Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Laboring in the God of Love’s Garden: Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women Kellie Robertson University of Pittsburgh On 12 October 1385, Chaucer was appointed to the commission of the peace in Kent. He served as a justice of the peace (JP) for the next four years, until being appointed Clerk of the King’s Works in 1389. For Chaucer’s biographers these years have always posed a problem ; they are the middle of his poetic career, seemingly transitional years between his courtly dream vision poetry and the later frame tales. They are some of the best-documented years in terms of official records, yet they have provoked divergent interpretations in terms of their import for Chaucer both as a poet and as a Ricardian servant. For Donald Howard, the late 1380s were ‘‘the worst of times’’ when the poet traded a relatively secure urban existence for debt-ridden rustication. For Derek Pearsall, on the other hand, the Kent years provided a well-deserved respite from the poet’s ‘‘arduous and thankless’’ activities as controller of customs as well as a necessary (and presumably welcome) distance from a court about to be thrown into disarray by the Appellant crisis.1 Both biographies imply that Chaucer, politically astute as ever, chose to ride out these turbulent years in a Kent backwater rather than brave them in a neighborhood nearer Westminster. Both biographies also describe these years as dominated by Chaucer’s single documented return to London in the fall of 1386, when he sat in the so-called ‘‘Wonderful Research for this article was made possible by a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as by a University of Pittsburgh Faculty of Arts and Sciences Grant. I also with to thank Mike Witmore for this valuable comments on successive drafts of the essay. 1 Donald Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Fawcett Columbine , 1987), pp. 383–400; Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 202–9. 115 ................. 9680$$ $CH4 11-01-10 12:34:28 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Parliament’’ and testified at the Scrope-Grosvenor trial. While these were certainly significant events for Chaucer, the parliament lasted only fifty-nine days, and his deposition before the magistrate only one. This article explores these years in order both to modify our understanding of them as a ‘‘respite’’ from politically controversial issues of the day and to further our knowledge of how these years may have influenced Chaucer’s later writings. As a JP, Chaucer’s primary duty would have been the enforcement of highly controversial labor regulation . First introduced in 1349, these laws sought a legislative solution to the labor shortages and wage increases following in the wake of the plague. The laws fixed wages and prices at pre-plague rates and significantly restricted the movements of laborers; deeply resented by workers, they were blamed in part for the rebellion of 1381. It is to Chaucer’s tenure on the peace commission that most critics assign the writing of the prologues to the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, both works with a keen interest in how labor shapes identity. The opening section of this article analyzes the documentary evidence that links Chaucer to these labor laws, while subsequent sections explore how the enforcement of the labor ordinances necessarily shaped the ‘‘social imaginary ’’ informing Chaucer’s work at this time, primarily the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.2 It is no coincidence that concerns over work emerge as central to the narrator’s self-representation in the Legend of Good Women, where the God of Love stages an inquiry into the validity of the narrator’s work as a writer. In the G-version of the Legend’s Prologue, the poet-narrator himself raises the question of ‘‘the entent of my labour’’ (78), suggesting that work in general, and written work in particular, are subject to scrutiny here.3 The subsequent exchange between the narrator and the God of Love makes literary labor publicly visible in a way that it generally wasn’t in the late fourteenth century...