As we begin our unit on Chaucer, let’s spend a few minutes
talking about the Middle Ages, Middle English, and all things Middle.
Here’s as good a place to start as any:
At this link, you will find a blog written by a medievalist
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s name. I present this blog to you because a. it is
hilarious and b. it is written in passable Middle
English,
Looking at this blog, you should notice a few interesting
things right off the bat:
1. It is more or less legible. That is,
we, speakers of Modern English, should be able to read Middle English well
enough to get a strong handle on what the speaker is saying. The grammar is a little
different from Modern English, the vocabulary is a little different, and the
spelling is drastically off, but it’s clearly an earlier version of the language
that we currently speak. That would not be true if we were looking at Old English.
2. The author switches back and forth between
English, French, and Latin in a way
that suggests his readers will know at least a little of all three. For a well-educated reader in the Middle Ages, all three
of those languages should be within reach.
To understand why these things are true, we have to look
back to 1066: the year of the Norman Conquest. At that point, England was ruled
by a Germanic group called the Anglo-Saxons, and the language of the land was
Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). Old English was heavily
Germanic, although it had some Scandinavian influences that came in through Viking raids.
In 1066, invaders led by William the Conqueror (who was the
Duke of Normandy—hence the name “Norman Conquest”)
defeated Harold the Saxon King and took control of England. Their language is
Norman (later called Anglo-Norman),
which is an early version of French.
Why did they invade? Because they wanted land, of course.
The law in many European countries said that the
first son of a noble family inherited all of the family property, and all
younger siblings had to fend for themselves. William the Conqueror’s army was
largely made up of second and third sons from noble families looking to carve
out a chunk of land for themselves—a motivation that we’re going to find will
have an enormous effect on history (and on every Jane Austen novel ever).
The end result is that for two hundred years following the
Conquest, English society wound up split into three groups so distinct that
they didn’t even speak the same language:
- The Anglo-Normans, who were very rich and powerful. Their language was Anglo-Norman French.
- The Anglo-Saxons, who spoke Old English.
- Members of the Church, which was an independent, international organization. They spoke Latin.
These three languages roughly corresponded to what were
known as the Three Estates—that is,
the three social classes that existed under the feudal system. French was the language of the
landowning nobles, English was the
language of the commoners, and Latin
was the language of the clergy (who
might have started life as either nobles or commoners, but who entered a new
social class when they joined the Church).
At first, there was a lot of resentment between
these three groups. (It’s believed, for example, that stories about Robin Hood
began as revenge fantasies by Anglo-Saxons against their new Norman overlords).
Luckily for the development of Middle English, this extreme stratification
didn’t last. Anglo-Norman nobles intermarried with Anglo-Saxon nobles, rich
commoners hired tutors for their kids, and, eventually, the three separate languages melded together to form Middle English.
I should also point out that Middle English was, up until
Chaucer’s time, what’s known as a vernacular
language. In other words, it was the language that the common people spoke,
not a language like Latin in which formal writing was done. Chaucer was not the
first writer to write formal documents in English, but he was by far the most
popular early writer in English—so much so that he helped to set and define its
rules for spelling and grammar.
This is
huge. Remember: for a very long time, one of the defining features of the
lower class was that they were unlikely
to be able to read. Part of that was because they didn’t have the time or
money for school, but part of that was because there was an extra barrier
for them that didn’t exist for other people—official documents were not even written in the language that they
spoke.
Vernacular language becoming the language of the land is going to be
quite important during the Renaissance (which Chaucer is just beginning to edge
into in the 1380’s-1400’s), so keep an eye on it.
Note that I said “rich commoners.” The development of Middle English was enormously helped along by the growth of
the middle class, which didn’t
really exist in the early parts of the Middle Ages. At that point, social classes were simple. There were
basically two kinds of people: those who owned large amounts of land (the
nobles) and those who farmed the land (commoners). Clergy, who did neither,
were off to the side.
As all of us who lived through the past century know,
however, technology has a way of messing up the established social order. The
High Middle Ages (the period between 1000 and 1300) saw enormous growth in
farming technology—better metals, better mills, better harnesses, the invention
of three field crop rotation, and all sorts of other things that spelled more
people eating better food with less work involved.
As a result, the commoners
were not only healthier and happier but also had more time on their hands and
more money to spend. They began doing things like buying land, educating their
children, and going into trades that were not related to farming—trades that
didn’t depend on owning land for success—in much greater numbers. Towns began
to spring up, and people began leaving the countryside to live together in
larger groups.
At the same time, the nobles were not thriving as much as you
would expect. Among other things, this was the age of the Crusades—and funding
Crusades became a nobleman’s Christian duty. Many went broke trying to keep up
with expenses like these.
The end result of these changes was an era with clearly
defined and inescapable social classes—but also an era where your social class was not determined by how much
money you had. There were plenty of poor nobles—and, more to the
point, there were plenty of rich, educated, landowning commoners. Chaucer himself came from one of these middle-class families.
We see plenty of examples of this new social order in the
General Prologue. The Franklin, for instance, is a perfect example of a rich,
educated, landowning middle-class man. (That’s what the word Franklin means, in
fact—a rich landowner who isn’t a noble). The Merchant and the guildsmen show
us how powerful and wealthy non-noble people could become in this era by
engaging in trade. The Oxford Clerk is almost certainly middle class in
origin—and he’s a college student, which was just as expensive a prospect back
then as it is now. Even the Reeve, who is a bit lower down on the social ladder
(a reeve was a property manager for a large estate)
has been known to lend money to the nobles whose property he manages.
In fact, one of the interesting things about the Canterbury Tales is that unlike what we
usually think of when we think of medieval literature (or even what we see when
we look at one of Chaucer’s most important influences, Boccaccio’s Decameron), this work spends hardly any
time focusing on noble characters.
There are basically two important noble
characters—the Knight, and his son the Squire. By contrast, we see an enormous
array of commoners from all walks of life—rich and poor, educated and
uneducated, from the town and from the country, farmers, professionals,
landowners, servants, and members of pretty much any other occupation that you
could think of.
We also see plenty of examples of members of that third
class—the Church. These include actually clergy (the Prioress, the Monk, etc.)
as well as non-clergy Church employees like the Summoner (whose job it was to
bring sinners to religious courts to be punished) and the Pardoner (who sold
palpal indulgences and access to relics).
One thing we modern readers might not notice right away is
that nearly all the Church characters are corrupt in some way. Remember: clergy
at the time were all supposed to take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. So, people like the Monk and
the Prioress might seem nice enough in their initial descriptions, but they’re
also rich and frivolous (the Monk owns fine horses, the Prioress has some
spoiled little dogs and nice clothes) which, according to the rules, they
absolutely should not have been. Other corruptions are even more obvious—the
Friar (whose job it is to collect money for the poor and the Church) spends all
his money on drinking and sex, and the Pardoner tricks people into believing
that pig bones in a jar are actually saint’s relics so that he can take their
money. All of these descriptions reflect dissatisfaction with the Church in
Chaucer’s time—dissatisfaction that would eventually bubble up in a big way
during the Protestant Reformation a century after this book was written.
Luckily, we do get to see one example of a clergyman who is
living exactly the life of celibacy, poverty, and obedience that his job
requires—the Parson. That’s pretty much how Chaucer works in the general
prologue: he presents us with many
corrupt, silly, and ridiculous members of a class, and then with one example of
a perfect, virtuous member of that class to balance things out. The Parson is
our perfect clergyman. His brother, the Plowman, is a perfect commoner. And the
Knight is a perfect noble, representing everything a noble should be.
Happy reading! I’ll see you all on Friday, when we’ll
discuss the Knight’s Tale.
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