Paul Strohm - Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury lyrics

Geoffrey Chaucer often wrote about reversals of Fortune. One of his most frequent literary themes is the impact of sudden turning points and transformations, blows of fate that alter or upend a situation. Some of his characters withstand such changes, and even find ways to turn them to their own advantage. His Knight, for example, muses upon a young man's cruelly arbitrary d**h and still counsels his survivors to find ways of seeking joy after woe. The Knight's proposed remedy is one that will recur several times in Chaucer's poetry: "to make virtue of necessity'' ("to maken vertu of necessitee") by confronting bad circumstances and turning them to advantage if one can. No wonder Chaucer favored this advice, since his entire career was a series of high-wire balancing acts, improvisations, and awkward adjustments. In his childhood he escaped the disastrous Black d**h that ravaged all of Europe. As an adolescent he declined to pursue, or was discouraged from pursuing, his vintner father's secure career in the London wine trade. He entered the more volatile area of court service instead. Early in that service he was packed off on a military adventure in France, where he was captured and held prisoner until ransomed by the king. He found his way to an advantageous marriage and a reputable position as esquire to the king, but was no sooner accustoming himself to that life than his political allies decided to deploy him elsewhere. They sent him back to London, where he was reimmersed in mercantile culture in the awkwardly conspicuous and ethically precarious post of controller of the wool custom, charged to monitor the activities of some of the richest and best connected and least scrupulous crooks on the face of his planet. He was given occupancy of quarters over a city gate­ the very gate through which the rebels would stream (probably under his feet) during the Peasants' Revolt. He was intermittently and undoubtedly disruptively tapped for membership in diplomatic delegations, including arduous trips over the Alps to Italy on royal business. Throughout, in court and then in the city, he maintained precarious relations with the most hated man in the realm, the overweening John of Gaunt. He was thrust into awkward and compromising dealings with the most controversial man in London, the unscrupulous wool profiteer Nicholas Brembre. He was in recurrent legal trouble, hara**ed over unpaid bills, and was the subject of a suit for raptus­ abduction or even rape-brought on behalf of a young woman named Cecily Champagne. Briefly recalled to royal service in later life, he was exposed to dangerous travel and several times violently robbed, once in a Falstaffian location known as the Foul Oak in Kent. Chaucer knew all about turbulence and change, but one brief period in his life posed a particularly severe challenge to his ideas about virtue and necessity. In the autumn of 1386 he was confronted by a clutch of adversities, not only disruptive of his personal and political life but potentially disastrous to his literary life as well. This was his crisis, his time of troubles. Its multiple origins, the hardships it imposed, and especially its remarkable outcome are the tale this book will tell. In the perverse way of crises, this one interrupted a period of relative calm. For the preceding twelve years, between 1374 and 1386, Chaucer had lived in a grace and favor apartment over London's Aldgate and settled into something approximating a routine on the Wool Wharf. As the autumn of 1386 approached, he was enjoying a high-water mark in his civic career. His duties as controller of the wool custom had recently been eased by appointment of a deputy, without interruption to his salary. His socialite wife, Philippa, was comfortably settled in Lincolnshire with her sister Katherine, mistress to the formidable Gaunt. Earlier that year Philippa had been inducted into the highly prestigious Fraternity of Lincoln Cathedral, along with the fu­ture Henry IV and other persons of consequence. His political allies in King Richard's royal faction had just engineered his election as a shire knight, or county representative, for Kent in the Westminster Parliament. In both court and city he had proven and reproven his worth as a pliant and useful member of the group of literate civil servants comprising the administrative bureaucracy of later medieval England. Although his selection as a shire knight was probably a result of his sponsors' wishes rather than his own desires, he might have taken some satisfaction in the position. Shire knights were the top tier of elected parliamentary representatives, enjoying higher status and privilege than those from boroughs and towns. Besides, members of Parliament (MPs) usually had a good time. The numerous inns and taverns along Westminster's King Street boomed. Despite civic attempts at regulation, prostitutes streamed toward Westminster and, especially, the freewheeling adjacent area of Charing Cross. MPs maintained an air of jollity, attending banquets and other collective events and also hiring private cooks and musicians to enliven private parties in their group accommodations. Whatever its recreational advantages, though, Chaucer joined this Parliament on behalf of other people's interests: those of Richard II, whom he had loyally served, and also the mercantile and political interests of the royal party in the city of Lon­don. And he joined it at a particularly unfortunate time. Richard was under unrelenting a**ault by the aristocratic followers of his uncle Thomas, duke of Gloucester, and this session was shaping up as an early and important test of strength. Its outcome would be disastrous for the king's faction. These bad results for his allies were closely intertwined with Chaucer's own life prospects. A petition approved and announced in Parliament encouraged his resignation from his patronage job on the Wool Wharf. Even as Parliament was meeting, previous city allies ousted him from his apartment in London; he could not return there, and would never again, in any settled or consecutive sense, be a resident of London.