Ecclesiastical
Characters in the Prologue
Of the thirty-one
pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales, twelve were attached to religion in some way
or other, and the manner in which Chaucer depicis them gives us some idea of
the slack condition of many Church officials at the time and the poor opinion
which the average man of education had of them. The writings of Prof. G.M.
Trevelyan and Prof. G.G. Coulton give a cumulative picture of the failings of
the Church which the contemporary writings of Wycliffe, Langland, and Chaucer
had made clear.
The bishops of the
day were mainly shrewd men of business, quite respectable and hard working, all
of them English, owing their position to the joint efforts of King and Pope,
but their energies were often devoted to public affairs rather than to the
interests of their dioceses. This was no new thing, but Wycliffe spoke and
wrote fiercely against the Caesarean clergy. The Clerical law Courts were
frequently not fair and just, their officials using their power to inflict
severe penalties for refusal of tithe. Chaucer's Archdeacon :
For smale tithes and
for smal offringe
He made the peple pitously to singe.
The state of
morality, as evidenced, inter alia, by Chaucer's tales, was bad in all classes.
Rich and poor alike were immoral, and had to submit to conviction, but the
former paid, sometimes regularly, while the latter submitted to penance.
Absentee clergy and
the practice of giving the great tithes to an abbot or lay rector, while the
vicar had inadequate pay, were of common occurence. Many persons abandoned
their ignorant or half-savage peasantry to flock to London or elsewhere as
chantry priest.
The ecclesiastical
courts were perhaps as powerful as ever, but they were losing their reputation,
and often becoming places of extortion. Chaucer comments on the Archdeacon that
he was more anxious to extort money from the people than to help them to a
godly life.
Many officials of the
Church tended to regard sin, not as a wickedness to be cured, but as an
opportunity of filling the Church's coffers.
It is interesting to
note the reaction of Langland, Wycliffe, and Chaucer to the problem of penance.
Langland believed in it when it was supported by genuine penitence; Wycliffe
disliked intensely the Church's claim to grant pardon and absolution; while
Chaucer simply "recorded what he saw, or what the man in the street saw.
So he gibbetted the summoner, who hangs in the sight of all to this day."
But the Church courts were no worse than the lay courts, and Wycliffe and
Langland and denounced all lawyers as instruments of oppression to the poor.
The clergy were also punishers of moral offences and they used these as a means
of money-making. Friars especially earned money for their orders by the
granting of absolution. Langland and Wycliffe, as well as Chaucer, derided the
practices of summoners, pardoners, and friar confessors, who were persecuting
blackmailers protected by the law courts.
Dean Milman, in his
History of Latin Christianity writes of the remarkable outburst of the English
language, and of a serious dissatisfaction with the economic and religious
systems, that are manifest during the latter half of the fourteenth century. He
writes that 'throughout its institutions, language, sentiment, Teutonism is now
holding its first initiatory struggle with Latin Christianity In Chaucer is
heard a voice from the Court, from the castle from the City, from universal
England...His is a voice of freedom, of more or less covert hostility to the
hierarchial system, though more playful and with a poet's genial appreciation
of all which was true, healthful and beautiful in the old faith.
The friars at the
beginning of the thirteenth century had started a real Church revival, and few
men, if any have ever followed the example and teaching of Christ more
faithfully than St. Francis of Assisi. But a century and a half had brought a
sad change, and from all sides one finds a condemnation so universal as to
demand belief. A contemporary poem condemns the greed of the friars:
Guile they know and
many a gap;
Full some can with a pound of sape
Get a kirtle and a cape
And somewhat else thereto.
which exactly bears
out what Chaucer says of his Friar:
His typet was ay farsed
full of knyves
And pynnes, for to yeven yonge wyves.
Another criticism of
the friars was made by John Wycliffe in his Fifty Heresies and Errors of Friars
(1384).
Chaucer's Hubert the
Friar is a man of unscruplous dealings for personal profit in the name of
religion. He grants easy absolution from sin in exchange for 'a nice sum' or by
sequeezing a farthing out of a destitute widow. And yet this Friar is not an
unlikable fellow. He has an almost infectious gift of merriment and musical
talents of an admirable kind.
Chaucer tells us that
his Friar was well beloved and familiar with franklyns and worthy women, with
rich folk and sellers of vitaille and avoided the poor and the sick, "it
is not honeste, it may not avaunce."
There was no very
great harm in Chaucer's Monk, except, that he was entirely unsuited to his
vocation and made no bones about it. He preferred hunting, horses and
greyhounds, fur-lined sleeves, gold pins, and love-knots to chapel services,
study and strict rules of the cloister. He was fat and flourishing,
well-mannered, a man of the world, and well suited to be made an Abbot, with
his taste for roast swan. In this portrait, Chaucer's complex irony points out
in two directions at once. It satrises the Monk and the growth of monasteries
which made such a Monk not only possible but also essential. Yet Chaucer also
admires the vitality in the man, the fact that he was a 'manly man' and he
began to find extenuating circumstances when he recorded the cavalier tone of
the Monk who said: Let Austin have his swink to him reserved. It is significant
that the aristocratic sport of hunting to which he is addicted, was forbidden
to all monks. He might only fish in preparation for the days of abstinence when
meat was forbidden. It is therefore suitable that Chaucer uses a fishing-image
to describe the Monk:
Ne that a monk, when
he is recchelees,
Is likned til a fissh that is waterless.
A critic observes
that the Monk is not the worst offender among the erring clerics of the
Canterbury pilgrimage, for at least his laxness and worldly interests do no
direct harm to other people, although of course they don't do any good either
to his order or to his monastery.
The Pardoner was a
thorough-going cheat who played on the credulity of the common people. He had a
wallet full of pardons hot from Rome, and his bag of relics earned him more
money in a parish in a day than local parson in a month or longer. Chaucer has
a poor opinion of the relics, by which he made his living. On the whole he is
the most notorious person, a predator and a hanger-on of the Church who is a
noble ecclesiast only in the pulpit where his preaching makes him so materially
successful. The congregation listens to him spell-bound and when his discourse
is at an end, the listeners become so bemused by his eloquence that they give
him all their silver.
An equally bad
companion of the Pardoner was the Summoner. He was a most unattractive figure,
with his red, spotted face which no quicksilver or brimstone, borax, white
lead, oil of tartar, or ointment could cure. He loved garlic, onions, leeks,
and red wine. His narrow eyes and black eyebrows and close-cropped beard, and
his blustering, bullying manner made him the terror of all children—his
greatest condemnation. He earned a reputation for learning by means of a few
Latin tags, which he spoke best when he was drunk. He frightened simpletons and
quiet men, blackmailed young folk in the diocese, and, in return for a quart of
wine, would tolerate the keeping of a mistress by a good fellow for twelve
months. If he was all typical of his class, no wonder that the Church was
unpopular.
The Pardoner and the
Summoner, an unattractive pair, afflicted with spiritual sterility, were highly
despicable as individuals, but institutionally they had the power of summoning
and in many cases of absolving or pardoning lay folk. On a small scale they
seem to set out the summoning of all mankind to judgement on the Last Day. This
is what the Church was doing even when the individual members of the
institution abandoned all interest in the spiritual obligations of their
calling. Both men are shown to us as sick men, hysterical and a little mad, and
this we should interpret in both the spiritual and physical senses. And yet
these members of the itinerant clergy were often popular because they brought
some freshness into village life; one sermon could be repeated in a dozen
scattered churches and mis-demeanours of which they were told would be
forgotten by the time they paid their next visit.
Significantly the
Summoner and the Pardoner are the last two of the pilgrims to be described in
the Prologue, excepting the poet himself and the Host, and being birds of a
feather they ride together. Both held offices which lent themselves to whole-sale,
abuse, the one by accepting bribes from people whom he was meant to summon to
appear in an ecclesiastical court, the other by allowing people to do penance
and thus obtain pardon from their sins by paying him money, as well as by
selling them any old rubbish claimed to be genuine sacred relics of the saints
or apostles. Chaucer does not have to give many details of the frauds practised
by them because his contemporaries knew them only too well.
As a pleasant
contrast to the profiteering clerics, the Friar, Monk. Pardoner, and
Summoner—four seemingly typical men of various aspects of Church life—we have
Chaucer's delightful picture of the faithful clergy.
The foremost among
the really noble eccelsiasts was the Poor Parson, a shepherd who protected his
flock from the wolf and was not a hireling. He taught and practised the gospel,
was sympathetic to the simple, severe with the stubborn, endeavouring to draw
men to goodness by fairness and good example. He was self-effacing, dutiful and
altruistic. He needed the tithes, the tax of one-tenth upon the produce of the
faithful in the parish, but was not prepared to submit the defaulters to the
extreme penalties if, perhaps through poverty, they were amiss. However, with
stubborn and obstinae sinners, he was impatient : "Hym wolde he snybben
sharply for the nonys " But even this was really a virtue in disguise.
Everything he did was 'to drawen folk to hevene by fairnesse'.
It is obvious that in
his character of the Parson Chaucer created a figure that deserves the reader's
fullest sympathy. He is a man of material poverty but his spiritual wealth is
great. He is indeed a Christian like figure, endowed with numerous virtues. He
is devout, diligent, patient, noble, clean, holy and discreet and his chief
delight is in teaching 'Cristes loore and his apostles twelve'.
The Parson was one of
the twin pillars of society, the other being the secular Plowman who
laboriously tilled the earth and helped his neighbour. But not all in the flock
were so good. From the instruction books of the period we reach the conclusion
that many labourers were unaware of the words of the main prayers, of the
meaning of the commandments or even of the dictates of the moral law. It is of
topical interest to note that, while the parson was lenient in the matter of
tithe, the Plowman always paid his regularly. When he had completed the
strenuous labours on his lord's demesne and on his own allotment, he was then
ready to thresh or dig for ditch for any other poor man, without hire—for Christ's
sake. As a sign of his poverty we are told that he rode, in a tabard, and on a
mare—a sign of, great humility.
The Plowman of
Chaucer is perhaps in rights and duties, a typical peasant. We may hope that
his sterling qualities do not make him in any way unique in medieval life. What
his rights amounted to must have varied from district to district, and we must
not assume that all Abbots were as stern as the Abbot of Burton, who told his
serfs that they owned "nothing of their own save their bullies".
The Plowman's
portrait, parallel to the Parson's is in something of an appeal for good honest
toil and the contentment to be derived from it:
A trewe synkere and a
good was he,
Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee.
The Oxford Clerk was
another good man of sacred life. He had devoted himself to the serious study of
logic and preferred to have at his 'baddes heed' twenty volumes of Aristotle to
any "gay sautrie" or rich clothing. His outer coat was threadbare,
for he was extremely poor—even his horse was as "leene......as is a
rake". Whatever he received from his benefactors (whom he fittingly repaid
by heartfelt prayers for their souls), he spent on books and learning. He never
displayed unseemly levity in behaviour ; he did not speak one word more than
necessary, and when he did speak, he was brief, to the point and always noble
in his meanings.
It has been remarked
that Chaucer's final line of description for his scholar—"And gladly wolde
he lerne and gladly teche" —epitomises the Clerk for us today” and perhaps
provides us with a brief summing-up of what all good teaching has meant in the
past and will mean in years to come. Chaucer himself must have had the
privilege of coming in contact with such a teacher as the Clerk of Oxford, for
the poet's learning reflects instruction that was both sound and enthusiastic.
The first of the
clerical pilgrims to whom the Prologue introduces us is the Prioress. This good
lady is sometimes condemned outright as worldly, ambitious, and insensitive to
the sufferings of others. But as it has been pointed out in the chapter on
women characters, Madam Eglentine (so has she been called) was a fine virtuous
woman, who had concern for small animals in an age when cruelty was all too
common. She was a conscientious nun who was also a lady, plainly over-anxious
to do the right thing and for this she was prepared to err on the right side
rather than offend against good manners or be false to her tender heart.
A very notable point
in the portrayal of Chaucer's ecclesiastical characters is that the good ones
are dull and drab; they are not so alive and interesting as the bad ones. This
indicates that Chaucer was much more at home among real people who had their
share of faults and failings which he enjoyed describing with all the artistic
means at his command. Even in general life we notice that wicked people have
always made more of a splash and hit the headlines more dramatically than the
good ones. People like the poor Parson and oxford clerk are idealised,
unsubstantial figures whom we find without the warmth and vitality of the Friar
and the Pardoner. Likewise, the Wife of Bath is a much more flesh and blood
character than the Prioress.
To conclude, the
profiteering clerics in the Prologue are easygoing worldings who lack spirit of
sacrifice, respect for authority, acceptance of discipline, and at least a
modicum of otherworldliness. The principal characteristics of Chaucer's monk,
friar, pardoner and summoner are greedy self-seeking, contempt for authority,
evasion of discipline self-imposed in the vows of their orders, and a
thorough-going worldliness, which not only sought the good things of life, but
sought them at the expense of the needy.
The Church in
Chaucer's time was therefore an object of satire. This great organisation, with
its wealth, its power, and its conservative traditions, might have been
expected to offer a safeguard against social decay but it was itself a fruitful
breeding-ground for the very things which were disorganising feudal society.
French says that no
one would pretend that every fourteenth century churchman was so thoroughly
depraved as Chaucer's Pardoner, or that the poet's other pictures of servants
of the Church were entirely without exaggeration. If we make some allowance,
however, for the licence which must be permitted every satirist, we can accept
his portraits as a just representation of the corruption of the Church of
Chirst in the fourteenth-century England. Every point which he makes is amply
supported by evidence from other sources. Other writers of the age, both
obscure and famous, have the same story to tell, the same departures from
ancient ideals to lament. Official documents record the attempts made, from
time to time, to curb the abuses which were bringing the Church into contempt
and weakening the influence of religion upon men's lives. The high dignitaries
of the Church itself have left us their testimony to the encroaching spirit of
worldliness, which some of them resisted manfully,——while others made it the
guiding force of their own careers. No age in the history of the Church has
been without its greed and worldliness ; but there is abundant evidence that
the late fourteenth century furnished a spectacle of general corruption, from
top to bottom of the institution which has seldom been equalled.
