CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL AND GEOFFREY CHAUCER: The Essence of England (20)

[This is the twentieth of a series of articles giving a brief description of each of the 26 ancient Anglican cathedrals coupled with a sketch of a person, activity or

institution connected to the area]

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother Church of the Anglican Communion and the senior bishop of the Church of England is Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All-England. The Cathedral’s origins stretch back to a church founded in 597 by St Augustine, (no connection with the earlier famed theologian St Augustine of Hippo) the Benedictine abbot of an abbey in Rome, who had been sent by Pope Gregory as a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons. The huge building we see now was started at 1070 and developed piecemeal over the following centuries, rather compromising its artistic unity. It remains however one of the great sights of England.

Canterbury Cathedral

 After several earlier structures, the Cathedral (at that time the church of a monastic abbey) was built in the Norman style by the first Norman archbishop Lanfranc. The east end was greatly extended, doubling the length of the cathedral by 1126, still in the Romanesque style. In 1174 a fire seriously damaged the choir and it was recreated partly in the early English Gothic manner. The murder in the Cathedral of the politically abrasive Thomas Becket in 1170, after he opposed Henry II, appalled Europe and the Cathedral became a major place of pilgrimage to St Thomas – enormously swelling the coffers of the Church. The Trinity Chapel in the East end and the Corona, to house Becket’s shrine and relics, followed in 1184. The Corona’s stained glass is the finest in England.

The Nave and transepts eventually fell into disrepair and were rebuilt from 1377 in spectacular Perpendicular style by the famous master-mason Henry Yevele, who also beautified Westminster Abbey. A lovely lierne vault was also raised at this time, and despite an earthquake in 1384, the cloister and chapter house were rebuilt; money was short and the south-west tower did not replace the Norman one until 1453. Astonishingly the north -west tower was not replaced until 1834 when a Perpendicular replica of the south-west one was erected, now known as the Arundel Tower. The fine main crossing tower with its fan-vaulted lantern was not completed until the early 1500s.

The Choir

The Nave at Canterbury

 It is not easy to do justice to this wonderful historic building with its many embellishments and its extensive precincts. It must be peacefully explored in person.

Canterbury as a place of pilgrimage evokes The Canterbury Tales, that wonderful sequence of poetic stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). Chaucer was not only a great medieval poet but assuredly one of the pre-eminent poets in the Pantheon of the English language.

A 17th century image of Chaucer

Canterbury Pilgrims

 

                            

Many schoolboys will recall the Middle English opening lines of his Prologue:

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 halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
(That slepen al the nyght with open eye)
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.

The Prologue describes most felicitously each of the pilgrims in turn, with many a memorable thumbnail line. Thus the Knight is “a very perfect gentle Knight”, the Squire “fresh as is the month of May”, the lax Monk declares “let Austin have his swynk (work) to him reserved”, the persuasive Friar ”his eyes twinkled in his head alright”, the Clerk of Oxenford “gladly would he learn and gladly teach”, the Good Wife of Bath “She was a worthy woman all her life, husbands at church door she had five”. Of the Poor Parson he wrote admiringly “first he wrought and afterward he taught”, or the Ploughman “living in peace and perfect charity, God loved he best, with all his whole heart”, less admiringly of the Summoner “as hot he was, and lecherous as a sparrow” or the smooth shaven Pardoner “I trowe he were a gelding or a mare”. The Prologue is carried off with great geniality and wry observation.

The Tales themselves include some of surpassing quality – The Knight’s (Hazlitt thought “In depth of simple pathos, and intensity of conception, never swerving from his subject, I think no other writer comes near him, not even the Greek tragedians”) or The Wife of Bath’s, The Pardoner’s and The Nun’s Priest’s, with its delightful fable of the Cock and the Fox, not to mention the hilariously bawdy The Miller's Tale.

Chaucer had a busy career as a courtier and diplomat attached to the court of Edward III and Richard II and enjoying the patronage of the grandee John of Gaunt. He had travelled to France and Italy and it is likely he had met Froissart and possibly he had contact with Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose poetry had substantially influenced him. His other works include The Parliament of Fowls and The Legend of Good Women but in my view the finest thing he did was Troilus and Criseyde, an epic love story crowned by a beautifully compassionate Envoi in the last 12 stanzas, where Troilus philosophises on the absurdity of human existence: (I attach a modernised extract)

Such ending has Troilus, lo, through love:

Such ending has all his great worthiness,

Such ending has his royal estate above,

Such ending his desire, his nobleness

Such ending has false words’ fickleness

And thus began his loving of Cressid,

And in this way he died, as I have said

            O young fresh folks, he or she,

 in whom love grows when you age,

return home from worldly vanity,

and of your heart cast up the visage

to that same God who in His image

made you, and think it but a fair,

this world that passes soon as flowers fair.

The note Chaucer strikes here and in many of his other works is that serene medieval voice, self-contained and confident, yet full of sympathy. I find it very attractive and Chaucer surely deserves the highest possible poetic rating.

SMD

29.11.12

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2012

,