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  The Peasants’ Revolt was the first and in some ways the most important insurrection in English history. It was the first people’s movement with a recognisably left-wing and levelling agenda, and the first of the radical programmes that have been such a part of London history. As Chaucer sat in his flat and looked out towards the fields of Mile End, he could hear a noise that drowned the summer murmurings of the bees and the doves. He could hear the voices of thousands of peasants as they prepared to camp outside the city.

  Darkness fell; traitors stole forth. The Mayor of London, William Walworth, had given instruction that all the gates of the city should be closed, especially Aldgate. In the middle of the night an alderman named William Tonge is supposed to have disobeyed the order and let the peasants in. If Chaucer had stayed in his flat, he would have heard them padding through the ancient gate. He would have heard the muffled oaths of people who wanted to destroy the world that had fostered his genius. Chaucer had nothing to gain from this revolution and everything to lose; and yet there is a sense in which he was himself a radical, if not a revolutionary. In one fundamental respect he stood shoulder to shoulder with the rebels. He elevated and glorified the language spoken by the people of England after three hundred years of French dominance.

  In the words of William Caxton, the pioneering London printer who kicked off his career with The Canterbury Tales, he was “the worshipful fader and first foundeur and embellisher of our Englissh.” It was now, in the late fourteenth century, that the bud unfurled to form the vast and intricate bloom of the English language.

  Geoffrey Chaucer was born in Thames Street under what is now Cannon Street station. Followers of this story will note that this is becoming a popular venue for key London events: Hadrian may well have stayed here on his trip in AD 122, in the governor’s house, and it is overwhelmingly likely—even if the area had been rebuilt dozens of times—that the scene of Chaucer’s nativity possessed at least some traces of Roman masonry.

  He was educated in the shadow of St. Paul’s, founded by Mellitus in 604 (and what a shadow it was by now, a colossal medieval cathedral, with a spire even taller than the building we see today). At the age of fourteen he entered the court of the Duchess of Ulster, as we can tell from an account book that records his uniform: short jacket, red and black stockings. He was only nineteen or twenty when he went campaigning in France, was captured at Reims and was ransomed by Edward III for £16—indicating that he was already a person of some consequence.

  He went on to have a long career as a diplomat, an MP, a spy, a Clerk of the King’s Works and, above all, a courtier; and in the court they did not, as a rule, speak English. They spoke French. His very name, Chaucer, probably comes from Chausseur—the French for a shoemaker. What did Edward II exclaim when he picked up the garter dropped by a lady of his court and gallantly tied it around his own calf? He didn’t say, “Never mind, darling,” or “There you go, sweetie.” He said, “Honi soit qui mal y pense”—Evil be to him that evil thinks. When John of Gaunt wanted to explain why he was giving a man and his wife an annuity, the record states that it was “Pour mielx leur estat maintenir,” the better to maintain their estate. And yet French was emphatically not the language of the buzzing crowd that passed underneath his chambers.

  Some of the vaguely educated may have attempted a bit of parley-vous, but even if they did they risked being mocked for their accents, like the pretentious Prioress, the madame Eglantine. “French she spake full fair and fetisly, after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe,” says Chaucer urbanely. She spoke French with a fine East End accent.

  The story of the fourteenth century is to some extent a tale of revolt against these hieratic class-redolent languages, French and Latin. In 1362 an Act of Parliament decreed that all legal pleas would henceforward be heard in English, and by now the countryside was humming with Lollardy, inspired by John Wycliffe and his English Bible. The Lollards didn’t like prayers or sermons they couldn’t understand. In fact, they didn’t think much of any kind of clerical mediation between man and God.

  When the fiery Lollard preacher John Ball was whipping up the peasants in Blackheath, he reached for rhyming English verse. “When Adam delved an Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” he demanded. Some have looked at Chaucer’s status—as a supremely well-connected merchant, married to the daughter of a Flemish nob—and wondered whether this decision, to mould the language of the proletariat into a new pentameter verse, was some kind of political act.

  Is he giving a clue, some historians have wondered, as to his own anti-clerical feelings? Is he a Lollard, like some of the knights he knew? Others have said no, they can’t find any real evidence that he was anything but a good (if caustic) Catholic. One idea we can certainly rule out: even if it is true that there were people like Alderman Tonge who were willing to collaborate with the peasants, Chaucer was surely not among them.

  What happened over the next three days was terrifying. On Thursday 14 June, Londoners awoke to the Feast of Corpus Christi. But on this day there were no pageants or miracle plays; the streets were sunk in fear. On the outskirts of the city, houses were already burning. A mob under Wat Tyler swarmed up through Southwark and stormed the Marshalsea Prison. In Lambeth they burned all the records—hated symbols of the Latinate judgments of their superiors.

  Tyler then led his men to London Bridge, where they broke down a brothel occupied by Flemish women and “farmed” by the Mayor—not so much because they objected to the concept of a brothel, but because they disliked the Flemish. Then there was more treachery (and again, Alderman Tonge and his colleagues were suspected), as the keepers disobeyed the orders of Mayor Walworth and opened the chain and drawbridge of London Bridge.

  Now the mob was hitting its stride. They broke open the Fleet Prison, attacked the Temple, to destroy more records, and then they set off down the Strand to what was the richest and most gorgeous residence in England, the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt. With great thoroughness they burned the fine linen and the hangings and the carvings, and then accidentally or not they finished the whole job off with three barrels of gunpowder. The next day the xenophobic murders began.

  In the Vintry—where Chaucer had been brought up—thirty-five poor Flemings were dragged from a church and beheaded by a mob led by one Jack Straw. Another group entered the Tower of London—again as a result of internal betrayal—and killed Archbishop Simon Sudbury and various other worthies and tax collectors. The mob cut off their heads and stuck them on poles on London Bridge. Then they announced that all Flemings should suffer the same fate, and for the sake of balance, they went to rough up the Italian bankers of Lombard Street. The next day, Saturday, the burnings and beheadings continued until the afternoon, when suddenly the boy king Richard II announced that all should go to Smithfield for a parley.

  It was one of those coin-turn events that could so easily have gone either way. Imagine the young King in his elegant armour, ranged against Wat Tyler and the angry bulbous-nosed peasants of Kent. We are told that Tyler treated the King of England with insolent familiarity. He wanted the abolition of villeinage (a kind of serfdom, where you were compelled to farm the lands of your lord); he wanted to abolish the process by which you could be outlawed for a crime, and he wanted an end to the new taxation and wage restraint. Then he repeated the demands of John Ball, the proto-communist preacher, that there should be no more lordship save that of the King, that the Church should be stripped of its possessions and that there should be only one bishop left.

  The King is said to have behaved with remarkable coolness, and seemed even to agree to these outrageous demands. But a fracas somehow blew up between Tyler and Walworth; and Walworth, Mayor of London, pulled the rebel off his horse and ran Tyler through with his sword.

  Others of the King’s retinue piled in and jabbed at the wounded man. There were shouts of anger from the crowd, and they might have shot the King with their arrows had the f
ourteen-year-old not spurred his horse to meet them and shouted, “Sirs, will you shoot your king? I am your captain! Follow me!”

  Spellbound by royal charisma, they all went to Clerkenwell, a few hundred yards to the north. The wounded Tyler was rushed to St. Barts hospital, but Walworth wasn’t having any of it. He whisked Tyler out and had him beheaded. Richard then stuck Tyler’s head on London Bridge, in place of Archbishop Sudbury, and told the peasants to go home—which, amazingly, they did.

  In London the Peasants’ Revolt was over. The King knighted Walworth on the spot.

  It is surely impossible that Chaucer could have supported any aspect of what had happened. Even if he resented Gaunt’s supposed carrying-on with his wife, don’t forget that he had once written a poem for the great man, in memory of his dead wife, Blanche. It must have been deeply shocking to learn—or even to see—that his house was burning. Chaucer was a well-travelled and cultivated man. He would have felt nothing but horror at the slaughter of innocent Flemings and the bashing up of Italians.

  How could he have sympathised with the rebels against the King and court on whom he depended? He didn’t. And yet his only reference to the revolt—this national disaster—has a bizarre jocularity.

  In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale he is casting around for a way to describe a bunch of people pursuing a fox.

  So hydous was the noise, a benedicitee

  Certes he Jakke Straw and his meynee

  Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrill

  Whan that they wolden any Fleming kille

  As thilke day was maad upon the fox.

  Which means something like, so hideous was the noise, Lord have mercy on us, that Jack Straw and his mob never shouted so shrilly when they wanted to kill any Fleming they could find, as they shouted that day in pursuit of the fox.

  It may seem a bit jaunty to compare Jack Straw’s vicious pogroms to a foxhunt. But that of course is Chaucer’s style: the deadpan detachment of the satirist. When old man January sees his wife being grossly embraced by a squire in a tree, Chaucer says: “And up he yaf a roryng and a cry, as dooth the mooder when the child shall dye.”

  The heartlessness makes us snort with laughter. That is surely Chaucer’s motive: to amuse. Take Absolon, the ludicrous parish clerk in The Miller’s Tale, who conceives a lust for Alison, a married woman.

  I suppose you could argue that his portrait of this silly golden-haired, twinkle-toed, lustful cleric is meant to be an attack on an unreformed church. The punch line of the Miller’s tale involves Absolon coming to Alison’s window in the dead of night and asking for a kiss.

  Dark was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,

  And at the window out she put her hole,

  And Absolon, hym fil ne bet ne wers,

  But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers

  Full savourly, er he wer war of this.

  Aback he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,

  For wel he wiste a woman hath no berd . . .

  And so on. I am not going to put that into modern English. I think we all know the meaning of ers.

  Call me juvenile, but even at a distance of 620 years I chuckle at Chaucer’s prep-school climax to this shaggy-dog story. . . . And now we are getting to the heart of the matter. That’s why Chaucer wrote in English—not because it was the language of revolt or of religious dissent. He didn’t deploy the people’s tongue because he wanted to make a political point, but because like all authors he wanted to reach the largest possible audience, and he wanted to make them laugh.

  English was the language of bawdy, because it was by definition the vulgar language. It was the language of the people he wanted to amuse and it was the most amusing language to write in. All along the riverbank from Tower Bridge to the Fleet there were wharves where Londoners loaded and unloaded the goods that were making them rich. There was Galley quay where the Italian galleys arrived; then there was the Custom House, where Chaucer worked; then Billingsgate fish market; then the Steelyard, the walled enclosure of the merchants of the Hanseatic League who dominated the trade with Scandinavia and eastern Europe.

  Those Germans spoke to the cockney stevedores in English, and English grew in importance with the rise of the merchant classes. By the end of the fourteenth century the aldermen of London were political heavyweights, and the King could not do without their financial support for his military ventures—not when the poll tax had proved such a dismal failure.

  The nobles might want war, but the merchants wanted peace, like capitalist cowards down the ages, and the merchants called the shots. Men like Sir Nicholas Brembre, a grocer and future Mayor of London, would lend one thousand marks at a time; but when Sir Nicholas and his chums decided not to stump up, as they did in 1382, the King had no choice but to call off his campaign. Thus was political power transferred to a rising class. The Peasants’ Revolt failed, like so many proletariat insurrections, but a successful linguistic revolution took place nonetheless, and it was led, like all successful revolutions, by the bourgeoisie.

  Chaucer’s choice of English was a function of a power shift from King and court to the affluent moneymen of London. A “gentleman” might not become an alderman, but the aldermen and sheriffs of London were increasingly keen on recognition; and, as ever, the sons and daughters of the nobility were willing to marry money.

  As London’s guilds or “misteries” grew more powerful, their power was contested more bitterly between them. They weren’t one homogeneous mass of wealth creators. They were divided with Sienese rivalrousness into grocers and drapers and mercers and fishmongers, and so on. The victuallers were engaged in chronic and bloody feuds with the drapers, and in the battle for power the factions of merchants would line up behind different nobles and indeed different royal houses.

  In 1387 Richard II, Chaucer’s ultimate patron, was almost deposed by a bunch of nobles (backed by the drapers), and some of Chaucer’s allies, such as the poet Thomas Usk, were executed, along with top grocer and leading moneybags Sir Nicholas Brembre. Chaucer seems at this stage to have been relegated to Greenwich, where he served as MP for Kent, and at one point he was given the unobtrusive job of deputy forester in Somerset, where he is thought to have concentrated on his poetry. With the return of Richard and Gaunt he was restored, taking up the grand-sounding post of Clerk of the King’s Works, overseeing repairs to the royal palaces. But in 1399 it was all over.

  Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (who was to become Henry IV, part one), and again the London merchants were behind it. Like so many other kings and governments down the ages, Richard had decided to take on the moneymen. He decided to punish the City for its role in the recent revolt by interfering with its ancient constitution. He appointed a Warden to govern the place—infringing the charter of liberty bestowed on London by the Conqueror himself—and tried to restrict the term of the Mayor to one year.

  The City wasn’t having it. When Richard asked Henry who had come to arrest him, the usurper replied (or so Froissart tells us), “For the most part, Londoners.” London merchants switched sides to protect their prerogatives.

  Gaunt was dead. Poor weak King Richard II was starved to death, aged thirty-three, in captivity; and there are some who think Chaucer himself was put to death. Out of favour with the new regime, hounded by Arundel, the new archbishop, for the allegedly irreligious tone of The Canterbury Tales, he may have been quietly “slaughtered”—to use the word of his friend and contemporary Hoccleve.

  It is a fascinating theory, but apart from that one word of Hoccleve’s, there just isn’t enough evidence to support it. The new king had in fact just confirmed Chaucer’s pension, and throughout his career the poet had shown a feline ability to flit between the warring worlds of court and the guilds—and to take money from princes and merchants alike—without notably falling foul of anyone. He was buried in Westminster Abbey fo
r his public service (not for his poetry); and yet his literary legacy was permanent.

  He took two great linguistic streams, Germanic and Romance, and fused them. Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry. Let me offer one final reason why English was the natural vehicle for a poet interested in pentameter couplets: with two parallel streams of vocabulary it was uniquely rich in rhyme, and the pleasure and magic was often to take a Norman-French-Latinate word and find an English rhyme; or even more satisfying, you could take a sensible Latinate word and find a raunchy English pun.

  Take the word queynte, which seems to come from the Latin cognitus, meaning clever or learned, and which happens to be a variant spelling for an Anglo-Saxon four-letter word that looks like a Danish king.

  One day Nicholas, the clever clerk from The Miller’s Tale, takes advantage of the absence of a husband to go and visit a young wife: “Whil that her housbonde was at Oseneye, as clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte; and prively he caught her by the queynte . . .”

  What worked for poetry worked for everyday life. With a dual or hybrid nature, English gave its users a flexibility like no other. They could go for the Latinate topspin or the Anglo-Saxon smash. They could be pompous or they could be blunt. They could talk about remuneration or pay, economies or cuts, redundancies or sackings, and ever since, Chaucer English has been like a gigantic never-quite-setting omelette into which fresh ingredients can be endlessly poured. The Oxford English Dictionary now has six hundred thousand words, and the Global Language Monitor calculates that there are one million English lexemes.