Dialogue: Ancient pilgrims' path still worth following

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

This month is the 600th anniversary of the death of Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales.

Whackydo! you may exclaim sarcastically. Or, so what? you may shrug.

Well, even though his stories have to be translated into modern English before most of us can read him comfortably, Geoff was writing when what was basically the language we speak, and which is now the most widely used in the world, was gaining respectability and starting to be used by educated Poms in place of French and Latin.

Ordinary English people spoke a number of dialects but it was Chaucer's London vernacular that eventually evolved into the language we use now, via the much more readily understood English of an even greater poet, Shakespeare, 200 years later.

But, much more important than all that, Chaucer wrote fantastic stories.

They range from bawdy farce through satire to shrewdly observed commentaries on what makes people tick, not only then but now.

William Blake put it thus: "As Newton numbered the stars and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men (and women). Every age is a Canterbury pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters."

The pilgrimage was a great platform for storytelling. Each of a band of travellers from London to St Thomas Becket's shrine in Canterbury Cathedral tells a story to while away what was then a longish journey.

It may seem improbable that such a mix of people would have found each other's company congenial, but you don't think of that as you read The Miller's Tale, and those of the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Prioress, the Merchant and others, all of them still compelling stories after six centuries.

I made the pilgrimage to Canterbury myself while in England a couple of weeks ago to see the great cathedral in which Archbishop of Canterbury St Thomas Becket was murdered, and whose martyrdom for centuries attracted pilgrims such as Chaucer's band (although they never quite made it to the city before the writer died).

Not that I'm much interested in the grisly subject of martyrs, but I carry with me since my teens the profound effect of the speech lent to Becket, at the moment of his assassination, by T. S. Eliot in his verse play Murder in the Cathedral.

It starts with:

"Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain;

Temptation shall not come in this kind again."

It's too long to quote here but it's a breathtaking piece of religious verse. The play was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival of 1935 and given its first performance in the cathedral's Chapter House.

But what also interests me is the attitude towards religion at the time of Chaucer. These people were no puritans, even though they were making their pilgrimage for the sake of their immortal souls (although some seemed to go along for the ride).

The Miller's Tale, for example, has a modern, bawdy tone to it.

A man who idolises a woman stands outside her window and begs for a kiss. She sticks her bottom out and when he realises what she's done love evaporates, he goes to a blacksmith and gets a red-hot branding iron, returns to the window, begs for another kiss and this time the woman's illicit lover sticks his bottom out - and guess what happens.

Much more is known about Chaucer than about Shakespeare because he was an eminent man of his turbulent times.

His family were in the wine trade and his father a well-off member of the emerging merchant class. Chaucer lived through the Black Death, went to France with Edward III's invading army, was captured and ransomed, went to Spain with the Black Prince, visited Italy and became an important government official.

And all the time he was scribbling away.

He had one of the best libraries of his time and, because he pre-dated printing, it's thought he read his tales aloud, possibly at court.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, was an obscure provincial playwright whose life the official records ignored.

Chaucer's stories were like novels as poems. The Canterbury Tales is in a number of verse forms but mostly in heroic couplets, and that's a problem with translations.

The first version I read was Penguin's 1951 translation by Nevill Coghill. It's fun and eminently clear, although I've always felt that he contrived too hard too often to achieve rhyme at the expense of narrative flow.

A better read is the 1985 Oxford University Press translation by David Wright.

This month, Canterbury is celebrating the life and writing of Chaucer and attracting hundreds of thousands of people. It's a lovely time of the year in southern England: not yet really cold, yellow leaves fluttering about in the cooling wind as autumn closes the days down towards winter.

Looking at Canterbury Cathedral, I tried to understand why, for hundreds of years, people left their tiny, primitive homes each day to slave away on a huge, beautiful building that functioned only as a tribute to their God.

I failed that test of the imagination and yet, courtesy of Chaucer, I know that their irrepressible humanity was just like ours.