Famous First Lines: The Canterbury Tales

April may have seemed the "cruellest month" to T. S. Eliot, but when you think about it, TSEliot is almost "toilets" backwards, so no wonder he had such a negative outlook.

For the rest of Britain, and especially for the South (where the weather always seems to have been better than for the rest of the islands), April signals spring, bright days, and that it's time to shake off dismal winter woe.

So April is the appropriate month to take a trip, and in the 14th century a great excuse for a trip was going on a pilgrimage to a shrine or other religious center -- whether you were devout or not. In fact, religion may well have been merely a pretext for many travelers who had no business or government reasons to leave town for a few days or weeks (see this article by Gerald Morgan in the Chaucer Review, however, for a more detailed examination of the social and moral imperatives of pilgrimages); the English word "holiday" is derived from "holy day," after all, and going on a holiday or on one's holidays is still used in Britain with no religious fervor at all (rather than the American "vacation," from the verb "to vacate" -- which always seemed a bit suspect to me, as it makes me think of a midnight flit).

While the history of the British Isles fascinates me, I would not like to have lived in the 14th century, and certainly not in London. The teeming narrow streets, the noisome refuse in the gutters (but do see Mumford's defense of medieval sanitation¹), the smells. . . .

The sound of Middle English is closer to our own usage than it looks on the page; students are always wary of reading the original text until they hear some of it aloud, Here are some links to audio files so you can check it out for yourselves:

• The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 1-18 (read by Professor Tom Hanks, Baylor University)

• The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 1-18 (read by Professor Larry Benson, Harvard)
  

And here is the text:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Why do these lines make me see Chaucer as someone with a twinkle in his eye and a warm smile? Notice how he starts the frame of the story firmly within the cycle of the seasons -- the renewal of spring, steeped in the life-bringing "licour" (even the rain in the south of England is sweeter than in the rest of the island).

This is more than the mere convention of starting a narrative along with new growth and new life: it's a glimpse into what medieval society knew about their world and the universe that surrounds it; from plant science to astronomy to religion to foreign policy to medicine to geography -- it's all in this opening sentence.

The geocentric idea, for example, that the motion of the sun around the Earth, cycling through the constellations ("hath in the Ram his half cours yronne" -- the Ram being Aries, for those of you keeping score at home), survived through the Middle Ages and gives us an indication of conventional wisdom.  I have to wonder, though, how much folk really thought about what the sun did and where it was when it wasn't shining on them.  It was another literary convention.

Chaucer's lack of faith in medieval medicine is evident throughout the Tales; here, however, he combines the contemporaneous notion that the Church could help expel the evil spirits of disease with the popular belief that going on a pilgrimage to a saint's shrine was a way of giving thanks for prayers being answered and illness cured.  

A Palmer, incidentally, was anyone who had been to Jerusalem; palmers were considered to have been somehow imbued with religious wisdom by means of this vacation; Spenser gave Sir Guyon a Palmer as a side-kick in The Faerie Queene, just to keep him in check in case he was tempted to wander off the path of righteousness.  

Canterbury is home to some of the most important religious icons of the Middle Ages.  There's the cathedral itself -- a monument to the huge gaping gulf between the lives of ordinary people and the immense wealth of the Church.  

But the shrine of Thomas à Becket is the goal of the pilgrimage that forms the frame story for The Canterbury Tales.  Becket was murdered in 1170, a grisly end for an archbishop; however, the fact that he was killed inside the cathedral itself had larger implications that rocked England on its foundations, as the rights of Sanctuary were sacrosanct, never mind the defilement of hallowed ground.

Over time Becket became a legend, saint, and powerful icon for the English, and his shrine became a popular tourist destination.  Located in Kent, where Chaucer was a justice of the peace in later life, Becket's shrine situates the Tales deep within the heart of England (or "Engelond" -- which is much more fun to say).

¹ Mumford, Lewis.The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961. 288 - 293