London - Edward Rutherfurd [278]
Chaucer was a little portlier of late; his goatee beard contained a few grey hairs; his face and hooded eyes were sometimes red. He looked, and was, a comfortable fellow. And he missed nothing. “Did you notice the wart on that friar’s nose?” he would suddenly ask. “That reeve had been making love to the miller’s wife – did you see how she looked at him?” He would chuckle. “The more despicable they are, the more you seem to like them,” Bull once chided him. But Chaucer only shook his head. “I love them all,” he said simply. “Can’t help it.”
Yet, as time went by, there was one thing that troubled Bull. Strangely enough, it did not concern his own affairs, but those of Chaucer. He was so respectful of his friend’s accomplishments, however, that for a long time he did not dare to bring it up. His chance came, at last, in April.
The two men had paid a visit to Bocton, where Bull’s brother had welcomed them with his family, and it was as they rode in the warm spring sun down the Canterbury road the following morning that Chaucer broached his idea.
“It’s an idea for a huge new work,” he explained. “I’ve written so much conventional courtly verse. But for a long time now I’ve wanted to try something completely different. Look at all these folk we’ve been seeing day by day in court. The yeomen, the millers, the friars, the fishwives. What if I could let them speak, as well as the courtly folk.” He grinned. “A great big work, a huge stew, a feast.”
“But how do you make the speech of the common folk into a poem?” Bull objected.
“Ah,” Chaucer cried, “I thought of that. What if each one of them told a tale, a little story like the Italian author Boccaccio uses. As they tell the stories, they also reveal themselves. Don’t you see the neatness of it?”
“Except that common folk don’t sit around telling stories like lazy courtiers,” Bull remarked.
“Oh, but they do,” his friend responded. “They do it when they travel together. And when do men and women of all conditions travel together, my dear Bull? On this very road.” He laughed aloud. “Pilgrims, Bull. Pilgrims setting out from taverns like the George or the Tabard on their way to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. I could tell dozens of stories and fit them all together. I shall call it the Canterbury Tales.”
“Wouldn’t it be very long?”
“Yes. It will be my life’s work.”
And it was now, at last, that Bull saw the opportunity to say the thing that had been troubling him.
“If this is going to be the crowning work of your life, my dear friend,” he said, “then will you allow me to beg of you one thing?”
“Of course,” Chaucer smiled. “But what?”
“For the love of God,” the merchant implored him, “don’t let your talent be wasted and all your work be lost.”
“Meaning?”
“Write it in Latin,” Bull cried.
In fact, Bull’s request was perfectly sensible and many would have agreed with him. When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his verses in English, he was taking a huge risk. For in a sense, the English language did not really exist. True, there were related dialects all over England, but a man from Kent and a man from Northumbria would hardly have understood each other. When a northern monk wrote the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the poet Langland wrote of Piers Ploughman in the countryside, their work, though English, was thick with the Norse alliteration and the desolate echoes of ancient Anglo-Saxon, which sounded rustic and even comical to the courtly Chaucer. Yet what was the language he used? Part Saxon English, part Norman French, full of Latinate words, falling as lightly as a ballad by a French troubadour, Chaucer’s English was the idiom of the court and the better classes in London. Not only that: aristocrats were just as likely to switch to French or learned men to Latin when they conversed. And even London English was constantly changing. “It’s changed since I was a boy,” Bull reminded his friend. “I dare say my own grandchildren will hardly understand your verses. Latin is best,” Bull urged, “because it is eternal.