Chaucer | Page 6

in the prosperity of the
capital,-- an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced
during the same period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had
grown larger as its houses had grown higher; and mediaeval London,
such as we are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived
those leading features which it so long retained, from the days when
Chaucer, with downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its
streets between Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in
England the remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which
have ever befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all
has been said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so
exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does
he refer to the Plague:--once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian
if not of French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the
ravages of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is
said to have "a thousand slain this pestilence,"--
he hath slain this year Hence over a mile, within a great village Both
men and women, child and hind and page.
The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the
description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple
surcoat and blue white-furred hood; nor, by the way, may this portrait
itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the
helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. For though in all
the world there was none like this doctor to SPEAK of physic and of
surgery;-- though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a loss
for telling the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient with
the appropriate drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful friends the
apothecaries;-- though he was well versed in all the authorities from
Aesculapius to the writer of the "Rosa Anglica" (who cures
inflammation homeopathically by the use of red draperies);--though

like a truly wise physician he began at home by caring anxiously for his
own digestion and for his peace of mind ("his study was but little in the
Bible"):--yet the basis of his scientific knowledge was "astronomy," i.e.
astrology, "the better part of medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it;
together with that "natural magic" by which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells
us, the famous among the learned have known how to make men whole
or sick. And there was one specific which, from a double point of view,
Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very highly, and was loth to part
with on frivolous pretexts. He was but easy (i.e. slack) of "dispence":--
He kepte that he won in pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.
Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart
by these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first
smitten the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if the
Plague of 1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck down
among others Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chaucer's
Duchess Blanche). Calamities such as these would assuredly have been
treated as warnings sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a
Church better braced for the due performance of its never-ending task,
eagerly interpreted to awful ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a
later generation, leavened in spirit by the self-searching morality of
Puritanism. But from the sorely- tried third quarter of the fourteenth
century the solitary voice of Langland cries, as the voice of Conscience
preaching with her cross, that "these pestilences" are the penalty of sin
and of naught else. It is assuredly presumptuous for one generation,
without the fullest proof, to accuse another of thoughtlessness or
heartlessness; and though the classes for which Chaucer mainly wrote
and with which he mainly felt, were in all probability as little inclined
to improve the occasions of the Black Death as the middle classes of
the present day would be to fall on their knees after a season of
commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the later years of the
fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not unfrequently
spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth moralisings
in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed lamentation in
Latin; and at different dates in King Richard's reign the poet Gower,

Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and in
English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption and
sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant
insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to
remain deaf.
A self-confident