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  • Chaucerian Vernaculars
  • Ardis Butterfield

Bilingual Chaucer

If only, we joke to our students, we could hear Chaucer speak. Yes, his poetry is full of speech, but what of his daily, domestic, historical voice? James Russell Lowell in 1849 may have heard “a delighted gurgle” when he read Chaucer, but for most of us it seems irrecoverable, in the same way that we are resigned to the absence in all those Life Records of any reference to his poetry or his life as a poet.1 But one of those records does contain his authentic voice. It is in French. The scene is a court chamber on October 15, 1386, where Chaucer, called as a witness to the “dispute between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms,” is describing how he noticed these arms hung outside an inn as he was walking down Friday Street. This scene has itself been beautifully described by Paul Strohm in an essay on London itineraries, and shown to be rich in symbolic [End Page 25] and spatial meaning.2 However, there is perhaps yet more to glean from it in terms of its language. Chaucer’s account begins, in fact, not only in French but in France:

Demandez si lez armeez dazure ove un bende dor apparteignent ou deyvent apparteigner au dit Monsieur Richard du droit et de heritage dist qe oil qar il lez ad veu estre armeez en Fraunce devaunt la ville de Retters et Monsieur Henry Lescrop armez en mesmes les armeez ove un label blanc et a baner et le dit Monsieur Richard armeez en lez entiers armez dazure ove un bende dor et issint il lez vist armer par tout le dit viage tanqe le dit Geffrey estoit pris.

Asked if the arms of azure with a bende dor belonged or ought to have belonged to the aforesaid Monsieur Richard by right and heritage. He said yes, for he had seen them bearing arms in France in front of the town of Retters [Rethel] and Monsieur Henry Lescrop bearing the same arms, his arms having a white label3 and banner4 and the aforesaid Monsieur Richard armed in the full arms of azure with a bende dor and having proceeded forth he saw them in arms during the whole campaign until the aforesaid Geffrey was captured.5

The whole deposition gives us a brief glimpse of two Chaucers, one walking down a London street, ever alert—as one is—to the possibility of a quick drink in a new establishment, and the other journeying along a northern French road in the midst of war.6 These two Chaucers, one a Londoner, the other a frequent traveler to the Continent, form the bilingual and bicultural heart of this lecture.7 It comes naturally to Chaucer [End Page 26] both to speak French and to discuss this heraldic dispute with easy reference to his own experience back and forth across the Channel. It may seem disingenuous of me to claim that this piece of legal French is a genuine echo of Chaucer’s own voice, but it reads very informally, and contains not only Chaucer’s own query about the new herbergerie but also the voice of an unnamed individual who replies conversationally: “Nenyl sieur . . .” There is some reason to suppose in view of court practices of the time that Chaucer did speak this French (recorded as it is in the third person) and every reason to recall that spoken as well as written French was utterly familiar to him.8

As my slightly perplexing title indicates, I hope, this lecture is about the fact that Chaucer had more than one vernacular. That our only record of Chaucer’s speech should be in French is a significant accident. Jill Mann once asked me what language I thought Philippa of Hainault spoke. It is a deceptively simple question, as she well knew. One would have to reply that it might depend at least partly on where Philippa was at any one time. In the Low Countries, where she stayed with Edward III for long periods in the 1330s and 1340s, and where two of...

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