How Did We Get Here?
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From Beowulf to Chaucer: Big Changes
Going from Beowulf to the General Prologue is usually a surprise: Immediately, we are aware that we are in a world very similar to our own -- and very different from that of Beowulf. In the Anglo-Saxon epic, we had the sense that there was not much else in the world besides Herot and Grendel: the sense of the world around us is that of a vastly depopulated (and often terrifying) emptiness. By contrast, the world of Chaucer teems with people from all walks of life and across the moral spectrum. How did we get here? |
Blame the Romans
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Rise of Feudalism
Imagine that Canada decides to invade and replace our bacon with that round stuff, or insist that we all listen to Alannis Morissette and treat Justin Bieber with respect. Imagine that the federal government is taken over. There's no "United States" any more. There's no "united" anything. If you've been clamoring for "states' rights" for awhile, well, you now have them. On a practical level, what that means is that in Las Vegas, we'd have to protect our glitter from raiders down in Kingman or up in St. George. We'd have to build a wall around the city to keep ourselves safe. Basically, that's what happened: After the fall of the Roman Empire, landowners found they had to build defensively to protect themselves -- hence, the rise of the medieval fortress. |
Serf's Up: Entrenched Servitude
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What feudalism meant -- in addition to, "You're on your own, good luck!" -- was that ordinary people were put into a position of having to trade freedom for security. In exchange for protection behind a castle wall in times of a raid, a serf (a peasant who works on the land) would provide free labor.
At the upper level, the nobleman whose land was being worked by the serfs would trade his ability to raise an army and fight in battle in exchange for land and power from the king. Bottom line, it's a quid pro quo arrangement up and down: the king gets soldiers and gives power; the nobleman gives soldiers and gets land; the serfs give labor and get protection. The good news: It was a very stable system that worked pretty well for a long time. The bad news: Basically zero freedom or social mobility for anyone except the king and nobles. |
The Game-Changer: The Plague
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A major game-changer occurred in the mid-1300s that altered everything: the bubonic plague. In some cases killing more than half of an urban population, the plague was devastating -- but came with one unexpected consequence: Job openings.
All of a sudden, there were lots of jobs open, especially in urban centers, and many of these jobs were labor jobs -- in short, the kind of work serfs had been doing for a long time. Landowners often lacked the manpower to bring back a serf who had decided to leave the estate for (say) London. Serfs with jobs become former serfs who hire tutors for their children and eventually send them to Oxford. We have a burgeoning middle class -- often, in many cases, richer than the nobility -- who is becoming increasingly literate and educated. There's more of a market (and more of a demand) for the written word, a factor that becomes a major feature of the Renaissance. Was the Renaissance caused by the plague? No, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but the plague undeniably played an important role. |
Chaucer's World
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Chaucer is illustrative of many of these social changes. As a wine-merchant's son who was given an incredibly good education and whose children marry into the family of John of Gaunt, whose descendants still occupy the English throne today, Chaucer illustrates the rapid development of the middle class better than almost any other figure of his time.
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The First Estate: Those Who Pray
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There's a great discussion of the three estates at this link here, so I'll focus on the first estate, Those Who Pray.
Chaucer's primary pilgrims who are members of the First Estate especially include the following:
Church corruption was a major issue at this time. To its credit, the Church worked diligently to eliminate corruption during and after the Protestant Reformation, but we can see in Chaucer's pilgrim portraits the cracks in the foundation even this early. |
Indulgences and Relics
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To the non-medieval sensibility, indulgences and relics tend to be somewhat foreign. Here are two comparisons that might help: the concert t-shirt, and the Get out of Jail Free card from Monopoly.
Get out of Jail Free Say you plan on a wild Vegas weekend in which you very well might indulge in activities some would consider to be sinful. Regrettably, you understand that accidents happen, Fate is not predictable, and you might end up by expiring your term of life right in the middle of your weekend before you have had a chance to confess and atone for your sin and be absolved. That's where indulgences come in. They're like a Get out of Hell Free card. Pay money in advance for a pre-forgiveness absolution of your sins, and if you die, it's all fine. As the Church has definitely acknowledged, this practice was certainly problematic. For one, it gave the rich essentially a carte blanche to do what they wished without fear of heavenly reprisal. For another, the Church was essentially profiting from this bad behavior. It was a central grievance pointed out by Luther and other reformers for these and other reasons. Relics Relics, to those not raised in the Catholic faith, can be somewhat unusual, so let's start with a comparison. Imagine you're at a concert of some person or group you really love, and the lead singer throws his or her t-shirt into the audience and you catch it. Would you keep it? Would you never wash it? Would you sell it on eBay? Would someone pay a lot of money for a sweaty t-shirt? If the answer to those questions is "Yes," then you're close to understanding how medieval relics worked and why they mattered. A relic is an artifact associated with or belonging to a religious figure. For example, relics can include items such as the veil of the Virgin Mary, a piece of Noah's Ark. Getting more personal, the tears of St. Peter, perhaps, or the blood of St. Joan of Arc could be relics. Even more personal yet, actual body parts were highly valued. In the famous Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, for example, are the bones of John the Baptist. In some cases, the Church has verified the authenticity of medieval relics, but obviously also, true authentication -- especially in Chaucer's time -- was nearly impossible. Selling false relics became, for some unscrupulous people, a way to prey upon the faithful and exploit people's desire for a connection to a saint or holy figure whom they admired. This too was a major focus of Protestant criticism of the Church, and we'll see in Chaucer's pilgrim portrait of the Pardoner that it was a problem long before Luther. Again, though, to its credit, the Church has done a great deal since the 1300s to eliminate corruption of this kind. |