Tom Shippey

What would you do if you had toothache, in a world of pre-modern dentistry? Those of us who have suffered a weekend of it can probably imagine (in the end) getting a friend to pull the tooth out with pliers. But what if the tooth was absessed? Or impacted? An impacted wisdom tooth growing sideways underneath the other ones? Can one imagine cutting into the gum – no X-rays to tell you where to cut, of course – and levering it out, very probably bit by bit? Anyone who has had this done under modern conditions will not like to think about such treatment under premodern conditions: but then, what was the alternative? Some of the root-rotted teeth found in archaeological excavations make one wonder whether it was possible to die just from pain. The thought casts a new light on the side-remark of Chaucer’s Northern student in the Reeve’s Tale: ‘Oure maunciple, I hope he will be deed, Swa werkes ay the wanges in his heed’ – I expect he’ll die, the teeth in his head hurt so continuously.’

Powerful books have been written, and will continue to be written, on feminism and Medieval studies, but Edith Ennen’s The Medieval Woman is not among them. It is full of information, especially on matters towards the end of her period of study, and much of the information cannot help being amusing or thought-provoking, on an anecdotal level: how uniquely contemptuous it was to make the prostitutes of Cologne give sixpence a week each to the town executioner, the man responsible for flogging or hanging them if they defaulted! How strange it is that the famous ius primae noctis, great horror of the Middle Ages to such as Mark Twain, should have been recorded only among the aggressively democratic Swiss cantons round Zürich (perhaps proving that nobody ever meant it seriously). But these accidental virtues are too often spoilt by a strange and generalising vagueness. ‘The German expected absolute moral purity from his wives and daughters,’ we are told. When early Germanic women were captured, ‘as prisoners and slaves they bore their fate with dignity and honour.’ What, all of them? How do we know? Professor Ennen does start catching herself towards the end, as when she qualifies her remark that ‘women clearly live on a more emotional level than men and have a strong religious need’ with ‘At least, this is true of many women.’ But that does not repair the damage. She should have remembered her own dictum that ‘the historian is concerned with the sober reality.’ It may not be true, and there is much to be said for the imaginative speculation, but facts on their own would be better than stereotypes.

‘Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in fact, that we are frequently conscious of it as a burden or restraint’. I wonder what he can possibly mean by that. The most anomalous thing about England in comparison with all other European nations (of course it isn’t a nation, but even in comparison with Scotland and Wales) is that it doesn’t have the formal marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania. It has no national anthem – ‘God save the Queen’ is played at football matches, but that is shared with other parts of the UK, who, however, don’t play it (except for the Northern Irish, who are making a political point). It has no national dress, nor any evident national icons in the tartan/leeks/thistles class. St George’s Day attracts no celebrations. It does have a national flag, but not everyone knows what it is. A football commentator remarked that he was pleased to see ‘nearly as many’ St George’s Crosses being waved as Union Jacks, when England played Cameroon in the World Cup. No Union Jacks were on display at Scotland’s games. At a recent conference in Denmark I asked some forty Danish Anglicists if they knew what the English flag looked like. Yes, they replied, it’s that red, white and blue one with crosses going different ways. At least they were pleased to discover that the English flag is the exact reverse of the Danish one, for, as Saxo Grammaticus wrote long since, history in the North began with two brothers, whose names were Dan and Angul. But that particular national myth is unknown in England.’

‘Thow doted daffe, dulle are thi wittes,’ says Holy Church to the Dreamer in Piers Plowman: ‘To litel latin thou lernedest in thi youthe!’ The Dreamer doesn’t argue with her; in fact, he agrees, saying sadly: Heu michi quia sterilem duxi vitam iuvenilem. But her view is one of the great, long-lasting English fallacies, a fine example of post hoc propter hoc. Because for many centuries sharp-witted boys (but not girls) were picked out and taught Latin, it was observed that sharp-wittedness and Latin went together, and concluded that learning Latin made you sharp-witted. Generations of later mixed success at the English public schools made no impact on the thesis. T.H. White’s Sir Grummore, discussing ‘eddication’ with Sir Ector, remains utterly sure that learning Latin is the main part of education, though he himself ‘could never get beyond the Future Simple of Utor. It was a third of the way down the left-hand page, he said. He thought it was page 97.’

Chaucer’s life is a standing temptation to a biographer. On the one hand, we have the 493 documented mentions of him brought together in the Crow and Olson Life Records, a body of paper which makes Chaucer far better evidenced as a person than Shakespeare two centuries later; on the other, there is the persistent refusal of these documents to see him as what we think we know he was (the major poet of his age), presenting him instead as a quite important civil servant with good connections to power, and from a family almost typically English in its concentration not on literary matters but on moving up the social scale. Chaucer’s great-grandfather, Andrew ‘Ie Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer line around 1539 at virtually the same moment as the first printing of Chaucer’s Collected Works in 1532. But the irony had been there all the time, in the almost unbroken refusal of Chaucer’s contemporaries to take any documented interest in him as a poet, while recording steadily his involvement with rape, robbery, profitable deals of one kind and another, and not least with His Majesty’s Secret Service – or as the records put it, in secretis negociis domini regis. What did they pay Chaucer for? Why was he so useful? Is there any clue to his James Bond activities in his poetry? At any rate it is a pleasure to have a literary subject who appears to have been taken seriously in his own lifetime, to have had a role in the great world.’