Introduction Introduction

stand how it could be that Chaucer concluded his career by writing the way that elicits its voice, some texts actively engage the phenomenon
text that provides us with the shrewdest and most capacious analysis of of voice, exploit it, make it the center of their discourse-make it their
late medieval society we possess . History impelled Chaucer toward the content. A text of this sort can be said to be about its speaker, and this
modern and he accepted the challenge by investigating not just the is the sort of text I contend that the Canterbury Tales is and especially
idea of history, as in Anelida and Arcite and the Troilus, but, in the Canter- the sort that the individual tales are. The tales ... concentrate not on
bury Tales, the historical world itself. the way preexisting people create language but on the way language
creates people. 48
IV
While in practice some Tales may efface their speakers, Leicester is cer-
The turn to the social world of contemporary England represents, I tainly right in recognizing that the very form of the Tales always raises
believe, a significant re orientation of Chaucer' s way of thinking: we the possibility of a radically subjectivized discourse.
should take seriously the discontinuity of his career and try to under- The General Prologue proclaims this possibility in no uncertain terms
stand the conditions that made the writing of the Canterbury Tales possi- and provides a model for the kind of selfhood the Tales are going to
ble. The presence of the Tales is for the modern reader so unavoidable, explore in detail. In Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, Jill Mann
their achievement so undeniable, that we approach them with a sense showed that although the conceptual framework of the Prologue was
of inevitability that assumes their permanent existence. But there was a derived from an estates literature that defined selfhood in terms of so-
time when they had not been written, and their coming into existence cial function-"the estate itself, rather than the individual, is the root
was not preordained. If something rather than nothing, then why this idea" (14)-the Prologue in fact pays scant attention to "social ends"
thing rather than another? (191) and instead manages "to create the ambiguity and complexity of
Anelida and Arcite and the Troilus define the problematic of history in response which persuades us that the characters are complex individu-
terms of the relation of the individual to an unfolding historical totality, als" (193).49 To an extraordinary degree, Chaucer allows the members
a totality that both stands over against the self and is nonetheless an of the various es~ates to define themselves, a procedure that in effect
effect of it. And both, and especially the Troilus, explore with often undermines their definition as estates. Rather than being representa-
astonishing perspicuity the complex subjectivity that constitutes the tives of social functions, in other words, the pilgrims become individu-
inner dimension of selfhood. It is this same dialectic-between the sub- als who have been assigned those functions, men and women enacting
ject and history-that is at the heart of the Canterbury Tales. But there is externally imposed roles toward which each has his or her own kind of
a difference. Throughout his early poetry Chaucer had insisted upon relationship. They become, in short, subjects .
subjectivity as the unavoidable condition of all discourse, that all writ- This definition from the inside is accomplished by several means.
ing, both that endowed with cultural authority and that which pur- For one thing, Chaucer persistently filters into the narratorial descrip-
ports to render experience directly, is mediated by a historically specific tion of each pilgrim an individualizing voice. Virtually every pilgrim is
human consciousness. The early complaints and the dream visions con- presented not only as a physical appearance and set of typical practices
stantly call attention to the narratorial voice, while Troilus and Criseyde is but also as a speaker, and the Prologue is full of references to their lin-
both presided over by the go-between Pandarus and delivered by an guistic habits: the Prioress's fastidious oath "by Seinte Loy, " her nasal
unavoidable narrator, in effect defining itself as a study in mediation. "entuning" of the divine service, and her Stratford French; the Friar's
But in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer goes further, for each Tale is not only "fair langage" -a pleasant absolution, solicitous in principio, and
grounded within a speaking subject but in effect serves to constitute sweetly lisped English; the Merchant's solemn "resons" and self-
that subjectivity. This quality has been best described by Marshall promoting "sowynynge"; the Clerk's verbal economy-"short and
Leicester:
48 . H . MarshalI Leicester, Jr. , "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the
The Canterbury Tales is not written to be spoken as if it were a play. It is Canterbury Tales," PMLA 95 (1980), 221, 217.
written to be read, but read as if it were spoken. The poem is a literary 49· Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
imitation of oral performance ... . While any text can be read in a Press, 1973).
 Introduction Introduction 29

quyk and ful of hy sentence" -that" souns" only moral virtue; the Ser- undefined subjectivity (content, for the moment, unspecified) and a
geant's "wordes [that] weren so wise"; the Doctor's ponderous account historically determined role. Character is what emerges from the trans-
"of physik and of surgerye"; the Wife of Bath's banter-"wel koude actions between the given world outside (history) and the unspecified
she laughe and carpe"; the Parson's" discreet and benygne" teaching- world within (the subject).
"he was to synful men nat despitous, / Ne of his speche daungerous ne This essentially rhetorical conception of selfhood is at work through-
digne"; the Miller's performance as a "janglere and goliardeys"; the out the General Prologue. The pilgrims' verbal energy is not just a charac-
Summoner's drunken Latin; and the Pardoner' s voice" as smal as . .. a teristic to be described by the narrator but is itself continually demon-
goot." strated by the pilgrims themselves: usurping the narratorial voice, the
Even more important, throughout the Prologue Chaucer reminds us pilgrims in effect represent themselves. We hear the Monk articulate
that the language of his pilgrims is not just a characterizing detail but his own objections to the monastic rule:
the very material from which they are (self-)constructed. Within the
narratorial voice we hear as well the voice of the pilgrim: narratorial What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,
objectivity is replaced by pilgrim subjectivity. Take, for example, the Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure,
case of the Parson: Or swynken with his handes, and laboure,
As Austyn bit? How shal the world be served?
This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf, Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved! (184- 88)
That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.
Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte, And we hear the Friar defend his power of confession-" As seyde
And this figure he added eek therto, hymself" (219)-and express his distaste for "sike lazars": "It is nat
That if gold ruste, what shal iren do? honest, it may nat avaunce, / For to deelen with no swich poraille"
For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste, (246-47). The Prologue is also saturated with the pilgrims' professional
No wonder is a lewed man to ruste; jargon. The Merchant's "bargaynes" and "chevyssaunce"; the Ser~
And shame it is, if a prest take keep, geant of Law's "patente," "pleyn commissioun," "termes," and "caas
A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep. and doomes alie"; the Cook's "mortreux" and "blankmanger"; the
Wel oghte a preest ens ample for to yive, Shipman's "herberwe, and his moone, [and] lodemenage"; the Doctor
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve. (496-506) of Physik's medical authorities-" olde Esculapius, / And Deyscorides,
and eek Rufus," and a dozen more; the Pardoner's "reliks" -Our
As Mann says, "It is the character himself who is speaking. It is not the Lady's veil, Saint Peter's sail, the" croys of latoun" and the pig' s bones:
moralist commentator who quotes from the gospel and adds the 'fig- as Mann says, "the narrator assumes that each pilgrim is an expert, and
ure' about rusting gold; it is the Parson himself." And she adds: "This is presents him in his own terms, according to his own values, in his own
no abstract, timeless figure; Chaucer envisages [the Parson] in a realis- language" (194).5' ~
tic spatial and temporal existence, and as not merely acting out a role, This procedure entails a specific idea of selfhood. For if the voca-
but expressing his consciousness of doing so" (66).5 0 Chaucer shows us that tional objects with which the Prologue is packed are displayed before us
the Parson's estate is not the sum total of his selfhood but a social iden- not just as the habitual materials of the pilgrims' working lives but as
tity that he deliberately adopts, a self-definition he labors to achieve. the means by which they constitute their social identities, we are also
He shows us, in other words, that character is not an object to be de- made aware of the conscious effort required by these acts of self-
scribed but the product of a dialectical movement between a socially fabrication. A telling case in point is the Prioress, the first portrait after
the rigorously conventional and objectified opening trio of Knight,
50. The first italicization is in Mann's text; I have added the second. That several of
Squire, and Yeoman. John Livingston Lowes memorably described the
the pilgrims appropriate the narratorial voice was already noted by E. Talbot Donaldson Prioress' s dilemma as "the engagingly imperfect submergence of the
in Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2d ed. (New York: The Ronald
Press, 1975 [1958]), 1040. 51. My italics.
 )0 Introduction Introduction )1

feminine in the ecclesiastical. "52 Telling as this description is, however, virtue: the Knight has no identity other than that with which his social
it in fact misrepresents the Prioress's situation. For her dilemma is not function endows him, and to ascribe self-consciousness to him, even
that of a womanly nature coerced into a constraining social role but were it a self-conscious submission to his role, would be to assume a
rather of a subjectivity caught between the demands of two conflicting subjectivity that would be itself subversive of the social order from
social definitions of femininity, those of nun and courtly lady. Repre- which he derives his identity. So too for the Squire and Yeoman, whose
sented by her ambiguous brooch, this social conflict is not an end in absorption by the collective values of the social order is most dramati-
itself but the means by which a hidden inwardness struggles to make cally marked by a single line in the Yeoman's portrait: "Wel koude he
itself known. And this inwardness is symptomatically revealed by the dresse his takel yemanly," as if the Yeoman's mode of acting in the world
activities that seem most to engage her, her eating and her petting. were fully determined by his socialidentity. How comforting a represen-
Quite apart from whatever social judgment we might wish to pass on tative of the third estate he is!-especially at a time when many of his
these particular habits for"a nun, they more profoundly witness to the peers were far from being so instinctively docile. And this gratification is
It pressure of an appetitive self that seeks for a satisfaction that continues extended to the psychologically opaque and socially quiescent Plow-
j:. to elude it. Food and animals become the signs of the Prioress's desire, man, whose portrait assiduously effaces the very real economic strug-
1 the objects of a yearning to gratify the self both by incorporating the gles of Chaucer's contemporary world, struggles that were in other texts
world ("she was nat undergrowe") and by entertaining feelings whose expressed precisely by means of the figure of the plowman.54
fleeting intensity-sharp but not deep-perhaps masks more perma- Deriving their historical legitimacy from the very social conception
nent aches. .that motivates estates literature, the unit of the Knight, Squire, and
In sum, the pilgrims are usually conceived less as objects whose par- Yeoman is naturally represented in the purely social terms prescribed
ticularity is to be detailed than as subjects caught in the very process of by the genre. But this is not the case for the majority of pilgrims, that
self-construction. Usually bu tnotalways, and the exceptions are instruc- broad group who are technically members of the third estate but are in
tive. The three opening portraits-of the Knight, Squire, and Yeoman- fact drawn from the middle ranks that the ternary social theory accom-
can be unproblematically accounted for by the prescriptions of rhetori- modated only with difficulty. Men and women playing socially defined
cal descriptio .53 The Knight's portrait, for instance, is carefully divided roles and largely aware of their performance, character is for them not a
into two parts: the opening thirty lines describe his moral qualities, first given fact but a construction; and it is constructed upon the ground of a
the military experience that marks him as "a worthy man," then the socially undetermined subjectivity that resists representation and
virtues that comprise the sapientia that is the counterpart to this makes itself known only symptomatically. The Prioress's food, the
fortitude-"And though that he were worthy, he was wys." And the Monk's sweat, the Friar's wintry gaze-these signs of an inward self
second part is an effictio, introduced by a marking line ("But for to tellen find counterparts in other portraits: the Merchant's namelessness, the
yow of his array") and followed by a brief but telling physical descrip- leanness of the Clerk's mount, the Sergeant of Law's "hoomly" array,
tion. The carefully delineated structure matches the fully conventional the "wo" of the Franklin's cook if his sauces fall below standard and the
quality of the portrait, a conventionality that is itself a sign of chivalric "mormal" of the Guildsmen's Cook (two displaced expressions of so-
cial strain), the name-"Maudelayne"-of the Shipman's barge, the
52. John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mif- Physician's protectively "mesurable" diet, the Wife's" shoes ful moyste
flin, 1919), 60-61; cited by Florence H . Ridley in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, and newe," the Miller's white coat with its blue hood, the Reeve's
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 803 . The phrase was even more telling in F. N . Robin-
son's miscitation; see The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, "yshadwed" dwelling in Norfolk, the Summoner's sexual generosity,
1957 [1933]), 653 · the Pardoner's "smal" voice straining to sing its "loude" song of love-
53. The locus classicus is Cicero, De inventione, 1, 24, 34-36. For medieval rewritings longing-each of these details (and every reader can easily construct
of these prescriptions, see Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et his or her own list) creates a discordance that forces us to acknowledge
versificandi, trans. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), 138-39
(who also cites Horace' s Ars poetica, 120-74); Matthe':'l of Vend6me, Ars versificatoria, 1,
38- 118 (both in Edmond Faral, ed., Les arts pOlitiques du XII' et du XIII' siecle [Paris: Cham- 54. See Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Claren-
pion, 1924]); and the anonymous Tractatus de attributis personae et negotio, in K. F. Halm, don Press, 1975), 22-23, and Hilton, "Ideology and Social Order in Later Medieval En-
ed. , Rhetores latini minori (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863), 305-10. 'gland," in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Hambledon, 1985), 248- 50.
 Introduction Introduction 33

the distance between social function and psychological inwardness. cer served was hierarchically arranged, with the chamber knights-a
And the process of self-constitution through discourse that is initiated group that included Chaucer's friends Lewis Clifford, John Clanvowe,
in the General Prologue is fulfilled, in different ways and to different and Philip de la Vache-near the top, and the king's squires, which
degrees, in the Canterbury Tales that follow. included Chaucer, near the bottom. The office of chamber knight (miles
The setting up of a socially undetermined subjectivity in opposition to camere regis) was first introduced by Edward III in 1348 to replace the
the social definition entailed by the estates theory carries large implica- more exclusively military household knights (milites de familia regis).5 8
tions . For the model of selfhood that underwrites the Canterbury Tales, Edward originally had twelve chamber knights, but in the later years of
wi th its emphasis upon an identity tha texis ts prior to and even in opposi- his reign the number dwindled as low as three; under Richard 11 and
tion to the social order, is the foundational assumption of what will come Henry IV, the number rose again to between eight and thirteen. At-
to be humanist individualism. There is an essential human nature that tached to the personal service of the king, these men performed a wide
exists apart from society-Dryden's "general character," Blake's "Uni- variety of functions, as councillors, special commissioners, and diplo-
versal Human Life" -a selfhood that constitutes our most essential be- mats. They were, in Given-Wilson's words, flan inner group of high-
ing. But is not this idea itself a function of historical conditioning? As ranking and trusted royal servants, valued by the king for their coun-
Raymond Williams reminds us, it is a characteristic of bourgeois ideol- sel, their administrative ability and their domestic service. " 59 Below
ogy to establish" an abstract se para tion and distinction between the 'indi- them in scale were the armigeri camere regis, the twenty or so squires of
vidual' and the 'social' . .. as 'natural' starting-points. "55 Does this the chamber who attended personally on the king, and the armigeri
mean that Chaucer should be understood as a bourgeois writer, or that familia regis, squires of the household who "almost certainly came to the
he understood himself in this way? He was, after all, a son of the mer- court on rotation.,,60 It is within this latter group that Chaucer was to be
chant patriciate and spent much of his life, as controller of customs in found .61
London, immersed in the commercial world of the city and surrounded The gap in status and power between the chamber knights at the top
by its merchants. Can we understand Chaucer's fascination with the of the scale of royal service and Chaucer, near the bottom, was substan-
subject of history in biographical terms? tial. In certain documents this difference is exp lici t to the poin t of quan tifi-
cation. Like Chaucer, the chamber knight Richard Stury was captured in
v the campaign of 1359-60; he was ransomed for £50, while it cost Edward
III only £16 to retrieve Chaucer. In the 1385 writ of allowance for liveries
While we can hardly account for Chaucer's attitudes and interests sim- of mourning for Joan, the Dowager Princess of Wales, the recipients are
ply by reference to his position within the social world of late medieval
England, it is nonetheless true that his social location was intriguingly 58. This account depends upon Chris Given-Wilson, "The King and the Gentry in
anomalous. While Chaucer was a member of the gentil estate-as a Fourteenth-Century England," TRHS, 5th ser. 37 (1987): 87-102, and Given-Wilson, The
Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Politics, and Finance ill England 1360-1413
squire he was entitled to bear arms-his position was somewhat un-
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
usual, in terms of wealth, of social status, and, especially, of the tasks 59. Given-Wilson, "King and Gentry," 92.
he was called upon to perform. 56 "Royal service ennobles" was a com- 60. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 66.
mon medieval maxim, and it was through his service to the king, rather 61. Chaucer is listed in three documents as a squire of the king's chamber, but Rich-
than through lineage or the acquisition of landed wealth, that this vint- ard Firth Green's consideration of the full evidence leads him to the conclusion that
Chaucer was in fact simply a squire of the household or familia (Poets and Princepleasers:
ner's son achieved gentil status. 57 The royal household in which Chau-
Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages [Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1980], 68). As well as these knights and squires of the household, the king retained
55· Raymond WilIiams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, men who constituted his affinity: king's knights were paid an annuity of between f20 to
1977), 28. f100, most payments being between £40 and f60, and king's squires received annuities of
56. Noel Denholm-Young, The Country Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Cla- between 20 and 40 marks (apprOXimately f13 to f26). These last two groups were com-
rendon Press, 1969), offers a description of Chaucer's arms, but without specifying his prised of men who would promote the king's interests in local affairs and whom he could
source (23-24). call upon for service on commissions, as sheriffs and justices of the peace, and for sup-
57· For service and ennoblement, see Christopher Given-Wilson, The English Nobil- port in Parliament. It may well be that after his move to the customs in 1374, Chaucer
ity in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 17- 18 . would have been thought to fit into this category.