ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Chaucer, the most varied o f our half-dozen greatest English poets, is well documented as a courtier, customs officer, diplomat, occupant o f a flat over Aldgate in London Wall, traveller to France and Italy, married, with children, and so forth. His poetry tells us about him as a poet. Put together the records, the poetry, and the history o f the fascinating fourteenth century, and we find a remark ably full and interesting picture of a man and an age. It was a great creative period. Many new things were starting or, having started, were gaining strength. The modem world was beginning. Towns were established, capitalist enterprise raised standards of living, serfdom was being eroded, new inventions such as clockwork and a new numeracy and power to calculate, were developing. New feelings, for the family, for the individual, a new tenderness for suffering, were being experienced. These have to be seen against a background of special sorrows and troubles. Things went badly for England in much of Chaucer’s lifetime, even when they prospered for him personally, and he was fully responsive to the sadness of life. Ancient sorrows continued: those caused by mankind, the savage warfare, the brutal rapine o f cities; and those caused by nature, starvation and disease from poor harvests, illnesses unmitigated by medicine, and plague. Religion ancient and new offered consolations. The message o f Christianity has always been the conquest o f suffering and death, the triumph of love and significance. Religious experience increased the emphasis on the individual’s internal values. The very success of Christianity in preaching higher ideals, more gentleness, more pity, led to men judging the Church unfavourably by its own divinely inspired ideals as inefficient and corrupt. O n the other hand the higher value which was being set on secular life gave that more vividness, more splendour, and consequendy, because it was so swiftly passing and so full o f suffering, gave it more pathos.
