Chaucer and His England Part 3

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art.

I warmed both hands before the fire of life: It sinks; and I am ready to depart."

W. S. LANDOR

From this time forward Chaucer seems to have lived from hand to mouth. He had, as will presently be seen, a son, stepson, or foster-son of considerable wealth and position; and no doubt he had other good friends too. We have reason to believe that he was still working at the "Canterbury Tales," and receiving such stray crumbs from great men's tables as remained the main reward of literature until modern times. In 1391 (if we may judge from the fact that problems in the book are calculated for that year) he wrote the "Treatise on the Astrolabe" for the instruction of his ten-year-old son Lewis.[69] It was most likely in 1393 that he wrote from Greenwich the "Envoy" to his friend Henry Scogan, who was then with the Court at Windsor, "at the stream's head of grace." The poet urges him there to make profitable mention of his friend, "forgot in solitary wilderness" at the lower end of the same river; and it is natural to connect this with the fact that, in 1394, Richard granted Chaucer a fresh pension of 20 a year for life. But the King's exchequer was constantly empty, and we have seen that the poet's was seldom full; so we need not be surprised to find him constantly applying for his pension at irregular times during the rest of the reign. Twice he dunned his royal patron for the paltry sum of 6_s._ 8_d._ More significant still is a record of the Court of Common Pleas showing that he was sued by Isabella Buckholt for the sum of 14. 1_s._ 11_d._ some time between April 24 and May 20, 1398; the Sheriff of Middles.e.x reported that Chaucer had no possessions in his bailiwick. On May 4 the poet obtained letters of protection, in which the King alludes formally to the "very many arduous and urgent affairs" with which "our beloved esquire" is entrusted, and therefore takes him with "his men, lands, goods, rents, and all his possessions" under the Royal protection, and forbids all pleas or arrests against him for the next two years. The recital of these arduous and urgent affairs is no doubt (like that of Chaucer's lands and rents) a mere legal form; but the protection was real. Isabella Buckholt pressed her suit, but the Sheriff returned in October, 1398, and June, 1399, that the defendant "could not be found." Yet all this time Chaucer was visible enough, for he was pet.i.tioning the King for formal letters patent to confirm a grant already made by word of mouth in the preceding December, of a yearly b.u.t.t of wine from the Royal cellars "for G.o.d's sake, and as a work of charity." This grant, valued at about 75 of modern money, was confirmed on October 13, 1398, and was the last gift from Richard to Chaucer. Before twelve months were gone, the captive King had ravelled out his weaved-up follies before his pitiless accusers in the Tower of London; and on the very 13th of October, year for year, on which Chaucer had received his b.u.t.t of wine from Richard II., a fresh poetical supplication brought him a still greater favour from the next King. Henry IV. granted on his own account a pension of forty marks in addition to Richard's; and five days afterwards we find Chaucer pleading that he had "accidentally lost" the late King's letters patent for the pension and the wine, and begging for their renewal under Henry's hand. The favour was granted, and Chaucer was thus freed from any uncertainty which might have attached to his former grants from a deposed King, even though one of them was already recognized and renewed in Henry's letters of October 13.[70]

"King Richard," writes Froissart, "had a greyhound called Math, who always waited upon the king and would know no man else; for whensoever the king did ride, he that kept the greyhound did let him loose, and he would straight run to the king and fawn upon him and leap with his fore feet upon the king's shoulders. And as the king and the earl of Derby talked together in the court, the greyhound, who was wont to leap upon the king, left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lancaster, and made to him the same friendly countenance and cheer as he was wont to do to the king. The duke, who knew not the greyhound, demanded of the king what the greyhound would do. 'Cousin,' quoth the king, 'it is a great good token to you and an evil sign to me.' 'Sir, how know you that?' quoth the duke. 'I know it well,' quoth the king, 'the greyhound maketh you cheer this day as king of England, as ye shall be, and I shall be deposed. The greyhound hath this knowledge naturally; therefore take him to you; he will follow you and forsake me.' The duke understood well those words and cherished the greyhound, who would never after follow king Richard, but followed the duke of Lancaster: [and more than thirty thousand men saw and knew this."[71]] The fickle hound did but foreshadow the bearing of Richard's dependents in general. The poem in which Chaucer hastened to salute the new King of a few days breathed no word of pity for his fallen predecessor, but hailed Henry as the saviour of England, "conqueror of Albion," "very king by lineage and free election."[72] In the months that followed, while Chaucer enjoyed his wine and his pension, the King who first gave them was starving himself, or being starved by his gaolers, at Pontefract. It must of course be remembered that, while Richard was felt on all hands to have thrown his splendid chances wantonly away, Henry was the son of Chaucer's best patron; and indeed the poet had recently been in close relations with the future King, if not actually in his service.[73]

Still, we know that few were willing to suffer in those days for untimely faith to a fallen sovereign, and we ourselves have less reason to blame the many, than to thank the luckier stars under which such trials of loyalty are spared to our generation. Chaucer's contemporary and fellow-courtier, Froissart, might indeed write bitterly in his old age about a people which could change its ruler like an old glove; but Froissart was at ease in his fat canonry of Chimay; while Chaucer, with a hundred poets before and since, had chirped like a cricket all through the summer, and was now face to face with cold and starvation in the winter of his life.

His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in the tone of Wamba the Witless: "Wait till you come to forty year!" There is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so--

Was never pike wallowed in galantine As I in love am wallowed and y-bound.

Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in the outspoken triumph-note of its close--

Since I from Love escaped am so fat, I never think to be in his prison lean; Since I am free, I count him not a bean.

He may answer, and saye this or that; I do no force, I speak right as I mean [I care no whit _Since I from Love escaped am so fat, I never think to be in his prison lean_.

Love hath my name y-struck out of his slate, And he is struck out my bookes clean For evermore; there is none other mean.

_Since I from Love escaped am so fat, I never think to be in his prison lean; Since I am free, I count him not a bean!_

Then we have "The Former Age"--a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for the ungrateful Present--

Alas, alas! now may men weep and cry!

For in our days is nought but covetise And doubleness, and treason, and env, Prison, manslaughter, and murder in sundry wise.[74]

Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning "This wretched worldes trans.m.u.tacioun"; a "Complaint of Venus"; the two begging epistles to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend Bukton; a piteous complaint ent.i.tled "Lack of Steadfastness," and two moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and most resigned--

Flee from the press, and dwell with Soothfastness ...

That thee is sent, receive in buxomness [obedience The wrestling for this world asketh a fall [requires, implies Here is no home, here is but wilderness: Forth, Pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!

Know thy countree, look up, thank G.o.d of all; Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead, And Truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.

The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are Chaucer's own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn again into closer kins.h.i.+p, just as early childhood is much the same in all countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer's later writings that reminds us of Renan's "pauvre ame develoutee de soixante ans." All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are, in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But, for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions, there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems: and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old man's disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer's old age; we see in him what Ruskin calls "a Tory of the old school--Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's"; loyal to monarchy and deeply distrustful of democracy, yet never doubting the King's ultimate responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He antic.i.p.ates in effect Heine's tragi-comic appeal, "Hate me, Ladies, laugh at me, jilt me, but let me live!" For all that we have lost or missed, the world is no mere vale of tears--

But, lord Christ! when that it remembreth me Upon my youth, and on my jollity, It tickleth me about mine hearte-root.

Unto this day it doth mine hearte boot That I have had my world as in my time!

But Age, alas!----

well, even Age has its consolations--

The flour is gone, there is no more to tell, The bran, as I best can, now must I sell!

There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer's later years--to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th century drew to its close; Edward III.'s sun had gone down in disgrace; his grandson's brilliant infancy had pa.s.sed into a childish manhood, whose wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to his own supporters.[75] The Great Pestilence and the Papal Schism, the Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants' Revolt in England, had shaken society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.

To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan's sense; a place of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was rather Thackeray's Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that, when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than "come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out." But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose last cry is recorded at the end of the "Canterbury Tales." Everything points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and, though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must beware of exaggerations on this point.[76] Moreover, even if his unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it needed a temper very different from Chaucer's to withstand, under medieval conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the clergy. Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology for a doc.u.ment which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the dying man's instinctive call for his mother. "I beseech you meekly of G.o.d"

(so runs the epilogue to the "Parson's Tale") "that ye pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts--and namely [especially]

of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved."

But we are antic.i.p.ating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had brought Chaucer once again into easy circ.u.mstances, and within a few weeks we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey "a tenement, with its appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel," _i.e._ somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.'s chapel, sheltered by the south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and "nigh to the White Rose Tavern"; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to be planted "in the herbary between the King's Chamber and the Church."[77]

"He that plants pears, plants for his heirs," says the old proverb; and it is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last; but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was paid through the hands of one William Somere; and then the Royal accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the Abbey which has since received the name of Poet's Corner.[78] It is probable that we owe this fortunate circ.u.mstance still more to the fact that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his last years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)

(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOWS OF CHAUCER'S HOUSE

(ON EXTREME RIGHT, PART OF HENRY VII'S CHAPEL, BUILT ON THE SITE OF ST.

MARY'S CHAPEL)]

The industry of Mr. Edward Scott has discovered that this same house in St. Mary's Chapel garden was let, from at least 1423 until his death in 1434, to Thomas Chaucer, who was probably the poet's son. This Thomas was a man of considerable wealth and position. He began as a _protege_ of John of Gaunt, and became Chief Butler to Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V.

in succession; Constable of Wallingford Castle, and M.P. for Oxfords.h.i.+re in nine parliaments between 1402 and 1429. He was many times Speaker, a commissioner for the marriage of Henry V., and an Amba.s.sador to treat for peace with France; fought at Agincourt with a retinue of twelve men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; became a member of the King's Council, and died a very rich man. His only daughter made two very distinguished marriages; and her grandson was that Earl of Lincoln whom Richard III. declared his heir-apparent. For a while it seemed likely that Geoffrey Chaucer's descendants would sit on the throne of England, but the Earl died in fight against Henry VII. at Stoke. Of the poet's "little son Lewis" we hear no more after that brief glimpse of his boyhood; and Elizabeth Chaucy, the only other person whom we can with any probability claim as Chaucer's child, was entered as a nun at Barking in 1381, John of Gaunt paying 51 8_s._ 2_d._ for her expenses. It is just possible, however, that this may be the same Elizabeth Chausier who was received as a nun in St. Helen's priory four years earlier, at the King's nomination; in this case the date would point more probably to the poet's sister.

This is not the place for any literary dissertation on Chaucer's poetry, which has already been admirably discussed by many modern critics, from Lowell onwards. He did more than any other man to fix the literary English tongue: he was the first real master of style in our language, and retained an undisputed supremacy until the Elizabethan age. This he owes (as has often been pointed out) not only to his natural genius, but also to the happy chances which gave him so wide an experience of society.

Living in one of the most brilliant epochs of English history, he was by turns lover, courtier, soldier, man of business, student, amba.s.sador, Justice of the Peace, Member of Parliament, Thames Conservator, and perhaps even something of an architect, if he took his Clerks.h.i.+p of the Works seriously. All these experiences were mirrored in eyes as observant, and treasured in as faithful a memory, as those of any other English poet but one; and to these natural gifts of the born portrait-painter he added the crowning quality of a perfect style. If his writings have been hailed as a "well of English undefiled," it was because he spoke habitually, and therefore wrote naturally, the best English of his day, the English of the court and of the higher clergy. In this he was even more fortunate than Dante, as he surpa.s.sed Dante in variety (though not in intenseness) of experience, and as he knew one more language than he. When we note with astonishment the freshness of Chaucer's characters across these five centuries, we must always remember that his exceptional experience and powers of observation were combined with an equally extraordinary mastery of expression. It is because Chaucer's speech ranges with absolute ease from the best talk of the best society, down to the Miller's broad buffoonery or the north-country jargon of the Cambridge students, that his characters seem to us so modern in spite of the social and political revolutions which separate their world from ours. It will be my aim to portray, in the remaining chapters, the England of that day in those features which throw most light on the peculiarities of Chaucer's men and women.

CHAPTER VII

LONDON CUSTOM-HOUSE

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green; Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves, Cut from the yew wood on the burnt-up hill, And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill, And treasured scanty spice from some far sea, Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery, And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne; While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen Moves over bills of lading----"

W. MORRIS

There are two episodes of Chaucer's life which belong even more properly to Chaucer's England; in which it may not only be said that our interest is concentrated less on the man than on his surroundings, but even that we can scarcely get a glimpse of the man except through his surroundings.

These two episodes are his life in London, and his Canterbury Pilgrimage; and with these we may most fitly begin our survey of the world in which he lived.

The most tranquilly prosperous period of the poet's life was that s.p.a.ce of twelve years, from 1374 to 1386, during which he lived over the tower of Aldgate and worked at the Customs House, with occasional interruptions of foreign travel on the King's business. The Tower of London, according to popular belief, had its foundations cemented with blood; and this was only too true of Chaucer's Aldgate. It was a ma.s.sive structure, double-gated and double-portcullised, and built in part with the stones of Jews' houses plundered and torn down by the Barons who took London in 1215. But, in spite of similar incidents here and there, England was generally so free from civil war that the townsfolk were very commonly tempted to avoid unnecessary outlay upon fortifications. The traveller in Germany or Switzerland is often surprised to see even villages strongly walled against robber barons; while we may find great and wealthy English towns like Lynn and Cambridge which had little other defence than a ditch and palisade.[79] Even in fortified cities like London, the tendency was to neglect the walls--at one period we find men even pulling them gradually to pieces[80]--and to let the towers or gates for private lodgings. As early as the last year of Edward I., we find Cripplegate thus let out; and such notices are frequent in the "Memorials of London Life," collected by Mr. Riley from the City archives.[81]

Here Chaucer had only half a mile to go to his daily work, by streets which we may follow still. If he took the stricter view, which held that gentlefolk ought to begin their day with a Ma.s.s, and to hear it fasting, then he had at least St. Michael's, Aldgate, and All Hallows Stonechurch on his direct way, and two others within a few yards of his road. If, however, he was of those who preferred to begin the day with a sop of wine or "a draught of moist and corny ale," then the noted hostelry of the Saracen's Head probably stood even then, and had stood since the time of the Crusades, within a few yards of Aldgate Tower. Close by the fork of Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets he would pa.s.s a "fair and large-built house," the town inn of the Prior of Hornchurch. Then, in Fenchurch Street, the mansion and garden of the Earls of Northumberland, and again, at the corner of Mart Lane, the manor and garden of Blanch Apleton.

Turning down Mart Lane (now corrupted into _Mark_), the poet would pa.s.s the great chain, ready to be stretched at any moment across the narrow street, which marked the limits of Aldgate and Tower Street wards. He would cross Tower Street a few yards to the eastward of "the quadrant called Galley Row, because galley men dwelt there." These galley men were "divers strangers, born in Genoa and those parts," whose settlement in London had probably been the object of Chaucer's first Italian mission, and who presently prospered sufficiently to fill not only this quadrant, but also part of Minchin Lane, and to possess a quay of their own. But, like their cousins the Lombards, these Genoese soon showed themselves smarter business men even than their hosts. They introduced unauthorized halfpence of Genoa, called "Galley halfpence"; and these, with similar "suskings" from France, and "dodkins" from the Low Countries, survived the strict penalties threatened by two Acts of Parliament, and lasted on at least till Elizabeth's reign. "In my youth," writes Stow, "I have seen them pa.s.s current, but with some difficulty, for the English halfpence were then, though not so broad, somewhat thicker and stronger."[82] Stow found a building on the quay which he identified with their hall. "It seemeth that the builders of the hall of this house were s.h.i.+pwrights, and not carpenters;" for it was clinker-built like a boat, "and seemeth as it were a galley, the keel turned upwards." But this building was probably later than Chaucer's time. The galley quay almost touched that of the Custom-House; and here our poet had abundant opportunities of keeping up his Italian while sampling the "wines of Crete and other sweet wines in one of the cellars, and red and white wines in the other cellar."[83] His poems show an appreciation of good vintages, which was no doubt partly hereditary and partly acquired on the London quays, where he could talk with these Mediterranean mariners and drink the juice of their native grapes, remembering all the while how he had once watched them ripening on those southern slopes--

How richly, down the rocky dell, The torrent vineyard streaming fell To meet the sun and sunny waters That only heaved with a summer swell![84]

When Chaucer began his work in 1374 there was no regular building for the Customs; the King hired a house for the purpose at 3 a year, and a single boatman watched in the port to prevent smuggling. In 1383, however, one John Churchman built a house, which Richard II. undertook to hire for the rest of the builder's life; this became the first Custom-House, and lasted until Elizabeth's reign. The lease gives its modest proportions exactly: a ground floor, in which the King kept his weigh-beams for wool and other merchandise; a "solar," or upper chamber, for a counting-house; and above this yet another solar, 38 by 21-1/2 feet, part.i.tioned into "two chambers and one _garret_, as men call it." For this new house the King paid the somewhat higher rent of 4. Chaucer was bound by the terms of his appointment to do the work personally, without subst.i.tute, and to write his "rolls touching the said office with his own hand"; but it is probable that he accepted these terms with the usual medieval licence. He went abroad at least five times on the King's service during his term of office; and the two original rolls which survive are apparently not written by his hand. His own words in the "House of Fame" show that he took his book-keeping work at the office seriously; but it is not likely that the press of business was such as to keep him always at the counting-house; and he may well have helped his boatman to patrol the port, which extended down-river to Gravesend and Tilbury. It is at least certain that, in 1376, he caught John Kent smuggling a cargo of wool away from London, and so earned prize-money to the value of 1000 in modern currency. It is certain also that his daily work for twelve years must have kept him in close daily contact with sea-faring folk, who, from Homer's days at least, have always provided the richest food for poetry and romance. The commonest seaman had stirring tales to tell in those days, when every sailor was a potential pirate, and foreign crews dealt with each other by methods still more summary than plank-walking.[85]

Moreover, there was even more truth than now in the proverb that "far fowls have fair feathers"; and the Genoese on Galley Quay had sailed many seas unknown even to the tempest-tossed s.h.i.+pman of Dartmouth, whose southern limit was Cape Finisterre. They had pa.s.sed the Pillars of Hercules, and seen the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, and shuddered from afar at the Great Whirlpool of the Bay of Biscay, which sucked in its floods thrice daily, and thrice belched them forth again; and into which about this time "four vessels of the town of Lynn, steering too incautiously, suddenly fell, and were swallowed up under their comrades'

eyes."[86]

Moreover, the very streets and markets of London then presented a pageant unquestionably far more inspiring to a man of Chaucer's temperament than anything that can be seen there to-day. It is easy to exaggerate the contrast between modern and medieval London, if only by leaving out of account those subtle attractions which kept even William Morris from tearing himself away from the much-abused town. It is also undeniable that, however small and white, Chaucer's London was not clean, even to the outward eye; and that the exclusive pa.s.sion for Gothic buildings is to some extent a mere modern fas.h.i.+on, as it was the fas.h.i.+on two hundred years ago to consider them a positive eyesore. To some great poet of the future, modern London may well supply a grander canvas still; but to a writer like Chaucer, content to avoid psychological problems and take men and things as they appear on the surface, there was every possible inspiration in this busy capital of some 40,000 souls, where everybody could see everything that went on, and it was almost possible to know all one's fellow-citizens by sight. Some streets, no doubt, were as crowded as any oriental bazaar; but most of the buying and selling went on in open market, with lavish expenditure of words and gestures; while the shops were open booths in which the pa.s.ser-by could see master and men at their work, and stop to chat with them on his way. In the absence of catalogues and advertis.e.m.e.nts, every man spread out his gayest wares in the sun, and commended them to the public with every resource of mother-wit or professional rhetoric. Cornhill and Cheapside were like the Mercato Vecchio at Florence or St. Mark's Square at Venice. Extremes meet in modern London, and there is theme enough for poetry in the deeper contrasts that underlie our uniformity of architecture and dress. But in Chaucer's London the crowd was almost as motley to man's eye as to G.o.d's--

Barons and burgesses and bondmen also ...

Baxters and brewsters and butchers many, Woolwebsters and weavers of linen, Tailors and tinkers and tollers in markets, Masons and miners and many other crafts ...