present in the Trevet versions in Originals and Analogues or Sources and Analogues, it appears that Correale has come up with a Trevet manuscript “which says that after Caesar conquered Pompey [sic], he ‘held a triumph for three years’.”84 Delasanta also objects to the Man of Law having Jonah spouted up at Nineveh [MLT, 484-87], which is “a city of three days journey inland” from the Tigris and thus far away from normal whale routes. This, he feels, clashes with the biblical account:85 82

To be quite clear on this, I should like to point out that I think that Chaucer’s borrowing from Innocent happened prior to his reassignation of the present Prologue and Tale to the Man of Law, even though I do feel that this cannot have been much earlier: a matter of weeks or months rather than years. 83 Benson, p 857. Such an edition would be most welcome, particularly if it were also to tell us how popular Trevet was in Chaucer’s day and to what extent his Custance and other writings were circulating. 84 Benson, p 860 note 400-401. There is a mix-up here of the town of Pompeii and Caesar’s one-time confederate Pompey. The former was never conquered, the latter was defeated. 85 Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 295.

Towards Composing a Testament of Love | 91 And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying. Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. [Jonah, 2:10 – 3:4]

But the inconsistency which Delasanta notes resides in the Bible itself. When, after three days and three nights, the whale regurgitates a penitent Jonah, there is nothing in the Bible text to imply that this was anywhere between Joppa and Tarshish or that the author of the text was unsure of Nineveh’s location. Instead, the story indicates that this marvellous creature, as a sort of watery jinnee, had covered a huge distance and did indeed disgorge him at Nineveh, in order to make Jonah comply with God’s command. It is a great miracle, foreshadowing the equally great miracle of the city’s populace repenting and, exegetically, a prefiguration of Christ’s death and resurrection as well as the conversion of mankind. The Bible is not concerned with geographic consistency here, but with the wondrous ways of God. Strictly speaking, Delasanta is also mistaken on the location of Nineveh. It is not “a city of three days journey inland”, which contradicts his own statement that it lies on the Tigris, but a place so large that it takes three days to traverse and Jonah does not feel com-pelled to preach his message until he is half a day’s distance from its centre. This is also what we find upon the basis of modern bible studies: the distance refers to Nineveh’s diameter, which is similarly the basic reading that is given by the Vulgate, Chaucer’s likeliest source.86 To give Delasanta his due, medieval ecclesiastical authority is none too sure on this point. St Eusebius Hieronymus, for instance, reads the text, which is “et Ninive erat civitas magna Dei, itinere trium dierum”, to refer to its circumference and, rather inconsistently, also to mean that it took three days to reach.87 86

Erik Eynikel, E. Noort, T. Baarda, A. Denaux eds, Internationaal Commentaar op de Bijbel (Kok/Averbode, Kampen 2001), Band 2, p 1326. 87 J.-P. Migne ed., Patrologiae Latinae, Tomus XXV [Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Stridonensis Presbyteri Opera Omnia, Tomus V, Saeculum V, Annus 420] (Paris: Bibliothecae Cleri Universae 1865), p 1193. The Vulgate omits the word Dei in the text just cited. Magna Dei here means “great, [even] to God”.


Delasanta further feels that, on account of his extensive travelling and therefore presumably deep interest in matters of geography, Chaucer must have been aware of Nineveh’s place on the map.88 This is not very likely, to be mild. We have little idea what Chaucer’s geographical knowledge of the ancient world was like. At times when it crops up he shows himself to be quite unsure of its topography, as we can see in his introduction of the story of Zenobia in the Monk’s Tale [2247-51] which associates the city of Palmyra with Persia instead of Syria. To be uncertain on the whereabouts of Nineveh seems to me no great fault on anybody’s part, schooled or otherwise, then or now. Lacking our archeological knowledge, which was only acquired in the past century, Chaucer would have had just the roughest idea of Nineveh’s location. Even a minute perusal of the Bible or, alternatively, something like the Mappa Mundi would have left him almost clueless. Chaucer’s words on Goliath – another perceived error – do not properly constitute a misrepresentation: they simply replace Goliath’s “six cubits and one span” by the hyperbolical “unmesurable of lengthe” [MLT, 934]. A genuine misrepresentation is found in the story of Daniel in the lion’s den [MLT, 473-76]: the narrator populates it with men who get devoured by the lions with the sole exception of Daniel. Yet the mistake is not greatly removed from the actual account: after his deliverance Daniel’s enemies do get thrown to the lions and eaten. And then there is the Hannibal matter. While the Man of Law refers to him as having defeated the Romans “tymes thre” [MLT, 291], Delasanta points out that in actual historical fact he inflicted many more defeats upon them.89 Yet here, too, the Man of Law cannot really be said to be dismally wrong. Hannibal’s campaign resulted in three major defeats upon the Romans: his double victory over the consuls Scipio and Longus at the rivers Ticinus and Trebia (218 BC), his victory at Lake Trasimene in 217 and the overwhelming one at Cannae in 216. These are the ones that really count. In addition, three being not only a familiar biblical number to suggest completion but very well-liked in this sense in all sort of religious context, it could further be that “tymes thre” is simply used here in a general sense and should be read to mean “thoroughly”. Obviously, the inconsistencies that Delasanta discerns are less serious and unambiguous than he feels. Nor do they contribute any88 89

Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 294. Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 295-96.


thing special with respect to Gower or his version of the Custance saga. This implies that, insofar as they are truly wrong, we are simply dealing with natural slips attributable to Chaucer or his sources. Matters might be different if Chaucer and Trevet’s citation from the Bible and other sources could be shown to be immaculate, but this is not so. Some of the other borrowings from Trevet that we come across elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales also exhibit errors, which are impossible to attribute to any tendency by the Man of Law to mix up his sources and reside with Trevet himself. Instances of this are the confusion of Jabel and Lamech as the inventor of tents (Anelida and Arcite, 150-54) and the Pardoner’s account of John the Baptist’s death (PardT, 488-91), both of which deviate from the biblical account.90 The Monk’s Tale, to mention another instance, places Daniel in the fiery furnace. Even the Parson’s Tale, not notably indebted to Trevet, reveals such slips, like the Parson’s claim that Mary Magdalene anointed Christ’s head when this should be his feet.91 A matter that remains for us to pay some attention to is to whose retained introduction the Man of Law’s Prologue must be supposed to point. Our first thought is of course the Merchant and his portrait in the General Prologue, especially the poverty matter in line 280 (“Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette”) and the suggestive clustering of textual echoes which the passage quoted five pages ago shares with these lines: His resons he spak ful solempnely, Sownynge alwey the’encrees of his wynnyng. He wolde the see were kept for any thyng Bitwixe Middelburgh and Orewelle. [GenProl 274-77]

The mercantile slant of the final two stanzas of the Prologue and the first eight stanzas of the Man of Law’s Tale are a running argument in favour of reading the Merchant here. But we run into a problem when we consider that every word of his Prologue reflects back upon himself, since his own indigence and his merchant status are major aspects of his portrait in the General Prologue. In debt himself, why should he inveigh against his fellow-victims or as a mer90 Robert M. Correale, ‘Chaucer’s Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet’s Les Chronicles’, ChauR 25 (1991): 238-65, at 254-56. 91 For the Monk see Benson, p 244 ll. 2165-66 and note (p 932); ParsT, 502.


chant himself level his irony at his fellow-merchants? Disgust at his own state and envy of his wealthy fellows? Unless one is prepared to overlook the sardonic voice of these final stanzas, like Benson for instance, who appears to read them to be in “praise of wealth”,92 there is a suggestion here that the Merchant is not the original narrator. This could also be inferred from its final two lines: “…a marchant, goon is many a yeere,/Me taughte a tale, which that ye shal heere”. It is the speaker’s use of “a marchant” that seems to imply that he himself cannot be a merchant, as this is not how we expect people to speak of someone belonging to their own station in life. Yet there is a good counter-argument to deal with all this. The textual correspondences are strong. In Chaucer, this almost invariably seems to mean a close compositional relation. It further implies that the failure of the speaker of the Prologue to identify with the merchant from whom he had the tale may simply be a matter of insufficient authorial immersion in his character. To this it may be added that it is perfectly possible to speak of an old colleague in terms of an old hand at the same trade in the way that the Prologue does. “This is a tale told to me by an old merchant – in fact, the man who many years ago taught me the tricks of the trade…” and such ways of framing things make perfect sense, without being inconsistent. What may help to resolve some of the Prologue’s puzzling aspects is by reading it not so much as an introductory passage but as basically an epilogue, even though we find it to be part and parcel of the tale to follow. There is no fundamental objection to doing so. The terms introduction, prologue and epilogue are actually quite arbitrary and fundamentally a scribal/editorial invention. Many links are simply inter-tale links that serve both to round off the preceding narration and introduce the next, and their present status as prologues and epilogues simply a matter of editorial intervention. Here we may also note that the Man of Law’s Prologue adds nothing to the theme of his Tale, and only the final three lines of its last stanza serve as an introduction, so that it becomes a likely supposition that its general contents do not so much point forward as refer backward instead. Upon consideration, this “prologue” is one that has a distinctly ecclesiastical ring. One long apostrophe, its repeated O’s, lofty tone, exaggeration, citation from every-day life, folk wisdom and reference 92

Benson, p 856.


to the Bible (which are also elements typical of the Tale) all point in a homiletic direction, reminiscent of such consummate performers as the Pardoner but this time, vide the tale that follows, pronounced by a good cleric but one, to judge by the evidence, who does not seem to be present among the Canterbury pilgrims. Now this just a suggestion, but what if the Man of Law’s Tale were originally written for a different occasion, a religious one, like some of the other Canterbury tales such as the Second Nun’s? This would account for the ecclesiastical voice. Subsequent steps would have been its incorporation into the Canterbury effort, under the Merchant’s aegis and with some cursory attention to his trade in the introductory stanzas. Such a situation also goes a long way to account for the inconsistencies in the mercantile voice. Such inattention to detail and to detailed revision is a familiar aspect of the Canterbury Tales, attributable – one would think – to an organizational set-up whereby, on the whole, only the most urgent alterations were effected and all other rewriting postponed until the time had come for a final, in toto revision of the entire work. Then, with the coming of the Testament of Love, it was reassigned to the Man of Law. The idea of such a shifting sequence may look somewhat forced but similar instances actually crop up elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. Also, beyond the introductory stanzas the Merchant may not seem to be particularly suited to the tale that follows but then this is something that can justifiably be said with respect to his present tale and several of the other tales as well. As for the tale that the Prologue refers back to, leaving aside the possibility of a tale not yet acquired or incorporated by Chaucer, there is only one tale that arguably fits the specifications, even if we have to stretch our definition of poverty in order to make it fit. This is the tale of the Merchant of St Denis, which we know as the Shipman’s Tale but was originally assigned to the Wife of Bath. Its nameless heroine is married to a rich merchant but has managed to run up a steep debt without her husband knowing. She owes a hundred franks, which is pretty much: something like a quarter of what we shall find Gower to have paid for the entire estate of Aldington Septvauns when we discuss this in the next chapter. She is prepared to prostitute herself in order to get out of her predicament. This is the poverty matter: she has not got a penny, and there is an element of spiritual poverty involved as well. No wonder that the prologist should be scathing on the subject: such poverty is worthy of contempt only. The husband has


no eyes for her needs (she has “to lite and he hath al”), for he is a merchant all bent upon making a good profit along typically mercantile lines and travels all over the country and beyond in his pursuit of gain. He ultimately gets repaid by his wife in the form of “taillynge”, a pun on the repayment of her debt in the shape of sexual intercourse. The use of words like “chevyssaunce” associates his transactions with disreputable practices such as usury, making clear that this merchant is as reprehensible as his counterpart in the General Prologue.93 Needless to say, this provides a prime context for a tale by a Merchant to have come in and, at that, with a tale perfectly suited to gainsay the import of the Wife of Bath’s old tale. Assuming that this is a correct reading of the evidence, the implications are worth noting. The tale shift for the Man of Law indicates that, at some time after the writing of the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, the original Melibee was shifted to Chaucer the pilgrim and replaced by the tale of Custance. This tale turns out to have involved another reshuffling, as it was already included in the first place, probably as a somewhat puffed-up cleric’s tale. What is more, the various shifts go to show that Chaucer at this time had progressed well beyond Fragment I (A), since at any rate Fragments II (B1) and VII (B2 ) are involved here. This situation shows several further things. First, it goes together well with both Brock and Nicholson, the former finding that one-third of the Tale is based closely upon Trevet and the latter that it follows Gower’s lines of composition. In fact, as Correale indicates, Chaucer’s actual close debt to Trevet may be no more than 20 per cent or about 200 lines. Secondly, it is unmistakable that Chaucer was willing to go to great lengths and even turn his writings upside down in order to keep Gower installed as his target. Thirdly, the presumable fact that he picked this tale from among his own tales is an indication that he either had or desired no direct access to the Confessio Amantis at the time of his reponse. In the fourth place, if the Confessio was unavailable, this may imply that his relation with Gower was at a low ebb but could also be explained by supposing that Chaucer heard the book or parts of it recited only. As Joyce Coleman notes, “Gower seems to share with Chaucer the basic sense that writers transmit their rewritten sources to the ears of their audience [as] part of an ongoing 93

Nancy M. Reale, ‘A Marchant Was There With a Forked Berd’, in: Lambdin & Lambdin: 93-107, at 97.


reality”.94 But if the indications are that, besides readers, the Confessio had its own audience, why should we not include Chaucer? One final aspect of the Prologue is that its Poverty Stanzas, perhaps unintentionally, also seem to suggest a link with the poverty argument of the Wife of Bath’s Loathly Lady. Her words are easily read as a correction of Gower’s stance on this subject (see Chapter Four), though they have no appreciable bearing on the Prologue. Could it be that Chaucer’s original ideas dwelt on a debate on riches vs poverty in marriage rather than maistrie vs gentilesse, that this was a factor contributing to his selection of the prologue and tale of Custance for the Man of Law and that this led to his inclusion of the Loathly Lady’s speech? What is attractive about interpreting matters in this light is that they fit the rest of the argument so well. With the Man of Law turned into a bit of a sententious fellow who may well be a caricature of Gower himself as we shall examine in the next chapter, the voice that is absent, except by implication, is Chaucer’s own. It is this lacuna that the present interpretation of the Prologue fills to a reasonably satisfactory degree, for it gives us the potential outline of a more outspoken authorial statement to complement the Man of Law’s outGowering of Gower,95 even if it forces us to assume that some extensive revision was still to come, As a final remark on the present subject, let me say that it is a mistake to assume, as Fisher appears to do, that the Man of Law’s Introduction is simply the place that Chaucer happened to working on when he was confronted with Gower’s challenge. While this is an attractive notion in the light of his presumed tendency for on-the-spot recording of new directions, it is contradicted by the evidence. We deduce from his work on the Legend that the challenge must have reached him earlier than this. We have seen that his later rearrangement for the Man of Law involved a reshuffling of tales already included and evidently belonging to (what we now define as) later Groups. Besides, I shall propose later that, in all likelihood, Chaucer was coterminously engaged upon writing as many as three (now unfinished) tales at more or less the same time when he broke up work 94

Coleman, p 187. A good alternative is that the entire situation reflects a stage of (incomplete) revision coming after a successful presentation of the Testament of Love and that the downtoning of Gower’s part is the outcome of Chaucer’s efforts to reintegrate the tales and links involved into the Canterbury Tales. See my Conclusion.

95


on the old plan. He had therefore progressed considerably beyond the original Sergeant of the Law and his return to this place must consequently be regarded as an important piece of evidence. We shall come back to this subject at the end of Chapter Four. The Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale Before we take our leave of the Man of Law, we should stop and pause at the Epilogue to his tale. This link as such is prime Chaucer and it is obvious that at one time it served to round off the Sergeant of the Law’s Tale and introduce the next.96 A better way of referring to it ought to be the Sergeant of the Law’s Epilogue. It is also evidently a piece of writing of uncertain status, either cancelled or meant to be thoroughly overhauled, so modern editors point out.97 It is accepted in many manuscripts as a useful link, because it is plainly associated with (the Introduction to) the preceding tale and seems to have been regarded as easily adaptable. This has made it quite popular among the editors/scribes. At a guess, the Epilogue was put aside by Chaucer when he changed his mind on the three pilgrims involved and the tales that they told, but retrieved from his literary estate by some editor in need of a useful link. In those manuscripts where it is found, which excludes both Hengwrt and Ellesmere, it is inseparable from the Man of Law’s Tale. It is almost always used to introduce the Squire’s Tale,98 which it does not in any sense fit. Its connection with the Man of Law is based on the words thrifty tale, which echo line 46 of the Introduction, and phislyas [presumably meaning files], “termes queinte of lawe” and the associated remark about “Latyn” [1189-90]. There is some reluctance among scholars to accept these references as indicative of the Man of Law, even if this is what they manifestly are within the terms of the Canterbury Tales as we know them. Instead, it is pointed out by Benson that the “references to philosophy, legal terminology, and Latin are more descriptive of Melibee than the tale of Constance”.99 96

Manly-Rickert, vol I, p 38. Of course, the reverse could also be argued, claiming that this is a late link, intended to ease the passage from the Man of Law to the Wife of Bath (which is how Fisher applies it) but somehow never included. What argues against this is the Parson’s role, which badly agrees with his knitting-up function. 97 Benson, p 862. 98 Benson, pp 862-63, 1126. 99 Benson, p 863 note 1188-90.


This is a bit of a puzzle. True, the Man of Law’s Tale is not a lawyer’s tale. It is a tale told by a lawyer but clearly not written with the legal profession in mind. A much more obvious point of reference is the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, which in a very similar way applies a variety of legal terms. Yet Benson is right to a degree. What we have here is a markedly unrevised endlink, which, with revision a long way off, deals with the three narrators who were originally involved: the Sergeant of the Law for the Melibee,100 the Parson as the unwelcome interrupter and the Wife of Bath for the tale of the Merchant of St Denis, now the Shipman’s Tale. This makes it more than likely that the legal terms refer to what the Sergeant, as the Man of Law’s predecessor, may originally have said in introducing the Melibee. All the same, it remains difficult to see what other than wishful thinking impels Benson to ascribe them to the Melibee itself. While its Job-like theme emphatically involves such concepts as justice and injustice, it deals with them in terms that are a far cry from the legalistic world of either the Sergeant or the Man of Law. It is certainly not a typical tale for lawyers. There can be little doubt that the link was originally meant to introduce a woman narrator and a married one at that. As such she must have been the Wife of Bath. All the other women in the pilgrimage are nuns. Admittedly, Chaucer may have had another married lady among his original cast of pilgrims and thrown her out, but this would have been a most unlikely action for an author whom we take to have been seeking to flesh out the number of participants rather than otherwise. The place of the narrator’s name appears in line 1179. Though the scribes almost invariably insert the Squire here, who certainly does not fill the part, the owner of the “joly body” encountered here is clearly the same lady who originally told the Shipman’s Tale, where the phrase crops up again in line 423.101 On the face of it, then, the Epilogue was written to link the Sergeant’s Tale to the Wife of Bath but uncoupled from her when Chaucer decided to fit her out with a new tale and assign her old one to the Shipman. The reasons that may have caused this uncoupling are discussed below. It is, anyway, easy to see that the final 13 lines of the 100

In all instances referring to the Melibee as the original tale as told by the Man of Law, I have stuck to an original Sergeant of the Law as a narrator distinct from the former. 101 Benson, p 862; Manly/Rickert, vol ii, pp 188-90.


Epilogue were produced with exactly the Wife in mind, since they are meaningless in terms of the Shipman’s Tale or any of the other tales, which confirms – if such confirmation is at all needed – that in the initial sequence of tales the Wife of Bath was the one to follow the Sergeant of the Law’s Tale. John Fisher is the first editor to have inserted the Wife of Bath’s name in line 1179 in his 1977 Chaucer edition.102 “Now! goode men,” quod oure Hoste, “herkeneth me; Abydeth, for Goddes digne passioun, For we schal han a predicacioun; This Lollere heer wil prechen us somwhat.” “Nay, by my fader soule, that he schal nat!” Seyde the Wyf of Bathe, “Heer schal he nat preche: He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven alle in the grete God,” quod she; “He wolde sowen som difficulte, Or springen cokkel in our clene corn. And therefore, Hoost, I warne thee biforn, My joly body schal a tale telle, And schal clynken you so mery a belle, That I schal waken al this compaignie. But it schal nat ben of philosophie, Ne physlyas, ne termes queinte of lawe. Ther is but litel Latyn in my mawe!” [EpiMLT, 1172–90]

Much like the editors who overlooked the “joly body”, Fisher also misses out on one point, even if this is a relatively minor one. “By my fader soule” [1176] is out of character for the Wife of Bath. This should be “by my moder soule” or “by my dames soule”. In passing over this detail, he now introduces as a new and foreign element in the Canterbury Tales this sole mention of her father. Its presence is psychologically inconsistent with Chaucer’s picture of her as someone in perpetual arms against male authority, so that, obviously, we ought to forget all about it.103 For the rest, he is evidently right about the appropriateness of the link. Note how unsuited these lines are to the three pilgrims whose 102 John H. Fisher ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (NY/ London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), pp 101-02 and note 1179. 103 I am admittedly basing my argument on a version of her Prologue that was completed well after the writing of this link, but the evidence goes to underwrite the proposition that Chaucer’s conception of the Wife never changed substantially.


names are inserted here in the various manuscripts – the ubiquitous Squire and the rare Shipman and Summoner. There is nothing to associate any of them with the gist of what is being promised here. Then contrast this with their perfect applicability to the Wife of Bath, even if she does not make an appearance in any single manuscript. Which of us does not remember her allergy to clerks presuming to preach, teach and “glosen” (a characteristic Wife-of-Bathism) the gospel to her? Note also the reference to cockle and corn and the way in which this calls to mind her remark about bren and flour [WBP 477–78]. Most of all, however, it is the final six or seven lines here that constitute a perfect passage from the Man of Law to the Wife. Her tale – that is, the now Shipman’s Tale, with or without some sort of prologue104 – is everything that is promised here. It is all about a woman’s “joly body” and graphic enough to make all the other pilgrims sit up straight in their saddles: she is announcing a rousing good tale with the promise of something salty thrown in for good measure. This is where the word “queinte” comes in, to prepare us for the way she uses it later. The only thing missing here is a response by the Host whereby she is accommodatingly invited to come forward with the experiences at which she is so obviously hinting. Upon consideration, does not this sound familiar somehow? We already possess this invitation, in much the same spirit, but have always overlooked it, because it does not come at the head of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue but 184 lines later. There we encounter an entirely natural transition from the Epilogue. The Pardoner has replaced the Host but for the rest one could not wish for anything smoother. By re-inserting the Host, we get this: “Dame, I wolde praye yow, if youre wyl it were,” Seyde oure goode Hooste, “as ye bigan, Telle forth youre tale, spareth for no man, And teche us yonge men of youre praktike.” [WBP 184-87]

This is exactly what is needed and so is the Wife’s reaction: “Gladly,” quod she, “sith it may yow like;” But yet I praye to al this compaignye, 104

If the Wife is referring to her Prologue, the thing to be kept in mind is that this was probably a much briefer exposé than her present one. If, on the other hand, she means her Tale, we should take this to refer to the Shipman’s Tale and not the Wife of Bath’s Tale as we know it.

102 | Towards Composing a Testament of Love If that I speke after my fantasye, As taketh not agrief of that I seye, For myn entente nys but for to pleye. Now, sire, now wol I telle forth my tale. [WBP 188-95]

What evidently happened is that, in a rather slapdash fashion, the Jovinian arguments on marriage were affixed to the original opening, leaving both the Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale and the Host’s invitation to the Wife dangling. The former was left like this, perhaps in the expectation of revision still to come; the latter was reassigned to the Pardoner. What I have attempted in the preceding pages is reconstruct the original transition from the Sergeant of the Law’s Tale (the Melibee) to the Wife of Bath’s tale of the Merchant of St Denis. As we know, both tales were replaced by new choices. This makes Fisher’s brave use of the Epilogue to link Man of Law and Wife a bridge too far. While perfectly suited to the old situation, it no longer applies to the later development of the Canterbury Tales. The Epilogue was evidently shelved along with the tales for which it was written. This is borne out by two major considerations. First, the Epilogue could easily have been adapted, without too much of an effort, to introduce the new Wife of Bath, but no such thing happened. Instead, we find the Host’s reaction rewritten to fit the Pardoner at line 184 of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, which seems a good indication that the old link had outserved its purpose. Then, there is the great puzzle why the two most natural candidates for being named in line 1179 – the Wife of Bath and her replacement the Shipman – get only a single vote among them in all the manuscripts. This is so surprising that one is tempted to assume a tradition among the early editors and scribes, possibly even stemming from some annotation found in Chaucer’s literary estate and proscribing its use for either Wife or Shipman. For the rest, the Epilogue appears to be an all-time editorial plaything. The early editors used the link to introduce the Squire without regard for its appropriateness, and for this reason they are the obvious suspects of having been the ones who carelessly rebuilt the Wife into a male narrator. Modern editors – aware that this link could not possibly be meant for the Squire, and proud of the clever detective work linking its “joly body” to that of the Shipman’s Tale – insert the Shipman’s name here. Of course, they have an ulterior motive here, a forgivable one, for the temptation is great. By making the Epilogue


announce the Shipman as the next speaker, the text gets manipulated to accommodate the “Bradshaw shift”, a tale sequence that many editors appear to believe in but dare not apply in their editions. What they fail to consider is first of all why Chaucer should not have put in the Shipman here himself. In terms of manuscripts, at any rate, there is exceedingly little foundation for his inclusion. As we know, the link is used in this way only once, in the manuscript known as Bodl. Arch. Selden B.14 (SC 3360). Here, they are partially excused by the fact that the original name in the link was evidently removed by the early editors/scribes in order to insert the Squire. Worse is the fact that the editors blandly assume that the good reasons which we have for attributing the feminine narrative voice in the Shipman’s Tale to postponed revision must also apply to the Epilogue. They deduce from the Tale’s unrevised “joly body” reference that the identical phrase in the Epilogue requires a similar revision. This is unsound logic, since the status of the Epilogue plainly indicates that it was uncoupled from the tale that followed. This means that revision – if any such thing was envisaged for it – ought to have taken a divergent direction. What the editors do instead is admit the uncoupling and yet, by inserting the Shipman for the original Wife of Bath, recombine the Epilogue and the Wife’s old tale once again. Another interesting aspect of the Epilogue, to which its shelving is probably also related, is the Host’s little exchange of unpleasantries with the Parson, with the support of the Shipman/Wife of Bath. The Host invites him to come up with a tale, but is severely censured instead for his swearing in a passage that has become rather familiar: The Parson him answerde, “Benedicite! What eyleth the man, so synfully to swere?” Oure Host answerde, “O Jankyn, be ye there? I smelle a Lollere in the wynd,” quod he. “Now! goode men,” quod oure Hoste, “herkeneth me; Abydeth, for Goddes digne passioun, For we schal han a predicacioun; This Lollere heer wil prechen us somwhat.” “Nay, by my fader soule, that he schal nat!” Seyde the Shipman, “Heer he schal nat preche; He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven alle in the grete God,” quod he; “He wolde sowen som difficulte, Or springen cokkel in oure clene corn.” [EpiMLT, 1170-83]


This Parson is a far cry from the man who concludes the Canterbury Tales. There he is a serious figure of harmony, drawing the entire fellowship together into a spiritual web to prepare all and sundry for the true viage of human existence. Here he is depicted as someone who is suggestive of politico-religious dissent and a moralist pest as well. While no one is claiming that the voices in the above passage represent Chaucer’s feelings on the subject, and the exchange of unpleasantries between Parson, Host and “Shipman” says more about the latter two than the Parson, it should at least be clear that this Parson is shown up as someone fallible, with evident weak points that are open to satire and serious criticism. The other Parson is a sacral person operating in a sacral function. This change of conception provides an interesting insight into the development of the Tales. The Epilogue Parson is unlike his portrait in the General Prologue or the one in the Parson’s. There he is not someone to elicit any hostility on the pilgrims’ part, as he does here, but figures as an idealized person of high spiritual authority. His appearance in the Epilogue cannot be a late piece of writing, among other things because it runs counter to the evidence of the Parson’s Prologue, which is plainly Chaucer’s last word on him. Within the Epilogue, which we assume to have belonged to the Sergeant of the Law, he figures as someone clashing with the Host and a Shipman who is easily shown up to be the replacement of the Wife of Bath, neither of which tallies with his final role as the spiritual father to the Tales. This makes him a retained figure rather than a new addition. This leaves us with two options. One is that, to judge by the General Prologue, the Epilogue Parson represents some intermediate stage of rewriting but was up for revision here, to be thrown out in favour of his original saintly alter ego’s reappearance in the Parson’s Tale, a tortuous yet not impossible construction. The other is that he reflects an originally less saintly Parson – a Lollard, possibly, to judge by the Host, who regrettably is not a truly perceptive person and therefore none too reliable a witness. But the Host’s suspicion is supported by the Wife (now the Shipman), whose hypocritical remark about “springen cokkel in oure clene corn” [WBP, 1183] may refer to Pope Gregory’s image of lollardry as lollium, cockle – a weed.105 Presumably, this Parson was dealt with in an earlier stage of the General 105

Jones, pp 222-23.


Prologue along ironical lines befitting a piece of estate satire. Later, other considerations, such as Gower’s demand for a Testament of Love, caused Chaucer to recast him as pastor to the entire fellowship and even take time off to rewrite his picture in the General Prologue. . As Chaucer can be careless and tardy in his rewriting efforts, or at least apparently so, we might be tempted to pick the first option. Yet the simpler and better guess is in favour of the alternative and for this, too, there are good arguments. What revisional changes may Chaucer not have effected that were so surgically precise that we have never noticed them? There are clear signs that, when his heart was in it, he was perfectly capable of reworking his material while leaving only faint internal traces of any such thing ever having happened. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, as we shall dissect them in chapters to come, are a good instance of this. More importantly, whereas the other pilgrims are dealt with in terms of estate satire, not so the Parson and his virtuous brother the Ploughman. We do not know what Chaucer had in mind for the latter beyond providing a spiritual contrast, but it is clear that the two of them want his satirical touch and it is this, more than anything else, that suggests that the Epilogue Parson is a leftover from the original situation. Such satire is, after all, manifest here in the Epilogue: the Parson is perceived to be a Lollard and in the rather sharp but funny clash that ensues neither the Host nor the Wife of Bath bandy any words on making it clear to all and sundry how they feel about such fundamentalists. In other words, we had best take the Parson’s portrait in the General Prologue as a piece of rewriting, done in order to make it tally with his new part in the Parson’s Prologue, and regard his part in the Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale as a moment frozen in time, felicitously recording traces of a discarded stage of development. It is something that is supported by the unspecific and hazy description which is accorded to his brother the Ploughman and is best understood by assuming that this pilgrim was provisionally sketched in, no doubt with the popular Piers in mind, at a time when Chaucer’s attention was chiefly fixed upon the Parson. More spectacular support for a rewriting of the Parson’s part in the General Prologue into something non-satirical may be found in Chaucer’s triple assertion there of the Parson being an “ensample”.106 106

Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p 8.


The thought that this should be related to Gower’s challenge finds no mean backing when Chaucer writes This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf, That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte. [GenProl, 496-97]

This is a clear and exceedingly close textual echo from the Confessio: Crist wroghte ferst and after tawhte So that the dede his word arawhte; [explained] He yaf ensample in his persone, And we the wordes have al one. [ConfAm, Book V, 1825-28]

The sentiment is from Matthew 5:19, which says that “whoever shall do and teach [the commandments], the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven”. Gower applies this to Christ and Chaucer to the Parson, yet it is clear that Chaucer comes very close to Gower in seeking to confer an exemplary status on the Parson that makes him very Christ-like. And of course it is clear that their way of phrasing things is entirely too similar to be accidental. The sentiment may have been proverbial. Yet to find a virtually identical choice of words in a similar context is remarkable. When this is followed three times by the additional incursion of the word ensample, the firm implication is that Chaucer took his cue here from the Confessio. This suggests that the Parson’s portrait must be interpreted as referring back to Gower’s Priest, at the same time giving us a very interesting indication as to the date of inclusion of these lines: 1390 or soon after. A belated point to be made about the exchange of hostilities between the Parson, the Host and the “Shipman” is that it calls to mind the many other moments when the pilgrims get into one another’s hair. Such clashes are an almost ritual phase leading up to a retaliatory telling of tales. Accepting that the Wife of Bath was the true pilgrim intended here, this gives us an interesting indication of an earlier stage of the Tales figuring a clash between herself and one of the clerics – an idea to which we shall return in the coming chapters. Here the implication is that our Lollard Parson may well have been meant to come back soon with a tale properly conducive to put the Wife in her proper Christian place. This cannot have been the present Parson’s Tale, which would have effectively killed the entire narrative effort of the Tales well before the end. If Chaucer had at all arrived at


a tale for him at the time, there are only a few real options here, such as perhaps the Clerk’s Tale. An indication that we are correctly interpreting the retaliatory atmosphere of the Man of Law’s Epilogue is further found in the Parson’s attack on the Host’s swearing. This is echoed later, in what we may designate as the basic Testament of Love, in the Pardoner’s very similar attack on the Host. It is something that calls to mind Hinckley’s suggestion that “the [Pardoner’s] Tale was originally intended for the Parson rather than for the Pardoner”.107 At any rate, the basic clash here shows that, once having got hold of a good idea, Chaucer was most unwilling to let go of it and perfecty prepared to wait until the next opportunity came along. Doubtless the present non-status of the Man of Law’s Epilogue is bound up as much with Chaucer’s changing conception of the Sergeant of the Law as well as the Parson and the Wife of Bath. Hence, the rewriting of their parts may well be closely related solutions, both as to their purpose and to the time when this took place. If the Parson’s Tale gave Chaucer the groundwork for a Testament of Love, it was the re-invented Man of Law with his rewritten Introduction which enabled him to move several steps closer to compliance with Gower’s terms. As his first and near-explicit reaction to Gower, it serves as an unmistakable signal that the contest was on. For Chaucer to have got truly close to a Testament of Love, though, something more brilliant was needed and for this he had the Wife of Bath standing in the wings, but only after reassigning her then tale to the Shipman. All the elements capable of accounting for the Epilogue’s unsatisfactory status turn out to be so interwoven that it is a likely assumption that the changes with which they are associated were more or less concurrent. We may note in this connection that the Wife, Pardoner and Parson are the only three whose speeches are sermons constructed out of confession joined to an exposition of the Deadly Sins, in what must probably be seen as a reflection of the similar composition of the Confessio Amantis. This suggests a very close relation, far exceeding that of the Man of Law’s Tale or any of the others. Another interesting point about the Wife and the Parson is the 107

Hinckley, Notes on Chaucer (1907; Northampton, Mass: Haskell House, 1970), pp 157-58. He plausibly argues that the Pardoner basically tells “an honest straightforward sermon”, but fails to come up with convincing reasons why it should have belonged to the Parson.


presumable rewriting of their portraits in the General Prologue, as something that resulted from the same motive and may have been simultaneously put into effect. The implication of all this is that Chaucer’s reply to Gower in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale constitutes the pivotal point of all that happened to the subsequent tales with their almost explosive transformation into something far surpassing Chaucer’s original conception. It is from this point onward that we see the emergence of his true Testament of Love. This is, of course, facilitated by the Parson’s Tale, even if this is not an answer but a means to come up with one. By and large, the Man of Law’s Tale and its links are a recognizable improvement on Gower, but not something truly inspired, except in their entertaining and slightly malicious portrayal of someone who may be Gower himself. They convincingly comply with several major elements that are required for a Testament of Love, notably their contribution of a reply to the challenge as well as a Gower tale and its theme of unrelenting virtue for an answer. What is lacking is a resounding demonstration of superior wits and the presence of lots of deadly sin to complement Custance’s rather forbidding virtuousness. Textually, the remarkable thing about Fragment II (B1), including the Man of Law’s Epilogue, is its association with all the major upheavals in both the Canterbury tale sequence. True, there is postponed revision elsewhere, tale links are lacking in several places and a good many tales are simply wanting. Yet it is in this place that we find major indicators for tale shifts indicating 1) a new, reduced and linear plan for the entire Canterbury effort, 2) a new deal for the Man of Law, 3) a new approach to the Wife of Bath, and 4) the involvement of the Parson in this, all of which it is possible to relate, or should I say impossible not to relate, to the Confessio Amantis. Dating the Testament of Love Chaucer’s reaction to Gower in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale points directly to the 1390 version of the Confessio Amantis, since this is the only place where its text refers to Chaucer. It was dropped in Gower’s second version, taken to have seen the light of day “in the fourteenth year of King Richard”, which gives us June 21,


1390 at the earliest and June 20, 1391 at the latest.108 It was also absent from the final version of 1392-93, which was in Richard’s sixteenth regnal year and possessed a revised prologue to complement the revised conclusion.109 It is perfectly possible that Chaucer should have been familiar with all three versions or that the eliminated “tribute” of the second and third versions could have contributed added impetus to Chaucer’s reply, all depending on when he learnt about this. Yet the only one that we can be sure of is the first, as this is plainly what the Man of Law’s reply is all about. Before we go on, let us briefly consider the disappearing accolade. It is missing in the intermediate and final redactions of the Confessio Amantis. Its absence has often been interpreted as a falling-out between Chaucer and Gower. While Fisher argues the exact opposite, one hesitates to side with him on this point. At issue is a duel of writing wits, which need not have been an antagonistic thing, but the competitive spirit that speaks from Chaucer’s way of dealing with Gower is unmistakable. Now that we have a better overview of the issues involved, it is rather clear that Chaucer’s strike at Gower’s “immoral” tales suggests a certain chill in the air. So does his shifting away of the Melibee with its implication that this was because of its associability with Gower, through the Sergeant of the Law, and that the latter’s overtures to Henry of Derby had made him unsuited for the presentation of a tale of the Fürstenspiegel type. And what about the recurrent indications that we seem to have of a lack of access to the Confessio or, perhaps, a refusal to make use of it, as attested by the dearth of verbal echoes even in the tales which demonstrably follow Gower? Here, however, it may be that Gower, too, basically acquainted his public with his book through the medium of readings, selected or otherwise, and that this was how Chaucer got to know the work at large, which would explain much. Our best option is to take the disappearance of Gower’s challenge in the later versions as simple corroboration of the existence and passing of a brief literary fad. Once past by mid-1391, its traces were eliminated as a matter of honour – rules of the game – or simple convenience. Exactly the same thing happened with the Daisy or Marguerite aspects of the Legend when the new G-Prologue was composed – a correspondence which is too good for coincidence and 108 109

Fisher, p 117. Fisher, pp 116-24.


ought to make us pause and wonder. It provides not only a good explanation of an otherwise puzzling aspect of the Confessio but links up exceedingly well with the curious goings-on in the Canterbury Tales at the very same time. To this let me add that, even if Chaucer’s contest with Gower were to have been a private thing, this was not an exclusive matter. There were still his presumed reading sessions and still those among his audience with ears to hear and minds to understand what he was saying. This does not exhaust our possibilities. Another option is Fisher’s idea that there was a political dimension involved. When we look at the second version of the Confessio, we note that not just the reference to Chaucer was dropped but also the book’s dedication to Richard. Finding both the original dedicatee and co-dedicatee gone at the same time, Fisher infers that this is not by pure chance. He feels that Richard was removed because Gower, who was ultimately to be the great apologist for Henry of Lancaster’s usurpation, was about to join the latter’s camp and the address to Chaucer, as someone belonging to the other side, was removed out of consideration for either. The third and final version of the Confessio, presumably some two to three years after the first, turns out to have been completely rededicated, this time to Henry. Plainly, Gower could not have done so yet prominently retain his “compliments” to someone on the other side of the political spectrum. Fisher even speaks of an act of consideration: retaining Chaucer while excising Richard could have made the former vulnerable to the king’s displeasure.110 There is every reason to question this interpretation. To begin with, the simultaneous disappearance of Richard and Chaucer need not have been connected or at least not along these lines. There is no evidence for Fisher’s conjecture and his logic here looks feeble. The exact contours of Chaucer’s duties with respect to Richard may be difficult to get a good grip on but whether out “on loan” or otherwise, he must primarily have been a Gaunt loyalist and a Lancastrian at heart. As such, he was always in a position to bet on two horses – Richard as the King whom Gaunt supported and Henry as the eventual King whom he must have known well enough through his connections with the Lancaster household and who, upon his accession, showed himself to be well able to reward a loyal Lancastrian. Thus, there need 110

Fisher, pp 119-20.


not have been any political reason for Gower to excise him from the Confessio or to go in for any acts of consideration. In fact, he was the one who was staking his life and fortune on a gamble that Henry was the next king to be, if his early support is not an ex post facto interpolation. If history had gone different, he might have well have hung from the highest tree or worse. What Fisher further forgets to take into account, even if this is a lesser option, is that the excision of the Chaucer passage could have been been a damnatio memoriae of someone who had come to represent part of the opposition. Finally, there is the consideration that Gower’s words to Chaucer are hardly a matter of “compliments”, which in its own way negates Fisher’s argument. As Fisher sees it, the only clear and immediate occasion for Gower’s break with Richard lies in the events of late 1392 when the king attempted to pressurize the Londoners into parting with a huge sum of money. This is a tempting view. The preceding years had been calm and stable, he points out, and show no particular cause for him to have turned away from Richard. Here comes the sticky point, however. One of the problems is with the date of 1391 (“hic in anno quartodecimo Regis Ricardi”) that is derived from a Latin sidenote in some of the intermediate and final versions. Fisher resolves this by proposing that the annotation was meant to refer to the original version’s date of 1390, which falls within Richard’s fourteenth year of rule, and does not apply to the time of the revision.111 While this makes the reference rather pointless, Fisher also glosses over the fact that, if we are to believe Gower, his transferral of loyalty had been in the making for quite a while, not as a hasty decision but as something that went through a number of stages. Thus we find that, while the first version of the Confessio is dedicated to Richard with due flattery, eight of the constituent manuscripts of this redaction include a brief second dedication at the end, this time to Henry of Derby:112 Derbeie Comiti, recolunt quem laude periti, Vade liber purus, sub eo requiesce futurus. 111

Fisher, pp 119-20. Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis”, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984): 159-79, at 159. Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works’, in Echard, pp 73-97, at 93-94. Pearsall mentions their number as seven. The Latin translates as: To the Earl of Derby, whom the wise [or experts, learned] honour with praise, Go, fair book; reside under him henceforward.

112


The appearance of the Latin dedication in the first version and the disappearance of the dedication to Richard in the second amply predate the 1392 affair, indicating that Gower was already weighing his options and preparing for the final step. Peter Nicholson, who also rejects Fisher’s conjecture on the London affair, regards the double dedication as a guileless one, arguing that this was not uncommon and that at this time Henry was no focus of rivalry with Richard, as this crystallized only at the end of the decade.113 But this seems altogether too mild on either. Henry had been one of the four barons to terrorize (the word is used advisedly) the Ricardian scene as briefly ago as 1388, which can hardly have endeared him to Richard or failed to make an impression on Gower.114 By way of brief explanation: the King’s mismanagement of the baronial conflict into which he had manoeuvred himself in the preceding years and the brief flurry of civil war in 1387 had led to a coup of sorts. This enabled the opposition under Gloucester and the Earls of Arundel, Warwick and Derby (the Lords Appellant) to control Parliament in 1388, since known as the “Merciless Parliament”, and force a checkmated King to surrender some of his staunchest supporters to their deadly vindictiveness. This was when Thomas Usk and Brembre were executed, as well as several members of the royal household, which can hardly have endeared any of the Lords to the King and must have rankled deeply. It is not very likely that the next ten years should have made Henry less ambitious or desirous to obtain a power base at home. The inferences to be drawn from the fact that Richard struck back at his tormentors in 1397 after almost a decade and sought to actively curtail Henry’s influence when Gaunt died by impounding his inheritance and banishing him are as clear as daylight. There was no forgive-and113

Nicholson, Dedications, p 185ff. Nicholson here sketches Henry’s role as Lord Appellant as a reluctant fourth (Dedications, pp 169-70). The fact that Henry acted fully counter to his father’s policy of supporting the throne rather contradicts any such view and suggests someone bent to make his mark in the face of all opposition. In this context, Nicholson’s remark that “Even Gower, in the Cronica Tripertita, plays down [Henry’s] role in the events of 1387-88” (p 169) seems ill-advised. Nothing would have been more natural for Gower, as an enthousiastic apologist for Henry, than to minimize his patron’s earlier efforts to undermine Richard’s rule and turn him into a long-suffering loyalist at heart. Other accounts from the same time that suggest that Henry was only half-heartedly involved similarly stand to be ex post facto whitewashing of an active participant. Propaganda is not a modern invention. 114


forget scenario here: Henry was still a danger to the throne and Richard was attempting to immobilize him by undercutting his finances. Thus Gower’s addition of dedicatory lines to Henry in 1390-91 are probably exactly as they appear to us: offensive to the King and in none too good taste. His address to Henry in the third redaction (139293) is worse and close to treason in its outspokenness. Here, however, as Terry Jones and his co-authors point out, is a good chance that this is not authentic but an interpolation postdating Henry’s accession.115 Then there is Gower’s implicit reference in the 1390 version to Thomas Usk, which seems a good guideline to suppose that the roots of his dissatisfaction with Richard II must have lain further back.116 As a politically astute operator, perhaps shocked by the death of friends and a fellow-writer, and – who knows – having been in fear of his own life (he had after all written up Richard with considerable fawning in the Vox clamantis), Gower must have been naturally upset by the facility with which loyal service and royal servants could be thrown to the wolves. He may have decided that there were more powerful forces in the realm than the King himself. The events must have made him well aware of the risks and uncertainties of continuing to serve such a beleaguered ruler nor would it have taken much discernment for him to see that the King was headed for further disaster. What he did, therefore, was look for a more dependable princely patron and, sensing well which way the winds of change were blowing, he lit upon Henry of Lancaster as his “oghne lord”. All the same, it seems somewhat shortsighted to interpret his actions as inspired by political issues only. There may have been other reasons for his disaffection. Greed and ambition are powerful aspects of the picture that even such a sympathetic biographer as Fisher sketches. Thus, Gower’s career during the years of Edward III’s reign appears to have been quite prosperous, both in terms of acquisition of property and, assuming that he is the “Goverus” whom we encounter in the next chapter, the very sort of legal offices that we find referred to in the Sergeant of the Law’s portrait. Yet what if Richard II’s succession had not turned out so rewarding and preferment somehow continued to elude his grasp? We have no direct information on this point, as the Year Books involved are wanting, but it looks as if his social progress under 115 116

Jones, pp 97-103. For a sympathetic sketch of Richard, see Sherborne, pp 19-20.


Richard was chiefly literary and nothing in the nature of advancement to desirable posts and functions.117 It is certainly not an uncommon fact of life for those in favour with a ruling king to find themselves eclipsed in the reign of his successor. Was Gower’s flight from John Ball’s horde in the days of the young King’s need held against him or was it the whisper of his bribability?118 Was the King desirous to rid himself of some of his father’s entourage or was a conservative like Gower simply not reçu? We shall probably never know but it is not an unlikely thought that matters such as these were involved. As Gower himself would have pointed out, this is the way the Wheel of Fortune turns. In support of this reading, there is of course the historically attested fact that Gower’s fortunes took a turn for the better, once Henry had taken over. Gower’s literary output saw an upswing, even if this was rather in terms of minor rewriting and reassemblage of earlier work than new efforts. There was even, for the first time since the death of Edward III, a regular royal stipend in the shape of two pipes of Gascony wine,119 though this looks rather symbolical and not exactly suggestive of any great royal enthusiasm. To return to the subject of dating, the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale provides us with a terminus a quo, fixing the earliest date of Chaucer’s reaction at 1390. If, as some scholars feel, Chaucer may have had advance access to the Confessio, his knowledge of its ending would contribute to clarifying the fashion in which the F-Prologue to the Legend seems to anticipate the terms of Gower’s challenge.120 What is at issue here, however, is not so much the earliness of the Introduction but its presumed lateness. Given the date of 1390 for the challenge and allowing for all sorts of distracting factors, such as – possibly – his work on the Treatise on the Astrolabe,121 the natural situation for Chaucer would nevertheless have been a reaction within a 117

This is of course a curious thing to have happened and one suspects that their disappearance is linked to Henry’s irregular occupation of the throne. 118 The incident is described in the Vox clamantis. See also William Woods, England in the Age of Chaucer (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976), pp 183-84. On the bribability matter, see Chapter Three. 119 Fisher, pp 68, 342; Nicholson, The Dedications, p 171. 120 Benson, p 854. Advance knowledge of some of the tales to appear in the Confessio is another matter. It certainly does not seem impossible for the two of them to have exchanged sources and ideas during the late eighties. 121 Benson, p 1092. There is no clarity as to the date of its writing and 1390, which is usually given for it, is purely a guess.


short space of time, particularly if there should have been a measure of court pressure behind it. His response is directed at the first version of the Confessio and it therefore looks unlikely that much time should have passed since the challenge. “Wasn’t there something like a challenge by John Gower a number of years ago?” is hardly the sort of exciting impetus to have moved Chaucer in the fashion that we encounter. Thus, a good date for the Introduction would be mid to late 1390. Its prickliness and anti-Gower drift suggest that its composition must have followed close upon Gower’s challenge. However, to judge by the manner in which the Introduction ends, announcing a tale in prose, he had not yet come up with the idea of inserting the tale of Custance. Instead, he left the Man of Law with the original tale, wellsuited to him for being pompously “wise” and dealing with wise advice for princes, as well as complying with the virtue/vice requirements of a Testament of Love. Such a date is somewhat problematic in the light of the Legend of Good Women. The evidence being that Chaucer’s first reaction was to have another go at this, we must allow for some time, from just a few days (we have no way of knowing how fast a worker he was) to a month or two at least, to have passed before Chaucer turned to the Canterbury Tales instead. This would make the latter half of 1390 or even early 1391 a better date. Yet once we move beyond the Introduction we run into problems again. The evidence of a retained Melibee that we deduce from the Introduction tallies well with the consideration that during the months to follow, Chaucer’s attention – insofar as it was not claimed by the writing of the Treatise on the Astrolabe, for which the same period has been proposed – must have been fully taken up by the challenge of coming up with something superior to the Confessio Amantis, which cannot have been a simple job. It may have involved a tidying of the various sources that went into the making of the Parson’s Tale. It certainly meant the addition of the Retraction as well as a thorough reconstruction of the Wife-Pardoner situation, which, as is the case with the Man of Law and as I discuss in Chapter Four, seems to have gone through more than one revisional stage. Indeed, the replacement of the Melibee by the Man of Law’s Tale provides good support for assuming a return to this place. This means that, even if we accept that Chaucer may have been a fast worker with ample time on his hands at this time, there may be good ground to stretch things to well into 1391. The ultimate date here


is June 1391, by which time the challenge was removed from the Confessio and we must assume the Testament of Love to have been completed, presented to a live audience and done with. This implies that some extensive writing must have taken place before Chaucer was able to get his reply truly moving, even if some of it was not new. But if all this was a court game, the short-lived nature of such entertainments, particularly one of this kind, would have made it a major requirement that it be presented before the court’s interest waned. More than a year for him to produce his reply is out of the question. One way of solving this would have been for him to produce a Testament in instalments and this may well be what actually happened. However, this would not have given him much extra time. The snag is that the tales that make up the Testament exhibit so much interrelated revision that we can only conclude that Chaucer did not come up with his presentation until it was as good as finished. In other words, something like mid-1391 may have been the actual date of presentation, though in the light of his penchant for irony surely April must have been the preferred month and Easter the preferred moment. If this is correct, it also means that we have run into a measure of dating trouble. We have seen that there are good reasons to believe that the Man of Law’s Introduction represents the state of things shortly after Chaucer gave up work on the G-Prologue and opted in favour of the Canterbury Tales as his Testament of Love. This means that the G-Prologue cannot be much later than 1390. The problem is that the critics generally assign it to 1394 or after. Yet once we take a closer look at this dating, it turns out to be solely based upon the assumption that Queen Anne’s name was deleted as a result of her death in 1394. Its solitary nature seems a feeble argument. A better reason for its disappearance is the passing of the Daisy cult which the FPrologue celebrates with the Queen at its centre. The G-Prologue is manifestly concerned with removing its most obvious traces and it is entirely logical that, with John Gower as its provisional new target, Anne’s name should have been eliminated as well.122 As I have pointed out, this may have been part of the rules of the game. These considerations alone would be sufficient, but it also strikes me as significant in a context where Chaucer was asked to pro122

In Gower’s second version of the Confessio Amantis the royals are similarly eliminated. If this had taken place in 1394, the critics would no doubt attribute this to Anne’s death as well.


duce his testament of love that he removed the daisy from the position which it had in the F-Prologue. Of course he was attempting to deal with Gower, but was not something more involved? Was not Gower’s call for a testament of love and is it not remarkable that the “margarite” also figures as the central symbol in Usk’s Testament of Love? Perhaps this ought to be rephrased: in view of Usk’s enthusiastic borrowing from Chaucer or rather his embroidering on Chaucer’s themes,123 is not his “margarite” as a central symbol similarly suggestive of a Chaucerian derivation? The identification by Shoaf and his team of the “margarite” as “pearl” is remarkable in its neglect or disregard of Chaucer’s celebration of the Daisy/Marguerite in the FPrologue to the Legend of Good Women as a thematic source. Thus, one of the most obvious ones of Chaucer-Usk links is simply left lying fallow. Yet it is here that the 1402 portrait of Chaucer comes in again, as promised. Its emblematic use of the marguerite and juxtaposition to his coat of arms after his death or, as others wish, at the end of his career strongly suggest that this was a potent association.124 What this means is inescapable: contrary to what we have been taught, Chaucer’s part in the Daisy cult must have been an important one, so much so in fact that it still could serve as an honourable and time-honoured badge after a quarter of a century. Reasoning from this point of departure, we must interpret Usk’s “margarite” to be in the nature of a sine Chaucer non and a truly deserving matter for further study. It is well possible therefore that, even without Gower’s prompting, deference alone to Usk’s fate might have been sufficient for Chaucer to remove from the poem what now had become a hateful association. All the same, as we have seen, there are also other reasons imaginable that may have contributed to its elimination. In particular, there is a suggestion of a certain disillusionment with the Ricardian court and Ricardian rule that accords well with feelings which he may have entertained about the way in which Usk had become a sacrificial victim to the times. That something like this was involved is clear from lines 341 in the Legend’s G-Prologue (which dwell on a king’s duties in a fashion that is reminiscent of the writing in Gower’s three major works and particularly Book VII of the Confessio) and the even stronger sentiment addressed to Richard in his balade Lak of Stedfastnesse, which 123 124

Shoaf, passim. Jones, pp 296-318.


presumably stems from the same period.125 All the same, it is most unlikely – out of the question even, in my opinion – that Chaucer should at any time have followed Gower and sided with Henry during Richard’s reign. Such a step is contradicted by historical fact or, more precisely, the inferences that we draw from history. When inspecting the story of Chaucer’s life, one cannot fail to deduce from it a close and personal loyalty and fealty to John of Gaunt. Everything that we know about his life argues in favour of this. His wife Philippa’s ties with Gaunt as a former mistress and her sister’s status as Gaunt’s acknowledged mistress and wife ultimately hint at an intricate tangling of webs. They also indicate, in the light of the relationships involved, that Chaucer may have been very close to Gaunt and served as his envoy at the royal court. There, even if and when officially employed by Richard, he would still have been seen as Gaunt’s man. Even the often remarked-upon hints of Lollard leanings on his part could lie in Gaunt’s espousal of the Lollard cause during the ’seventies. Pearsall makes light of any truly close connection, but in fact it is well-supported by the regular grants and annuities which he received from Gaunt during his later life.126 It would certainly explain a number of ups and downs in his career which in more than one instance seem to coincide with Gaunt’s absences from the country.127 Gaunt, however, always figures as a loyal supporter of the throne. If he sympathized at all with his son’s ambitions, there is little hint of this in either the annals or his conduct throughout the years of Richard’s reign. In this connection, it may be worth remembering that Henry did not make his move against Richard until well after his father’s death. On Chaucer’s part, his Lak of Stedfastnesse and the passage addressed to the King in the G-Prologue are good evidence that he had not given up on Richard. As we know, this way of reviewing the evidence also accounts for Chaucer’s apparent transference of loyalty to Henry when, after 125

Robinson, pp 844-45 note 341, 862. Pearsall, pp 82-83. 127 Gaunt’s absence from 1386-89, for instance, left Chaucer without his patron and appears to have made him more or less officeless during this time. His brief time in Parliament may be ascribed to his ties with Gaunt, too, for whom he possibly acted in a caretaker function. Coghill (p 14) attributes his lack of employment to the fact that Gloucester, who was effectively in power at the time, “had never been a patron of the poet”. Chaucer’s close ties to Gaunt seem a likelier explanation. Terry Jones et.al. suggest that he simply lay low during this time, pp 309-10. 126


Gaunt’s death, the latter made his power bid and deposed Richard. There need be no betrayal here or shifting of allegiances, as long as we allow Chaucer to have always served the head of the House to the best of his ability and to have continued to do so when Henry came to replace his father. His acclamation of Henry’s accession to the throne in the Envoy to the Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, in which he hails him as “verray king” by “line and free eleccion”, is arguably readable as a natural effusion from a loyal Lancastrian, even if a closer reading makes one wonder. Similarly, Henry’s royal gesture of doubling Chaucer’s annuity on his coronation day is readily understood from this point of view, even if half of it was money owing to him, the actual payments were not forthcoming quickly and the gift itself backdated so as to put Henry in a more favourable light. Both the time and measure of Henry’s largesse, if such it was, could indicate a rewarding of a loyal retainer of the House, but we should not make too much of this. Several interpretations are possible here, some of them contradictory, the most negative of which is to see this as a move to appear generous toward one of the major voices of the previous regime or even as a bribe for someone struggling to come to terms with Richard’s lot.128 Perhaps the fairest interpretation of the situation is to assume that both Henry and Chaucer were going through the motions in an exploratory way, without any great liking for one another. As I have pointed out, it is not very probable that someone of Henry’s lineage would have been pleased to be related to an upstart commoner who could actually claim to be his stepuncle through his father’s misalliance with a former mistress. On Chaucer’s part, loyalty to Gaunt, Richard and all those who in 1388 were victimized by Henry and his fellow-Appellants must have been a major obstacle for him to have warmly welcomed Henry’s rule ten years later. Thus, if he remained Gaunt’s man to the very end, which is highly probable, any dislike of Richard’s rule – if at all there – must have been subservient to Gaunt’s public policy of supporting Richard’s throne. There is no saying what different loyalties either of them may have entertained in their hearts, but this is what the record states. Gaunt appears throughout as an honorable man, fully in tune with the chivalric ideals of the times, and with a warm heart for the well-being of the realm. This makes it most 128

See R.F. Yeager, To His Purse: 373-414. He convincingly argues that Chaucer’s “Complaint” postdates Richard’s murder and is implicitly unsupportive of Henry.


unlikely for Chaucer to have sided with Gower in any anti-Ricardian fashion and shows that there is no convincing ground to follow Fisher and extend the dating of the Testament of Love to the 1392 London affair, which is an implausible proposition anyhow. This leads us back to our earlier choice of mid-1391 at the latest. Now this tallies extremely well with the date of Gower’s excision of his lines to Chaucer in his second redaction of the Confessio Amantis. So what if their disappearance should not be political at all but rather more naturally a matter poetical? If we take Gower’s call for a Testament of Love as an invitation to a literary court game, its absence in the later versions may well be read as a natural indication that the game had taken place and Gower had now turned to different concerns. We have seen the same thing with respect to the Daisy cult of the Legend of Good Women and, as we shall see, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale and the tale shifts which they involve carry the same implication. Thus, this study favours mid-1391 as the ultimate time of Chaucer’s Testament of Love and will accordingly adhere to this in the pages to come, while rejecting any political dimension suggestive of a later date. The selfsame dating issue is something that we also run into in other places. Thus, another major source used for dating some of our tales is Chaucer’s intensive use of St Jerome’s Epistola adversus Jovinianum, which once again provides a late date – this time put around 1395-96 by Benson.129 Reference to this work is found in the Legend as well as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, which nicely links them together in excellent support of my theory or would do so, if it were not for this date. A closer look, however, shows us that the lateness is both inflated and unproven, since the dating turns out to be based solely on his mention of Jerome in the G-Prologue to the Legend and the dubious date that we have found assigned to it. Thus, while aware of the intricacies of dating Chaucer’s writings, we had best define Chaucer’s use of the Epistola as indicative of a date around 1390. One further work associated with the Man of Law is Innocent III’s De miseria humane condicionis, elements of which were used in his Prologue and his Tale. The “period from 1390 to 1394-95” is how this is dated by Benson.130 In terms of what we have found, the utmost limit is mid-391, while the years of 1394 and 1395 are out of the ques129 130

Benson, pp 864, 1063 note G 268-312. Benson, pp 856-57.


tion. It will come as no surprise that, here too, it is the G-Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which claims for Chaucer a translation under the title “Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde”, that provides this date.131 Let us therefore also register his work on De miseria as more likely to belong to 1390 or thereabouts. A special point to be made here, underscored by its reference to De miseria, is that the inclusion of the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale stems from this approximate date. From the time of his switch to the Canterbury Tales as the answer to Gower’s challenge we may assume Chaucer to have concentrated upon coming up with his Testament of Love. With all the work that this involved and possibly the writing of the Astrolabe besides, it is hard to accept that he could have been engaged at the same time upon constructing (or adapting) the prologue and tale of Custance (as a single work) to fit a pilgrim who, by dint of its mercantile stanzas, cannot have been the Man of Law. What we deduce from this is that Chaucer fell back here on a tale that was already written for a sententious voice, probably already included in the Canterbury Tales, and therefore easily assignable to a kindred spirit. This would fix its composition at a date before mid-1390 and its inclusion into the Testament as belonging to the first half of 1391. Something similar in the way of unreliable dating may be reported for the date of 1393, to which Robinson and Benson frequently refer in connection with the Wife of Bath. This is the year of Deschamps’ Miroir de mariage, which Chaucer is assumed by Lowes to have known and used. This is entirely conjectural and, as Benson admits, the likelihood is that Chaucer never had a chance to consult it.132 Thus, deference to received opinion simply leads us round in circles and produces unreliable results. Within the parameters of the Canterbury Tales there is not a single trusty piece of dating evidence for any of the tales and links involved in this study save the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, which, through its links with the first version of the Confessio, gives us 1390 as the only date that we can be relatively sure of. This is why, in these chapters, I shall stick to a date for the Testament of Love no later than mid-1391, while assuming a rough date of 1390 for Chaucer’s work on the G-Prologue of the Legend (and consequently an even earlier one for De miseria humane condicionis and the Epistola adversus Jovinianum) and the Introduc131 132

Benson, p 1065 note G 414. Benson, pp 864; Robinson, p 698.


tion to the Man of Law’s Tale. If this runs counter to traditionally “established” fact, it may nonetheless be noted that it is well within the modern limits set for the presumed dates of inclusion of the tales involved and the writing of their links. They are all assigned to the same general period, which, if we are to believe Benson, means that they could all be as early as 1390 and as late as 1394-95.133 For a final bit of argument, let me point to the textual correspondences and internal associations that seem to interconnect everything. Assuming that they attest to a certain contemporaneity and that all borrowing from the Confessio is from its first redaction, we find that the Retraction, inseparable from the Parson’s Tale, echoes a line in the Legend’s G-Prologue. This prologue is also believed to refer to the Confessio in a number of places. Its Balade is echoed by the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, which refers directly to the Confessio Amantis. The presence of the Man of Law’s Tale is both relatable to the Confessio and to several tale shifts, namely those of the Melibee, the Wife’s old tale (now the Shipman’s), the Parson’s and possibly more. It is also relatable to the inclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The latter’s Tale is borrowed from Gower and can be shown to contain textual echoes from the Confessio. Similar echoes and structural correspondences with the Parson’s Tale go to show that the Wife’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s were produced very closely upon the composition of the Parson’s Tale. The Parson’s portrait in the General Prologue indicates through a triple echo that it was (re)written under the influence of the Confessio Amantis. Thus everything comes together.

133

Benson, pp 854-57, 864, 872, 904-05, 956-57.

3. The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower The Identity of the Sergeant and Man of Law Much of what we have discussed so far is closely bound up with the demotion of the Sergeant of the Law to a mere Man of Law, a matter that we have noted before as an instance of Chaucer changing his mind on a pilgrim’s stature. In the Man of Law’s case this is a demotion from being one of the mightiest men of the realm to what is implied by his being a “man of law” – just a lawyer. Instead of being one of the truly great, he is someone whose claim to being a man of culture is made a point of sport by the errors that he makes.1 Joseph Hornsby writes that sergeant was still used loosely in Chaucer’s day and might be applied to “a pleader in another court as well the more prestigious king’s sergeant”.2 True, but Chaucer’s portrait in the General Prologue is uncompromising: his Sergeant is precisely such a prestigious personage. It is here that we stand to get our best taste of the spirit of Chaucer’s acknowledgement. If we are reading it right, it is not a truly accommodating one, yet precisely the sort of response that one expects in well-fought duel. The point, in elaboration of an earlier suggestion by Fisher, is that the Man of Law, as presented in the Introduction, could well be a tongue-in-cheek portrait of Gower. Fisher rejects his own notion because he believes it to be inconsistent with the sketch provided by the General Prologue.3 As it is, the inconsistency that he claims to see is just not there, which leaves the field wide open to accepting the Sergeant as a sardonic sketch of Gower from the very first. Yet let us be clear on two things here. One is that, however welcome such corroboration, it does not constitute a linchpin for this study’s main argument and my readers are welcome to reject it as they 1

On the Man of Law’s errors, cf Fisher, pp 287-89; Scala: 17; Rodney Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 288-310. 2 Joseph Hornsby, ‘A Sergeant of the Lawe, War and Wyse’, in: Laura C. Lambdin and R.T. Lambdin eds, Chaucer’s Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (Westport CT/London: Greenwood, 1996): 116-34, at 122. 3 Fisher, p 287.

124 | The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower

like. The other point is more intricate. If we accept the identification, we must also allow for a complex and ironic interplay of voices, effected in much the way that a ventriloquist plies his profession. Thus, there is a range of voices, whereby it is sometimes Chaucer speaking through the Sergeant/Man of Law, sometimes his Gower caricature and sometimes a bit of both. The notion of a pilgrim’s portrait drawn from actual life is a familiar one to Chaucer students. While most of his characters seem to be fictional, there are some notable exceptions. The Host is the most obvious instance but in other instances, too, there have been attempts, some of them convincing and others less so, to relate Chaucer’s descriptions to actual contemporaries.4 There is an apparent contradiction here with the concept of estates satire drawn from stock models. But some reflection learns us that real life is riddled with people possessing traits and mannerisms that do come close to the satirical, not to mention the consideration that in writing for a small coterie it must have been both tempting and rewarding to hold up familiar figures for a good laugh. In any case, it is a natural thing for an author to flesh out his fictional characterizations by drawing on ideosyncratic traits encountered in his contacts with actual people. In the Man of Law’s case Thomas Pynchbek has been put forward, who “served as a justice of assize between 1376 and 1388 and who was known for his acquisition of land, as well as for his learning; in 1388, as chief baron of the Exchequer, he signed a writ for Chaucer’s arrest in a case of debt”. This and a perceived pun on his name in the shape of “pynche” are the chief grounds for this identification.5 A good look at the portrait of the Sergeant of the Law makes us wonder about the felicity of this identification. The General Prologue is all about estates satire. If and when in using such satire Chaucer used real-life persons to base his descriptions on, we may assume that he took care to steer away from treading on the toes of the truly high and mighty. Herry Bailly of the Tabard would not have had any problem with his part, as this was great advertising and well-suited to attract curious customers. Much the same thing goes for the Shipman, 4

Benson, p 6. Benson, p 811. It is not impossible, of course, that Chaucer should have based his portrait on Gower yet thrown in some aspects of Pynchbek for good measure. In fact, his use of “pynche” may well be a play of words contrasting Gower’s activities with those of a true Sergeant of the Law.

5

The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower | 125

also identified as having been drawn from life, and his “Maudeleyne”. Yet it is a different matter entirely for a seasoned diplomat like Chaucer to have wittingly gone in for a satirical dressing-down of one of the twenty-one supreme legal authorities in the land, who ranked with the cream of the nobility.6 If this portrait were directed at Pynchbek and made before 1388, the writ against Chaucer which he signed in that year affirms how risky and ill-advised such satire would have been, at a time that was fraught with danger for all who remained on Richard’s side; if included after the writ had been served, it shows us a reckless and foolhardy Chaucer who was prepared to stick his neck out for the sake of an easy bit of satire. Neither option is consonant with the inferential picture that we have of him. The reverse notion of a boastful personality’s inflation into a Sergeant of the Law is both easier to understand and funnier. The entire portrait in the General Prologue can be read as scoring a wide range of easy hits on Gower’s person. Thus, the question is really whether the correspondences are just the lucky outcome of Chaucer having drawn a satirical portrait of someone high in the legal profession or the intentional inflation of Gower from a self-important lawyer into one of the legal masterminds of the realm. Book VII of the Confessio Amantis, in which Gower takes it upon himself to outline the education of a king, in imitation of Aristotle’s tutorship of Alexander the Great, carries the correct whiff of ego to fit this Sergeant. Fisher’s study on Gower extensively yet inconclusively discusses the tradition, as found in Leland and Speght, that Gower was legally trained and schooled at the Inns of Court.7 Unfortunately, the information that we possess from his own time is not too clear. But it is a documented fact that he was frequently involved in all sorts of litigation, both in judicial functions and as an interested party in some contested cases, such as the Septvauns matter, which would seem to have enabled him to make quite a kill in terms of acquisition of property.8 Then there is the Gower who served as Chaucer’s attorney when he was in Italy, which seems to indicate a legally trained person. His adherence to French as a vehicle of expression, as in Mirour de l’omme and Cinkante balades, links up nicely with someone whose 6

Benson, p 811. G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (Oxford: Clarendon, 18991902), vol iv, pp viii-x. 8 Fisher, pp 51-54, 313-18. 7


work was largely in the legal language of the time, which was French rather than the Latin that one might expect. Moreover, Gower’s work abounds in legalistic language and there is also his discussion of law in his Confessio, in particular natural law (kinde) in its relation to reason and human law, with special reference to how it ought to be applied by good rulers and an incorruptible Church.9 For reasons like this, modern critical opinion has swung away from Fisher and come to accept Gower as a legally trained person. “It is highly plausible that part of the younger Gower’s education would have taken place in the Inns of Court of London, and a famous reference in Mirour de l’homme, in which he declares that he wears a garment with striped sleeves, apparently as some form of recognisable professional garb, has reasonably been linked to the wearing of rayed garments in the law courts and taken as evidence that Gower pursued a legal career”.10 Clearly, this also makes the identification of the Sergeant as Gower a real option. The Septvauns Case The Septvauns case is instructive. If the raptus of Cecilia Chaumpaigne represents a puzzling and possibly dark page in the story of Chaucer’s life, as potentially damning are Gower’s manoeuvrings in the acquisition of the Sepvauns holdings. In 1364 the orphaned young William de Septvauns was confirmed in the possession of his father’s large estate upon proving his majority before the escheator in Kent. It appears that he was in desperate money trouble, which led him to borrow £1,060, a huge sum in terms of fourteenth-century money, £1,000 from one Sir Nicholas de Loveyne and £60 from John Gower, and, on their advice, to sell off his holdings. Among the purchasers there was Gower again, who acquired the property of Aldington Septvauns in exchange for 80 marks (£53.6s.8d), which roughly 9

Fisher, pp 154-56. Fisher regards the legalistic framework of Gower’s works as “legal commonplaces rather than the specific allusions one would expect of a trained lawyer”. I think that Fisher is wrong here and that there is every reason to accept commonplaces as quite natural for a ‘legal’ Gower to have used with respect to a lay public. For the subject of natural law, see Fisher, pp 135-203, passim; Baker: 152-57. Of course, Gower’s interest in natural law does not make him a lawyer. The fact is mentioned here purely because it does underscore his interest in the subject, as something not entirely unnatural for someone engaged in the legal profession. 10 Hines, pp 23-41, at p 25.


coincides with the £60 loan. Evidently, William had not been entirely truthful about his age and Gower must have been aware of this. He took the unusual step of having his purchase tested “as to whether it would be to the prejudice of the king” and “had the writs and charters concerning his purchase recorded in Chancery”.11 This was wise, for before long the transaction was called into question, investigated and annulled because William was adjudged to have been under age at the time of the sale and to have caused the King loss of income by the premature release of his goods and lands. Thanks to his precautions, however, Gower’s claim proved strong enough to be upheld “by a special licence recorded on February 6, 1368”.12 There are several things worth noting. To begin with, what we are talking about here is a major property deal just a year or so after the second great outbreak of pestilence in 1361–62. With the first still firmly in memory, this was an ideal time for those with a bit of money at hand to obtain rich pickings. Good pieces of property were to be had at a pittance in all sort of instances – from depopulated holdings to estates run by straitened land-owners unable to meet their obligations. The Septvauns situation smacks of something like this and no doubt young William’s claim to be of age was inspired by the fear that if he did not inherit soon he would not inherit at all. Gower’s activities in this case were not unusual for him, as the evidence is that he was quite an active collector of property, largely in Kent, in these years.13 Then there is his circumspect dealing with the purchase. As Fisher admits, this happened “with more than the usual formality”, to which he adds that Gower “evidently […] knew that this was a sticky wicket”.14 Though Fisher does his best to exonerate Gower here, the case carries overtones of someone young and unexperienced being fleeced by slick city operators. It certainly shows that Gower was walking the razor’s edge of the legally permissible here, as Fisher admits. Immediately linked up with this is the implication of all this, namely that Gower must have been an astute businessman with a sharp eye for good pickings to be had and, what is more, well aware of the niceties of legal manoeuvring. It is this last detail that ought to interest us most at this point. 11

Fisher, pp 51-54. Fisher, pp 51-54. 13 Fisher, pp 37-69, passim. 14 Fisher, p 51. 12


What the General Prologue Tells Us Together, all of the aspects that we have been discussing here combine into a portrait of someone who is definable as a man of law in various senses of the word, from judge to litigator, from litigator to property dealer well-initiated into the niceties of the law and from property dealer to philosopher dealing with a wide range of matters touching upon the subject of law. Now let us test this with respect to the Sergeant of the Law in the General Prologue and read his portrait with Gower in mind: A Sergeant of the Lawe, war and wys, That often hadde been at the Parvys, There was also, ful riche of excellence. Discreet he was and of greet reverence – He semed swich, his wordes weren so wise. Justice he was ful often in assise, By patente and by pleyn commissioun. For his science and for his heigh renoun, Of fees and robes hadde he many oon. So greet a purchasour was nowher noon: Al was fee symple to hym in effect ; His purchasyng myghte nat been infect. Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was. In termes hadde he caas and doomes alle That from the tyme of kyng William were falle. Therto he koude endite and make a thyng, That koude no wight pynche at his writyng; And every statut koude he pleyn by rote. He rood but hoomly in a medlee cote, Girt with a ceint of silk, with barres smale; Of his array telle I no lenger tale. [GenProl, 309-30]

Short of the inflation of Gower the presumable lawyer into one of the great Sergeants, holding session at St Paul’s (the Parvys), there is not really anything here to argue against this identification. As Macaulay notes,15 Leland’s claim that Gower was brought up and practised as a lawyer is corroborated by a gloss in Leland’s manuscript (“Goverus seruiens ad legem 30 Ed. III”) and corresponds with documented fact in the shape of “the Year-book of 30 Ed. III [1356], where we 15

Macaulay, vol iv, p ix.


find the name Gower, apparently as that of a serjeant-at-law who took part in the proceedings”. In fact, even the inflation may not be what it seems: this Gower appears in the Year Books for both 29 and 30 Ed. III, “usually as counsel, but on some occasions he speaks apparently as a judge”.16 Macaulay regards this Goverus as too young (twenty-six or so) to have been our Gower. He may be correct, but there is good reason to doubt this. Youth and ambition make a pretty potent brew and it is hard to see why a young and eager “legal Gower” could not have served in either function, particularly as Macaulay seems to be using serjeant-at-law in its older, loose sense. What also pleads in favour of this Goverus being our Gower is the historical context: we are once again talking about the aftermath years of the great Black Death calamity which caused huge disruption in all layers of the social fabric and, at the same time, created untold opportunities for those survivors who were capable and willing to take over the interesting posts and possessions that had fallen vacant. It is something that, ironically, is pointed out by Gower himself in the Vox clamantis (and also in the Mirour de l’omme), when with a straight face he complains about the rapaciousness of lawyers and the scramble for high office. As Macaulay condenses it in Liber Sextus, caput ii, of the Vox, the lawyer “contrives every device to enrich himself and his offspring; he joins house to house and field to field”,17 which is Septvauns all over again. A like complaint involves the ease with which a mere lawyer may become a sergeant of the law (sergantus, here used in its old sense) and go on to be a corrupt judge: Hic loquitur qualiter isti causidici et iuris aduocati, in sua gradatim ascendentes facultate, Iudicisque aspirantes officium, iudicalis solii tandem cacumen attingunt; vbi quasi in cathedra pestelencie sedentes, maioris auaricie cecitate percussi, peioris

Here we discuss how these attorneys and lawyers, climbing upwards step by step in their profession and aspiring to the office of judge, finally reach the top position of holding the judge’s seat; where, as if sitting in the seat of

16 Macaulay, vol iv, p ix note 2. These Year Books are basically the year’s registration of legal cases and lawsuits. Unfortunately, many have not come down to us, while others have survived only fragmentarily. Only 11 Edward to 20 Edward have been edited and translated (Luke Owen Pike and Alfred J. Horwood, eds, Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third (London: Mackie, 1883-1911; reissued 1964). Gower’s attendance is found in Tottil’s edition of Edward III’s Year Books (1585), which partially draws on sources now lost to us. 17 Macaulay, vol iv, p L (i.e. Roman numeral 50).

130 | The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower quam antea condicionis existunt.

Est Apprenticius, Sergantus post et Adultus, Iudicis officium fine notabit eum. 18 Si cupit in primo, multo magis ipse secundo, Tercius atque gradus est super omne reus; Et sic lex gravibus auri moderatur habenis, Quod modo per iustas non valet ire vias. Libera qualis erat lex non est, immo ligatam Carcere nummorum ceca cupido tenet.

pestilence, they show themselves in a worse light than before, struck as they are by the blindness of a greater avarice. First he is an Apprentice, then a fullyfledged Sergeant; Finally the office of judge will mark him. If he is greedy in the first state, so much the more in the second, [While] the third is a step that is culpable [of greed] above all; And so the law is led by heavy reins on the ear [= can no longer hear clearly], So that it is no use to walk the paths of justice. Free and open as the law used to be, it is not so now; on the contrary, Blind greed for money holds it prisonlocked.19

A striking detail is that, like us, Gower links the pursuit of judicial power and financial gain to the Plague, even if this is expressed metaphorically.20 Also, his words indicate that offices were up for 18 The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, vol I, A-L (London: OUP, 1975) draws this specific reading directly from Gower’s “adultus”: “c. ripe, fully fledged, arrived at culmination of career”. This distinctly clashes with Gower’s own text, which makes it clear that the culmination does not lie here but in a third and final stage of being a corrupt judge. 19 Macaulay, vol iv, p 237. The translation is mine. 20 The cryptical “in cathedra pestilencie” is from Psalms 1:1-2: Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non stetit et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit sed in lege domini voluntas eius et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte. The King James Bible comes up with the seat of the scornful. The reason why the Vulgate’s cathedra pestilentiae, seat of pestilence, differs so distinctly from this and its modern variants resides with the text of the Septuagint, which reads ’İʌȓ țĮșȑįȡĮȞ ȜȠȚȝȦȞ × : Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, According to the Septuagint, vol II (Cambridge, CUP 1922), p 213. Greek ȜȠȚȝȩȢ means pest(ilence) or any great disease, and this is from where St Jerome derives his meaning, evidently reading its plural case as an intensifier. However, the plural is also applied to people (as in English ‘pests’) and this is how it ought to have been interpreted. Modern translations simply read scoffers, show up the Septuagint version as a rather free translation. All the same, the procession of homologous images – abiit/impiorum, stetit/peccatorum, and sedit/pestilentiae – has always ensured that the basic meaning of cathedra pestilentiae remained clear enough, as a metaphor for all the pestilent ones who do not follow the word and the law of God. The seat or, rather, gathering of scoffers, refers to those who who have no use for God (Robert G. Bratcher and William D. Reyburn eds, A Translator’s Handbook on the Book of Psalms. United Bible Societies, New York 1991, p 16). Doubtless much of this is what Gower is suggesting here. The judges that


grabs: what he seems to say is that any youngster could be a Sergeant of the old kind as long as he was close to being of age. The word order in which Gower lets the apprentice first become a sergeant and then deals with his ripeness for the job (“adultus”) is a prime pointer. To return to Macaulay’s rejection of “Goverus” as a sergeant on account of his age, it is plain that Gower’s own words above on the situation of the legal world in the wake of the pestilences show him to be wrong. In fact, it looks as if not just Macaulay but also John Fisher and Alfred David are mistaken here. The latter two briefly go into the possibility that the Sergeant may be Gower but reject it for no clear reason.21 Yet the portrait in the General Prologue is fully compatible with what we know about Gower and, even if it comes some twentyfive years later, very much calls to mind the smooth operator of the Septvauns affair. It is readable throughout as a proper parody, exaggerating his weak points yet also showing us someone recognizable to his contemporaries as a politician and showman full of self-importance and pretence to wisdom, an active collector of goods and income, and a man vain of his knowledge of the law and his writing. Some of this we have already deduced from the above pages. Other aspects may need elucidation. Thus it is perhaps a good idea to note that, reading between the lines of Fisher’s study, we meet Gower as a man actively currying favour with the truly great. His writings show him as pursuing this object with attention to Richard II and, even more so, Henry of Lancaster. Such a man would have had no objection to being promoted, by way of repayment for his services, to the desired position of Sergeant of the Law. At this point it may be a good idea to make clear my own ideas on Gower. Of course the entire tenor of this study is to show that Chaucer fought him in a literary duel, but I have no particular axe with him to grind and the same thing may well have held good for Chaucer himself. The latter certainly defuses matters by sketching more or less he describes are godless creatures and a plague visited on the people. Moreover, the text that he refers to deals with the law as God’s law (lege domini) and refers not just to the true dispensing of justice but hints at divine justice to come. Another part of his point is found in his description of the judges as people who, already in a terrible state, are struck by new afflictions such as spiritual blindness. This is where pestilentia in its literal and familiar fourteenth-century sense comes in, including its widespread interpretation as a divinely ordained punishment of human sinfulness. 21 Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington, U of Indiana P, 1977), p 125.


the same picture of himself: in his pilgrim persona he is a naive observer, a silly rhymer (Sir Thopas) and narrator of a most sententious tale, which, in demonstration perhaps of how closely he related his own role to Gower’s, he had originally apportioned to the Sergeant. If I am right and the latter is Gower and thus depicted in the General Prologue and the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale as a bit of a bombastic person, with a philosophical cast of mind but also an eye for good pickings, this is consonant with the impression that one gets from reading his various works: a contradictory man, not truly likable in every respect, yet also someone very much like Chaucer himself. This seems to me a fair sketch. If it sounds negative, it nonetheless does not detract from his qualities as an author. His writings, while frequently sounding a reactionary note, are sympathetic in their concern for the well-being of England and his Confessio Amantis is clearly one of the great landmarks in medieval English literature. There is no actual need to go through the Sergeant’s portrait word by word, but the majority of lines are simply too good to pass up. He was ...ful riche of excellence. Discreet he was and of greet reverence – He semed swich, his wordes were so wise.

The qualification added to his highly excellent, discreet [judicious, prudent or morally discerning] and distinguished state is that he seemed such, because his words were so wise. It is pretence and pretentiousness that we are dealing with here. One is irresistibly reminded of the didactic and moralizing passages in his Vox clamantis and The Education of a King in Book VII of the Confessio. It also calls to mind Chaucer’s criticism of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre, as two not-so-wise tales in a seemingly wise list of tales. If we are right in reading the Sergeant as Gower, what are we to think of the innuendo in the lines on his participation in judicial sessions? He is fully qualified to sit on all sort of cases and is a welcome member of the bench, and the job is clearly not without its perks. In fact, if we follow Robinson here, who has a colon after “commissioun”, there is even a hint of bribability: Justice he was ful often in assise, By patente and by pleyn commissioun:

The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower | 133 For his science and for his heigh renoun, Of fees and robes hadde he many oon.

Yet we ought not to forget that, if this is Gower, we are dealing with parody and what we read as insinuation here may just as well be a sly reversal of the actual state of affairs, Gower being notoriously vocal in his books on the subject of the proper application of the law and himself being therefore arguably a stickler for absolutely impartial jurisprudence. Gower’s acquisition of land in Kent comes into ken again in the lines that follow. Of course, the rapaciousness of lawyers was a stock complaint in his time, yet unless we are much mistaken, Chaucer’s lines read as a plain hint at Gower’s own property transactions. In fact, the line about the impossibility of invalidating his purchasing looks like a direct jab at the old Septvauns matter. This is so clear that, even though he rejects the notion of the Sergeant being Gower, John Fisher feels compelled to link them directly together here. “In his real estate transactions, Gower was engaging in what he himself criticized as one of the principal vices of the legal profession. We may recall Chaucer’s Man of Law in connection with Gower’s canny handling of the Septvauns affair”.22 He then quotes: So great a purchasour was nowher noon: All was fee symple to hym in effect; [unrestricted possession] His purchasyng myghte nat been infect. [invalidated]

It seems to me that the easy and obvious associability of this passage with Gower’s record as a property collector may be taken as a signal on Chaucer’s part as to how he wished his public to read it. Next, the Sergeant is described as a bit of a poseur: Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was.

The thing to be noted is the recurrence of the telltale “semed”, which goes to underline that Chaucer is making a point here about the Sergeant’s posturing but whose reason is hard to understand unless we take it to apply to a real-life person. Once again, John Gower, as he 22

Fisher, p 56.


speaks to us from his works and his political activities, is a prime candidate to have been the self-important fusser that is described here. The lines that follow sketch the Sergeant as a great one for showing off his knowledge of the law from the Conqueror onward: In termes hadde he caas and doomes alle That from the tyme of kyng William were falle.

We must probably read in termes as a variant of in terme, meaning with formal accuracy.23 Thus, the text suggests someone with a penchant for citing old legal texts (“he could reel off all the cases and decisions”),24 which was presumably somewhat of a joke. French being the legal medium, this person must probably be thought of as going about pronouncing ponderous texts in antiquated French. If the joke was at Gower’s expense, there is an interesting link to be laid with his evident preference for this language. French would have been something that a legal Gower was well conversant with. Also, it still carried a chic and courtly ring throughout the latter half of the century, even if – to judge by Chaucer’s voice and his own Confessio Amantis – it was rapidly being replaced by English. Thus, by way of illustration, Gower accents his name throughout the Confessio with the accent on the second syllable, no doubt in order to achieve a certain francophone ambiance.25 Both of these aspects come together in his writings, such as Mirour de l’omme and the Cinkante balades. In fact, Gower’s adherence to his beloved French appears to have gone beyond the grave. When one visits his tomb in Southwark Cathedral, one of the striking things is that the three Virtues depicted in the background of his monument – Charity, Mercy and Pity – display scrolls whose texts are not in the usual Latin but French instead. In this connection, there is a final interesting little matter of language that points to Gower. This is the Man of Law’s French oath of depardieux – a matter of swearing and yet not swearing. A common formula in French legal language, the point of its inclusion as a semioath could well lie in its applicability to Gower, as the very person 23 Robinson, pp 982-83. Benson, p 1297, interprets this specific instance of termes to mean Year Books, thus suggesting the Sergeant’s possession of huge legal library. 24 Anonymous ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1969; reissued as a Penguin Popular Classic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p 16. 25 Tiller, p 282 note.


whom we might expect to swear so daintily in French, particularly if he was the lawyer that I think he was.26 The word could well have been deliberately inserted here for Chaucer’s audience. The next lines on the Sergeant also carry suggestive overtones: Therto he koude endite and make a thyng, That koude no wight pynche at his writyng.

Benson reads this along judicial lines, which is a legitimate approach, but there is also something to be said in favour of regarding them as deliberate ambiguity, enabling Chaucer to take a swipe at Gower the poet, particularly since the description of the Sergeant appears to alternate from his professional activities to his private interests and back again, for evident ironical reasons. Our primary association with “endite” is with the Squire in the General Prologue, the Second Nun’s Prologue and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women [F-Prol, 414; G-Prol, 402], where each time it means something like “composing poetry”. This makes it a tempting thought that Chaucer may be jabbing at Gower here, describing his Confessio or one of the other works as just a clever and pinchproof “thyng”. The passage ends on a note whereby the Sergeant is described as unpretentiously dressed. This is irony again, for behind the apparent modesty of his “medlee cote […] with barres smale” we discern his official “power suit [as] an advertisement for his exalted place in his profession”, which immediately makes the silk (and hence costly) belt that he wears easier to comprehend.27 It also calls to mind Gower’s self-portrait in Mirour de l’omme, which describes his outfit as suggesting a legal or civil office and comes up with similar stripes: Je ne suy pas clers, Vestu de sanguin ne de pers, Ainz ai vestu la raye mance Poy sai latin, poy sai romance.

26

I am not a clerk clothed in red or in purple, but wear a garment with striped sleeves. I know a bit of Latin, I know a bit of French. [Mirour, 21772]28

Benson, p 855 note 39. Hornsby, Lambdin & Lambdin: 123. 28 Fisher, pp 55-56. Fisher makes a good case for rayed garments as “a civil livery of some sort” that was particularly associated with the law. This is confirmed by Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp 101-25, at 112-19. The translation here is Fisher’s, 27


Like the lines that describe him as someone eager to cite the law at all times, the General Prologue’s description here very much suggests a personalized and contemporary portrait, not so much intended for eternity as for a good laugh by Chaucer’s own public. This seems to me precisely why he ends his description with the words “Of his array telle I no lenger tale”: at this point his message ought to have been well-understood. Having found the Sergeant’s portrait to be consonant with the notion that it is a likely parody of Gower himself (proof, of course, being a different matter), let me emphasize once again the parodial aspect. I am not saying that Gower was all that the Sergeant’s portrait comes up with. Satire being satire, the real Gower must have been less extreme than he is made out to be, yet at the same time the picture ought to have been sufficiently recognizable for Chaucer’s public. What we must next decide whether the Sergeant’s portrait is the original one or a rewrite. With Chaucer’s occasional use of real-life persons as the basis for his portraits, the question really comes down to whether the Sergeant was always founded on Gower or rewritten to resemble Gower, in which case the preservation of his title is best taken as a piece of editorial laziness. If I am right, the Sergeant provides a portrait in which Gower is inflated into someone truly important, reflecting perhaps his aspirations to the office at which all of his political efforts were directed. His demotion to Man of Law, on the other hand, is a matter of deflation, as a direct result of his literary quarrel with Chaucer which calls for a decimation of the opponent. Evidently, these are contrary impulses and difficult to reconcile as part of the same writing effort. As the Sergeant’s portrait in the General Prologue is all about self-interest and self-importance, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that we are dealing here with a somewhat different conception than the deflatory one that we encounter with the Man of Law. It is therefore likely to be part and parcel of one and the same original effort and not a rewritten version. Yet when we come to weigh matters, is this not a bit too felicitous to be true? After all, such a conclusion implies that Gower was a target from the very first, which except for the last line, which is an obvious bit of ironical self-deprecation. Fisher’s reading of this as “I know little Latin or French” is hardly consistent with Gower’s undeniable grasp of both languages and has been replaced here by a more appropriate (as well as literal) translation.


seems to carry the rather unlikely implication that Chaucer had been anticipating Gower’s challenge. This is probably the wrong way of looking at the evidence. What we have already noticed is Chaucer’s occasional liking for drawing his characters from real life. Thus, there is an excellent chance that in his early search for a suitable figure to fill the judicial slot in his estates satire he lit upon the ambitious Gower. Surely there must have been some eyebrows raised at Gower’s upward drive and the means that he employed, so that the sketch which we have here may be assumed to have been good for a few chuckles. Later, when Gower’s challenge came up, the Sergeant was the natural choice on whom to found his reaction. This leads us to the exciting possibility that the entire literary duel between Chaucer and Gower was sparked off not so much by the latter’s challenge as by the provocative portrayal which was meted out to him in the General Prologue. Gower’s challenge at the end of the Confessio does come out of the blue, striking at Chaucer for no apparent reason. Here, however, we have an excellent indication that Chaucer had given him good cause to do so. It is a natural starting point. Basically, Chaucer paints a deprecatory picture of Gower and, assuming with Fisher that these two were sometime friends, it is one that appears to express a measure of reproof. As I have pointed out before, the issue seems to be all about morality. At the end of his Troilus (probably finished between 1382-85) Gower is still a worthy person, moral Gower, and mentioned in almost one and the same breath with Strode and Christ, so that we can hardly suppose the accolade to have been a cynical one. Just a few years later his General Prologue comes up with what may well have been a satirical portrait, which several years later is amended to a near-explicit though probably tongue-incheek statement in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale that Gower is an immoral writer. Essentially, this reduces us to a chicken-or-the-egg debate, for the natural question to be posed here is of course why Chaucer should have changed his mind on Gower so dramatically. From our great distance it is virtually impossible to come up with anything even remotely qualifying as reliable evidence. This leaves guesswork only. One option, which is the one that I prefer, is to take everything as game and play, as part of an on-going literary skirmish between the two. There is much to be said for this. Alternatively, it is also quite possible to put a dark gloss on the things that we have learnt so far. What if


some not so very moral property deals, to which he appears to refer in the General Prologue and which may also have been why the Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale was preserved, had come to his ears at this time and rather shocked him? We are, after all, talking here about unscrupulous buyers of lands and goods that were to be had at a pittance from destitute survivors in the wake of the great outbursts of the plague. In this connection, it is worth noting that Chaucer served as Justice of the Peace in Kent in 1385 and 1386, signal years – or so one assumes – with respect to the writing of the General Prologue29. Both “time and place did then adhere” for him to have become better acquainted with our legal Gower. With Kent as Gower’s favourite haunt, what if, in this new function, Chaucer had learnt about his acquisitions and courtroom practices or observed them at first hand or even run foul of him, and used this knowledge for a good jest in the newly-begun Canterbury Tales? The Gower just described would have been a natural target for Chaucer’s arrows, and even more so if the situation meant that Chaucer should have felt undeceived. Of course, our access to Chaucer is largely through his public face, as expressed in his writings, which gives us a considerably straightlaced person. We find this confirmed by his accolade to moral Gower and philosophical Strode, which implies a self-image whereby his own moral nature and philosophical bent constitute their common bond. What tends to confound us is that Chaucer’s judgemental stance is continually leavened by an excellent sense of humour. This reveals a man well capable of putting things in their perspective, implying a flexible mind as well as leaving room for assuming that in his own way he may have been a bit of a rogue. Another and different consideration is that part of the answer may lie in Gower’s increasing leaning towards Henry of Lancaster’s cause, while, as Gaunt’s man as well as Richard’s, Chaucer remained firmly bound to the powers that were.30 What argues against this is Chaucer’s general evasiveness on the political matters of the century’s 29

A.C. Cawley, ed. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1908; London: Dent, 1966), p vii; Benson, p xix. 30 To be frank, there is a third reading that also deserves to be mentioned. This is the possibility that Gower’s challenge first resulted in the Sergeant of the Law’s portrait as Chaucer’s reaction and that his subsequent demotion to Man of Law reflects Chaucer’s countermove to being eliminated from the Confessio. However, this does not sound very probable and runs into all sort of trouble with the part that the Legend of Good Women plays in all of this.


close and his seeming acceptance of Henry’s takeover in his Complaint unto His Purse. With aspects of Chaucer’s Sergeant of the Law still readable as a potential caricature of Gower after more than six centuries, it becomes easy to accept that it was probably no difficult matter for those about court to recognize the Sergeant’s true colours. Less easy is the question whether in due course the portrait in the General Prologue was meant to undergo some adaptation with respect to his status. This seems indicated by the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, which gives us someone cut down to size but still recognizably the same pompous personality that we encounter in the General Prologue. Reduced to being just a lawyer, he is hoist here by his own petard, hanged by his own weak points. His portrait still exhibits some of the characteristic aspects that we find in the General Prologue, even if he is now just one of the rank-and-file Canterbury pilgrims. He remains self-important and not a little bit vain about his status or his wide reading. As Alfred David defines him, he is the “type of wealthy bourgeois who condescends to dictate his taste to the artist”.31 However, his lot here is worse than before. He has now been made Chaucer’s puppet and is reduced to pronouncing judgement upon himself – both in the literary critique that he is made to pass on his own Confessio and in the sententiousness of the tale which he is given to tell. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the Sergeant’s demotion is much more effective and incisive as it is now than a rewriting – even if only in the shape of a renaming – could ever have hoped to be. The Malapropisms of the Man of Law Though this is speculation again, the instances of a patronizing yet self-depreciating Man of Law who garbles bits of his text and misrepresents both Chaucer and Gower may also be explained from the same perspective. While most of the Man of Law’s slip-ups are clearly a matter of huffing and puffing as part of Chaucer’s reply to Gower’s challenge, they evidently also serve to draw a portrait of the man. But what exactly do they contribute? The situation becomes more transparent , once we allow that they were all directed at Gower as a person who was given to boasting and occasional slips of learning, possibly 31

David, pp 221-22. I am indebted to Delasanta for pointing out the remark.


not averse to claiming to have anticipated in writing all sort of tales by contemporary authors.32 This accords well with the portrait of the Sergeant who seemed discreet and respectable and whose “wordes were so wise”. Thus everything comes to look like a firm joke at Gower’s expense, whereby his deflation of Chaucer’s versification in the Confessio Amantis is turned against him by a mouthpiece who is based upon himself. There is a good case to be made of the slips that the Man of Law makes in his Introduction, which tend to show him up as a bit of a pompous man. Rodney Delasanta notes here that “Chaucer is not the Man of Law” and that “he is quite obviously not fond of the Man of Law”,33 a remark that is meaningless unless we substitute him by a real person, such as Gower. To underline his interpretation, he comes up with a good set of little errors in the Introduction which are all to the point, though of course the Man of Law’s true faux pas is his mixup of his own and Chaucer’s work. Delasanta’s remarks about Chaucer’s dislike of the Man of Law fit in well, especially when we put ourselves the question where it should have come from. In fact, it seems a natural step for us to assume that the funny fashion in which the Man of Law garbles his own and Chaucer’s writings has some bearing on the man himself. On the one hand, we seem to be dealing with a multi-level joke at Gower’s expense, in which he functions as a somewhat maliciously manipulated puppet, and on the other to be receiving echoes of a Gower with a capacity for mangling his texts and obscuring their message.34 Alternatively, this may be Chaucer poking fun at Gower’s penchant for displaying his erudition. A wicked bit of irony is involved in his discussion of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre, in which Chaucer makes him throw out the old accolade of “moral Gower”. Chaucer is the one to have been so moral as not to touch such tainted tales, whereas it is Gower who, by implication, is made out to have stooped to some writing in execrable 32

The reference, of course, is to the intricate mix-up of the Confessio and the Legend that is perpetrated by the Man of Law, as an elaborate joke on Chaucer’s part that leaves us guessing at its exact contours but must have been obvious to his contemporary public. Of course, here the “pilgrim Gower” persona is made to mess up things by attributing his own works to Chaucer, but this may well be an ironic reversal of Gower’s acte de présence. 33 Delasanta, ‘Great Reverence’: 290. 34 Something similar has been argued by Sullivan and Wood, see Benson, p 854, though without any notion that the Man of Law could be Gower.


taste. There is a bit of a joke involved here, as it is plainly Gower’s public image of moral outspokenness that he is made to apply here to his own writings, with the unspoken message that one should practise what one preaches, which is where the word “sermons” in line 87 of the Introduction may well come in. What also ought to strike us with some force is the Man of Law’s apparent inside knowledge of Chaucer’s literary progress. His reference to the Seintes Legende of Cupide, our Legend of Good Women, is basically an impossible one. We tend to forget that the work was in medias res at the time of the challenge and presumably unavailable to any public, with the possible exception of some reading sessions and, though unlikely, a very restricted circulation among intimate friends. How, then, could this boastful noncognoscento be in possession of all this information? Of course his list of good women may represent Chaucer’s projected work on the Legend and as such anticipate its completion, which is Benson’s view, but the puzzle is just as well resolved by reading the Man of Law to be Gower, as – at this point and possibly always – a Chaucer intimate. As I have noted before, our deductions about Gower may have been common knowledge to Chaucer’s public and a point of common amusement as well. If anything, they indicate a route toward understanding the Man of Law’s list of tales that is not equalled by other interpretations, while at the same time accounting for the paradox of Gower – even if only as a literary persona and in disguise, at that – attributing his own writings to Chaucer. It is clearly ridiculous to suppose him to have mistaken his own Confessio for the Legend of Good Women. This is where we should remember that it is always dangerous to read Chaucer’s writings on just one level. The present place is no exception. The crucial aspect of what the Man of Law is doing – and this seems to affirm that he must be Gower – lies in his faulty listing of the tales that Chaucer tells in the Legend of Good Women. Apart from showing him up as being given to garbling things, the text also allows us to interpret the Man of Law as a Gower persona living under the illusion that Chaucer had rushed off to remake the Legend into a mirror image of the Confessio, being convinced that the latter had no other choice than execute his suggestions. This may be why he is made to say – or made to mean to do so – that young Chaucer wrote about Ceyx and Alcyone but, for the rest, one should turn to his excellent imitations in his new edition of the Seintes Legende of Cupide. With remarkable restraint (though hardly


so on Chaucer’s part) he avoids mentioning his name and his major work but, in order to provide a good hint, twice defers to his major classical source, Ovid’s Heroides. In doing so, Chaucer neatly makes him reflect the self-congratulatory nature of his challenge. The list that he provides may even echo actual suggestions, made in person by Gower, on the shape of the Legend as the Testament of Love to be. If so, it confirms those scholars who see the Man of Law’s list as a prospectus for the Legend-to-be. They may well be right, the difference being that it constitutes a list of Gower’s preferences and expectations and in no way reflects what Chaucer came up with as his answer. Even the scathing remarks on the tales of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre fall within this picture. We hear, loud and clear, what appear to be Chaucer’s own feelings on the two. No such immorality for him, he makes the Man of Law say, and it is plain that this must to some extent represent his own feelings. Yet the excessive colouring (cursed, wikked, unkynde abhomynacions) is unlike Chaucer. Gower, on the other hand, is always quite vocal in his major works on the subject of immorality but comes across as lenient on the subject of incest.35 It is therefore both a credible and attractive notion that in this place the Man of Law is made to dance to Chaucer’s tune and pronounce judgement upon himself along characteristically Gowerian lines. Needless to say, this, too, accords very well with the notion that what looks like a serious clash of rival poets may in actual fact have been a literary Punch-and-Judy show directed at entertaining the court at great and perhaps unusual length. A good illustration of the multiple levels on which Chaucer is engaged here, including the Man of Law’s penchant for showing off his erudition yet muddling everything, is the Pierides passage. Near the conclusion of the Introduction, the Lawman remarks that he …were looth be likned, doutelees, To Muses that men clepe Pierides – Metamorphosios woot what I mene. [IntroMLT, 91-93]

The text is somewhat obscure, but it is obvious that the Man of Law is attempting to show off his wide reading. What he wishes to in35

The Mirour de l’omme and the Vox clamantis both contain long tracts on contemporary abuses, some of which (like those dealing with matters of the law) seem to be perfectly applicable to Gower himself (Macaulay, vol i, pp 267-74; vol iv, pp 230-45).


dicate is that he does not want to be a cheap imitator. In his pompous way, he turns to Ovid’s story of “the daughters of King Pierus, who unsuccessfully challenged the Muses to a singing contest and were changed into magpies”36, his point evidently being the magpie’s proverbial thievishness. If he had simply stuck to referring to the Pierides, things would have been all right. The ides-ending represents a patronym in classical Greek and thus refers to Pierus. So far, so good. Where he bungles things is by attempting a play of words on the Muses, whose birthplace is Pieria, which makes them Pierides of sorts. The result is disastrous, because the way he puts things turns the daughters of Pierus into the Muses whom they failed to outdo or the Muses into daughters of Pierus, whichever one prefers. Of course, what the Man of Law means to say is that he is not going to try and compete with a past master like – yes, like whom? Like Chaucer, to whom the outward reference is, or like Gower, who is the implicit author referred to and, as an Ovid imitator, is hinted at by the reference to the Metamorphoses? Plainly, with Chaucer as the puppet master here, his poor Gower marionette is attempting to insinuate an inordinate amount of borrowing from Ovid on Chaucer’s part and suggesting wholesale literary theft as the latter’s muse. Instead, the only thing that he manages to effect is the suggestion that he, Gower himself, is the magpie in question. Robinson and Benson attribute the genitive Metamorphosios, which is used here instead of Metamorphoses in accordance with medieval and even post-medieval practice to retain the appropriate case for classical words even though applied to a different language (modern German is a case in point: “Ich will Jesum selbst begraben”), to an elided liber and cite some authorities for this.37 The Man of Law does not wish to be likened to the Pierides of the Metamorphoses, though strictly speaking this is not what he says, because here he makes another of his little telltale mistakes. In this attempt to show off his classical literacy, he should have used the genitive plural, which – as a Greek borrowing – is metamorphoseoon. Instead, he now speaks of the Pierides “of the metamorphosis”. Fortunately, the error is a minor one and, with a bit of good will on the readers’ part, capable of

36

Benson, p 856 note 91-92. Robinson, p 691, Benson, p 855. The genitive sing. properly ends in -eos rather than –ios. 37


being read as referring to the Pierides’ case as one of the many transformations in Ovid’s book.38 “Metamorphosios woot what I mene” is entertainingly ambiguous. It carries a whiff of the Man of Law’s superior attitude, nicely illustrated by his use of such a classical name, while it also includes the same sly wink at the reader as does our modern “[if you] know what I mean” and as such is easily read as a hint on Chaucer’s part that reading the Man of Law’s magpie remark as a self-indictment is correct. It can certainly be read as a pointer to the metamorphosis that he has made Gower undergo. As promised, here are levels within levels. As the Man of Law, the speaker indicates that he wishes to imitate neither Ovid nor Chaucer. By picking the tale of Custance (or the Melibee) he adds force to his words. As Gower presenting his prospectus for the Legend he attempts to give us Chaucer as inspired by the wrong sort of Pierides – a magpie. This prick against Chaucer falls short of its target and, as Gower the garbler of texts, he metes out to himself the judgement that he seeks to pass on Chaucer. Who else but he is the great magpie making off with Ovid’s tales? In recognition of what we shall find later on the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, let us note this as a very exegetical type of writing, involving several layers of meaning and closely related to the way in which sermons (line 87!) were composed. Within this perspective Fisher’s suggestion of the Man of Law’s Tale as a study in sanctimoniousness acquires a new meaning. The Man of Law is not so much Chaucer’s mouthpiece – he is Chaucer’s Gower-puppet who is used here to poke fun at Gower’s own sentiments and weak points by inflating and deflating them at the appropriate moments, with all sorts of telling detail added in order to make his public share the joke, and all this emphasized by a tale so familiar that, as Elizabeth Archibald notes, it would have been effortlessly associated with incest by his audience.39 And with Gower’s recent book, we should add. One is irresistibly reminded of David’s comment40 that “the joke is really on the Man of Law, who only makes himself seem ridiculously prudish in professing to be more moral than moral 38 Against this, see Robinson p 691 and Benson p 855, who claim that the genitive sing. was a common form for referring to the Metamorphoses. 39 Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Flight from Incest: Two Late Precursors of the Constance Theme’, ChauR 20 (1986): 259-72. 40 David, p 125.


Gower”. How appropriate does not this become if he should be a caricature version of Gower himself? Everything that he says contributes to a picture of Gower being Chaucer’s butt here. There is a final point on this issue to be discussed here. If the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale was a new addition or a rewriting of an earlier Introduction and the original Sergeant of the Law’s tale shifted and replaced by the Prologue and the tale of Custance, with their rewriting still to come, why is it that Chaucer’s attention should have been drawn to precisely this place in the Canterbury Tales? We know at least one possible answer to this question. This is our earlier option that Chaucer’s selection of the then Sergeant of the Law’s Introduction and Tale was made because it was the natural launching platform for a strike against Gower. With the Sergeant as a parody of Gower, he would naturally have come to mind as the perfect medium to deal with the challenge. This resulted in the Introduction being rewritten to include his reply to the challenge and to demote Gower by way of “quytynge”, to a mere Man of Law. Having got so far, Chaucer had a change of heart soon after. What with the Man of Law as a Gower substitute and the foolish hash that he makes of Chaucer’s writings and his own, the one thing that is missing is a tale that also spells Gower. After all, there was a public here who deserved a good chance to see clearly what he was driving at. Being well aware who was targeted here, they would have been disappointed if Chaucer had foregone further undercuttings of Gower. As we have seen, the Melibee was appropriate enough for this, particularly as its Fürstenspiegel type of narration easily brings to mind Book VII of the Confessio. For some reason, possibly political, it was reassigned to Chaucer himself as the more suitable narrator and replaced by the more distinctly Gowerian Custance. It is clear that much of what we have found on the ChaucerGower situation here seems to reflect a clashing, if not of personalities then at least of writing wits. It supports the old and insistent tradition that Chaucer and Gower were somehow engaged in a quarrel, even if the exact nature of the quarrel remains unspecified. When Carolyn Dinshaw claims, in 1991, that the “old, lingering, if discredited, notion of [a] ‘quarrel’ between Chaucer and Gower” has now largely been laid to rest or should at least be in a state close to this, this study’s


findings rather bring down any such complacency.41 All the evidence, here and in chapters to come, indicates a considerable bit of friction. Thus, if anything, the old spectre is still active, even if there was not so much a falling-out as, more likely, a battle of writing wits which required them to be engaged in a mock duel, or perhaps a bit of both. Earlier I stated my reasons for accepting a court game. Here in this chapter, we have come across further support. Considering how well everything allows itself to be read as a literary duel that both poets were engaged in for the sake of the court coterie that they were writing for – how, in fact, it is these people chiefly who would have been truly able to appreciate all that our two poets were doing to each other – we had perhaps best accept Chaucer’s portrayal of the Sergeant of the Law as the casus belli that led Gower to come up with a sharp but dignified response. The court’s awareness of this, and perhaps even its active stimulation, is what could have led to a vogue of sorts in the course of which its members were entertained by Chaucer’s engagement in literary combat with the other major poet of the day. One need only imagine Gower grumbling about the way in which Chaucer had dealt with him and “sympathetic” courtiers proposing that he do something about it, to see how easily such a bit of court sport could have been set into motion. Or perhaps the royals, whom John Fisher sees as the commissioners of Chaucer’s and Gower’s rival works, were in a mischievous mood during that particular boating day on the Thames.

41

Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer’ in Yeager: 130-52, at 130-32.

4. The Testament of Love The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as a Testament of Love On the issue of the resoundingness of Chaucer’s answer to the challenge, this study has been well anticipated by John Fisher: “While the choice and shaping of the [Man of Law’s Tale] itself may have been indebted to Gower, there was probably more than a glint of humor in his decision to outdo his old friend at his sanctimonious best. ‘If we’re going to be proper, leeve brother, let’s be really proper.’ The glint must have grown to a grin when he conceived the notion of expanding the Wife of Bath’s prologue and assigning to her yet another tale 1 from the Confessio”.

A little later he adds: Let us suppose that out of deference to Gower’s opinions, Chaucer had laid aside the Cook’s Tale and written the Man of Law’s headlink and tale, superbly retelling one of Gower’s stories. With Gower still on his mind, and seeking for a way to get back to something saltier than the tale of Constance, he decided to recast the Wife of Bath as a shrewish wife, making use of Jankyn’s book of wicked wives.[….]. Either to tease Gower (by this time using one of his tales in so questionable a context), or simply because he found the story an extremely appropriate vehicle for the amalgamation of the satiric and the romantic, Chaucer decided to assign to the Wife of Bath the tale of the Loathly Lady.2

Fisher makes it all sound very simple and natural, but in actual fact the transition from the Man of Law seems to have been carefully prepared. We deduce this not only from Chaucer’s choice for the Man of Law of a tale starkly emphasizing virtue3 as well as Custance’s sanctified womanhood, which provides an evident black-and-white contrast with the Wife of Bath. Also there is the Tale’s debt to De miseria and its twin sentiment of “joye after wo” and “wo after glad1

Fisher, p 292. Fisher, pp 295-96. 3 Fisher, pp 290-91; Lewis: 488-92. 2

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nesse.”4 These two are recurrent aspects throughout the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. We hear them echoed in the “wo that is in mariage” and in her various dealings with her old and niggardly husbands. Her marriage to Jankyn surely fits the notion of joy after woe, to be turned upside down by his recalcitrant conduct and once more reversed after their great quarrel. Similarly, the bachelor knight of the Wife’s tale experiences woe after his moment of rapist delight and is ultimately rewarded with the most supreme form of joy – bliss – after his testing moments of misery. The problem with Fisher’s insight is that it is not so much a deduction as an intuition. This is a pity, as there is no doubt in my mind that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale are Chaucer’s superior brainchild here and were specifically composed as an answer to Gower. Textually but also in other respects, such as the fact that they head the Marriage Group, and perhaps most of all for the patent vigour of their telling, there can be little doubt that they represent an inspired new approach to the Canterbury Tales. Taken as a whole, they constitute a sublime piece of writing, not only from a literary point of view but from several other ones, and demonstrate a truly remarkable measure of indebtedness to Gower. In fact, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale fit the notion of a Testament of Love by Chaucer as a masterful repartee so well that no other tales are at all necessary – with the exception perhaps of the Parson’s Tale as their referential key and the Man of Law’s Tale as their virtuous complement. They are the perfect answer to the challenge, a sparkling miniature Confessio Amantis intended to outdo Gower at every turn. What should concern us here briefly is another point. Assuming that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and its associated tales put paid to Gower with a vengeance, what about the new plan? Why a new plan at all, now that Gower has had his answer? The basic answer is simple. Set into motion by Gower’s challenge, the new plan is the direct outcome of Chaucer’s affixation of the Parson’s Tale to coincide with the pilgrims’ arrival at Canterbury, its practical consequence of all second, third and fourth tales being scrapped, and its further consequence of tales being set to a spiritual application. Another way 4

Lewis: 488-92. The sentiment itself is not new. It is also found in the Knight’s Tale, where it is stated in exactly these words [line 2841]. Rather than assume that De miseria was already known to him at the time of its composition, I would guess the phrase (and similar references) to be later interpolations.

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of looking at this is to recognize that Chaucer threw out his original gridlike narrative concept in favour of Gower’s linear approach and affirmed this by putting the Parson’s Tale at the end of a one-way pilgrimage. Looking at matters closely, as we did when we discussed the terms of Gower’s challenge, we see that Chaucer’s switch to the new plan with its Confessio-like scheme of a virtue-vice discussion marked by an intermittent debate on marriage is roughly synonymous with my broad definiton of a Testament of Love. This clearly is the Testament of Love that he was seeking to create once the court duel was over. In contrast to this, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the other two tales that are directly involved (three, if we include the Parson) constitute a capsule version of such a Testament that is ruled by a much stricter interpretation of the task set by Gower. Thus it is also possible that, once Gower had been directly dealt with in the shape of this brief Testament of Love, whether advertised or not but presumably presented in one or more reading sessions, Chaucer returned to the every-day business of composing a Canterbury Tales and in the process sought to remove its traces as something that had only temporarily stood out from the rest. This part of things had merely been a passing matter of game and play, after all. It may not have been his wish to turn everything into an elaborate and monumental tribute to Gower, but it is difficult to deny that the outcome of all the changes that Chaucer effected after the 1390 challenge is a work that is more Gower-oriented and Gower-indebted throughout. Once again we find ourselves in the company of Fisher who attributes to Gower’s influence Chaucer’s creation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the tales generally associated with her and known as the Marriage Group. What is more, “From gentilesse and sovereignty in the Confessio and Mirour,” he says, “to the marriage group in the Canterbury Tales – this is Chaucer’s final and most stunning transformation of Gower’s themes and moralizations. This became the ‘testament of love’ Gower begged him to get on with in 1390”.5 Though it is difficult to see the begging element in Gower’s challenge, this group of tales, as proposed by Kittredge and reaffirmed here by Fisher, fits in well with my idea of a Gowerian new plan. Modern criticism is none too happy with the Marriage Group, which is understandable in the light of some of the wild claims that 5

Fisher, pp 294-95. The italics are mine.


have been made for it.6 Yet its basic concept is inescapable, by virtue of the discussion that some tales go in for with specific reference to the Wife of Bath and her theme of marriage. Consisting of seven tales from the correct period (Groups III-IV-V/Fragments DEF), the Marriage Group was originally seen as four tales alternating with three thematically unrelated ones and discussing marriage from a variety of viewpoints, both temporal and spiritual, with the Wife of Bath providing their basic impetus. These are the Wife’s Prologue and Tale, the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, the Merchant’s Prologue and Tale and the Franklin’s Prologue and Tale. Later emendations have come up with more tales, including one of the initially excluded ones, the Squire’s Tale, but these lack the specific reference to the Wife of Bath that so securely links the others. It is indeed very likely that several tales from outside Kittredge’s original group were meant to be included or were so included, even if they do not specifically refer to the Wife of Bath. A major case in point is the Man of Law. Though it is unmistakably the Wife of Bath who in her confrontational fashion kicks off the dbate, it is equally true that the Man of Law is the one who sets the ball rolling and marks Chaucer’s transition to a new concept for the entire Canterbury Tales. A later thematic refinement of the theory suggests that it is not so much marriage which is the central point of the debate but maistrie in marriage and thus, within terms of profane love versus sacred love, marriage of the body to moribund maistrie in this world vs the spirit’s marriage to the maistrie of Christ and life everlasting.7 Needless to say, the Man of Law’s Tale is perfectly suited to such a debate. In much the same way, it would be most surprising for Chaucer to have realised the suitability of the present Wife of Bath’s Tale for the Marriage Debate, yet to have overlooked the possibilities afforded by her original one. The marriage theme, so narrowly linked to the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath, is manifestly indebted to the Confessio Amantis. Despite his outward concern with amour courtois Gower comes up with several tales on the subject of married love and actually has Genius come down in its favour in several places, while ending his opus on a 6

Peter G. Beidler, ‘Transformations in Gower’s Tale of Florent and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R.F. Yeager (Victoria, BC: English Literature Studies/U of Victoria, 1991): 100-14. 7 Fisher, pp 294-95.


note that is close to a non-erotic definition of love.8 Ideal love, from a courtly point of view, is a lady’s service but it is a profane sort of love, designated usually as amor, which works through the senses, and is fundamentally a non-connubial thing. Its theological counterpart operates through the spirit. It is caritas – one of the three great virtues. In marriage these two types of love combine in a sacrament that reflects the spirit’s union with Christ and metaphysically fuses the procreative act with God’s own powers of creation. It is the instrument through which amoral kinde – the sexual urge, chiefly – is restrained and formalized by the reason brought to bear upon it by society through the wisdom of God’s word. This train of thinking, which crops up in various places where Genius speaks, is something that must have profoundly appealed to Chaucer for him to have applied it as the major issue in his post-Testament writing. It may therefore well be that we are on the track here of something truly special, for the situation suggests once again that the Canterbury Tales are Chaucer’s Testament of Love in a double fashion. On the one hand, they were the obvious means that Chaucer sought to use in order to demonstrate his superiority in the 1390/91 duel or, if one wishes, reading sessions; on the other, once this was over, they were made to serve as a tribute to his nestor by further exploring the latter’s intriguing discussion of the “honeste love” of marriage. This makes good sense, as a yin-and-yang sort of alternation of war and peace, discord and concord, a passion and a lassitude. The debate is opened by Man of Law arguing that marriage is all about steadfast endurance, reflecting the spirit’s submission to the humanly incomprehensible vagaries of Fortune which are ultimately revealed to be guided by a benevolent Providence, in much the same way that Griselda’s trials in the Clerk’s Tale are resolved when Walter’s harsh “maistrie”, which is really God’s, is ultimately shown to be conciliatory. Constancy, steeled by adversity, leads to bliss. What he also seems to argue (and with this we are in the middle of a debate that continues well into the Reformation) is that self-effacement or, rather, the non-exertion of free will is an absolute prerequisite for the proper working of constancy and the attainment of heaven. Naturally, the Wife dismisses the Man of Law’s words as foolishness by turning everything upside down and claiming that the 8

Lawlor, 113ff.


essence of marriage is a lady’s service, interpreted by her as nothing less than licence for unrestrained sexuality, in total disregard of its sacramental aspect. Submission to herself, surrender of her husbands’ free will to hers, is what leads to bliss and the devil may care about the rest, God, authority and all. She is determined to have her will. It is this contrast, complemented by a persistently involved element of gentilesse, that is worked out by the rest of the Marriage Group. It is gratifying to find that, here and there, very similar ideas have been presented. Fisher, whose insights sometimes run close to mine, suggests that the Marriage Group is set to a double theme, with maistrie as the negative aspect and gentilesse as the positive bond. He feels that “these themes were first joined the way Chaucer joins them in Gower’s Tale of Florent and Mirour de l’omme”.9 Or, to put it more clearly, Florent and the Mirour were the first to combine the concepts of maistrie and gentilesse and these are the sources from which Chaucer took his maistrie/gentilesse notions. Even more simply, the Marriage Group as a whole debates a variety of Gower-derived aspects of love and marriage and their religious implications. As such it is closer to Gower than the new plan, adding to its virtue-vice one-way journey to Canterbury the signal element of divinely institutionalized love – God’s word and the laws of reason vs kinde. The gentilesse argument is there to underscore this: what we do and who we are is not based on lineage or wealth but on true nobility of the spirit. The Wife of Bath’s Debt to Gower We may by this time well ask what is it about the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale that makes them the overwhelming demonstration of Chaucer’s debt to Gower that I claim for them. As it is, on most aspects little more than their pointing out and an awareness of their fundamentally Gowerian nature is required to show how patently the Prologue and Tale are inspired by the Confessio Amantis. Clearest of all is the point that most of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is literally a confession and while engaged in this confession she proves herself to 9

Fisher, pp 294-95. This is not necessarily correct. The association of maistrie and gentilesse is also encountered in the Clerk’s Tale, which may stem from Chaucer’s Italian period. It also crops up in the Parson’s discussion of Pride [461-63], where maistrie signifies the domination of sin over a person and gentilesse its virtuous counterpart. Here, however, a debt to Gower is well within reason.


be an expert in love matters, what with her five husbands and “oother compaignye in youthe”, her roving eye and her “wandrynge by the weye”. What this means ought to be supremely obvious once again. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is nothing if not a lover’s confession, a confessio amantis by a senex amans that repeats the essence of Gower’s great opus but with a double twist: the sins against love to which she confesses are not accompanied by any sense of contrition, and the lady’s service and gentilesse that she claims are a parody of Gower’s vision of courtly love. Of course, the type of confession that we are dealing with here is confession of sin. Regrettably, critics and editors have contributed much confusion on this point. Benson speaks of a literary confession, while Robinson calls it “at once a confession, an apologia, and a program of matrimonial reform”.10 He, too, means by confession a literary matter rather than one of the confessional, yet this latter aspect is precisely what the Wife’s Prologue is all about and one of the facets of this study that is easily demonstrated. On the other hand, his “program of matrimonial reform” is simply not credible. It equates the Wife’s voice with Chaucer’s own ideas, for which there is no foundation. It is one of life’s finer points of irony, therefore, that the first to point out the debt owed in her Prologue to the medieval confessional voice was Jerry Root in 1994, who uses this to work out a feministoriented concept of “space to speke” and in doing so totally bypasses the implications of the Wife’s all-out confession of sin.11 Confession necessarily deals with the commission and admission of mortal sin. A point of major significance is the demonstrable fact that in the course of her confession the Wife, in full conformity with Amans and the remedial exempla offered by Genius, owns up to 10

Benson, p 11; Robinson, p 7. Root: 252-74. He takes both the Wife’s theme and the first 162 lines of the Prologue to be part of the Wife’s confession. The point missed is that these lines constitute a running argument against scriptural authority and are not in any sense a confession. Root further argues that the Wife appropriates the Prologue’s anti-feminist sources in order to build up a “reified image of women” (whatever this may mean) and concludes that “her truth and her ‘privetee’ cannot be contained by the seal of confessional secrecy”, thus giving us a Chaucer using confession as licence to speak in defiance of “the most well established and traditional authorities”. Needless to say, this is not my Chaucer nor do we seem to be speaking the same language. Also cf Barry Sanders, ‘Chaucer’s Dependence on Sermon Structure in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, SMC 4 (1974): 437-45, who notes sermon elements of all sorts, including “degenerate pulpit rhetoric”, but reads them as homiletic satire by the Wife. 11


all the Seven Deadly Sins in a great variety of forms and shapes. Even her own fundamental sin of Inobedience – strictly speaking a subclassification of Pride but, more specifically, the primal sin that caused Eve to bring death and destruction down on mankind and so the mother of all sins – reflects Amans’ situation. Thus what we find repeated here is Gower’s very own notion of the Seven Deadly Sins within his very own frame of a lover’s confession and applied in a very similar way. Then there is the Wife of Bath as a character. She is a compound creation, easily encompassing the three major dramatis personae of the Confessio. She looks like a female version of Amans, as a confessing and elderly (senex) lover – an observation that is selfevident – but with a measure of Genius thrown in. She needs no priest or other male mouthpiece for the feminist doctrine she preaches ably enough herself – this is a role which she takes upon herself with great gusto and which is reflected in the sermon scheme to which everything that she says will be shown to adhere. At the same time, she is the Dame Venus of the Canterbury Tales and as such she is easily recognized as Chaucer’s ironic rendition of Gower’s Venus. Her Venerean nature is most emphatically drawn nor do her portrait in the General Prologue and the one that she comes up with herself leave any doubt on this point. Venus crops up again and again, and not just that – she manifestly stands for Venus as the force of kinde, that is, amoral sexuality that is neither restrained by reason or the bounds of human and divine law.12 But where Gower’s Venus represents an elevated vision of earthly love, the Wife of Bath stands for something much greedier and more carnal – a debased vision. In doing so she may well embody Chaucer’s satirical assessment of what courtly love ultimately comes down to, once women are free to demand it rather than have it bestowed on them. The crowning touch here – and a complex one, as we shall discuss later – is the combination whereby the Wife of Bath is made to perform as a preacher who emphasizes a Gowerian theme with the aid of a sermon exemplum whose profane, mock-courtly application thinly overlies its spiritual import.13 This, too, repeats the basic scenario of the Confessio Amantis in which Genius similarly blends courtly and spiritual applications. In point of fact, as a preacher, the Wife is recognizably a purveyor of concupiscence, an interpretation that may well 12 13

Baker: 152-57. Cf Sanders: 437-45.


be read as a piece of Chaucerian criticism directed at Venus’ twotongued Priest and possibly even his creator. To be precise, we recognize the Confessio Amantis to be not just a confession of sin set to a selective manuel de pecheux but a voluminous sermon on the subject of courtly and spiritual love at the same time which is not without its internal contradictions. We find something similar again with the Wife of Bath, and with a vengeance. Whereas the Confessio Amantis shows a loose sermon structure chiefly consisting of confessional dialogues followed up by a serial presentation of sermon exempla and their application, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as a whole are demonstrably built up along much stricter lines. Her Prologue is a confession in both the literary and religious sense of the word, but together with the Tale it also constitutes what comes down to a recognizable sermon preached according to the rules for sermons known as the “modern university type” or modernus modus predicandi. Chaucer includes the three required levels of interpretation known as the letter, the sense and the sentence.14 This may be a novel insight, as Chaucer scholardom has rarely gone beyond admitting that “Pardoner and Friar seem to regard the Wife’s performance as a kind of sermon”, drawing as it does on pulpit rhetoric and exempla.15 The notion that the Prologue and Tale function on more than one level has occasionally been recognized but without any clear awareness of their fundamentally homiletic nature. How close the Gower connection is in the matter of the Wife’s preaching efforts is seen in the theme of her sermon: the “wo that is in mariage”, as preached from the commonsense perspective of experience. A familiar theme in medieval literature, this may nevertheless derive directly, as I discuss later, from the opening lines of Book I of the Confessio Amantis, so near in both place and time – providing yet another indicator of Chaucer’s debt to Gower. Similarly, the fusion of narrative entertainment with confession, the Deadly Sins and sermonizing into a single whole is entirely Gowerian, even if and well in keeping with the challenge Chaucer’s way of dealing with all of this seeks to be more sophisticated. A point to pause upon is the contention in these pages that the Wife of Bath’s confession is also part and parcel of the sermon that 14 The subject is addressed well in Robert P. Merrix’s article on ‘The Sermon Structure in the Pardoner’s Tale’, ChauR 17 (1983): 235-54. See also Chapter Eight. 15 Benson, p 865.


she preaches. Can something be a sermon and a confession simultaneously? St Augustine afficionados will surely admit to the overlappingness of the two. Siegfried Wenzel, on the other hand, addressing this point with respect to the Pardoner, is scathing: “I have yet to see an actual sermon, which, like the The Pardoner’s Prologue, uses selfrevelation as its pro-theme”.16 In answer to this, Robert Merrix points out the frequent self-confessed unworthiness that medieval preachers profess.17 Though one feels that this is not exactly the same thing, it provides a starting point. More useful is the observation that Wenzel is wrong to equate the Pardoner’s sermon with an actual sermon. The Canterbury Tales is a work of fiction and within this work we are dealing with a fictional sermon, subject not only to the rules of good preaching but those of good writing as well. In the meantime, we should not forget that the way for this literary fusion of confession and sermon was prepared by none other than John Gower and repeated, though differently applied, by the Parson’s Tale, which refutes Wenzel in its own fashion. For the time being, let us note that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale have the hallmark of being a much improved miniature Confessio Amantis. As we have seen again and again, improvement upon Gower is precisely what we should expect for the duel to be really on. Any effective reply to his taunts (or invitation, if one wishes) must needs lie in a satisfactory demonstration of Chaucer’s genius, in outperforming his challenger on his own chosen ground. Among other things, we find this in the improved homiletic structure that has just been mentioned but, doubtless, its best proof should reside in one or two tales demonstrably borrowed from Gower yet superior in their treatment of their subjects.18 Such a superior tale exists in the shape of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, which is the closest known analogue to Gower’s tale of Florent, and much of the evidence required is available. While such early analogue researchers as Margaret Schlauch are unwilling to go beyond admitting that the “resemblances are due to the use of common sources” and Benson fails to do much with the implications of his acknowledgement that Chaucer was acquainted with Gower’s version, 16

Wenzel, ‘Contemporary Reading’: 140. See Chapter Eight. 18 This is a matter of equilibrium: too many Gowerian tales would make Chaucer a mere imitator, too few would make it impossible for anyone to recognize their slant. 17


it is this study’s contention that with respect to the Wife of Bath we are actually dealing with a case of direct borrowing from Gower and doing so in order to provide a transparent reaction to the challenge.19 We find ourselves once again in the company of John Fisher, who points out that “the differences in his version are best explained as a conscious alteration designed to improve the pace and structure of the story and to adapt it to the new conception of the Wife of Bath”, a suggestion that is both simple and wise.20 There is even an additional likelihood that the Wife of Bath’s Tale is Chaucer’s combined rendition of two Confessio Amantis elements: the tale of Florent and Gower’s discourse on gentilesse, which we discuss below. It is probably best to define Chaucer’s version of the latter, the crone’s bedroom lecture, as a brief sermon of sorts. This is how it is generally referred to, but always in a figurative sense and not in the literal fashion that we are speaking of now. The above picture gives us a valuable insight into what Chaucer must have meant the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale to be with respect to the Confessio Amantis: the perfect answer – a tale meant to turn the tables on Gower, in which he is defeated by his own strategems, the same or similar strictures and structures, devices and tales, and all in order to demonstrate what courtly love comes down to in the hands of such ruthlessly profane lovers as the Wife of Bath – or Gower, for that matter. Add to this the ultimate sting of what we shall come to know as the implicit self-refutation of the Wife’s Tale or what Lenvoy de Chaucer says, and Chaucer’s point is clear. A Confessio Amantis like Gower’s is all about “the taste of that forbidden fruit”, it is Eve tempting Adam all over again, it is body over soul and matter over mind. It is an invitation to blind oneself to the joys of heaven in favour of the pleasures of the flesh, a reversal of divinely ordained order and a return to the law of kinde, emphatically underlined by the theme of female domination that is preached by the incarnation of Dame Venus, better known to us as the Wife of Bath. It seems a good idea, for the sake of clarity, to go through the various points of correspondence methodically. The Wife of Bath’s 19

Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and Its Social Foundation (London: Oxford UP, 1967), p 224; Benson, p 872; Chaucer’s reaction is found in the loathly hag’s speech on gentilesse, which, on one level, may be reproof of Gower’s ideas on the subject. 20 Fisher, p 296.


Prologue and Tale are the obvious answer to Gower’s challenge, combining all the significant elements of the Confessio Amantis with a sophisticated Chaucerian answer and fitting the requirements so well that inspiration by the Confessio Amantis is almost inescapable. They coincide with what was specified in Chapter Two as a narrow and detailed imitation, which in itself is remarkable. The more obvious points of correspondence include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

a senex amans a Venus-like figure a lover’s confession the Seven Deadly Sins confessed to a preacher a Gowerian theme a prologue discussing biblical matters extensive glossing throughout (see p 82) a kinde and resoun debate a comprehensive sermon structure the use of the confession as an integral part of the sermon the preaching of a sermon exemplum with a Venerean application the preaching of a sermon exemplum with a spiritual application the use of a tale also used by Gower in the Confessio Amantis in illustration of the very same sin the use within this same exemplum of a sermonette on the subject of gentilesse, which echoes the Confessio courtly love elements a final sentence pronounced on the lover.

It is hardly necessary to point out, in partial repetition of what we observed in Chapter Two, that the combination of Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Man of Law’s Tale and Parson’s Tale is more than sufficient as a miniature Confessio Amantis or, rather, a Testament of Love that outperforms Gower on several, if not all levels of his challenge. In fact, given a proper exegetical awareness of how everything that the Wife says points to the Confessio Amantis, it is obvious that it is sufficient onto itself as a Testament of Love, with the other two serving as useful keys to its unriddling but not truly essential parts


of it. This ought to be the proper place, therefore, for a chapter summary and a passing on to a more detailed substantiation of theory outlined here. What restrains us, however, is the remarkable fact that among the tales of the new plan there is one further combination of prologue and tale which is constructed in an almost identical fashion. The Wife of Bath’s Twin: the Pardoner Armed with this knowledge, a person would be inclined to think of one of the subsequent Marriage Group tales. But no – there is nothing to link it to the subject of marriage at all. What we are dealing with are the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. This may come as rather a surprise. Surely there is not all that much to link them with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, apart from the relative length of the Prologue and the use of a typical sermon exemplum for his Tale? Appearances will be deceptive, for they are actually singularly alike. Let us consider the Wife and the Pardoner for a moment. Conceptually, their basic difference, besides gender, is a matter of drive. She is motivated by her unabating search for love, she is a lover for all her nonconformist quirks. He is, as the Host notes so perceptively, driven by anger more than anything else, which makes him an excellent counterpart for the Wife. All the same, for all his anger and what else springs from it, he has been fitted into the same structures and strictures as the Wife of Bath. Anger drives him, but pride is what rules him and love of earthly things is how he gratifies these two urges, much like the Wife of Bath does. They are two mercenary travelling salespersons – she offering sexual bliss in exchange for maistrie, he promising the joys of heaven at the drop of a groat. Not surprisingly, therefore, we recognize in them two kindred souls – they are grabbers, graspers, devourers and, as such, symbols of the negative forces ruling the medieval universe. Something complementary to this has been pointed out by Anne Kernan, who notes that the two of them reflect sterility, come up with autobiographical prologues, and tell tales that include significant projections of the narrators in the shape of the Loathly Lady and the Old Man.21 From a textual point of view the correspondences are also considerable, for both draw extensively on St Jerome’s Epistola adversus Jovinianum and the Roman de la Rose.22 21 22

Anne Kernan, ‘The Archwife and the Eunuch’, ELH 41 (1974): 1-25. Benson, p 904.


Interestingly, the Pardoner’s Prologue is furthermore linked textually with the Man of Law, for the “use of Innocent III’s De miseria condicionis humane [...] associates the work with the Man of Law’s Prologue”, while at the same time the “extensive use of Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum associates [the Man of Law] with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Merchant’s Tale”. This also holds good for the Sins of the Tavern in the Pardoner’s Tale.23 The Pardoner’s Prologue is a confession, just like the Wife’s, set to a theme which is continued in his Tale, a sermon exemplum, preached for purely selfish purposes that spring from Pride yet ultimately culminate in an implicit act of public self-condemnation. Just like the Wife, he is so steeped in his particular sin that he recognizably encompasses all the other Deadly Sins in various guises as well. If she is unregenerate Eve, up to the old tricks of her “olde daunce”, he is her complementary unregenerate Adam.24 Most of all he is like the Wife of Bath because his Prologue and Tale are ingeniously incorporated in the very same kind of sermon structure. This brings us very close what Emile Legouis once defined as the two main themes of the Canterbury Tales: love and religion, the wife and the priest.25 Like the Wife also, he is readable as a refutation of Gower, this time exposing Genius’ two-faced service of God and Venus as timeserving (one cannot serve God and one’s own cupiditas simultaneously) and thus at the end of the day as a slipslide to damnation. The Pardoner’s Tale is not one of the tales whose analogue we find in Gower – regrettably so, for this would have been a most convincing piece of evidence. But we have the next best thing in the form of his Prologue, which contains several passages on his hypocrisy that are a close parallel to the Priest’s discussion of the same subject in the Confessio Amantis.26 True, the subject of religious hypocrisy is a familiar one in Chaucer’s day and could have come from a variety of sources. What points in Gower’s direction, besides his book’s nearness in time and place, is the presence of some textual correspondences that are too interesting to be dismissed as coincidence and are more readily explained as a memory traceable to the Confessio. 23

Benson, pp 904-05. Also see Chapter Six, under Koeppel’s Evidence. Robert P. Miller, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner’s Tale’, in Schoeck & Taylor: 221-244, at 241. 25 Emile Legouis, Geoffrey Chaucer (London: s.n., 1913), p 153. 26 Macaulay, vol ii: Confessio Amantis, Book I, ll.594-645. 24


It seems to me that a major key to understanding the inclusion of the Pardoner’s performance must lie in Gower’s profound anticlericalism. As Scanlon notes, much of the Confessio’s subject matter is dominated by Gower’s disgust of contemporary clerical abuse, which he sees as infecting the Church from high to low. And yet there is also a suggestion of being spellbound: “He is clearly as fascinated by the Church’s power to fabricate divine authority as he is appalled by it”.27 Are these aspects of clerical corruption and its fascination not reminiscent of the Pardoner? In his person Chaucer has created a character who is more perverse than anything that Gower comes up with and easily outdoes the worst of simoniacs in his book, yet weaves his own almost inextricable spell. In doing so, Chaucer shows himself well capable of rivalling Gower on his own speciality – something that also helps to explain why someone so given to innuendo rather than outspokenness should in the Pardoner’s case have gone overboard to record this person’s spiritual corruption in minute detail. What remains true of course is that lacking a parallel tale in the Confessio Amantis, the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale are necessarily less Gowerian than the Wife’s sermon with its analogue tale of Florent. Yet their striking and extensive correspondences with both the Wife of Bath and the Confessio mark them as further major evidence in support of a Gowerian inspiration of the Wife’s part in the Canterbury Tales, particularly since they serve to emphasize that we are indeed dealing with structural correspondences and allow us to discard the possibility of having misread random parallels. The points of accordance, including such reversed points as 1, 2 and 13, that the Pardoner’s account shares with the Confessio are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

27

a person driven by anger such a person’s confession the Seven Deadly Sins confessed to a Priest-like figure preaching extensive glossing of the Tale the portrayal of the Pardoner as a hypocrite along lines echoing the Confessio Amantis’ discussion of religious hypocrisy

Scanlon, p 260, and pp 248-97 generally.


7. the portrayal of the Pardoner as a simoniac along similar lines 8. a comprehensive sermon structure 9. the use of the confession as an integral part of the sermon 10. the preaching of a remedial sermon exemplum with a profane application. 11. the preaching of a remedial sermon exemplum with a spiritual application 12. the presence of a sermon within the sermon 13. a final judgement of the angry man. Both in the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner do we come across the curious phenomenon of a sermon within a a sermon. In the Wife’s case, this is true in a loose sense of the word. The loathly hag of her Tale preaches a lectio, adorned with various homiletic devices, on the theme that gentilesse is a matter of virtue. The Pardoner’s sermon that we find within his wider sermon is more complicated and the reason for this surprising exercise is not so easily understood. We recognize that Chaucer is here giving a virtuoso performance that leaves Gower far behind, but this fails to explain why he should have chosen such a wheels-within-wheels device. Perhaps, I am over-intellectualizing the problem and ought to read the situation as simply a reflection of Chaucer’s awareness that in a sense the entire Confessio represents one huge sermon composed of scores of internal sermonettes and a hint on his part that he understood this. Yet there is a perfectly good technical explanation possible as well, whose mechanics are discussed later. All of the above points also conform with, or provide a negative contrast to, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, which actually makes them very much alike. And so they can be shown to be. Wife and Pardoner confess to their sinful practices, they preach, and they stand convicted by their own words. Apart from this, they have some other mutual traits that further underline their close relationship: 1. the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are physically and spiritually sterile 2. they are complementary constructs, serving as the manifestations of an impenitent Adam and Eve


3. they are travelling salespersons, manipulators, scoffers, amorally preaching for their own profit and achieving their ends by hoodwinking their victims – the evil genii of the pilgrimage 4. their themes are closely related: both maistrie and cupiditas are plain facets of a perverted caritas 5. their narratives are significantly indebted to the Parson’s Tale, unlike any of the other tales 6. their tales both include a brief sermon within the wider sermon parameters 7. the Wife of Bath’s Loathly Lady and the Pardoner’s Old Man are demonstrably parallel constructs 8. the Wife and the Pardoner both get exposed explicitly: she in Lenvoy de Chaucer, he at the hands of a maddened Host 9. the exposure is effected in both cases through the addition of a second moralitas to the application of their tales (in the Wife’s case: Lenvoy de Chaucer). The Narrative Relation of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner While it is a wonderful surprise to find that the Testament of Love includes a prologue and tale from such an unexpected direction, it is not altogether easy to see how and where the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale fit into its scheme. Doubtless we must associate their writing directly with that of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Their evident conceptual and structural closeness strongly argues that we are dealing with the twin offspring of one and the same creative impulse. Yet this must not be taken to mean that Chaucer conjured them up at the drop of a hat. Rather, we should think in terms of the remodelling of earlier writing. There is a good case to be made for an earlier stage characterized by a retaliatory telling of tales, involving both the Shipman’s Tale and an earlier version of the Pardoner’s Tale. If this goes a long way to account for the Pardoner’s involvement, there may have been a further reason as well. What if Chaucer set out upon his Testament of Love by casting the Wife as a confessant and the Pardoner as her confessor? That such a division of parts did not work out ultimately is obvious but need not mean that he did not seriously look into its possibilities or actually tried it out.


In their narrative order and assuming them to have been planned initially as a literary duet, which is the most logical explanation of their extreme correspondence, we are obliged to take the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale with their extensive association with Gower to have been first in the original sequence of tales. This is a consideration that conforms to what we deduced earlier from the Man of Law’s Epilogue. Presumably, the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale were to have come immediately or very soon after the Wife. The alternative order, with the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale coming first, leading up as it were to the subsequent explosion in the shape of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and all that follows (which we find in Skeat’s edition and in the “Bradshaw shift”), does not bear close scrutiny. The idea of the Pardoner shrewdly realizing what the Wife’s preaching has been all about and attempting to outdo her is perfectly appropriate – whereas the Wife of Bath imitating the Pardoner (and a humiliated Pardoner at that, ultimately) is inconsistent with her independent stance and runs into all sorts of difficulty along the way. It is a plausible thought that Chaucer originally intended the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale to be a twin rebuttal of Gower, exposing Venus and her Priest (disguised as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner) as evil tempters at the wayside of man’s heavenward pilgrimage as well as demonstrating his own superiority. But if he did have such an answer to Gower in mind when he wrote the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, he must have discarded it soon after completing the Testament of Love and parked the Pardoner elsewhere. There is evidence of changes in both the ending of the Wife’s Prologue and the Pardoner’s Tale which may well be related to this.28 A major reason why these occurred may have been because Chaucer’s attention was in due course taken up by the Marriage Debate as a continuation of Gower’s love theme, which saw the Pardoner replaced by the Clerk and the Merchant as the ones best suited to provide a direct response to the Wife’s revolutionary view of marriage. Whatever their exact position in the Testament of Love, the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale provide ample corroboration of the inter28

Robert A. Pratt, ‘The Development of the Wife of Bath’, in: MacEdward Leach, ed. Studies in Medieval History in Honour of Professor Albert Croll Baugh (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1961): 45-79, considers the conception of the Wife of Bath to have covered a considerable period of time.


pretation that has been argued for the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale are a good key to all that the Wife of Bath expounds: they confirm the Seven Deadly Sin basis along confessional lines, they figure a narrator preaching largely along the lines of regular sermonizing procedure, they come up with a selfincriminating sermon exemplum, and even end upon a similar twist in the shape of an application that is meant to serve their own greedy ends but is ultimately their condemnation. They are a serendipitous control, an unlooked-for yardstick whereby any dissection of the Wife of Bath can be reliably checked. Of course, the reverse also holds good: the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale are an excellent key towards the unriddling of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. A point worth clarifying here is what I assume to be the exact relation of the Wife, Pardoner and Parson to their counterparts in the Confessio Amantis. As a lover with a highly Venerean streak the Wife of Bath is a plain amalgam of Venus and Amans, like whom she is also a senex amans. Her accomplished preaching further identifies her as someone comprising marked aspects of Genius the Priest in her make-up. Apparently, she was basically conceived to serve as an allround answer to Gower’s three major protagonists, just as her Prologue and Tale are sufficient as a solo reply to the Confessio itself. The Pardoner and the Parson are a different matter altogether. It seems to me that they both derive from the figure of the Priest, who serves the double and not always easy function of acting as Venus’ spokesman, which doctrinally comes down to serving a false god, and a true priest at the same time. What Chaucer appears to have done is assign his shadow side to the Pardoner, whom he proceeded to make a much darker character by turning him into the evil genius to the Canterbury undertaking. The Parson, on the other hand, reflects Genius’ good side but, as a truly good man, outperforms him by being stricter and thus better at the office of saving souls. The Original Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale In the above pages we have come across a variety of reasons why we should take the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Tale as something originally conceived as a twin answer to the challenge issued by Gower, with the Parson closely involved as the third party. As we noted there, the inference is that the Pardoner


was immediately preceded by the Wife in the initial order of tales but that, ultimately, new developments – chief of which may have been the creation of the so-called Marriage Group – caused Chaucer to place the Pardoner elsewhere. There are good indications that they were at one time closely linked together, engaged in a quarrel along the familiar lines of a retaliatory telling of tales, but that this was discarded when, after some considerable rewriting, Chaucer switched to the Marrriage Debate. This is how the original situation allows itself to be reconstructed. First of all, like all the other pilgrims, the Wife of Bath ought to have been invited by the Host to come forward with a tale. This part appears to be actually preserved in the Prologue, not at its head but beginning at line 184 and now assigned to the Pardoner. We have already seen that a substitution of “this Pardoner” by “oure goode Hoost” or something like it is easily effected. The passage itself is fully along Chaucer’s usual lines of introducing a tale. It is an entirely natural beginning and if the Wife of Bath’s Prologue had come down to us with its first 183 lines missing and actually reading “oure goode Hoost” where it now says “this Pardoner”, no one would ever have noticed or complained. But there is more: the invitation provides a perfect sequel to the lines upon which the Man of Law’s Epilogue ends. In point of fact, this realization helps us to understand one of the obscure aspects of the composition of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Man of Law’s Epilogue. Let us tackle the Epilogue first, because this will automatically lead us to the older Wife of Bath. For this, we must have another look at our amended version of Fisher’s reconstruction of the Epilogue’s original ending and add to this the Pardoner’s invitation for the Wife to tell her tale, but with the Pardoner now replaced by the Host. The first four lines [1178-81], as well as those preceding them, were evidently up for revision, but I include them because it gives us the Host scathingly introducing a new narrator, only to be overruled – as he has been before – by the Wife. The italics signal my incursions into Chaucer’s text, which partly follow John Fisher: “Now! goode men,” quod oure Hoste, “herkeneth me; Abydeth, for Goddes digne passioun, For we schal han a predicacioun; This Lollere heer wil prechen us somwhat.” “Nay, by my moder soule, that schal he nat!

The Testament of Love | 167 Seyde the Wyf of Bathe; “heer schal he nat preche;29 He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven alle in the grete God,”quod she*; “He wolde sowen som difficulte, Or springen cokkel in oure clene corn. And therfore, Hoost, I warne thee biforn, My joly body schal a tale telle, And I schal clynken you so mery a belle; That I schal waken al this compaignie. But it schal not ben of philosophie, Ne phislyas, ne termes queinte of lawe. Ther is but litel Latyn in my mawe!” [EpiMLT 1178-90] “Dame, I wolde praye yow, if youre wyl it were,” Seyde oure goode Hoost, “as ye began, Telle forth youre tale, spareth for no man, And teche us yonge men of youre praktike.” “Gladly,”quod she, “sith it may yow like; But yet I praye to al this compaignye, If that I speke after my fantasye, As taketh not agrief of that I seye. Now, sire, now wol I telle forth my tale. As evere moote I drynken wyn or ale, I shal seye sooth….” [WBP 184-95ff]

Even if, to judge by the rhyme, one or more lines have gone missing at the point of juncture, this is not just an excellent fit and appropriate introduction to the Wife’s story-telling, including the same sort of initial hemming and hawing that we find elsewhere. It also explains why her tone is so mild and her reply uses the polite form of address. In the version with which we are familiar she clashes firmly with the Pardoner and tells him off in emphatic terms of “thee” and “thou”, which is quite to the point, only to continue inexplicably in a different spirit with the rather incompatible “yow” and “sire”. Here this issue is well resolved. What evidently happened was that Gower’s challenge led Chaucer to decide on a new approach for the Prologue and start with a debate on serial marriage, lines 1-162, in order to introduce his new theme and to make this serve as the foundation for the Wife’s marriage advertisement within the sermon scheme that he had decided upon (see Chapter Seven). We realize that this passage, with its non29 I realize that, while the Wife of Bath is the obvious one to enter into the fray here, the scansion is faulty. Thus something like “goode wyfe” or a similar phrase is needed to get things truly in line.


confessional nature and heavy debt to St Jerome, is distinct from the Wife’s subsequent confession and its varied sources.30 It looks like something that was affixed to it without regard for the original introduction, which it ineffectualized. With a bit of reshuffling of a subsequent passage involving the Pardoner, Chaucer appears to have reassigned the Host’s invitation to the former, thereby overlooking or postponing a correction of telltale personal pronouns. Another consequence of this intervention was that the Man of Law’s Epilogue was left dangling, though, given some revision, still potentially serviceable as an introduction to the Wife. It was preserved among Chaucer’s papers, but probably required too much rewriting for Chaucer to use it again soon. Its unrevised state suggests that the uncoupling of the Wife of Bath from the Sergeant of the Law was either a definitive one or something whose revision he never got around to. We deduce this from the consideration that a proper link between the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath is a high-priority requirement for the Testament of Love, as this figures the Man of Law as the Wife’s herald. For reasons which are obscure at this point Chaucer appears to have failed to come up with any such link and, instead, took pains to transform the Host’s original invitation into a witty interruption on the Pardoner’s part. The Host’s invitation to the Wife of Bath was most probably followed by an account of her “praktike” to fit those of the heroine of her old tale. As we shall find later,31 the tripartite division of the Wife’s marital account as we know it is intimately associated with her sermonizing and further serves to expose her as an inveterate sinner, two aspects which are directly referrable to Gower’s challenge. Doubtless her old Prologue was briefer. Similarly, it is a likely assumption that there were not so many husbands to begin with and that both her portrait in the General Prologue and her own Prologue were at some time rewritten to come up with the number of five marriages. The five-husband situation is directly associated with the passage about Christ and the Samaritan, whose implication and signalling function are elements crucial not just to her defence of serial marriage but to her whole sermon, so that it does not seem probable that it should have been present at an earlier stage. 30 31

Benson, pp 864-67. See Chapter Seven, The Wife of Bath’s Sermon.


Thus one feels that original situation for the Wife of Bath’s Prologue was, at most, an account of her first three marriages, garnished with some of the usual trappings that we find with headlinks. This need not have gone much beyond what is now line 222, which is where she takes up the subject of her chiding practices, though we shall come across indications that parts of the later passages were also present already.32 In fact, the entire subject of serial marriage looks like a later addition, so that it is well worth considering whether there may not have been just one old and cuckolded husband in the first place who was later expanded into the three that we are familiar with. This would provide an agreeable fit with the plot of the Shipman’s Tale, the tale that we believe to have been formerly assigned to her and which cannot be thought to have gained anything by the multiplicity of marriages that we are familiar with. It also agrees well with the various passages in which she describes how she treated her old husbands but speaks as if there was only one. And, as we shall find in Chapter Seven, the extra husbands were probably introduced for trinal reasons (three old husbands and three types of husband) when the Wife’s prologue was rewritten in order to serve as part of a sermon and the need came up for something threefold by way of divisiones. The extensive passage about the Wife’s chiding or some place very much like it seems a natural moment for the Pardoner to have popped up with his impertinent remarks: Up stirte the Pardoner, and that anon; “Now, dame,” quod he, “by God and by Seint John! Ye been a noble prechour in this cas. I was aboute to wedde a wyf; allas! What sholde I bye it on my flessh so deere? Yet hadde I levere wedde no wyf to-yeere!” [WBP, 163-68]

Such an interruption in the middle of her account of her shabby treatment of her old husband(s) would have been a much better situation for the Pardoner to sting her than the present conclusion of her defence of serial marriage, which is all about her willingness to engage in sexual activity in the marital bed and hardly the deterrent that he is implying. The word “prechour” could be a later addition, but 32

In particular, see Chapter Five on The Blocks of Sin in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue,.


may just as well have been a fortunate choice of word from the very beginning. When later Chaucer remade the Prologue this part was shifted to line 163 and coupled to the Host’s original invitation for the Wife to tell her story. One feels that, just as in the present situation, the Pardoner with his high, unmanly voice threatened to make an immediate fool of her and she consequently retaliated at once. She snubbed him firmly,33 “Abide!” quod she, “my tale is nat begonne. Nay, thou shalt drynken of another tonne, Er that I go, shal savoure wors than ale.” [WBP, 169-71]

This allows itself to be read as a perfect announcement of a tale that is to be told in retribution for the Pardoner’s impertinence. From here the natural step would have been for her to inveigh (give or take a few characteristic asides) against “pardoners and othere hooly freres”. We find exactly such a passage in her present tale where it covers lines 857-81, replacing “pardoners” by “lymytours”. This passage about the magic of life being driven out by “the grete charitee and prayeres/Of lymytours and othere hooly freres” who infest the country really belongs with quaestores, for, surely, its conclusion is much better suited to our Pardoner: Wommen may go now saufly up and doun. In every bussh or under every tree Ther is noon oother incubus but he, And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour. [WBT, 878-81]

The meaning of the last two lines is that “the incubus always caused conception” but the friar brings “only dishonour upon a woman”.34 As a prick against the Friar, this is a meaningless insinu33 Not everybody seems to be susceptible to the Wife’s waspish voice. Kittredge, for one, writes that she reacts to the Pardoner “with great good humour, jocosely threatening further revelations”. Chaucer and His Poetry, (1915; Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1946), pp 187. So, too, Helen Storm Corsa, Chaucer, Poet of Mirth and Morality, (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1964), pp 136, who sides with the Wife’s feminism and reads her snappish reaction as something “genial, almost benign”. 34 Benson, p 873, n. 881. Cf also Nicholas K. Kiessling: ‘D878-881’, ChauR 7 (1972): 113-16, who feels the incubus remark to refer to the violence of the incubus rather than its capacity to cause conception. I do not think that the context warrants any such interpretation. For the prick at the Friar’s virility, see Theodore Silverstein, ‘The Wife


ation, as there is nothing in the Tales to suggest that his virility is in doubt. But as a retained bit of nastiness at the address of the Pardoner, the “geldyng” or “mare” of the company, it makes good sense. In this connection, we may note that various commentators have remarked that the Pardoner speaks “as if he belonged to a mendicant order.”35 It has been proposed, among other things, that he is meant to be seen as a renegade Dominican Friar, a supposition that finds some support in the consideration that the Dominicans were the century’s preachers par excellence.36Also, the Pardoner’s remark on the vita apostolica,37 which he rejects (“I wol noon of the apostles countrefete”) points in this direction, the implication being that he is one who by rights ought to follow this path. Thus, a Pardoner-Friar switch may have been facilitated and duly effected by their easy associability. Another consideration is that, if the Wife’s remarks really apply to the Friar, we ought to be in for some retaliation on his part, in full conformity with Chaucer’s wont, when he gets to tell his tale. Yet we come across nothing of the kind there, whereas various passages in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale do appear to point to her. There is a further reason why the Wife’s present outburst is an important piece of the puzzle. These opening lines of the Wife of Bath’s Tale are a digression, thematically irrelevant to her subject beyond introducing the Arthurian setting but well-suited to the tale that she told earlier, the Shipman’s Tale with its hypocritical and lecherous opportunist priest, Daun John. It is true that in the final version that we know the Friar has just made a slight joke at her expense, even though it is a restrained one that implicitly warns her not to play with fire. Given the Wife’s evident allergy to clerics, her complaint is credible, but too strident, all the same. The Friar, however, seems just a later replacement of the Pardoner, as we see when we compare their interruptions:

of Bath and the Rhetoric of Enchantment; or, How to Make a Hero See in the Dark’, MP 58 (1954): 153-73. 35 Robinson, p 730 note 416. 36 Hinckley, p 45. Other suggestions are that he may be a mendicant friar (Benson, p 907 note 416) or an Austin canon: Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p 286; Marie P. Hamilton, ‘The Credentials of Chaucer’s Pardoner’, JEGP 40 (1941): 48-57. 37 R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp 280-83.

172 | The Testament of Love “Now, dame,” quod he, “by God and by seint John! Ye been a noble precchour in this cas”. [WBP, 164-65] “Now dame,” quod he, “so have I joye or blis, This is a long preamble of a tale”. [WBP, 830-31]

What the Friar also duplicates is the Pardoner’s function of introducing a retaliatory telling of tales. His words lead to a direct clash between himself and the Summoner, only to result in a punitive exchange. The implication is of course that the original Wife-Pardoner relation was similarly subject to such retribution. Let us go back to the Wife’s lashing words on the omnipresent and lecherous clergy infesting her world which are so well-suited to the Merchant of St Denis but solely contribute a small point to her present Tale. Here they are followed up by her story of the rapist knight brought to heel by the Loathly Lady. However, within this story we find a digression on women who “kan no conseil hyde” [WBT, 980] – the Wife’s own version of the tale of Midas’ ears. Once again this is a matter that, while sufficiently suited to the general tenor of her confession, does not seem to contribute anything new to either her portrait or her Tale. As Robertson points out, it reveals her spiritual deafness as typical of “someone who has undergone exactly the progress of Midas” and persists in allowing sensuality to dominate her reason.38 Its inclusion is rather unnecessary, since this aspect of the Wife is monolithically present throughout her Prologue and Tale and hardly warrants further emphasis, while the subject of being unable to keep a secret has no bearing on the Tale and may even be felt to detract from the maistrie argument which she so cogently puts forward. She is, admittedly, a great talker and easily sidetracked, so that this excursion is not difficult to take as a sardonic comment on Chaucer’s part, but it clashes with the narrative economy of most of her Tale’s continuation and does not in any significant sense contribute to it. Of course this is speculation but the Midas story becomes much more understandable if we take it to be a retained element of the Wife’s original introduction to what is now the Shipman’s Tale. The lady of this tale is precisely one of this sort, all too willing to betray even her bedroom secrets to the false monk Daun John. In doing so she uses almost the same words:

38

Robertson, ‘ Midas’: 1-20.

The Testament of Love | 173 Ful lief were me this conseil for to hyde, But out it moot; I may namoore abyde. [ShipT, 159-60]

This is the perfect environment for the Wife’s digression on Midas, whose wife had the selfsame difficulty with bottling up her conseil, and thus a much better situation to relate it to. Not surprisingly, the Pardoner picks this up in his tale when he inveighs against those in “whom that drynke hath dominacioun”. Such people “kan no conseil kepe” [PardT, 561]. We shall come back to this again. Meanwhile, we may note the presence of an earlier passage in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue that is similarly concerned with the keeping of the Wife’s conseil. It is found early in her account of her affair with Jankyn but looks back upon the way she dealt with her “housbonde”. From the context, we take this to be her fourth husband but in point of fact it could be just as well any of her old husbands or even better – as suggested by her use of the singular – the single old husband who has been proposed for the original situation. For this reason, it is not at all impossible that this passage was part of the original prologue, too, leading up to her Midas digression. The passage that we are talking of is the one about her gossip, her namesake Alisoun: She knew myn herte, and eek my privetee, Bet than our parisshe preest, so moot I thee! To hire biwreyed I my conseil al. For hadde myn housbonde pissed on a wal, Or doon a thyng that sholde han cost his lyf, To hire, and to another worthy wyf, And to my nece, which that I loved weel, I wolde han toold his conseil every deel. [WBP, 533-38]

These lines, with their ironical sequence of her heart’s secrets revealed only to her closest confidante and then to another worthy wife and then to her niece as well, would have been an excellent introduction of the Midas passage. Note, too, that the passage involved deals with the betrayal of bedroom secrets, which is something that is easily related to the heroine of the Shipman’s Tale. Whether so introduced or not, the Midas passage would have helped the Wife to get to the essentials of her original tale. It fits her well, for it is all about a fickle wife who is both mercenary and willing to overstep the bounds of marriage and whose voice and sentiments we recognize as identical to hers. Also, the notion that it was shifted


away bodily together with the Wife’s original prologue sits well with the reassignation of her old tale to a new, this time male, narrator. If we accept that Chaucer worked along a system whereby major inconsistencies were generally ironed out but minor ones were left in abeyance (which may have been bound up with the manuscript status), this leaves us with a very acceptable result. Clearly there was no way that it could have been preserved as an introductory passage to the Merchant of St Denis, while its preservation as part of the Wife of Bath’s narrative produced no special problems, even if it was somewhat redundant. There is an interesting suggestion here of Chaucer as a parsimonious writer seeking to hold on to whatever he had written so far. As a way of putting paid to the Pardoner the Wife’s old tale is less successful – it does expose lechery and hypocrisy in the shape of one of its protagonists, Daun John, but leaves the wife of the tale open to much the same charges. The very same sort of vulnerability resides in the Midas story, which she maltreats frightfully. In doing so she provides ample grounds for refuting her, with special emphasis on spiritual deafness and blindness. It seems to me that this is intentional, serving to provide a firm basis for the old Pardoner to come to grips with the lady, along lines much like those proposed by Robertson.39 The Pardoner’s Original Reaction Very likely, this vulnerability of the Wife’s tale was intentional. In my reconstruction it enables the Pardoner, nothing loth, to use this in order to repay her, with a tale much like the one that we are familiar with but without any extended Prologue or the Sins of the Tavern and with a different outcome of his preaching efforts: the Wife of Bath being grudgingly compelled to come up and offer her groat (see below). There may have been a Prologue, but – as is largely true for the Wife of Bath as well – the one that we know was evidently written with an eye to Gower’s challenge. As a compound answer to the Gowerian requirements of a confession of all-out sinfulness and sermonizing at the same time, it can in its entirety hardly have been part of the original situation. Similarly, the Tavern Sins are so clearly indebted to the Parson’s Tale and authors such as St Jerome and Innocent III (see Chapter Six) that a late inclusion is hard to gainsay. 39

Robertson, ‘Midas’: 1-20.


So what we are talking about, basically, is a Prologue which need not have been more than a brief headlink and a Tale that did not yet include the Sins of the Tavern. Interestingly, it seems well possible to retrieve the Pardoner’s original theme. It is a familiar datum that the Pardoner preaches a sermon which is set to the theme of Radix malorum est cupiditas. Yet anyone willing to stop and consider for a moment will realize that this is nowhere near the real theme that is illustrated by the exemplum of the three rioters, for plainly this is that the wages of sin is death. True, there is an element of cupiditas in the rioters’ hasardie but it is not displayed in any striking fashion. Swearing and gluttony are even less appropriate to the subject of cupiditas. However, all three fit in well with the old moral of the Tale. The rioters are not motivated by greed but by a proud desire to find and eradicate Death. What this suggests is that Chaucer’s reconstruction of the Pardoner’s part first led him to come up with a set of divisiones drawn from the Tale’s basic moral on the wages of sin. Only at a later moment, presumably when he had come up with the idea of the egoswollen Pardoner brought to heel through his own avarice, did he substitute this by the new theme of radix malorum est cupiditas. Yet even this need not have been a great step away from the original effort. The Parson gives us to understand that Pride is also the “roote of alle harmes” [387]. As this is much closer to the true moral of the Tale, it may therefore well be – as I believe – that the Pardoner’s cupiditas is simply a replacement of an earlier superbia. Even if the Prologue is a later innovation, its description of the Pardoner’s way of repaying those who have offended him is much to the point: it is all innuendo, oblique and nasty little hints which are understood by all and enable him to quash those to whom has taken a dislike. He is a bully, but a most insidious and reptilian one. …whan I dar noon oother weyes debate, Thanne wol I stynge hym with my tonge smerte In prechyng, so that he shal nat asterte To been defamed falsly, if that he Hath trespased to my bretheren or to me. For though I telle noght his propre name, Men shal wel knowe that it is the same, By signes, and by othere circumstances. Thus quyte I folk that doon us displesances; Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe Of hoolynesse, to semen hooly and trewe. [PardT, 412-22]


To judge by these words and assuming that Chaucer’s conception of the Pardoner himself never substantially changed, any retaliation on the Pardoner’s part ought to be along these lines – nasty little comments whose object is to pull the intended victim down and smear him as much as he can. In this light, retribution for the Wife’s sally ought to be along very similar lines, since the Wife has so manifestly “trespased” against him. Given the Pardoner’s present admission of his “quytynge” practices it is a logical assumption that he is speaking with an eye to getting even with one of his fellow-pilgrims. In the final version of the Canterbury Tales, this is the poor Host, who is altogether innocent of having given offence. There is a good chance that what we have here is a memory of the earlier situation in which it was the Wife who was repaid for her snub. Given Chaucer’s frequent reluctance to throw out useful material, it may well be that part or parts of the original denouement are still around. The most likely passage for this is where the Pardoner describes his gaude (ploy, trick) of expressly forbidding unfaithful wives to come forward and be absolved by him: Goode men and wommen, o thyng warne I yow: If any wight be in this chirche now That hath doon synne horrible, that he Dar nat, for shame, of it yshryven be. Or any womman, be she yong or old, That hath ymaad hir housbonde cokewold, Swich folk shal have no power ne no grace To offren to my relikes in this place. [PardP, 377-84]

What he says is that only faithful wives can come forward, implying that those who do not are cuckolding their husbands, thus effectively blackmailing the wives in his audience to come forward and pay up. It is such a good trick that in the back of our minds some of us will have wondered why Chaucer did not put it to better effect, with such a one as the Wife of Bath among the fellowship, but of course we should not have. If I am correct, he did, but was obliged to discard it later. Within a context of the Pardoner attempting to put paid to the Wife of Bath, this is the natural handle for him to have compelled her to pay up. Though she is scandalously adulterous, in the spirit if not in the flesh, the Wife’s disclaimers are loud and clear in the Prologue that we are familiar with and doubtless were equally so in the earlier


situation, which makes her an obvious mark for the Pardoner. In fact, as the sole “wyf” in the company she would have been put on the spot without any discernible route of escape. Thus what it all comes down to is that the original version of the Pardoner’s Tale may have been directed at bringing the Wife to heel by a sneaky sales ploy from which she was unable to disentangle herself. This would have happened at the conclusion of his tale, at the moment that he comes up with what we now distinguish as his “sample” offertory. Now this is not just a wild guess. It is something that is strongly suggested by the outcome of our forthcoming discussion of the Pardoner-Shipman link, which adduces further reason to assume that the original Pardoner’s Tale must have ended on very much such a note. Possibly, too, it was here that Lenvoy de Chaucer came in, though without its Griseld references. Its sardonic voice, so unsuited to the Clerk’s Tale, would have been quite appropriate here, as is the fashion in which it outlines her sins, which would have been a natural follow-up of a tale dealing with this subject. This has brought us very close to what I believe to have been the pre-challenge Pardoner’s Tale. Within the confines of the proposed quarrel, this results in an agreeable fitting of tales. The Wife’s old tale deals with a mercenary, adulterous and very Dame Alice-like wife and a clever cleric, the hypocritical and lecherous Daun John who uses a loan from her husband to seduce her into prostituting herself, the upshot being that – the money having been spent – the husband gets repaid by “taillynge”, payment in bed of what the Middle Ages referred to as the marriage debt but done here most meretriciously. Our reconstructed context for the initial Pardoner’s Tale comes up with very much the same themes. What if both were first written with this in mind and, with a variety of ironical shifts of emphasis, our adulterous and mercenary Wife of Bath was, in the end and in spite of her cautionary tale of unscrupulous clerics lying in wait to cash in on faithless females, most fittingly made to part with her money by a clever and equally mercenary hypocrite, and quite a lecher at that: Daun John the Pardoner? It is worth noting, in this context, that as many as 32 manuscripts read the Host’s initial address to the Pardoner not as “Thou beel ami, thou Pardoner” but “Thou beel ami, John Pardoner”.40 40

Hamilton: 53.


The Evidence of the Pardoner-Shipman End-Link All this accords well with what we learn from the PardonerShipman endlink, a major piece of support for the above reading. This passage, found in as many as nineteen manuscripts, connects the Pardoner’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale. Manly/Rickert have this:41 Nowe frendes saide oure oost so dere How lykith you by John the pardoner For he hath unbokeled wel the male He hath us told right a thrifty tale As touching of mysgovernaunce I pray to god yeve hym good chaunce As ye have herd of thise riotoures three Now gentil Maryner hertily I pray thee Telle us a good tale and that right anon Hit schal be done by god and by seint John Saide this Marynere as wel as ever I can And right anon his tale he bygan.

Here is the same John Pardoner again and his Tale is the same, too, “of thise riotoures three”, but there is not the slightest hint of any grievous clash between Pardoner and Host. The Host’s tone is jovial, as is his parting prayer that “god yeve hym [the Pardoner] good chaunce”. This and his remark that John the Pardoner “hath unbokeled wel the male” indicate a sermon that did not end in the familiar debâcle but resulted in an actually effected loosening of purse strings, in full conformity with the proposal that someone, the Wife of Bath presumably, was originally made or meant to be made to pay up. The problem here is of course the status of this link. It is no great writing, corrupt, not found in any of the major manuscripts like Ellesmere or Hengwrt and, since a transition from Pardoner to Shipman provides a most improbable sequence, regarded as spurious by all the modern editors.42 Thus, it does not seem to have much in its favour, which is obviously why in modern times it has been rejected as a scribal/editorial invention used to combine two tales in Chaucer’s style in the absence of some other appropriate link. It is also the evi41

Benson, p 1130 note 968; Manly/Rickert, vol. iv, pp 495-96. Robinson also gives this link (p 895) but, curiously, comes up with a much more corrupt version drawn from the Petworth MS. 42 Manly/Rickert, vol iv, pp 495-96; vol vii, p 110; Robinson, p 895; Benson, p 1130.


dent reason why no modern editor has taken the trouble to adapt it to editorial interpunction and spelling conventions. Yet if this is so, why is it that it poses such a puzzle once we consent to linger on its contents and its composition? Let us start with some common sense. It is patently foolish to act as if Chaucer never wrote any mediocre or even bad verse for the Canterbury Tales, as Norman Blake would agree. There certainly are other links which are just as mechanical yet are uncritically accepted as being Chaucer’s. Stanza 1212a-g at the end of the Clerk’s Tale is an excellent case in point and much the same can be said for the officially approved Shipman’s end-link. Next, how is it possible for anyone with any notion of the contents of the Pardoner’s Tale to have come up with a link like this? The answer is that it is not. Neither the dullest-witted scribe nor the drowsiest editor could have invented something like this. The Pardoner’s fall is so monumental that it beggars belief that some deluded scribe or editor could have unflinchingly composed a link that so flagrantly denies this and suggests a jolly success for a jolly good fellow. It could be argued that the phrase “unbokeled wel the male” is used here in the fashion that we come across it in the Miller’s Prologue [3115], where is it used to mean that “the game is well bigonne”.43 This fails to work, however, for there it applies to the opening moves of the early Canterbury Tales, the place where the game did begin. Here the context of the link does not allow any such interpretation and plainly refers to the Pardoner’s own words on this point. That this is how things were also read in the early days is clear from the Sloane 1685 MS, British Library, which has a variant reading of “oure male”.44 The expression as such, while no doubt colloquial, is of good Chaucerian standing. A further and crucial puzzle is that, even though the link is invariably used to introduce the Shipman’s Tale, the internal evidence is that it was not originally written for this purpose. Its twelve lines, possibly adapted here and there by the scribes and equally possibly garbled in some places, are unlike the execrable inventions that we occasionally come across in manuscripts. In fact, their scansion is pleasantly if uninspiredly Chaucerian throughout, until it breaks down at lines 8 to 11, which are precisely those that introduce the Shipman: 43 44

Benson, p 66 note 3115. Manly/Rickert, vol vii, p 110.

180 | The Testament of Love Now gentil Maryner hertily45 I preye thee [8] Telle us a good tale and that right anon. [9] It schal be don by God and by seint John [10] Saide this Maryner as wel as ever I can. [11]

These lines are manifestly corrupt and the reason why is also manifest: they have been altered by the insertion of the Shipman here. At some time a scribe or editor replaced the originally announced narrator by the “gentil Maryner” with little consideration for their scansion. This is why line 8 is a mess. The word “Maryner” breaks up its metre, resulting in unnatural and crippled iambics, implying at the same time that the rest of the line is authentic. Replace it by something like “Sire” or “Dame” (and hence “thee” by “ye”) and the metre evens out most agreeably. Line 9 is a similar mess. “Telle us a myrie tale right anon” or something similar ought not to have been too difficult to come up with. The fact that it is not there in the first place implies, of course, that the original tale called for was not one of the merry ones, such as the Shipman’s, but a moral one: “Telle us a moral tale right anon”. Someone replaced “moral” (or an equivalent) by “good” and got into trouble with the rest of the line.46 Line 10 scans all right, but is clearly extraneous. The swearing looks as if it was lifted straight from the Pardoner (see WBP, 164) and is therefore suspect. The best guess is that it was inserted here as a replacement of an earlier line, in order to paint a traditionally illmouthed sailor. Line 11, another crippled line, offers us two options as to finding out who the original narrator was. If “Saide this…” was part of the original line, which is by no means certain, we can read this with somewhat curious stress on the final -e of “saide”. In this case the line requires a single (stressed) syllable in the place of the Maryner’s three, thus indicating that, if the rest of the line is authentic, the intended next speaker was one of those with a monosyllabic name or a 45

Manly/Rickert give “hertly” in vol iv, p 495 and “hertily” in vol vii, p 110. Robinson’s version has “hertely” (p 895). Benson’s glossary (p 1257) gives “hertly” as the adjectival form but this is not supported by the Middle English Dictionary, which makes no so such distinction. The final –y is an editorial modernization. 46 It could of course be argued that the Parson, in introducing his own profoundly moral Tale, uses myrie an exegetical synonym for moral. This, however, it is entirely dependent on its context there. Here nothing of the kind is involved and, anyway, a replacement of myrie is precisely the one thing that would have been absolutely superfluous, even if it were used in the Parson’s sense.


bisyllabic one ending in optionally pronounced -e, such as Reeve, Cook, Wife, Clerk, Monk, Nun and Priest. The other option is to read the line with final -e elided in “saide thís”. On this basis, only names whose second syllable is or can be stressed may be inserted here: Merchant (Marchánt), Parson (Persoún) and, to be precise, Chaucer (Chaucér) are the sole ones to fit the bill. All these considerations show that the Pardoner-Shipman link as a scribal/editorial invention is simply not a viable notion. What we do have is scribal/editorial intervention in lines 8-11 of an already existing link written to introduce someone other than the Shipman. As the link is not merely found with the Pardoner but also very plainly refers back to him, the most logical conclusion is that it represents an original link for him that was discarded by Chaucer but preserved in his Nachlass and put to new use by some later editor. Other options do not work out, since none of them can account for its “happy” conclusion of the Pardoner’s preaching. This discarding is a thing that we may suppose to have happened when Chaucer altered the application of the Pardoner’s sermon and uncoupled the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale from the Wife of Bath. Thus, the inference here is that the link must basically be authentic Chaucer and originally written for the Pardoner, at an early stage of the development of his tale when, presumably, the cuckold ploy was still in force. It looks to all intents and purposes like one of what I would term his “stop-gap” links, brief provisional links that were temporarily inserted for the probable reason of establishing a narrative order. What we may suppose to have happened is that, though discarded, it was preserved among Chaucer’s papers and put to its present use by a scribe or editor in need of a suitable link. Its plain reference to the Pardoner and its verbal echoing of the Tale itself made it an obvious choice. Out of deference to Chaucer or simply because this person was a careless reader and overlooked how much its “unbuckling” differs from the actual ending or because he evidently was not much of an improviser anyway (or any combination of these options), he left the Pardoner’s part unaltered and solely adapted the lines needed to introduce the next narrator. Naturally, this situation must whet our curiosity. If I am right about this, the original Pardoner’s Tale was followed by a moral tale and the link’s scansion tells us, after elimination of the impossible, that this was told by either the Merchant, the Parson or Chaucer or,


alternatively, the Clerk, the Prioress (Nonne) or the Monk. A brief parade past these six shows that there is not really much of a choice. The Merchant’s Tale is not a moral one, even if it is used to facilitate a moral debate. The Parson is not much of a choice, either. His present tale could never have been the one referred to and there are no convincing indications as to any present-day tale that he might have told before. Chaucer the pilgrim is another matter, of course. We already know him as the abortive narrator of Sir Thopas and recipient of one shifted tale (Melibee), so that it is not impossible for him to have been the provisional narrator of a further tale, in abeyance of a new place to be found for it. On this point we simply have no information to go by. Of the choices with optional -e, the Prioress (Nonne) can be rejected without too much of a problem. Her tale is concerned with entirely different matters than the ones at hand and she is too wellsuited to the one that she pronounces. The Clerk’s Tale is more interesting. It is certainly a moral one and much concerned with Testament of Love matters. It is also old enough to have been an early part of the Canterbury Tales. The problem is that it is not concerned with the Pardoner but with the Wife of Bath instead, as underlined by its Lenvoy de Chaucer. Our best option altogether is the Monk’s Tale. True, the Monk, as described in the General Prologue, is not a moral person, yet his Tale with its case histories of the downfall of important historical characters is eminently suited. When we consider how ultimately the Pardoner has a great fall among the pilgrims, it is tempting to think that this was somehow inspired by the Monk’s instances and that these originally constituted the tale to follow the former. They would certainly would have provided a good fit, with implicit moral reproof of the Pardoner’s pride, especially if Chaucer should have added some words in the concluding link on how this also applied to him. As it is, we do not have any such lines. Yet it is worth noting that both the Monk’s Tale itself and its links, the Prologue of the Monk’s Tale and its epilogue (usually known as the Prologue of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale) show good indications of successive rewriting efforts and tale shifting.47 Needless to say, these are activities that are also easily associated with the Testament of Love. The rewriting is particularly striking in the links, which reveal a Monk quite unlike the 47

Benson, pp 928, 935.


one who figures in the General Prologue: despite the host’s attempt to tickle his sense of humour, this Monk is an austere and serious cleric and well-deserving of being qualified as moral. In the Canterbury Tales as we know them it seems clear that the links serve to adapt the teller to his Tale, which makes it a likely thought that his portrait in the General Prologue was due for revision – one of the many cases perhaps in which this was postponed until it was too late. However, what if all this should stem from the time of Chaucer’s old solution for the Pardoner when, in view of the 20-odd portraits that he had so far written for the General Prologue, there was no good choice of pilgrim for him to assign the countervoice to, unless he rethought the part of the Monk? Having done so, in the shape of links showing a moral Monk, he now had a tale that was well-suited to warn the high-and-mighty Pardoner of the vicissitudes of Fortune. It seems to me that this is also where the story of Croesus comes in, which has been noted as an appropriate ending but provides a bad fit with the tale’s Modern Instances, a later interpolation of recent victims of the turning of Fortune’s wheel. The “riche Cresus” provides an excellent peg on which to conjecture a moral conclusion about vanitas and the shortsightedness of trusting in the lures of transient life, especially money, the very sort of points that the Pardoner makes in his own tale but without any apparent self-reflection. Thus, it is an attractive supposition that the Modern Instances stem from the time when, in the process of coming up with his capsule Testament of Love, Chaucer was obliged to restructure both the Pardoner’s and Monk’s parts. Yet if this was the case he stayed close to the original situation. This is because here he hit upon the felicitous notion of turning the Pardoner into another one of the Monk’s case histories, as it were, which is the observable situation when the Pardoner is made to come to his fall. With the new message spelled out large and clear, however, the Monk’s Tale would have been quite superfluous and hence reassigned to a different place, together – presumably – with sufficient alterations in the links to make them fit their new context. In this connection, it may even be that the Pardoner’s transformation into a modern instance was itself the impetus that inspired Chaucer to flesh out the tale with the Modern Instances that we are familiar with.


Further Suggestions of a Wife-Pardoner Quarrel While the chief outline of the Pardoner’s original retaliation thus shows itself to be quite gratifyingly tractable, what about other indications of the Wife-Pardoner quarrel? The major area where one seems to come across these is the matter of the Sins of the Tavern in the Pardoner’s sermon. As much a “quyter” as the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner is one who seeks to strike at his opponent’s weak points. Assuming that he has a specific person in mind, the obvious passage is the one dealing with the Sins of the Tavern. This is where he comes down quite heavily on Gluttony, Hazardry and Swearing. In terms of the quarrel Hazardry is chiefly window dressing, though important for the tale itself, which leaves us Gluttony and Swearing – two sins which are easily linked to the Wife of Bath. This leads us to an interesting refinement in our reconstruction of the genesis of the Pardoner’s Tale. As we shall find, the Sins of the Tavern are identifiable as late inclusions that we must associate with the Testament of Love by dint of their debt to St Jerome, Innocent III, John of Salisbury and the Parson’s Tale.48 This is something that we also deduce from their tripartite nature, which is directly bound up with the divisiones of the full sermon that they are part of and which, in this form, we assume therefore not to have been included until Testament of Love times. It is further and fundamentally borne out by the textual condition of the Tale. Its Flanders opening with its company of revellers is interrupted by the Pardoner’s triple exposition of sin, only to return to its natural story-line when this is finished. Its rough going has been remarked on by many scholars and has sometimes been characterized as shoddy work.49 It is undeniable that the Sins of the Tavern break up the tale’s narrative flow. So why do we not eliminate them and see what result we get? In Flaundres whilom was a compaignye Of yonge folk that haunteden folye, As riot, hasard, stywes, and tavernes, Where as with harpes, lutes, and gyternes, They daunce and pleyen at dees bothe day and nyght, 48

See Chapter Six, under Koeppel’s Evidence. Benson, p 909 note 661; Carleton Brown, The Pardoner’s Tale (1935; Oxford: OUP, 1970), p xvi; Gordon Hall Gerould, Chaucerian Essays (Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1952), p 64.

49

The Testament of Love | 185 And eten also and drynken over hir myght. [ParsT, 463-68] Thise riotoures – thre – of whiche I telle,50 Long erst er prime rong of any belle, Were set hem in a taverne for to drynke…[ParsT, 661-63]

With some adapted interpunction (which is an editorial matter anyway), the story now moves smoothly. This offers another piece of confirmation that the Tavern Sins ought to be regarded as extraneous and later interpolations on Chaucer’s part. Markedly similar incursions are found in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, as we have noted above and shall discuss in greater detail in Chapter Five. Now if these Sins are late and to be associated with the Testament of Love yet also applicable to the Wife of Bath, this suggests that at the time of their insertion, which was plainly done with an eye to upgrading the Pardoner’s homiletics, Chaucer was still thinking and writing within the parameters of a Wife-Pardoner quarrel. This indicates that the Pardoner was first to be reconstituted and that the Wife followed later. Later, other considerations, probably related to Chaucer’s new solution for the Wife’s part and the Pardoner’s altered status, caused him to reconsider and throw out the quarrel altogether. Thus, when next we turn to the Wife, we find the Pardoner removed from the reach of the Wife’s anger in spite of all his provocation and assigned a more innocent role with respect to her. The old quarrel is no longer in force, which effectively indicates that the Wife’s rewriting must have followed upon that of the Pardoner. Though this makes things somewhat more intricate, it is nonetheless a welcome indication, as it sheds light on matters that would otherwise have remained obscure. The intricacy chiefly revolves around the consideration that if the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale were first redone with his quarrel with the Wife of Bath still in force, they must have been revised anew after having definitively been phased out by Chaucer’s rewriting of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. 50 Although they are well suited to the Tavern Sins, I have retained lines 465-68 for two reasons. One is that their use of riot provides a natural transition to the subsequent riotoures. The other is the evident need for some lines to have passed in order to enable Chaucer to return to the company at hand and resume his tale along the lines that we find here. For the rest, I believe that the simple emendation of putting thre between dashes in line 661 effectively solves the redactional problem of narrative (dis)continuity that has so often been remarked upon, though Chaucer could also have intended a subclause here: “[of ] thre of whiche I telle”.


There are three Sins of the Tavern: hasardry, swearing and gluttony. In the version that we are familiar with gluttony has become a side-issue – for the Pardoner’s ultimate selection proves to be made on the basis of bad language. For this, there are just two natural candidates among the fellowship: the Host, who is a taverner himself, and the Wife of Bath. Though the Host – a gross and violent swearer throughout – is made the Pardoner’s dupe, the original and logical choice is the Wife of Bath, as she is the only one to have given him cause for wishing to “quyte” himself and the other truly great swearer among the entire fellowship to boot. “By God” says the Pardoner in line 457 when he expresses his hope that his tale shall be to the others’ liking. As we shall see elsewhere, the Pardoner’s infrequent swearing is fundamentally a matter of mimesis, as a way of insinuating what he means, something to which he refers as signs.51 The exception is “by seint John”, which is really a personal signature on the Pardoner’s part, John being a familiar nickname for pardoners and priests. “By God” happens to be one of the Wife of Bath’s favourites. It occurs six times in her Prologue, not counting its francophile version “pardee” or the almost identical “(as help) me God” and “(thonked) be God”. The oath most typical of her is “God (it) woot”, woot being one of the signature words for the Wife of Bath’s speech. It, too, crops up in the pages to come. But there is more. In Chaucer’s original conception, the Wife of Bath may have gone about cursing like a shipman – she still does – yet the essence of his censure ought to have been her sexual appetite, that characteristic blending of gluttony and lechery, within a general context of avarice.52 Thus what happens to the Host in the aftermath that we are all familiar with is not just a clever shifting of parts but a realignment of emphasis as well. What was a minor aspect of the Wife has become a major aspect of the Host. Allowing that the setting of the Tale “in Flaundres” may be a hint at her craft of “clooth-makynge”, of which “she hadde swich an haunt,/She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt”, we do come across several instances that are easy to read as signs directed at her appetite, such as the Pardoner’s description of the revellers:

51

The subject of signs is more extensively discussed in Chapter Seven. Evidence that Avarice, in the shape of marriage for gain, was a major, or possibly, the major element of the Wife’s original prologue is given in Chapter Five. 52

The Testament of Love | 187 …yonge folk that haunteden folye, As riot, hasard, stywes, and tavernes, Where as with harpes, lutes and gyternes, They daunce and pleyen at dees bothe day and nyght, And eten also and drynken over hir myght, Thurgh which they doon the devel sacrifise... And right anon thanne comen tombesteres Fetys and smale, and yonge frutesteres, Syngeres with harpes, baudes, wafereres, Whiche been the verray develes officeres To kyndle and blowe the fyr of lecherye, That is annexed unto glotonie. [PardT, 464-69, 477-82]

This brings to mind the Wife of Bath during her fourth marriage. Her husband was such a reveller and she herself as well: And I was yong and ful of ragerye, Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye. How koude I daunce to an harpe smale, And synge, ywis, as any nyghtyngale, Whan I had dronke a draughte of sweete wyn! [WBP, 455-59]

And what do both the Wife and the Pardoner immediately add to this? And after wyn on Venus moste I thynke, For al so siker as cold engendreth hayl, A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl. [WBP, 464-66] The hooly writ take I to my witnesse That luxurie is in wyn and dronkenesse. [PardT, 483-84]

Even if this should not have been levelled at the Wife, since the passage was probably not included in her original Prologue, this is well applicable to her condition. Not much later the Pardoner adds that … woodnesse, yfallen in a shrewe, Persevereth lenger than doth dronkenesse. [PardT, 496-97].

While Chaucer’s “shrewe” is also applicable to men the remark makes good sense as a piece of nastiness directed at the Wife of Bath. So do his expressions of disgust at the “enemys of Cristes croys [whose] wombe is hir god”:

188 | The Testament of Love O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod, Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun! At either ende of thee foul is the soun. [PardT, 534-36]

The reference to womb and belly is ambiguous, pointing both to gluttony and lechery. Philippians 3:18-19, which the Pardoner quotes here, similarly names as Christ’s enemies those “whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame”, shame being a scriptural euphemism for the sexual organs. A further passage that is quite reminiscent of the Wife of Bath’s appetite and its consequences is his description of the drunkard, a subject freely delivered into the Pardoner’s hands by her opening remark to her confession: “As evere moote I drynken wyn or ale”. O dronke man, disfigured is thy face, Sour is thy breeth, foul artow to embrace, And thurgh thy dronke nose semeth the soun As though thou seydest ay “Sampsoun, Sampsoun!” And yet, God woot, Sampsoun drank nevere no wyn. Thou fallest as it were a styked swyn; Thy tonge is lost, and al thyn honeste cure; For dronkenesse is verray sepulture Of mannes wit and his discrecioun He kan no conseil keepe, it is no drede. [PardT, 551-61]

Of course the Pardoner prefers his signs to outspokenness and does not speak of any woman but sticks to the more general “dronke man”. Yet this does not serve to indicate gender, his “disfigured is thy face” agrees all too well with the Wife’s face “reed of hewe”, “his foul artow to embrace” not only suggests a woman but is eminently applicable to her fading looks, prefiguring her Loathly Lady manifestation. The loss of “tonge” and the demise of one’s wit and discretion fit the Wife’s autobiographical revelations admirably and the remark that a drunk “kan no conseil keepe” is a literal echo from her Midas anecdote that women “kan no conseil hyde”. This, as we have seen, looks like a foreign element in her tale and may have been part of what is now the Shipman’s Tale, which is much concerned with the notion of “conseil.” Above all, let us mark the Pardoner’s selective use of the Wife’s favourite expletive here and the fact that this is done in combination with a name that rhymes with hers: “God woot, Sampsoun nevere drank no wyn...” But Alisoun certainly did.


Besides suggesting a drunkard’s snoring and rhyming with Alisoun, the name of Sampsoun is a keyword for the wickedness of women. “Who was stronger than Sampson, wyser than Salomon, holyer than David? And 3it thei were all overcomen by the queyntise and whiles of women” was a favourite pronouncement of the homilists.53 The story was also Jankyn’s second favourite, coming straight after Eve in his “book of wikked wyves”: Tho redde he me how Sampson loste his heres: Slepynge, his lemman kitte it with hir sheres; Thurgh which treson loste he bothe his yen. [WBP, 721-23]

When the Tale is finished and the Pardoner takes up the offertory, it is the wives who are asked to come forward. Reference to the Wife cannot fail to be indicated, since she is the only secular woman around: Cometh up, ye wyves, offreth of youre wolle! Youre names I entre heer in my rolle anon... [PardT, 910-11]

The “wolle” may well refer to the Wife’s “clooth-makyng” activities, the rest a knowing wink about his earlier remark on cuckolding when he says of these wives that, for a price, Into the blisse of hevene shul ye gon. [PardT, 912]

These final two points lead us back to our reconstruction of the original outcome of the Pardoner’s sermon, providing additional fuel for a reading that this was all about the Wife of Bath being put into her place in a characteristically underhand way. The exact conclusion of the original effort of course evades us, but I should not be at all surprised if it was followed by some words of reflection by the author. Keeping in mind that the Pardoner was not yet the ultimate villain that he was to become in Chaucer’s later version, we recognize that the full focus here is on the Wife of Bath, adulterous and avaricious in much the same way as is the Merchant of St Denis’s wife. The Pardoner may have compelled her to go down on her knees, kiss his relics and offer her groat, but this is purely a matter 53

Owst, Literature & Pulpit, p 384.


of power play and would not have involved anything as laudable as contrition on the Wife’s part. Hence, a word on her true condition would have been very much to the point. As we have noted, we have such a passage in the shape of Lenvoy de Chaucer, whose sardonic comment is entirely in line with this, so why not assume that its verses originally belonged here? In direct support of this is the fact that it is not only a most unusual and extraneous second moralitas, but is introduced in almost the same words as the similarly unusual second moralitas of the Pardoner’s Tale, with which we have just associated it, thus implying a close conception and execution: But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go… [ClT, 1163] But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale… [PardT, 919]

What argues against this picture is that Lenvoy demonstrably discusses the Wife in terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, as we shall see below, and this is something directly associated with the Testament of Love. Still, as its reassignation to the Clerk would have been directly related to Chaucer’s reconstructional efforts on the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, this leaves ample room for Chaucer to have experimented with making it fit the Pardoner first before giving up on this. As there is good evidence that the rewriting of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale involved at least two stages, a genesis of the Envoy as part of the first stage is therefore an option worth considering. What remains to be discussed here is a matter of narrative order. Of course, it is clear that the Pardoner must have come after the Wife, but we do not know whether he did so straightaway or after the intervention of some other pilgrim or pilgrims. In the first few Canterbury tales quarrels are a matter of immediacy, as witness the Miller and the Reeve. Later, in particular association with the Wife of Bath, there are the Friar and the Summoner, whose quarrel is made to wait a tale or two before being consummated. Chaucer’s selection of the Wife and the Pardoner for his basic Testament of Love points at a close association. Yet we cannot be sure. The Marriage Debate, which is really a more sophisticated variation on the quarrels, shows that it is well possible for a tale or two to slip in without spoiling the discussion. One such is the tale of Custance, now told by the Man of Law. As we have seen, its mercantile stanzas strongly suggest that it may


have been assigned originally to the Merchant. This is further supported by the consideration that the Wife of Bath’s old tale, the Merchant of St Denis, manifestly strikes at the Merchant’s profession, so that a reaction from his direction would have been a most natural thing to expect. Even the present-day Canterbury Tales evince a close relation between the Wife of Bath and what the Merchant has to say about women of her kind, particularly in the headlink to his present Tale. To this we may add that the Tale itself is in no way tailored to its teller, which makes it well worth considering as one more instance of the tale shifts that were set into motion by the Testament of Love. While this is a scenario that I am inclined to favour, it does not exhaust our possibilities. The Clerk’s Tale, in particular, would also have been an appropriate remedial tale – and one that we assume to have been written well before the Canterbury effort – and Lenvoy de Chaucer, even if it is a later interpolation, bears this out. How the Prologues and Tales Acquired Their Final Form Having reconstructed the major outlines of the initial Wife of Bath-Pardoner situation, adorned with lesser indications, let us try and see what happened to them to result in the radical changes that Chaucer put into effect. The prime mover for all this was, as I argue, Gower’s challenge. This put everything that Chaucer was busily engaged on in a state of flux. After or during a temporizing phase associated with his work on the Legend of Good Women and the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer had a true inspiration: the Wife of Bath as his answer to Gower’s Lover and Venus combined, the Pardoner as a caricature of the Priest. Both were to come up with a sermon incorporating all the Deadly Sins, in plain reference to the way that the Confessio Amantis was structured. As a key to the discriminating listener/reader and perhaps as insurance against the accusation that the tales tended to “sownen into synne”, there was to be a further piece, the Parson’s Tale, combining Pennaforte’s manual of confession (Summa de poenitentia) and a condensation and rearrangement of Peraldus’s treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins (Summa vitiorum), with a good deal of material from other sources, along lines similar to the Confessio. In this context, the Parson evidently serves as a reflection of the Christian side of Gower’s Priest. The Retraction completed this effort, by turning everything into a formal testament.


As I have said before, where Chaucer went to work first is guesswork. Echoes from the Parson’s Tale in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Pardoner’s Tale indicate that the Parson was first. The real question is who came next. The Wife of Bath’s original marital self-exposure may have suggested itself, but the obvious choice was the Pardoner, who presumably already told the rioters’ tale in the original situation as part of a loosely-structured sermon.54 His textual debt to the Parson is the greater one, too, which cannot fail to be significant. Chaucer now outfitted the Pardoner’s Tale with the Sins of the Tavern, thus managing to complement the deadly sins already present and arrive at the desired total of Seven.55 The result was what we know as his sample sermon, which is a sermon in its own right and probably is so because it was provisionally meant to be the Pardoner’s part of his answer to Gower. At this point, Chaucer’s idea is likely to have been a scenario whereby the Pardoner’s sermon was meant to serve as a confessional instrument for expounding the various sins in the Wife of Bath’s confession. In all likelihood, Chaucer’s first effectuation of a confession of sin was tried out on the Wife of Bath. As we have seen, there are good indications that there was a relatively substantial Prologue to begin with, covering some 200 lines, largely dealing with a boastful confession of her avarice and how she exploited an old husband for all that he was worth. Chaucer now hugely expanded the Prologue. He probably took his theme from Gower and mixed it with elements taken from Innocent’s De miseria and Jovinian’s arguments in St Jerome’s Epistola. The next 160-odd lines also reflect Gower’s Confessio Amantis, this time its prologus, half of which similarly deals with a biblical theme (Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream) and the author’s attempt, not unlike the Wife’s, to apply its subject matter to contemporary issues. Even more telling perhaps is the fact that, together with the Man of Law’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s words are among the most heavily glossed ones in the Canterbury Tales. Although we cannot be sure that these glosses can be attributed to Chaucer’s redaction, they do call to mind most forcefully the way in which Gower encadred the 54 We deduce this not only from the Pardoner-Shipman endlink but also from the fact that a second moralitas was added to the tale’s original one, a phenomenon that we also find at the conclusion of the Clerk’s Tale where it is introduced in almost the same words (Carleton Brown, The Pardoner’s Tale, p xxxv). 55 This is discussed in Chapter Eight.


Confessio with Latin sidenotes as well as headings, and suggest a good way of accounting for their presence here. All of these lines were prefixed by Chaucer to the old beginning, thus ineffectuating the Host’s original invitation to the Wife and her acceptance. The latter two he fused with the old passage where Pardoner and Wife clashed and which was now brought for-ward to line 163. The confession was turned into a tripartite dilatio and expanded, among other things, with the Venerean references, a quintet of husbands and an extensive catalogue of sins, both great and small.56 He also – and this is an unusually thorough step for him to have taken, indicating how important his efforts on the Wife were – appears to have adapted her portrait in the General Prologue to the new situation, as is shown by its textual echoes from the Parson’s Tale. Not surprisingly, he did the same for the Parson. On the other hand, the bad fit of the Pardoner’s admission in his Prologue to a liking for a wench in every town rather clashes with his portrait in the General Prologue, where he is deemed a gelding or a mare, so that we may assume it to be the original one, on which no new work was done. Furthermore, though Chaucer partly preserved the original clash with the Pardoner, which enabled him to move on to the next sermon element, he added a new ending to the Wife’s Prologue. Here the Friar and the Summoner took over the original quarrel, which enabled him to shift this away to another place altogether. He replaced the Wife’s old tale by his own version of Gower’s tale of Florent, which removed another major link with the Pardoner, even if he seems to have preserved several passages belonging to the old situation. The structurally important thing to note here, in anticipation of further discussion to come, is Chaucer’s development of the Wife’s Prologue into a kaleidoscopic confession of blatant sinfulness and its clever fusion with the homiletic requirements of her sermon. Having tested the effectiveness of this sermon scheme and its incorporated confession, Chaucer seems to have been well satisfied with the result and decided to use the same device on the Pardoner. Consequently, he, too, was given an extensive confession to pronounce, which at the same time was made to serve as part of a new, overall sermon structure.57 This new combination, however, effectively eliminated the Pardoner as a confessor. It had made him much more perfidious than 56 57

For the sins, see Chapter Five. See Chapter Eight, The Pardoner’s Double Sermon.


before, so that perforce the outcome of his simoniacal preaching was amended to its present shape. Another consideration is that, with the sample sermon integrated in a full-blown and formal sermon, the application of sermon rules to the Pardoner’s Tale required that sentence should be passed on him rather than licence given, as in the original situation, for such a glib rogue to get away with his knavery without undergoing some sort of retribution. Either way, this resulted in the affixation of a second moralitas, effected in much the same way as that of the Clerk’s Tale. A final aspect involved here is that the Pardoner’s entire preaching effort is, on some level, readable as a condemnation of a perceived want of spirituality that governs the Confessio Amantis. This is seen not only in his performance as a false Priest to the Canterbury fellowship in their role as lovers en route to their union with Christ’s charitas but particularly in the import of his harrowing tale. Though one wishes that matters were simpler and more clearcut, the convolutions of this complicated reconstruction are largely corroborated by what we shall find in the chapters to come. The evidence suggests that, rather than moving in a straight line from one tale to the other, Chaucer worked on them more or less conjointly, switching back and forth whenever this was needed. Ironically – and one wonders if Chaucer foresaw this at all – the result of this reworking and restructuring of the Wife’s and Pardoner’s parts along closely parallel lines was that the old quarrel that linked them together was written out of existence and made it necessary to set up another pilgrim altogether as the Pardoner’s dupe. The Provenance of the Wife of Bath’s New Tale One theoretically viable avenue of finding out what sort of changes Chaucer effected in his original material and why is to compare his sources and the end result. In the case of the Pardoner’s Tale this fails to work, for the simple reason that source and analogue research has failed to come up with its direct source. Matters are different, though, when we turn to the Wife of Bath. It is a well-known fact that Gower’s tale of Florent and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale are close and contemporary literary variants of one and the same folktale. As such they represent a major indicator of Chaucer’s debt to Gower. The Gower connection, however, has always been made light of. Even the observable fact that the authors use virtually the same tale in the


same function of sermon exemplum and for the same purpose of illustrating the same virtue of submission in love, which ought to be an eye-opener, has generally been swept aside by hairsplitting argument. Gower’s tale is supposed to be about obedience,58 whereas Chaucer’s deals with maistrie. This is not truly tenable, of course, for the distinction is merely one of perspective, whereby the preacher’s demand of maistrie stands for the same thing as the other party’s obedience. When one further considers that the two tales are incontrovertibly one another’s closest analogues in place, time and substance, it really seems rather perverse to deny Chaucer’s debt to Gower. Surely we must allow him to have read the Confessio Amantis or at least heard it read, to judge by his reaction to Gower’s 1390 “accolade” and all the other evidence for my theory, and to have used the tale of Florent for his own purposes. Recent developments indicate some willingness to allow that Chaucer knew the tale.59 For all this, there has so far been a persistent refusal to accept it as his model for the Wife of Bath’s Tale. What is it, then, besides an anti-Gower bias, that has kept and keeps Chaucer criticism from admitting the obvious? There are two stumbling blocks. One is that there are no textual echoes to link them. This is not quite true, as there are some interesting ones in the hag’s sermon on gentilesse, but they link up with a different part of the Confessio. The other is the claim that the differences between the two are such that Chaucer cannot be thought to have been borrowing directly from Gower.60 This does not really mean much either, upon closer inspection. A likely explanation for the scarcity of textual correspondences is to accept that it was Chaucer’s wont to draw from memory or perhaps notes, possibly because he had no copy of the Confessio to consult. An alternative option that we have noted is that he never read the book but only heard it read out. A

58

Robinson, p 703. Benson, pp 872-73. 60 This view is well-expressed by Barlett J. Whiting, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in: Sources & Analogues: 223-68, at 224. “Clearly enough the English poems have a common ancestor but their relation to that ancestor is by no means clear nor, for that matter, is their relation to one another. Chaucer’s version and Gower’s agree in certain marked points as against the other two [the Marriage of Gawain and the Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell], but they differ too much in other respects to make it possible to speak of a common source”. 59


final possibility is that, in some cases at least, he was simply unwilling to defer to Gower and the ideas for which he stood. All of these choices link up well with the fact that other places where Gower’s influence is indicated or even uncontested show a similar scarcity of textual echoes. The recent reassessment of Chaucer’s debt to Gower in the case of the Man of Law’s Tale shows in which direction we ought to look. It is not just textual correspondences that count. There is a world of argument applicable in which shared passages, shared omissions and additions, and, particularly, a shared reduction of the plot – as well as a consideration of the authors’ narrative aims – play a major part. The other objection, of differences being too great, requires a more extensive discussion, involving the subject of source and analogue studies. In the case of the Wife of Bath’s Tale such studies represent a fascinating field and yet one that suffers – or has at least suffered – from curious practices. One of these is the frequently encountered proposal of hypothetical intermediary versions in order to account for differences between analogues. In our case, one gets the impression that such a hypothetical tale is actually preferred to the possibility of a Gowerian derivation. Another is that theme shifts and motif changes within folktales are, by unspoken consent, assumed to be the outcome of involuntary processes. Now this may be proper procedure as long as we are talking about orally and anonymously transmitted tales. As soon as tales enter upon the literary scene, however, things change and the old rules no longer apply. Thus, if Gower and Chaucer had been simple, faceless and nonliterary transmitters of the Loathly Lady folktale, without any great intervention on their parts, it might be tempting to accept that major differences between them can be accounted for by assuming separate sources. The alternative of a common source which each of them worked out differently does not stand up to careful inspection, since evidently the proposal of a such a source to account for major differences is a rather self-contradictory exercise. The point, however, is that they were both poets writing for a court audience and it is thus entirely within reason to attribute the differences that distinguish their tales to precisely this. Basically, Gower is not likely to have effected many changes in his original for its use as an exemplum on Obedience. The submission motif is typical of the folktale type in question and the structure of the


Confessio Amantis essentially imposes no special adaptational requirements on the tale, save that of brevity, the more so as Gower is not greatly interested in applying his tales thematically and is at times content to draw the desired moral from a marginal aspect. Chaucer, however, while using the tale for a like purpose, introduced an entirely new dimension when he chose to apply it to a particular person, the Wife of Bath, her philosophy, her preaching, her bedroom objective and her ultimate self-condemnation. This meant that he had to tailor the Loathly Lady tale to serve a number of very specific ends. It should come as no surprise therefore that in doing so he ranged well beyond the original tale. Once we concede this, there remains little reason to dismiss the notion of Gower’s tale having been Chaucer’s model. The sensible view is provided here by Fisher who points out – and it seems difficult to improve on this – that comparisons have led to the conclusion that Chaucer’s version is independent of Gower’s Tale of Florent. But if he knew Gower’s tale of Constance from Book II of the Confessio, it is hard to imagine that Chaucer did not know Florent from Book I. Furthermore, the differences in his version are best explained as conscious alterations designed to improve the pace and structure of the story and to adapt it to the new conception of the Wife of Bath. None of the differences can be explained by reference to different sources, and Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions are, in spite of their variation, far more similar than any of the ballad and romance analogues.61

Sensible also is Peter Beidler: the “differences can best be explained not by saying that one teller is better than the other, but by saying that two fine poets had quite different purposes in composing their tales”.62 Ideally, Nicholson’s reappraisal of Gower’s Custance and the Man of Law’s Tale shows how to deal with a situation like this. The problem, however, is that Nicholson also had access to Trevet’s version, the immediate original (or something close to this) from which Chaucer and Gower are thought to have worked. In the case of the Wife of Bath and the tale of Florent there is no such direct analogue, so that it is impossible for us to apply Nicholson’s approach here. What we can do, however, is try and identify the major instances in 61

Fisher, p 296. Peter G. Beidler, ‘Transformations in Gower’s Tale of Florent and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in Yeager: 100-14, at 101. 62


which the Wife of Bath’s Tale diverges from the tale of Florent and determine the reasons for this. The Differences Between the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Florent In an earlier place we excluded the Wife’s diatribe against friars and her account of Midas as extraneous inclusions by Chaucer. The chief remaining points of difference are: 1. the faerie setting [WBT, 857-882, 989-996] 2. the Arthurian element [WBT, 857, 882, 890, 1089] 3. the courtly love element [WBT, 894-912, 1023-1045, 1228-1235] 4. the knight’s namelessness 5. the rape vs the slaying of Branchus [WBT, 885-88] 6. the judgement by Arthur’s queen vs that by Branchus’ grand-dame [WBT, 1023-45] 7. the list of women’s desires [WBT, 919-950] 8. the altered sequence of the knight’s movements 9. the hag’s reduced repellence [WBT, 997-99] 10. the discourse on gentilesse [WBT, 1106-1218] 11. the altered riddle and the knight's choice [WBT, 1219-35] 12. the unenchanted nature of the hag 13. the coda [WBT, 1257-64].63 At a glance, all of these are very much bound up with the Wife of Bath and largely literary additions. Most of them are important to her theme of maistrie, with which we deal extensively in Chapter Seven. Thus the Arthurian setting prepares the audience for the theme of submission to women, the lady’s service which is so characteristic of courtly love. And courtly love in its turn spells Arthur. The faerie touch is there to suggest magic and wonder, in special contrast to the wandering friar who is depicted as a leering but impotent sexual predator. This is part of the Wife’s little clash with the Friar and as such

63 A similar list of differences is found in Beidler: 100-14. While our accentuation of various aspects is different, we share a conviction that the differences between Gower and Chaucer are fundamentally a matter of authorial intervention.


recognizably extraneous in its origin.64 The recurrence of the faerie motif later in the Tale, when knight meets hag, is essentially about the same thing – magic, wonder and the service of women – but also serves to introduce an interpretational signal on the subject of temporal evanescence. Paradoxically, the courtly love element is arguably derived from Gower. While there is little such love to be found in Florent it should nevertheless be remembered how prominently it figures in the general make-up of the Confessio. The linking element is probably gentilesse, a term that is used once or twice in the tale of Florent and easily allows itself to be associated with courtly love. The idea that the Arthurian setting may have been present in Chaucer’s source, as David Hartwell takes for granted, is doubtful. True, three of the six known analogues, including the Wife of Bath’s Tale, look Arthurian. Hartwell, in leaving out King Henry and The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter, slants matters even more in favour of this. Yet in the Wife’s case we learn that its Arthurian nature is solely dependent on four bare references in the Tale. Inspection learns that this is entirely too meagre and indicates that the Arthurian element was superimposed on the story.65 This is confirmed by Gower’s tale, which is not at all concerned with Arthur. His hero is “nephew to the Emperor”, which reminds us of the continent and the Gesta Romanorum. Who this Emperor is we never find out, but he is certainly not Arthur Then, the Arthurian element recurs in the Weddynge of Sir Gawen and in the ballad known as the Marriage of Gawain, but this proves little. As we shall find, the Weddynge is imitative of Chaucer, thus indicating that the entire Arthurian element may ultimately lie with Chaucer as its inventor. There remains the Marriage of Gawain, but, as William Entwhistle points out,66 medieval ballads tend to draw upon literary models and are hardly the folk product that they are often taken for, so that it is a much likelier scenario for the ballad to be based upon the Weddynge or some analogue than otherwise. 64 The faerie element is basically there to set the Arthurian/courtly love elements going and was cleverly inserted into the Tale by way of the Wife’s little revenge on the Friar. Yet to some they are evidence of a Celtic origin, well in keeping with Eisner’s ideas (on whom, see later). Cf Robert Dudley French, A Chaucer Handbook (1927; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p 278ff. 65 WBT, lines 857, 882, 890, 1089. It is worth noting that neither Arthur nor the Arthurian setting is in any way instrumental to the story’s plot. 66 William J. Entwhistle, European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), passim.


A different matter altogether is the nameless knight. As such he naturally links up with the “marriage advertisement” that the sense of the Wife of Bath’s theme comes down to. The knight is a stand-in for potential but unspecified husband Number Six. He is “Everyhusband” and, as there is still room for applicants, his name consequently remains a blank. Yet anyone familiar with folk literature will at the same time recognize that its heroes are frequently anonymous in the very same way that the knight is. They are designated as “Brave Little Tailor”, “Girl Without Hands” or “Miller’s Son”. Even when they are given names these frequently turn out to be descriptive of a particular trait or characteristic attribute rather than proper names: Cinderella [Cinders Girl], Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White. It is tempting, therefore, to read the anonymity of Chaucer’s knight as an indication of a greater faithfulness to the tale’s folk origin, yet this is somewhat contradicted by the fact that Gower’s Florent (Lat. florens: flowering, blooming) also comes close to folktale naming.67 In terms of female maistrie the rape motif stands for Original Sin. It is anathema to the Wife’s notion of a husband’s submission. It is male violation of a woman’s will and body, without the sanction of marriage. Woman is the one who should exert “the power durynge al [her] lyf/Upon his propre body, and noght he”. The motif functions as a counterpoint to the actual submission passage when the knight foregoes the choice which the hag has set him, and leaves the decision to her.68 Rape is not a common motif in folktales, which tend to tone down such sexuality to sharing the same bed during the night.69 It

67

It is also very curiously echoed in the antagonist’s name in the Weddynge, Sir Gromer Somer Joure. Evidently, its author saw something of a nature myth in the tale, with Summer’s Day (Somer Joure, which somewhat paraphrases Florent

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