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- [00:01]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're just popping up here to tell you some insider info.
- [00:08]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
If you would like to listen to Gone Medieval ad free and get early.
- [00:12]
Matt Lewis
Access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries such as my new.
- [00:21]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Series on everyone's favorite conquerors, the Normans.
- [00:25]
Matt Lewis
Or my recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.
- [00:29]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
There's a new release to enjoy every week.
- [00:32]
Matt Lewis
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show Notes for this episode.
- [00:49]
Christian Dropo
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- [01:18]
Eleanor Jaenega
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- [02:19]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders. To find the stories, big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. If you enjoyed Eleanor's last episode all about the Wife of Bath, then you're in for a treat as we stick with Chaucer and his pilgrims. People's jobs in the medieval period can sometimes feel obscure, hard to pin down, and it can be difficult to be clear exactly what they did and where that placed them socially. So we're going to take a look at a few more of Chaucer's pilgrims to help us understand who they were and what they bring to the story. And I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Robert Mayer Lee, whose books include Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales. Bobby is going to get us better acquainted with four of Chaucer's pilgrims. Welcome to God, Medieval Bobby. It's great to have you with us.
- [03:41]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
I'm so happy to be here. So happy and honored. Thank you.
- [03:44]
Matt Lewis
Look, it's great to have you on and learn a little bit more about Chaucer. So hopefully, listeners have caught our last episode, which was all about the Wife of Bath, but I wondered if you could just give us a little bit of a reminder. What are the Canterbury Tales? What is it?
- [04:00]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
What are the Canterbury Tales? Yes. So the Canterbury Tales, to translate them into the modern idiom, are essentially a linked collection of short stories. What's distinctive about them is that each of those stories are told by the perspective of a particular described person, a separate person, a separate narrator who is in each of those narrators, or most of those narrators are described in what's called the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales. So you have these little capsule descriptions of each pilgrim, and then you then encounter a tale told by that pilgrim. And then there's the deep desire then to link that tale to that teller in some fashion into making the sum of the whole much greater than its parts. His work that Chaucer was working on in the last decade of his life or so, it's unfinished. He started it probably the late 1380s, and at some point, he died in 1400. And if it's not clear exactly when, he stopped working on it, but it is not quite whole as we have it, although it has a very clear beginning and a very clear end.
- [05:05]
Matt Lewis
And I just wondered if you could give us a sense as well, of why you think it's such an important piece of literature. You know, it's often considered this. This monument of early English literature. Yeah.
- [05:16]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. And obviously, what we consider to be important pieces of literature are what we've been Taught are important pieces of literature and gets passed on that way. But beyond that, it's. It is that idea that he had of having a group of pilgrims on a journey to Canterbury tell tales and then interact between the tales. This pretty simple fictional structure has just enormous creative power where you're wondering about the relationship of this tale to that tale and this pilgrim to that pilgrim, or the relationship of tale to pilgrim. And you're also wondering about the whole relation to the whole journey to Canterbury and what that means in terms of a pilgrimage and then Chaucer. By choosing to tell each story, often in a very distinctive way, choosing a completely different genre from the one before, like a saint's life or a family of sort of a lewd comedy, it creates all sorts of resonance from one part of the work to another part of the work, that it ends up being very lively to read as a reader, but also as a sort of a work of art. Just enormously complex, even though it's actually very simple to describe what it is. So it's that combination of sort of a simple, A kind of simple form that produces such enormous complexity that I think makes it endlessly fascinating as a literary composition.
- [06:39]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it's wonderfully put. It's really interesting. So you mentioned in the preface there, there is a whole list of these pilgrims, and Chaucer gives us kind of, you know, 20 or so different professions that his, his pilgrims have. So I wondered if we could pick out a few of those to talk about in a little bit of detail. And maybe we'll go first for. For the merchant. So who and what is a medieval merchant? Who is the merchant that we meet in the Canterbury Tales?
- [07:03]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
The merchant class is what we would probably call international wholesalers. So we're not talking about a guy selling stuff on the street, but we're talking about an importer and exporter. And it was very often in Chaucer's day, the merchants, especially the merchants in London, one of their prime exports was wool. England was, of course, the big wool producing medieval nation and exported a lot of wool. And the royal government made a lot of money on taxing that wool. And Chaucer, one of Chaucer's jobs was to account for that tax on the wool. Chaucer was the son of a wine merchant who also probably dabbled in the wool trade too, and so was very familiar with this class. So these merchants, it was a high risk business. They shipped products overseas and tried to sell much more than their costs, and they often made a lot of money and they were the amount of capital that they were able to gain in just a short period of time made them one of the crowns. One of the government's favorite people to go out and go and ask for money. The crowd would often finance themselves by borrowing money from merchants because they had the ready cash on hand. And this is obviously, there's the days before there were other ways to raise money for the. From the royal government. So Chauce's merchant was one of these people. And we, we don't learn a whole lot about them. We don't learn a whole lot about any of the pilgrims really, except maybe the wife of Bath. We learn more about it. What's wonderful about the portrait of the merchant is how over and over again Chaucer emphasizes how reserved and how much he's hiding. And there's a line in there about nobody knew that he was in debt and how much Chaucer would have known this class, how much. Even today, when you're making a business deal, right, you have to. You have to put on the good front and look like you're someone you can trust and look like someone that you're someone's prosperous. In just a few lines, he suggests this phenomenon of what we could understand as a kind of a class based or social based Persona that is created. There's a certain set of values that go into putting on a good front and keeping everything only revealing what you want to reveal in order to make a good business deal.
- [09:13]
Matt Lewis
I was going to ask next kind of where merchants would sit socially because I think there's a sense that they almost represent an emerging middle class in a society where the middle class doesn't really exist yet, but they're sort of, they're not nobility, but they're not peasants. They can be incredibly wealthy, but like you say, they can be in debt and hide it well. And there is, there's almost that element of a middle class today of keeping up with the Joneses that kind of looking like you're doing really well even if you're not, right.
- [09:41]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
So going back to your first point is that, yeah, the middle class hardly existing, right, There is the massive underclass that are mostly agricultural workers. There's a very small nobility and then there's the clerical class. But merchants were unusual given the sort of middle strata. They were unusually wealthy, as you just said. Some of them, obviously not all of them, but some of them, especially some London merchants, had much more cash on hand than a lot of the nobility would have had. For many of them, they managed to Get a lot of political power based on this. So that the mayors of London were typically from the merchant class. I think this idea that for the merchant, unlike a member of the nobility who has a title that marks their social status, a merchant's social status was entirely how prosperous they were. And so, as you suggest, that sort of looks forward to that middle class do better than the Joneses. I gotta have a nice lawn. I have to have a nice car. That sense that my class status is in what I can purchase in my presumed purchasing power as opposed to a title that makes that status sort of concrete and that you could pass on to your children and that kind of thing. So it does create. You do see this sort of proto sort of bourgeois anxiety creeping into the portrait of the merchant in that way. And often the tale he's told is understood that way. But as though, as I argue with my book, there's a lot of complications when we try to start thinking about the relationship of teller and tail.
- [11:04]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. So what does the merchant's tale involve? What does he tell us?
- [11:08]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Interestingly, the merchant's tale is not about a merchant. It's about a knight. It's about a knight who is an old man who decides late in life to get married. And he chooses a young woman to be his wife. And the woman is not very satisfied in this relationship. It's a tale that sort of follows the machinations of her and the knight squire as they find a way to get together in the garden. In the knight's own garden, which is what happens at the end of the tale. It's actually. It's one of the tales that was often excised from collections because it was deemed offensive and especially its end day. I like to think of it as a kind of great, wonderfully creative junk heap of everything Chaucer wanted to throw into one tale. Because it's got this comedic structure, but it also has all these philosophical discourses. It's got reflections on the marital bond. It's got an appearance of Jupiter and Juno having a little squabble is randomly thrown in this tale. It's got a moment in which January is the knight's name. And he has two advisors. He's deciding about whether to get married or not. And he has these two advisors. And one of the advisors refers to the wife of Bath. So he has this weird moment where the tale kind of goes outside of its own fictional frame and is talking about what is supposed to be real. So it's incredibly creative. It's a sort of tour de Force of stitching together all sorts of disparate parts as a sort of Frankenstein's creature. But it all works in the end. But it also has one of the things that one could say about it. It's hard to see what the moral worst of this tale would be. And it's often commented that. So that's one of the things often related back to the merchant. Somehow he's telling this tale. It's also prefaced by this short little prologue. The tale was told right after the Clerk's Tale, which features a wife that is utterly obedient to her husband. In this short little prologue, the merchant complains about his wife and how he wishes he hadn't got married. And it's only been, like, two months since he's been married. It's, like, already so awful. So the tale is often read as psychologically as this expression of he sees himself as January, as this night that is duped by this young wife. I myself think that's an incredibly simplistic way of reading the tale, because the tale itself is much more complicated than a simple psychological reflection. And I also think that prologue is ironic, too. But that's one of the. Again, as I was talking about earlier, about how the little pieces of the Canterbury Tales all work together, they often have these little moments, these little prologues, these little prefaces, where you hear from a pilgrim or you hear an interaction among pilgrims, and then you want to understand somehow that detail in relationship to what's said before.
- [13:47]
Matt Lewis
And what do you think Chaucer is trying to tell us about merchants with the Merchant's Tale? Is the fact that, you know, it jumps and lurches all over the place and doesn't really have any thread to it. Does that reflect what you were talking before about merchants? You know, they're often. It's all smoke and mirrors. They're hiding how much money they might owe or what they actually do or how rich they are. They're trying to run a show for the world. Is that part of what's going on here?
- [14:09]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
I think so. I think I should back that up a little bit and say. My personal theory is that Chaucer had written most, if not all, of the Merchant's Tale before deciding it was the merchant who was going to tell that tale. And there's. I've made this argument. There's manuscript evidence that suggests that he generally. He was working in a very sort of opportunistic way. And there's a suggestion that these particular sequence of tales in which the merchants appears was One of his last decisions. But even within that restriction, he still had this tale. And he wanted to assign it to this portrait that he had written. Having him think about what this tale was doing in terms of what it was hiding, in terms of its commodification of all value. That happens in course of the tale that he thought, yeah, that will go with the Merchant. And I think part of the brilliance to me at the kid retails is Chaucer can make those simple decisions and it just works so well. He's finding his own art. Right. But he's putting together these pieces and he's. Yeah, that goes together really well without necessarily have written every line with that in mind when he had it. But he was steeped enough in this set of values that it's actually not hard to read many of the tales as commodifications of values. And I think this reflects Chaucer's own experience as both a son of a merchant and also working on the wool wharf as a kind of tax controller that he was. That he would have experienced that very strongly. The Merchant's Tale takes that idea of the commodification of value, and it applies it all sorts of different ways to spirituality, to marital ethics, and in so many more ways that exceeds this narrow definition of what a merchant is. But it still works. It's a merchant's tale writ large in that sense.
- [15:46]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting idea that he found these stories, or came up with these stories and then found a teller for them, rather than thinking, I need a story a merchant would tell.
- [15:55]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah. I don't think he had one method throughout the Tabor tales. I'm certainly with the Wife of Bath, as you probably talked about. There is. There was the sense that he had written one tale for her already and then said, oh, no. After he wrote the prologue. He's no, I need a. I need something else. In that case. In the existing wife of Bath's tale, that seems very clearly a tale that he decided to write for her with having her prologue in mind, made even. Whereas in other cases, it seems, especially with the merchant, with the Franklin, I think with the squire, he was more opportunistic. Right. He had tales. It's not clear exactly when he wrote what's called the general prologue, this whole set of portraits. It's not clear at what point in the process he wrote that. It seems we know he wrote some of the Canterbury Tales before there were any Canterbury Tales at all. There were some poems that he had just lying around that he had written years before. And so he was drawing on work and he might have written like 10, 15 years before and was dropping it into this new context. It's not clear. At some point he thought, huh, I could write little portraits for all of these. And then it's all the pilgrims he put in there. He probably just added some pilgrims thinking he was someday going to write tales for them or have tales that he had already written that he was going to attach to them. This is a guy that had day jobs, right. And so he was not sitting around in his room just writing all day. And I think he would have an hour here, half an hour there, a couple hours at night. He would look around what he had and he would be putting these pieces together, I think again, in a sort of opportunistic creative process, one that he didn't end up finishing. A lot of people believe that his plans for how the tales were going to work and how they were going to organize, he kept revising them too. There's some inconsistencies in what teller's saying about that overall structure too. He kept hitting on this idea of, wow, this is really going to work. And he kept adding more pieces to it. So, yeah, so when it comes to those pieces with the merchant and other is that it does seem like he himself sat down. And what does this teller and this tale have in common? And then what can I add in this little intervening interaction between pilgrims is going to bring that out. And so he would be almost in some ways in dialogue with his own creative process from before.
- [17:57]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to think of the Canterbury Tales as Chaucer's side hustle. And Here we are 600 years later still talking about it.
- [18:03]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [18:05]
Matt Lewis
I wondered if we could talk next about the clerk. You kind of mentioned him a little bit earlier. His tale comes just before the. The merchant. So what is a medieval clerk and what would his job description be?
- [18:14]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, right. So that word had a pretty broad range of meaning in Chaucer's day. It meant anything from somebody that was basically a priest to someone that was what we would think of as clerical work today. So I'm working in an office. Its sort of most important quality was someone that had some kind of official church sponsored training, whether that was the university or some other sources. So Chaucer was actually later referred to as a clerk, even though he wasn't a at all. As far as we know. He had no university training, but he just seemed educated and so used loosely as that person this particular Clerk is a university student as an Oxford student, and it's not clear whether he is what we now call postgraduate or where exactly he is on his studies. But academics love his portrait because his description, because it's like he's such a sort of live force love of study. I think from a more different point of view, you would see something that would be like that graduate student that never can quite finish their degree. He also seems like someone that isn't quite grown up.
- [19:15]
Matt Lewis
In other words, eternal student.
- [19:16]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yes, the eternal student. There's a wonderful line in the portrait about he uses all the money that he gets from friends and family, he spends it all on books. And books were really expensive and he has a whole bunch of them. This otherwise very poor student who's very. A tattered appearance, he seems a very. The classic like, yes, starving graduate student nonetheless has this really expensive array of books. Maybe you should be getting a job. In Chaucer's day, most of the people that went to university did not actually graduate, did not actually stay to get a degree, because you could go for a couple of years and learn Latin and then get pretty good work in the sort of booming bureaucracy or what, working for a noble household or something as a sort of intellectual laborer. Whereas getting all the way to getting the degree, then looking for a benefice, trying to be a parish priest or something. Those were actually scarce in Chaucer's day for various reasons. There was underground. The supply of people that wanted them was much greater than this demand. This idea of being an eternal student had this more of this edge in that sense as that there really was. We like to think that way back in the day that university education wasn't as commodified as it is today. But it actually really was way back then as well. There was that sense of aren't you supposed to be getting a job then as now? This was before the nobility really started going to university. That that sort of happened in the next centuries, as was a more precise prestige thing to have a degree. It really was an opportunity for a sort of non noble class, this middle strata of various tiers, to advance themselves in the world.
- [20:44]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. So are we talking about someone who would be socially sort of on a par with a merchant? Or would Clark consider themselves above or below a merchant?
- [20:53]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
This is where it gets tricky socially. Right. It was not unheard of for basically farmer sons to go to university. Right. In fact, it's quite often the case. And yet once they get there, they have this sort of special status that clerical Class was. They were. Use polite terms to refer to them. And certainly if you advance and you become a priest, you are considered to be a noteworthy important person, even if you are making quite a bit less amount of money. And even within the clerical class, there is such a huge range of. From the people at the top of the hierarchy could become very, quite wealthy to the sort of poor parish priests, some of whom were involved in the sort of rising of 1381. And so there was within that class, there was a lot of stratification. So you could imagine that this group of pilgrims at Chaucer, Drew the Merchant is this guy that's probably very wealthy and this university student is probably not. And yet it's somehow they're not as far apart class wise as that would in terms of their actual social prestige and the status that they hold.
- [21:57]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. What is the Clerk's Tale? And do we have any idea what the message behind it is? What is Chaucer trying to tell us with the Clark's Tale?
- [22:05]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, the Merchant's Tale, as far as we know, it's a sort of conglomeration of different things that Chaucer's pulled together. What's striking about the Clerk's Tale is that it's got a very definite source. Francis Petrarch's version of Boccaccio's version of this tale of Griselda. Boccaccio had this tale of Griselda, the incredibly obedient wife that in the Cameron seems to be suggested that it's a kind of political allegory. This is like what happens when the people. When you have a tyrant, basically you have a tyrant and you have the people that are. That don't challenge the tyrant. The tyrant does these horrible things which the husband in the Karstail does these horrible things to Griselda. Petrarch then took Boccaccio's version, which was in Italian and translated into Latin and tried to turn it into a spiritual allegory. This is how basically reverses the message. We should all be obedient in this extreme way to God, who's this absolute ruler of the universe. Chaucer seems likely to at least have known of Boccaccio's versions. There's also a French version that intervened and Chaucer had seemed to have all of these versions, versions of this tale, which is. It's one of those tales that is intellectual puzzle or an interpretive puzzle. Like how do we understand this husband is truly a monster, truly does monstrous things to this his wife that accuses in the beginning. And the wife is completely obedient, allows all of this to happen, including allowing him to take her children away from her as far as she knows, to kill them, to murder them. Right. Which he isn't actually doing. But it does take them away for their whole childhood. And what are we supposed to make of this terrible story? In some ways, what's the moral of it? I think what Chaucer saw, these competing versions is that's really interesting is that question of a tale that seems to ask for a moral. There's all sorts of competing ones. It's a problem of interpretation. And so what he does with it. This in some ways fits a clerk who's fond of these sort of logical puzzles or in these university exercises, these problems of interpretation that you would have with whatever a text or that becomes a kind of. It's framed that way. We know it's Chaucer's very upfront that this is the source because he has his unusually in the carry tales, he has the clerk say, oh, I got this tale from Petrarch. And so he actually inscribes that. And then he talks about Petrarch, the great laureate poet, and is he going to tell this tale? But at the end he provides Petrarch's moralization, but he also then provides other interpretations in this sort of interaction of pilgrims at the very end and leaves it very much up in the air. The clerk just decides, you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to take my guitar and I'm going to sing a song to the wife of Bath. And he sings a song to the wife of Bath about how women should not be like Priselda but should be like Jubilee, tough on their husbands. Which is obviously meant to be ironic, but it's hard to know exactly where that irony ends.
- [25:07]
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- [27:50]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, and it's interesting to think of Chaucer writing this in the wake of something like the peasants revolt in 1381. You know, he's dealing with a group of people around him who have tried to stand up to authority or who have thought about it or who've done it for different reasons. And maybe he's just leaving those questions hanging in the air. You know, why did you do it? Should you have done it? Was it the right thing to do? Was the outcome what you hoped for?
- [28:13]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think those are very questions that, you know, again, it's hard to know exactly where Chaucer's sympathies would have lain. He had achieved enough of a class status and I think he would have been quite frightened by the peasants revolt on the one hand, especially because they came into the city quite literally underneath his apartment in Aldgate where he Had a place in Aldgate and a government sponsored apartment, basically for his job working on the Woolworths. But at the same time, he would have known, I think he. He would have known that the government wasn't there. Good. Because he worked for them. Right. He would have known their problems and the impressions that they involved and things like that. So I think the Canterbury Tales shows him really interested in the question of political power and political authority and how it can operate and what its limits and problems are. And he's reflecting on those questions in this indirect way. The peasant revolts only shows up in the canary tales in two very offensive sideways allusions to it and sort of comic moments. One of them is when the God Saturn in the Knight's Tale is talking about his evil, malignant kind of influence over human affairs. And he says, mine is the hanging of the throat cut and all these other things. And also the churls. Revolting is one of the things that Saturn does. Right. And it's in there. Another moment is in the beginning of the nun's priest tale where the sort of chaos in the farmyard when the fox is chasing the rooster around is an allusion to the peasants revolt in that context too. But I think more seriously, he's thinking about these questions in one instance, in that very transition between the Knight's Tale and the miller's tale. Right. Where you had that. Exactly. Those two classes coming into contact. And he has positioned this tale told by the knight in this very philosophical romance genre with Fablio, a comic tale told by a miller, coming right next to is a mockery of that preceding tale. So he's working out in terms of a generic sequence and a tale teller sequence that he's replaying that very conflict between the landowning class and the laboring class, which was that revolt. And so he transposes it to a different register in order to think about it.
- [30:19]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And I think interesting that he's asking those questions without necessarily offering answers. You know, he's just leaving those hanging there for the reader to answer in their own way. Take whatever from it they will. I wonder next if we could talk about the squire's tale. So again, could you tell us what a medieval squire is?
- [30:35]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Chaucer was a squire. So in Chaucer's day, a squire was a relatively new innovation in terms of the class titles, class statuses. Of course, there had long been the role of the knight's helper. And that's our traditional understanding of the squire as the young man that then becomes a knight later on. And that's what this squire seems to be in the Canterbury Tales. But it was also invented as a class status, as a place to recognize a certain group of people that had separated themselves out through some means or another from the unmarked class, the untitled class. But you were not, for whatever reason you were, did not make it into the nightly class, which costs. For one reason is that costs money. You had to pay the crown to be the nightly class, and you may not want to pay that amount. In Chaucer's case, he was given the title because of his work for the government. It was like, okay, yeah, you now deserve to be called. And also, people that were in the king's household often achieved that status of squire. And so it was a intermediate buffering layer between the sort of nobility and the rest, the commoners. In this case, this squire is the son of the knight in the Canterbury Tales and seems to be that traditional model of what we think of as a squire, as the knight's help or the knight's son, that later on becomes a knight, which this squire would seem to be destined to do. You know, what then becomes interesting from an interpretive perspective, then, is to recognize that Chaucer would have had the squire portrayed like that, While he himself was a very different kind of squire, would have that in mind as he's creating this in some ways, very stereotypical character. The contrast, the knight's portrait is about a guy that goes around and fights battles, fights in wars. And it lists all the wars that he's fought in. And many of them seems to have fought as a sort of mercenary in many of these sort of wars that have a crusading element to it. He has fought all over the world. He's coming back on pilgrimage in a sort of very tattered, rusty Hauberk. And then whereas the squire is talked about as the guy that is courtly love guy, where he just makes poetry that he's very dandy and he's. So it's. There's this contrast between the nobility as what they were, which was basically the king's army or is a military arm, and. And the nobility as a sort of cultural spectacular display of their splendor that's portrayed through their class status and through cultural achievements. The squire is the only pilgrim that's describ described as a poet. He's also. He writes love poetry, too. So there's been a desire upon some critics to see Chaucer writing an imagination of a youthful version of himself in the squire. Although I think, well, the caveat with that is that Chaucer did serve in households, in noble households as a young man, he would have served alongside of. It was very common for the nobility to place their children, their sons into noble households as young men early on to send them out and say, you be a page, here you go, work there. So Chaucer was placed in a noble household and would have been working alongside of somebody that was destined for a much higher class status than he was. And so I think that is important, again, to keep in mind as he's looking at this upper class with kind of like a half a foot inside of it, but mostly outside of it at the same time.
- [33:49]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it's interesting. The three that we've talked about so far seem quite concerned with a degree of social mobility. They're professions that you can come from almost any background and you can really make a name for yourself, some money for yourself, make a good career in some ways.
- [34:04]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
The sequence of tales, these four tales that follow, the clerk, merchant, squire, the Franklin, all have that in common. And this is a sequence of tales that was, again, as I have argued, and is now actually the new Oxford Chaucer is represented this way. Finally, the new Oxford Chaucer that just came out, you know that traditionally these were called. These four tales were broken up into two fragments, but that was just a mistake made in the 19th century and that they really are this tightly leaked sequence of four. But it was a very late decision of Chaucer to put them together in this way. And the new Oxford Chaucer does represent them that way. But it is, as you point out, each in their own way, the clerk, the merchant, and then the squire, who is in that relationship to squire more generally, has this possibility for mobility. And then you have the Franklin, which is this very mysterious, in some ways, mysterious class status, that is, which is. Are they gentle or are they not gentle? They're landowners, but they don't have a title. And Chaucer's Franklin is portrayed as particularly wealthy, a particularly wealthy one who actually has achieved certain positions like an MP and knight of the shire, that were almost unheard of for someone of that class status to have achieved. What's striking is that Chaucer himself had that, had those positions too. And so there's often seemed to be a relationship between that class s of Franklin and Chaucer's own sort of social ambiguity.
- [35:45]
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- [36:27]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
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- [36:28]
Matt Lewis
Every style, every home. We're going to come to the Franklin in a second. I think it's really interesting that we're talking about social mobility again. We can fit this to the world that Chaucer is living in. The post Black Death kind of that, that questions of social mobility. It's interesting that he is perhaps being influenced by all of those things around him. But we should probably just deal with what the Squire's Tale is.
- [37:01]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
So the Squire's Tale is. It's, it's. I think we would call it a great piece of fantasy fiction today if we wanted to. It's set in this faraway place with Genghis Khan in the court of Genghis Khan, which is this spectacular court from a post colonial perspective. One of the things that's interesting about this kale is that this sort of what, alien faraway place that is actually contemporary with Chaucer's world, right, Is portrayed in mostly positive terms. This like incredibly accomplished court where this knight comes to visit. This knight has a magical horse that can. A magical mechanical horse. And these other, these gifts that he gives to Genghis Khan are all these sort of special magical devices. And, and then it segues dramatically the middle and talks about one of the daughters who wakes up and goes and has this magical ring where she can hear what birds are saying. And this female bird complains about being rejected by her male partner. And then it just suddenly stops. It sort of, it doesn't exactly stop. He trusts her at the very end. The squires, after this, I'm going to tell about all these things. And he lists all this, this really incredibly long. These plot. Plot points that would take us on this incredible journey. And then it just stops. And then the Franklin says, oh, that was a good tale. And we move on. One of the things that Chaucer was definitely doing with the Canterbury Tales is he was trying his hand at this genre and that genre. I can write one of these. I can write a saint's life. I could translate this Latin treatise on this. I can write this philosophical romance. He's trying all these different things and then putting them together. And here, this is what has been called a composite romance with their very complicated plot that moves across very characters of the faraway place and time. And there has been various explanations for why it stops suddenly. One long standing argument is the whole thing is meant to be a parody. It's making to show the squire as a bad tale teller and how immature he is. So then going back to that way of reading the tales as the purpose of the tale to characterize the teller, this one's taken. I'm not sure he would quite go to quite so length to write an entire parody just to say this is a bad tale teller. Especially because this, it's as famously known, Spencer, Edmund Spencer, loved the Squire's Tale and completed it. And John Milton loved the Squire's Tale. There's a certain imaginative scope to it that is very attractive to it. But it does seem that for whatever reason, Chaucer was like, eh, I'm not going to write the rest of this. And decided dramatically to have this kind of very, again, abrupt segue into the Franklin. But again, I think he signed it very late to the Squire and had maybe written the whole thing ahead of just trying his hand at this kind of tale. And then decided, let's make sense inside of this choir. At the very least, it characterizes the squire as sort of class status as someone that would tell this kind of tale, this tale of a romance as a sort of reflection of the cultural capital of the noble class, where that genre of tale was what a squire should be able to tell of, what they should be expert. And it was a way of for them performing their class status, which coming in the wake of the Merchant's Tale, where you have a sort of morally and ethically corrosive tale, you had this sort of springtime burst of here's a happy sort of romance that seems to put aside all of this sort of very complicated and learned a very corrosive tale, the Merta just told, followed by this sort of happy springtime fantasy romance. But it's the same way. It could be this choir saying, saying, yeah, you're a merchant and I'm squire and I can do this because I have this class status and I can perform a tale like this as a part of my class status and not have to. Not have to hide things, the kinds of things you're doing. Even though he's Also, ultimately, it's still a kind of commodification of values, but just done in a different key.
- [40:43]
Matt Lewis
We need to get on to the last one of these four, which is the Franklin, which, if the other professions have sounded pretty familiar to people, Franklin might be a word that.
- [40:51]
Christian Dropo
That.
- [40:51]
Matt Lewis
That is a little bit alien. What on earth is a Franklin?
- [40:54]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
What is it? And that question still remains to be answered. Historians have been asking that question for a long time. From the research that I've done and looking to the historians work on this. It wasn't used consistently in Chaucer's own day, but it seems to be the label given to somebody that was a landowner, a free landowner, but did not have a title. And it was the question. What's debated is whether they were considered in the gentle class or not, and to what degree would they have been perceived as being belonging to that class. And I think probably the best answer to that was a dependent that if you lived in a little village and there was a Franklin and everybody else was working the fields, then they seemed to be part of the noble class. But if you lived in a town of any size and there were merchants and there were people with titles, then they probably didn't. They probably seemed like commoners. I think it was probably relative to their circumstances. So Chaucer's Franklin is very interesting because he seems to perform his place in the gentle class extravagantly. He holds huge dinners. He has. He's very. Such a great host. He's a very generous man and he tells a story that is a story in some ways about what constitutes generosity. Following the squire's tale, there's this moment where he is very paternal to the squire. Oh, you did so well, squire. And the host, who is an innkeeper, who is. He's also in this middle strata. He's certainly not. He's lower on the. On the sort of totem pole of the middle strata. He has no patience for this at all. He's. Shut up. You, Franklin, basically just stop talking. He seems to understand the Franklin as has positioning himself in the same class as the squire. And he is irritated by that because the Franklin actually talks about gentilessa, this quality of. The quality of the gentle class in relationship to the squire and the host is like straw for your gentlenessa. Just shut up. Don't even talk about that again. It's seeming like he wants to draw the line between the squire, he's very deferential to the squire, he's very deferential to the knight, he wants to draw the line, he doesn't want to include the Franklin in that class. And then the Franklin did again. He goes on to tell this tale about a knight, about a squire, about a. A clerk. He includes all these class statuses and the sort of chain of generosity among them. At the center of this tale is the knight's wife, Dorigen, who is the abused female object throughout this sort of chain of generosity that happens among men, which many people have pointed out about this tale. The tale ends with a sort of harmonious picture of these different people in different classes relating across the thing. But again, it depends upon the subjection of the female object in. In that tale. Who gets. Who actually has the center stage through most of the tale.
- [43:42]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. They're a really interesting four to think about. The way that society is changing during Chaucer's time. You know, the questions are there of how you achieve social status. Can it change who can move where? Who sits where? It's really unclear. It's a bit muddy. And, you know, someone like the innkeeper is looking in and saying, I'm putting the line here, but maybe not everybody would. Chaucer is kind of asking those questions of how society is changing all around him. I guess at the end of the 14th century.
- [44:13]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah. I think Chaucer himself, as a son of a merchant and then found his way into the sort of bottom layer of the gentle class through his work for the government. But he was still working. Is that he was well positioned to see this middle strata and the kind of pressures around it and its fluidity within it. But even though it was going back to what you were talking about earlier, about the Black Death, before the Black Death, there was this. Society was less mobile. It was locked into this sort of system of oppression more. But the Black Death opened that up simply through the labor shortage, the immense labor shortage that suddenly enabled that most oppressed layer to give them basically some economic power and economic agency that then was tried to stamp out through various means, like the statute of laborers that followed. But such would have been. Had a way of seeing the local for him, which was this sort of his own sort of middle strata experience. And mapping that onto a society as a whole and seeing its moving parts, seeing how London merchants actually had more wealth than this regional baron over somewhere else. Or that even in Chaucer's day, it was very. It was very common for members of the ability to start getting into the world trade, because that's where all the money was. And whereas some of the merchant class were basically buying titles.
- [45:32]
Matt Lewis
So this big interchange, this interrelationship between them, the blurring of the lines that had existed for so long. And it's interesting, I think, that that's Chaucer at the very beginning of this process that will obsess, particularly people in Britain for centuries to follow. You know, it hasn't necessarily ended now, but you think about 19th century society, it's still utterly obsessed with where you are. Precisely which notch of that ladder are you on? Are you just above this person or just below them? Can you creep above them? That those are still things that are current today? I guess.
- [46:03]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, yeah. And I think this is one of the. Going back here, almost the beginning of our conversation, this is one of the things that makes the Canterbury Tale still interesting, is that Chaucer found this topic of basically social mobility. He was struck by it and he found that something he wanted. He incorporated that into the formal structure of the canary tales itself in a way that then makes it. He's not just sitting on a podium and saying, he's talking about class deaths, but he's. He's built into the relations among the pilgrims, the tales they tell and their interactions and the genres they choose to tell their tales in. And all these indirect ways that it shows up at a purely literary level. It's almost a literary allegory for the class mobility that's actually happening. And it was lucky in some ways that what he stumbled upon was he had seen these collections of short narratives were produced by Boccaccio and other Boccaccio's Decameron, but all the tellers in that of Picasso, Decameron are all of the same class. They're all upper class Italian gentility. And then he'd see this other genre of estate satire which goes down through the various social identities and mocks each one and tells them how each identity from Emperor through Copenhagen all the way to the bottom are corrupted some way. And his friend John Gower had written a couple of these. He was familiar with both of these. What he did is he put them together and broke both of them at the same time and invented something new through this idea. What if I take estate satire and I basically, I take out the part where you judge each estate and I'm just interested in describing them. I put that together and I have then them tell stories that reflect the interactions among these estates. And rather than just the static, this is what a miller will say and this is why that would reflect more directly simply their class status. I think, as we were saying that it's that his positioning and his sense that social mobility was an interesting topic is what he intuitively then put into this. So the driving thing behind this really innovation of taking these two existing kind of literary forms and running them together in this way.
- [48:07]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a real danger that I could do this all day with you, Bobby. This is absolutely fascinating, but I'm just conscious we're probably up against the clock a little bit now. I just want before we go then, two quick questions. Who's your favorite pilgrim?
- [48:20]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Oh, my favorite pilgrim. Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. I really like the pardoner, I have to say. The partner, the pardner, is the most self admittedly corrupt. He's both a sort of brilliant ironist and he's a tragedy. And he knows he's a tragedy and I find him to be. Yeah. Just enormously interesting in terms of that. What we've just been talking about, that relationship between one's position in society and everything and. But also just in his way that. Yeah. The different. The way that he manipulates irony.
- [48:54]
Matt Lewis
Least favorite pilgrim.
- [48:55]
Professor Robert Mayer Lee
Yeah, yeah, my least favorite pilgrim. Oh, I have to say the mansiple. The mansiple is just mean. He just is a mean guy and he tells a sort of mean story. Actually. The reeve is actually even worse. I love it. Mansible and Reeve are both up there. The reeve is also just tells a terrible story about rape. It's just in the Mansible story. But the Mansible, the cook towards the end, the Caribbean tales, the cook is so drunk that he falls off his horse. And the Mansible just makes fun of himself. Have another drink. Give him more. It's like imagine like the worst thing you do with someone that's obviously an alcoholic is give them more. Right? And this is what the man makes a joke out of. The Reaver.
- [49:32]
Matt Lewis
You can catch Eleanor's episodes if you missed that too. The father of English literature with Marion. Fascinating, Bobby. There are new installments of Go every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Head to historyhit.com subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history.
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