 When, that April, with his sure sote, The draught of marsh hath perced toe the rote, And bathed every vein in switchly-core Of which vertu engendered is the floor, When Zafiru's ache, with his sway to breath, Inspired hath in every halt and haith the tender croppers, And the youngest son hath in the ram his half-a-coursirone, And small-a-foolers mark in melodia, That slaypin' all the nigt with open ear, So pricketh him natur in hir corages, Then longen folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to sake in strongest strondes, To ferne haues cooth in sundry londes. And specially from every she-resende of Engelon To contibry they wende, The holy, blissful marcher for to sake, That him hath hopin' when that they were saken. That's the opening to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Read to us by Anaïna Joakinen. And that is Middle English. It may not sound like something that's closer to our English. It certainly sounds more familiar than Beowulf, probably. Beowulf, remember, is Old English. When we get to Shakespeare, we'll be in Modern English, as old as that sounds. It's Modern English. This is what's in the middle. This is Middle English. You may recognize a few of the words. Some words may seem unusual, like in this page on the fourth line of Engelon To contibry they wende. That word, wind, we don't use that word in the present tense. We use the word go. But we still use the past tense of that word, wind, which is wint. So if you ever wondered why the past tense of run is ran or the past tense of jump is jumped, we understand those rules. But why is the past tense of go, wint? They don't sound anything alike. Well, they come from two different words. And so if you look back at Chaucer, you can actually read Chaucer in the Middle English if you have time, if you, you know, are patient. But I assigned this reading in the translation. I gave you a few choices of translations here. So hopefully that was a little bit easier than trying to read it this way. But I encourage you if you're interested in this kind of thing to go back and try to read the entire prologue or any part that you're interested in, in the Middle English. So how did English go from what we saw in Beowulf, this old English Germanic language, to something we can kind of sort of recognize? To understand that, we've got to understand what has happened since the Beowulf manuscript was written. I remember the Beowulf manuscript was written sometime in the first decade of the 11th century. And after that, just about 66 years after that, we have an invasion coming from Normandy. This is when William the Duke of Normandy invades England and defeats the English king, Harold, and introduces, well, brings all of his nobles with him and all these nobles speak French. Now, I've mentioned Normandy in the past. This is a Viking kingdom originally, just two or three centuries before this, when Rolo or Rolf the Ganger, and the Rolf the Walker, who was too large to ride a horse, so he had to walk everywhere. He had taken this province on. He had been basically hired to defend this area from other Vikings. And because he and his Vikings were there on the side of the French crown, this area was called Normandy, place of the Northmen. Well, they still, through intermarriage, through family ties, they have connections to the English royalty. And this becomes especially tight when the king of Denmark also becomes king of England. But anyway, there's a dispute over who should inherit the throne of England. King Harold claims it, but William decides to pursue his claim to the throne. He comes from France to England to claim it by force. This is something we're going to see happen in the opposite direction in just a few centuries. But introducing French means that French now becomes the language of the aristocracy. The king speaks French, the nobility speak French, but the commoners, the people who don't have ties to the throne or people that may have been nobility under King Harold and the English kings, are no longer nobility. Now they're commoners, so the language of the street, the language of the countryside, the language of the common people is that old English. The language of the aristocracy is French. And there's a third language, which is Latin. And Latin is spoken not only by the church, because keep in mind the Catholic liturgy was maintained in Latin for centuries before this, and of course it would remain Latin for centuries after this. But it also becomes the language of office work. If you needed to write something in a language that was official, that was in legal terms, or that was a catalog of an inventory for a business interaction that you're conducting with somebody in other countries across Europe. Everybody across Europe speaks different languages, but everybody, at least the educated people, all speak Latin. So Latin becomes the language of business, it becomes the language of economics, as well as the language of religion and law. And these languages, as they're spoken over a few generations, what happens is the same thing that happens anytime you have a multilingual population, people start to blend all three, all three together. And this is why modern English has a significant French component to it. Just as we don't recognize the old English as being too German, we also don't recognize French because it seems different, but when we put the two together, we start to recognize the language that we speak today. As that language is evolving, another important event that takes place just about a hundred years later is the murder of Thomas Becket. Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry II. Henry II is probably best known because of his sons, Richard the Lionheart and King John, the villain in the Robin Hood movies and stories. But the King Henry had a dispute with Thomas Becket over how much power the church had. Now the Archbishop of Canterbury was the most powerful clerical official, church official, in England, but the King tried to limit the ability of the church to influence political affairs. And because of this disagreement, there was a lot of bad blood between the King and Thomas, and it's not clear that the King had anything directly to do with this, but some of the King's men went to Canterbury and murdered Thomas Becket, and of course there was a lot of suspicion that King Henry either gave the order or implied it or something to that effect. But the fact that a political official kills an official of the church makes that church official by definition a martyr, especially because that church official was standing for religious power and autonomy in the face of political power. So due to that, Canterbury was already a very, probably the most important religious site in England because it had been one of the first or the first bishopric, the first sort of central church in all of England since the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England. But it became even more sacred now because now there's a shrine to someone who becomes a saint, so he becomes a saint and because he's a martyred saint, his shrine is considered especially holy, and this is why it becomes the destination for pilgrimages like the one described in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. A little over a century or about a couple of centuries later, we have the beginning of what will be called the Hundred Years War. Now to start at about 1200, about shortly after the time of Thomas Becket's murder, England actually occupied a lot of France. It had done so consistently since the Norman conquest because that area of Normandy, seen here in blue on the map, that had been already in the possession of the kings like William the Conqueror, and so he maintained his dukedom over this territory on the continent. And even beyond Normandy, the English crown threw marriage mostly, and sometimes political negotiations, sometimes purchases. But rarely through warfare, mostly through peaceful means, especially marriage, the English crown was able to obtain large regions in continental France. Places like Normandy were dukedoms, they were still subject to the French crown, but they were possessions of the English king. The English king was sovereign ruler over England, but was only a duke who was a subordinate to the king of France in regard to those particular territories. But of course, how is a king going to tell another king that you're just my duke in these territories, but you're a king when you're in that territory? So the possession of these regions becomes really ambiguous, and the British start to maintain larger and larger territories, and eventually they take over this entire area. I know it's hard to see on the map, but this area here is all purple. This remains strictly ruled by the French crown. But this area over here is sort of pink and red, and as well as the blue areas here, this is all English territory, or English-held territory, that is most of the time, strictly speaking, subject to the authority of the French crown, but that doesn't always hold out like that. But starting about 1200, England starts to lose a lot of this territory. One of the reasons they lose it is because, as the English crown specifically under King John, the robinhood villain, King John runs the country into debt, and to be fair, his brother Richard the Lionheart, when he'd gone on crusade, it's been a lot of the crown's wealth. So to get back some of that wealth, they had to sell off some of these territories. So they start to lose a lot of land over the next century, and this English territory goes from having been at this line, this red line through the middle of France, all of this had been English possessions. It goes from that to down to just this area of Gascany right here. They lose all of this, and so all they're left with on the continent is this area. So in order to take back some of that area, the English try to pursue their claim to these territories, but also there's a dispute about whether or not the King of England actually should be the heir to the French crown. And this argument, and you know, putting that argument into practice in warfare, this starts the Hundred Years War in 1337, which will last actually longer than a hundred years. It's going to last until 1453. But during that time, England is going to go from just having this area of Gascany here. They're going to retake a lot of this portion of lower France, but they never do take back places like Normandy. They do win a lot of victories, like the victories at Agincourt that's recorded in Shakespeare's Henry V play. But this conflict will be ongoing throughout Chaucer's lifetime, and it's specifically relevant to Chaucer because he's going to end up fighting in these wars, or at least one of them, one battle during this war. During that time, also we have a major outbreak of the bubonic plague, which is also referred to as the Black Death. The plague kills about a quarter of the population of Europe. That is an enormous number of people. It kills the commoners more than the nobility, which you might expect because the nobility can sort of sequester themselves, and quarantine themselves, and be a little bit less vulnerable to it. Also, the fact that the plague was spread by rats, specifically the fleas on one species of rat, the rats were more able to get into lower-lying houses. They would actually climb up into the thatched roofs of these houses, and the fleas would fall off of them down into the places where people were sleeping, and they would bite the people and spread this disease. But if you lived in a castle, if you lived in an upper floor of a stone residence, you're less likely to get this. But what this means is, there's a lot of people, the commoners, that the nobility can sort of dismiss, and they can sort of look down on. But these are actually the people that are the infrastructure of this society. And they're the people that grow the wheat that bread is made from. They mill the bread. They raise the cattle and sheep that goes not just toward the production of meat, but also the use of leather. And leather is one of the only things you can make a lot of substances with at that time, where leather is a luxury today, but it was an absolute necessity for all sorts of things, from clothing to saddles to all sorts of tools, and also the people who were blacksmiths. So all of these people who have specialized labor, they usually get overlooked. They usually are things that the nobility just presumed that they're entitled to, that these people just need to work and not complain about it. These people start to die off, so that there's shortages, shortages of grain, shortages of food, shortages of leather, shortages of metal. And because of these shortages, the demand for these specialized laborers goes up. The nobility are not really in demand anymore. They need the laborers just as much or more than the laborers ever needed them. And because of this, this makes the people who survived the plague and have a skill, are able to plow the fields, are able to raise oxen and sheep and that sort of thing. They are in a much better bargaining position when it comes to how much they get paid and what sort of treatment they get at this time. And that over the next few decades is going to lead to a great upheaval in the social class system of all of Europe, but especially England. During this time, England is still in the Middle Ages, very much in what we call the High Middle Ages. But Italy is now moving into the Renaissance. Italy is now starting to rediscover classical Latin and Greek writings, philosophers, artists and that sort of thing. These sorts of arts and sciences and philosophies are starting to make a comeback. And one of the people who is reviving a lot of ancient literary art is Giovanni Boccaccio, a Florentine, someone from the city of Florence in the northern part of the peninsula of Italy. And Boccaccio was very well written. He wrote a lot that we don't ordinarily pay attention to in at least in English literature. But one thing we do remember him for is the Decamerant. The Decamerant is an anthology, a collection of different stories that Boccaccio wrote. But what makes it interesting, well it's interesting to us for a couple of reasons. One is some of the stories within the Decamerant will be adapted by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. But even more important than that is the frame narrative that Boccaccio creates for this work. Boccaccio doesn't just throw a bunch of stories together as if they were chapters or something within the same book. He unifies these stories by creating a frame narrative. And the particular frame narrative that Boccaccio uses uses the events of the plague. The fact that the nobility were now sort of quarantined and trying to avoid the plague. They would sort of wall themselves off, not literally, but they would go somewhere where they were together but not going out much, not mixing with the common people. And while they were sort of quarantined like this there was probably very boring. So one of the ways they would entertain each other is to tell each other stories. And that is the narrative that creates the narrative frame that Boccaccio uses in order to have a reason to tell the stories that these people tell. And another artistic decision that Boccaccio makes that's going to be very influential on Chaucer is he's actually writing the Florentine vernacular. Vernacular means just the common tongue, the way normal people talk. Not in Latin which is what most people, educated people would write in. Again remember the language of the clergy, not just in England but everywhere in Europe. Language of the clergy but also the language of the court. That is the king's court that's also the law court. So laws are going to be written in Latin and because they're imitating these ancient Latin writers like Virgil they're usually writing fictional literature in Latin as well and poetry in Latin. But Boccaccio decides to not do this. He decides to write in his, the vernacular, the city he lives in. Another event that happens just a couple of decades later that's going to be very influential on Chaucer's life and Chaucer's literature is what's called the Great Schism. This is when the Pope had been since the days of Pope Leo, the first official pope, the first pope with the power of the modern papacy, had moved, it had been in Rome for centuries and then it was moved to Avignon France. And there was a pope in Avignon France but when a new pope was selected the Romans insisted that the new pope had to come from Rome and the papacy should move back to Rome. Well this actually created two papacies. There was all of a sudden a pope in Avignon and there was a pope in Rome. And different countries would divide up as to which ones they were going to side with. Obviously France is going to side with Avignon because Avignon is in France. But the English side with the Roman pope but then that means that the Scots are going to side with whoever the English don't side with. It's more complicated than that. But we have this division where some people side with, they recognize the Avignon pope as the real pope and others decide that the Roman pope is the real pope. And in the Holy Roman Empire they don't really have an official position. Some go one way, some go the other. Well it seems, it might seem kind of silly to us now but if you're alive at that time and you believe the pope is chosen by God as God's infallible voice on earth and all of a sudden you have two of them, what happens when they disagree? And they did disagree. Most of all they would disagree about which one of them was the actual pope. So this becomes not just a political issue, it becomes a religious issue. And this leads people to become a little bit more skeptical of the clergy than they had been. If they see these two clerical officials who they presume to be always the morally upright examples and leaders and they see them sort of fighting just the same way that backstabbing nobles would, like the carillon nobles in El Cid. This leads to people losing a lot of faith not necessarily in their religion but a lot of faith in the clergy themselves, the people who were the representatives of their religion. And that's something we're going to see influence Chaucer's portrayal of the clergy at this time. And so remember I said that during the bubonic plague a lot of the commoners who were specialized in the different labor practices, they were depended upon by the rest of the population. The nobility depended on the plowmen and the millers and the textile industry, the people who'd raised sheep and spun the wool. They depended on those people a lot more than they thought they did. A lot more than they would pretend to. But now that that labor is in more demand, the peasants are asking for more money, they're asking to be treated like not peasants, asking to be treated as labor professionals, which is what they were. They recognize, they realize that the nobility needs them. They don't necessarily need the nobility. Does it matter that you have an English lord ruling over you and treating you like a peasant instead of a French lord ruling over you and treating you like a peasant? Not really. But it definitely matters if you're a noble and you need to eat and you need clothes and you need weapons and you need tools and you need a house to live in. And these peasants, despite the fact that they would spend most of their lives farming or working in textile mills or spinning wool into yarn or whatever, they were not unfamiliar with conflict. It wasn't like the nobles were the only ones who would ever go to war during the Hundred Years War. In fact, one of the reasons England was so successful in the Hundred Years War against the French is because while the French put all their military strategic emphasis on heavily mounted nobles, heavily armored mounted nobles, writing around on horseback, the horses were covered with plate armor and the French nobles were covered with plate armor and they had these big lances, but that meant all of their emphasis was on cavalry and a lot of Francis is very muddy and it's not really easy to ride a horse through a lot of battlefields because of the mud, especially if you're bogged down with all this armor. Well, the English put a lot of their emphasis on archery and the people who were the best archers were not the nobles themselves. They were the peasants that were brought to the war. And so the peasants become really, really good at archery. It becomes a law that all male peasants have to practice archery and it probably didn't take a lot of guys, a lot of convincing to spend a lot of time instead of working in the field. You can go shoot at a target. So because of the proficiency of these archers, they're very good at combat and these are the very same people who are going to turn against the nobles or at least stand up and argue for better treatment by the nobility. The peasants then stage their own revolt. A guy named Watt Tyler leads this rebellion. Sometimes it's called Watt Tyler's Rebellion. Sometimes it's called the English Rising or the Peasants Revolt. And that Peasants Revolt gets pretty far for this kind of movement, more so than we've seen in the Middle Ages. But it's only successful up to a point, eventually Watt Tyler's killed in a sort of underhanded way. He goes to meet with King Richard II and say that, you know, give their terms and, you know, they've actually invaded London. The peasants have come into the walls of London as an army. They come right through the gate where Geoffrey Chaucer was living. So Chaucer, if he hadn't fled, could have literally looked out his window and seen Watt Tyler's army coming into London. But when Watt Tyler goes to meet with Richard II to discuss terms for their leaving London and putting down their arms, one of Richard II's men, and it's not clear that this was just the plan, it just ends up a scuffle happens and the king's man kills Watt Tyler. And then without their leader, the peasants disperse. And a lot of them are really abused after that. A lot of the nobility want to really punish their peasants for rebelling. Okay, so that leads us to Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm going to back up a little bit and go through some of these same things I just mentioned in this timeline insofar as they relate to Chaucer himself. Chaucer is born a commoner. He is a wealthy commoner. His father was a wine merchant. And his father had, well, it was part of a trade network that had him traveling in France and Italy and other places where obviously you have to go to a really good wine country for your supply of wine. And he was really wealthy because everybody drank at this time. This wasn't just because they loved to get drunk. It was because water in medieval England was frequently bad. We have a little bit of experience with unhealthy water here in Corpus Christi. Every few months we have another water bowl warning. Well, if you can't just throw water on the stove to boil it, to purify it, you need a source of liquid that is not going to be easily infected with pathogens. And the easiest thing to do was just to brew some beer and brew some wine and that's where your liquid came from. So everybody drank that meant Chaucer's father was very wealthy and Chaucer himself was raised very wealthy, but he's still a commoner. And the distinction between the aristocracy and the nobility and the commoners is just as obvious, just as abrasive in England and Chaucer's time as it was in Spain during El Cid's time. Just like El Cid had the carrione nobles looking down their nose at him even though he was so successful in the battlefield, they still just thought they were better than him for no other reason than because they were nobility. Chaucer has that same sort of issue going for him. He's very successful. He's very close to the nobility, but he is still a commoner. He becomes a page to the Earl of Ulster at a young age. He then becomes a soldier at the rank of Yeoman and he goes to war alongside or in the army of John of Gaunt who was the son of the king, King Edward III. And that meant he's really well, very highly placed. And what shows how highly placed he was was the fact that when he was captured, he wasn't killed by the French. He wasn't sort of thrown into prison or put to work with their commoners. He was treated as gentry, which is basically almost a noble. In fact, he was put up for ransom, which is something that usually only nobles could depend on. If you went into battle and all your men lost, all of your commoners who were your soldiers, they would probably be killed. But you could, if you were a noble, depend on being captured and getting sort of a cushy like a room to stay in while you waited for the folks back home to send a lot of gold to buy your ransom. Well actually, Chaucer gets ransomed. He gets taken prisoner. He gets the French offer to ransom him. And it's actually King Edward III himself. It is the king of England who pays Chaucer's ransom. So Chaucer was highly respected in the royal court clearly. He then later becomes a squire in the king's court. He sort of, due to his intelligence and his diplomacy, his social intelligence in particular, he becomes a cherished diplomat for John of Gaunt, the son of King Edward III. He's later chosen to travel to Italy twice as an ambassador during the reign of Edward III. And it's during this time that he probably comes into contact with Boccaccio. He may have even met Boccaccio. But of course, clearly came into contact with the Cameron. And he also came into contact with the Italian Renaissance authors. And again, Italy is in the Renaissance at this time. England is still in the Middle Ages. But he is influenced by other famous Italian authors like Dante and Petrarch. Shortly after that, he's appointed the chief customs clerk for the Port of London. And the customs clerk primarily dealt with the wool and textile industry because this is something that England made a lot of money on. So France and Italy, they make a lot of wine and England buys that. But everybody else in Europe, nobody raises as many sheep and spends as much wool as the British. And this is relevant also because the wife of Bath, this is where her wealth comes from. But Chaucer sort of learns everything there is to know about the wool industry because he's the chief customs clerk for the Port of London. Now in 1380, he's accused of raping Baker's daughter. I'm gonna come back to that. Just wanna put that in the timeline right here. In 1386, he becomes a member of parliament. And of course, this is the House of Commons. The English parliament is divided between the House of Lords where you can only be part of the House of Lords if you're part of the nobility. But the House of Commons is becoming increasingly powerful. And Chaucer is a member of it at that time. Unfortunately for a lot of members of parliament at that time, this is when the merciless parliament as it's called takes over, accuses a lot of people of being traitors. They basically try to take power away from the young king at this point who is Richard II, who was the son or actually grandson of Edward III. I don't think it would be too much of an exaggeration to compare this time period, especially with the death of Edward III, followed by his young grandson, Richard II, coming to the throne and other people using that vacuum to try to create a power grab because Richard II was very young and very weak. A lot of the nobility started fighting each other. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to compare this time period with the sort of thing you see in like Game of Thrones. Now there's no isombies, no dragons, but if you wanted to take power, it wasn't enough that you just sort of got ahead of somebody else. You needed to kill them off, or people did, whether they needed to or not. So if you just get on the wrong person's bad side and that person finds themselves in a position of power, you could have to worry about yourself and your family and all your friends and your allies being executed on trumped-up charges, even if everybody knew they were trumped-up charges. And that's what's happening right now during the merciless parliament time period. But for whatever reason, Chaucer seems to have not gotten on anybody's bad side. He seems to have had that social intelligence that led him to make allies without making a lot of enemies. At least, he had the right allies during this time because he managed to survive when a lot of his friends were put to death. After that, he becomes Clerk of the King's Works, which means he was sort of one of the top managers of the Crown's wealth. And the Crown had a lot of wealth and Chaucer was the one keeping the books. And other clerks of the King's Works in the past had been executed because they had been skimming a little off the top. They had been embezzling money, or they were just accused of embezzling money. But Chaucer had the reputation clearly for being honest and he managed to be Clerk of the King's Works for a couple years without having anybody accuse him of theft and executed. And eventually, he gets a semi-retirement when he becomes the deputy forester of the King's Royal Forest in Somerset. Now, that doesn't mean that he was, you know, grabbing his bow and arrow and hopping on a horse and riding around and chasing off poachers who were hunting the King's deer or anything like that. He was still sort of sitting in an office somewhere rather than really being out in the forest. But this is, you'll notice that I put Forester in blue just like I put Clerk and Member of Parliament, diplomat and squire and soldier. Because all of these jobs that he works lead him to have expertise or experience with the people, the task, the jobs, the requirements of different levels of society, different specializations, different parts of the social economic infrastructure that we're not used to hearing. Most of what we hear writers write about is the nobility. Everybody knows what the nobility did. They courted each other and they went off and fought each other and that's about it. You never find out who made their clothes or who provided their food. Where Chaucer is different is the fact that he also knows the commoners, not just commoners as one group as if that was all, like as if every commoner sort of thought the same way. But he understands, he knows the doctors. He knows the legal specialists. He knows the millers. He knows the masons, the architects. He knows the merchants, the sailors that are the ones that shipping cargo back and forth. He has to interact with them. He knows the plowmen, the people who are out there in the fields. He knows the people who are milling that wheat that the plowmen are planting. He knows the shepherds who are raising the sheep and he knows the spinners who are spinning that wool into the number one cash crop in England at the time. And he knows these individual jobs better than most other people would. And he's not one of these specialists, although he has sort of gone from job to job. Been there just enough to get to know a few people there, but then broaden his knowledge, broaden his social expertise, his social intelligence, his social experience, at the same time as his economic experience, at the same time as his political experience, by interacting where all of these different people come together to communicate, to negotiate, to compete with each other. And because of this, he doesn't just interact with stereotypes. He doesn't just interact with job types or nobility or commoner or Englishman or Frenchman. He interacts with individual minds in all of these. He understands that there's not just a sort of a commoner way of thinking or a nobility way of thinking or the church way of thinking. He knows that each of these larger groups is composed of lots of different types of minds and he's had experience dealing, negotiating, or just observing each of these individual minds. This is why he's able to give us something that nobody else at this time was able to give us, which is the sort of representation of interesting characters that we see in the Canterbury Tales.