Abstract
The first three pilgrim portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales summarize English fighting capabilities during the Hundred Years’ War, the conflict between England and France and allied powers that dragged on from 1337 to 1453. Chaucer’s Knight carries himself with the meekness of a virgin (GP 1.69). His thoughts are not of Calais and Laon, but of fabulously distant locales at or beyond the far edge of Christendom: Alexandria, Morocco, al-Andalus, Turkey, Lithuania, Russia. The air of dreamy exoticism enveloping him seems to protect Chaucer’s Knight from association with the bloody, sharp end of war: except that, as Terry Jones has definitively shown, those distant locales witnessed some of the greatest bloodbaths of fourteenth-century Europe.1 Chaucer’s “verray, parfit, gentil knight” (GP 1.72) might thus be imagined as the English military machine’s super ego: if so, his Yeoman (GP 1.101-117) provides its id. At first glance, the Yeoman riding with the Knight and his son, the Squire, seems no more than a woodsman, a protector of the lordly domain. But although he knows woodcraft (GP 1.110), he is armed to the teeth. He carries a sword and a small shield (“bokeler”), “a gay dagere,” sharpened like a spear, and “a gay bracer” (GP 1.111-14). The bracer is an arm guard, worn by an archer; fully five lines attest to his proficiency in preparing and firing arrows from his “mighty bow” (GP 1.108).
It was not the inspiring vision of Chivalry taking to the field that his new eyes saw, but Destruction on the move.
Terry Jones, The Knight and the Squire
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Notes
See Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1985).
See John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).
Archers are celebrated in a broadside entitled “Agincourt, or the English Bowman’s Glory,” but this dates from 1665, a much later phase of the complex afterlife of the 1415 battle.
See Anne Curry, The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, Suff: The Boydell Press, 2000), 302–04.
In his History of the Battle of Agincourt (London: Johnson and Co., 1832), Sir Harris Nicholas, K. H., includes extensive listing of retinues, 331–404.
Terry Jones, The Knight and the Squire (London: Puffin, 1999)
The Lady and the Squire (London: Puffin, 2002).
Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Livre I (première partie, 1325–1350) et Livre II. Rédaction du manuscrit de New York Pierpont Morgan Library M. 804, éd. Peter F. Ainsworth and George T. Diller (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), 646
The Chronicle of Froissart. Translated out of the French by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. William Paton Ker, 6 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1901–03), I, 332.
Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Début du premier livre. Édition du manuscrit de Rome Reg. lat. 869, ed. George T. Diller (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 840
see further Peter Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 298.
See John Le Patourel, “L’occupation anglaise de Calais au XlVe siècle,” Revue du Nord, 33 (1951): 228–41 (228–30)
Dorothy Greaves, “Calais under Edward III,” in Finance and Trade under Edward III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918): 313–50 (314–15, 337)
Henri Platelle and Denis Clauzel, Histoire des Provinces Françaises du Nord, II: Des Principautés à l’Empire de Charles-Quint (Dunkirk: Westhoek-Editions, 1989), 150–54.
Michelle Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.
For brief but cogent comparison of events in Calais with impositions of English communities in Wales and southern Scotland, see Christopher T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy: The History of a Medieval Occupation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 50–51.
Text and translation follow Machaut, The Fountain of Love (La fonteinne amoureuse), ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1993)
on the Fonteinne Amoureuse as “a poem of war,” see Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 276–77.
Somewhere, he recalled in 1386, in the vicinity of Réthel: see Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, ed., Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 23–28
Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 173–74.
Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c. 1300-c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 56
Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, 27. See further the excellent account of Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside (Woodbridge, Suff: Boydell Press, 1998), 68–69.
See Allmand, Hundred Years War, 69
Herbert Hewitt, The Organization of War Under Edward III, 1338–1362 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1966).
See Jones, The Knight and the Squire Jones, “The Image of Chaucer’s Knight,” in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. Robert F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), 205–36 (219–33 and plates 5–6, 14–15)
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 33–40.
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, second ed. (London: Everyman, 1995)
B 3.210-11. I here prefer the reading “mede to men” to Schmidt’s “[men mede]”; the former reading appears in all B MSS. For texts of A and C, I follow Piers Plowman: The A Version. Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman and Do-Well. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.14 Corrected from Other Manuscripts, With Variant Readings, ed. George Kane, rev. ed. (London: The Athlone Press, 1988)
William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008).
W. M. Ormrod, “The Domestic Response to the Hundred Years War,” in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (Woodbridge, Suff: Boydell Press, 1984), 83–101 (86).
Hostilities broke out again in 1369. Derek Pearsall sees A text as a product of the 1360s, likely still being revised and written in 1369–70; B as largely a product of the 1370s, with “much allusion to the events of 1376–9”; and C as probably postdating 1381 and not finished until soon after 1388 (New Annotated Version of the C-Text, 1). But see now Lawrence Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman: The Earliest Transmission of Langland’s Work (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
On this Calais-based tale from the Burgundian Cent nouvelles nouvelles, featuring one John Stotton (squire and carver) and Thomas Brampton (cupbearer to the cardinal of Winchester), see David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 44–45.
See Jack Arthur Walter Bennett, “The Date of the A-text of Piers Plowman,” PMLA, 58 (1943): 566–72.
B 3.228-29; see also A 3.215-16; C 3.284-85. For acute questions posed of issues arising, see Anna P. Baldwin, The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1981), 25.
See Hewitt, Organization of War, 30
Adrien Blanchet, Les souterrains-refuges de la France (Paris: Picard, 1923), 76, 186
Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants, 69, 101.
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© 2012 R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya
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Wallace, D. (2012). Chaucer, Langland, and the Hundred Year’s War. In: Yeager, R.F., Takamiya, T. (eds) The Medieval Python. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137075055_16
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