Chaucer | Page 7

nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes. On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of Edward
III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from the
period of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the king's
unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the overburdened and
enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the King himself to
renounce the proud position of a conquering power. In 1363 he had
celebrated the completion of his fiftieth year; and three suppliant kings
had at that time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success.
By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained
by himself and the valiant Prince of Wales; and during the years
remaining to him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed his
favourites. From being a conquering power the English monarchy was
fast sinking into an island which found it difficult to defend its own
shores. There were times towards the close of Edward's and early in his
successor's reign when matters would have gone hard with English
traders, naturally desirous of having their money's worth for their
subsidy of tonnage and poundage, and anxious, like their type the
"Merchant" in Chaucer, that "the sea were kept for anything" between
Middelburgh and Harwich, had not some of them, such as the
Londoner John Philpot, occasionally armed and manned a squadron of
ships on their own account, in defiance of red tape and its censures. But
in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which he grew up
were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in the
land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the burdens
which military glory has at all times brought with it for a civilised
people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time when the decline
in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is evident from the
answer given to the application from Rome for the arrears of
thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or rather from
what must unmistakeably have been the drift of that answer. Its terms

are unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated.
The power of England in the period of an ascendancy to which she so
tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of
her arms. Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most
others in Europe. Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer
for a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed
proprietors, and of the "worthy vavasours" (smaller landowners) who,
like Chaucer's "Franklin"--a very Saint Julian or pattern of
hospitality--knew not what it was to be "without baked meat in the
house," where their
tables dormant in the hall alway Stood ready covered all the longe day.
From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders came
the laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did so
much to consolidate national feeling in England. The foreign
companies of merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the
banking business and export trade assigned to them by the short-sighted
commercial policy of Edward III, and the weaving and fishing
industries of Hanseatic and Flemish immigrants had established an
almost unbearable competition in our own ports and towns. But the
active import trade, which already connected England with both nearer
and remoter parts of Christendom, must have been largely in native
hands; and English chivalry, diplomacy, and literature followed in the
lines of the trade-routes to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Our
mariners, like their type the "Shipman" in Chaucer (an anticipation of
the "Venturer" of later days, with the pirate as yet, perhaps, more
strongly marked in him than the patriot),--
knew well all the havens, as they were From Gothland, to the Cape of
Finisterre, And every creek in Brittany and Spain.
Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on the
part of our shipmen in this period to self-help in offence as well as in
defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently
employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized
or impressed for the purpose by order of the Crown. On one of these

occasions the port of Dartmouth, whence Chaucer at a venture ("for
aught I wot") makes his "Shipman" hail, is found contributing a larger
total of ships and men than any other port in England. For the rest,
Flanders was certainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth, and
in mercantile and industrial activity; as a manufacturing country she
had no equal, and in trade the rival