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History of English Literature

Notes from exhibiting any signs of decay, reached perhaps its fullest development at this time. More
than two centuries were to elapse before it was finally killed-by the satirical pen of Cervantes.”
The Knight in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is typical of his kind. Even the tale he narrates concerns
the adventures of two true knights-Arcite and Palamon.

2.4 The Black Death, Peasants’ Revolt and Labour Unrest

In the age of Chaucer most people were victims of poverty, squalor, and pestilence. Even well-
educated nobles eyed soap with suspicion, and learned physicians often forbade bathing as harmful
for health! That is why England was often visited by epidemics, especially plague. The severest
attack of this dread epidemic came in 1348. It was called “the Black Death” because black, knotty
boils appeared on the bodies of the hopeless victims. It is estimated that about a million human
beings were swept away by this epidemic. That roughly makes one-third of the total population of
England at that time.
One immediate consequence of this pestilence was the acute shortage of working hands. The socio-
economic system of England lay hopelessly paralysed. Labourers and villains who happened to
survive started demanding much higher wages. But neither their employers nor the king nor
Parliament was ready to meet these demands. A number of severe regulations were passed asking
workers to work at the old rates of payment. This occasioned a great deal of resentment which
culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 duringthe reign of Richard II. The peasants groaning
under the weight of injustice and undue official severity were led to London by the Kentish priest
John Ball. He preached the dignity of labour and asked the nobles:
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
The king, overawed by the mass of peasantry armed with such weapons as hatchets, spades, and
pitchforks, promised reform but later shelved his promise. The “Peasants’ Revolt” is, according to
Compton-Rickett, “a dim foreshadowing of those industrial troubles that lay in the distant future.”
Chaucer in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale refers in the following lines to Jack Straw who with Wat Tylar
raised the banner of revolt:
Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meyne
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille,
When that they wolden any Flemyng kille
As thilke day was mad upon the fox.
R. K. Root thus sums up the significance of this uprising: “This revolt, suppressed by the courage
and good judgment of the boy King, Richard II, though barren of any direct and immediate result,
exerted a lasting influence on the temper of the lower classes, fostering in them a spirit of
independence which made them no longer a negligible quantity in the life of the nation”. This was
another line of progress towards modernism.

2.5 The Church
In the age of Chaucer, the Church became a hotbed of profligacy, corruption, and materialism. The
overlord of the Church, namely, the Pope of Rome, himself had ambitions and aptitudes other
than spiritual. W. H. Hudson maintains in this connection: “Of spiritual zeal and energy very little
was now left in the country. The greater prelates heaped up wealth, and lived in a godless and
worldly way; the rank and file of the clergy were ignorant and careless; the mendicant friars were
notorious for their greed and profligacy.” John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, whom he calls
“moral Gower” thus pictures the condition of the Church in his Prologue to Confessio Amantis:
Lo, thus ye-broke is cristes Folde:
Whereof the flock without guide

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