- CULTURAL BACKGROUND
As it is well known, Chaucer divides society into the three conventional estates, those praying (the church), those fighting (nobility) and those working (all). The church was the most powerful institution and owned one-third of the property. Taken together, about 75 percent of English land belonged to the Crown, the aristocracy and the church. The fact that he leaves out the two extremes of aristocracy and serfdom indicates a deliberate choice from a bourgeois perspective: he primarily views society through the eyes of the rising middle class.
Villani was the largest class of people. They were tied to the land about four in ten people. They did not own the property but farmed their own holdings (about 45 percent of all English land), which they were allowed to occupy in return for labour services.
Nevertheless, significant events and incidents such as the Flemish Famine and Black Death and the Hundred Years War led to a Feudalist crisis in France, Scotland, Wales and Northern Italy. Feudalism was no longer a political and social force by the late 14th century. The majority of the cities acquired personal liberty. Attaching a money value to the services performed by tenants on the manorial estate became common practice.
The three estates lasted until the mid-14th century when new professional-only classes began to rise. The commercial class, consisting of merchants and considered an urban middle class, was introduced. The rise of this middle class, in turn, caused French cultural hegemony to disintegrate. Another new class was the intellectuals, who broke off from the church, the first estate.
In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer begins with the Prioress and the Monk quite highly in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, then the Friar, the Nuns Priest, then the Parson, the Clerk, then the Summoner and the Pardoner come.
Perhaps no other element in Chaucer's world brings out the gap between the ideal and the actual as of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love. Harking back to pagan morality, chivalry anticipates the concept of the modem gentleman. The real and ideal knight distinguished himself by courageous courage, generosity, and faith. The knights were simply just soldiers mounted and not much more. In 1095, on their way to the Holy Land, Pope Urban II in Rome exhorted the First Crusade knights to give up cruelty and greed in favor of Christian values of charity, sacrifice, and faith. The sword is attached to the cross. With the war's reductions as the twelfth century progressed, leisure gave rise to war games such as jousts and tournaments, as well as the allied idea of courtship. While courteous love as a cultural ideal was refined and civilized, it remained primarily a literary convention and will, therefore, be discussed at a later time.
What really was the state of affairs?
Chroniclers and historians have pointed out so many incoherences and abuses from the earliest age of chivalry that one is left to doubt the entire social code. Notwithstanding the ideals of justice,-magnanimity and defense of the poor, the chivalric ideal presupposed a culture in which serfs outnumbered freemen. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the code had reached a high point. But even here the decline started sufficiently soon because of the decline of cruelty and the increasing wealth of the commercial classes. Christians either struggled with one another or led a pleasant life, instead of fighting the infidel in the possession of the Holy Land. The wealthy citizens brought a lot of material comforts but their wealth weakened the feudal aristocracy: they began buying the ranks of knighthood for themselves. Edward, I might want to speed up the process by persuading all freeholders to become knights, owning £ 20 a year's land. Nevertheless, in every area of life, honest trade acquired dignity; while civil law prohibited the knights from becoming merchants or businessmen, they could hardly stand up to historic power. The Cistercians, probably England's richest religious body, derived their riches primarily from success in the wool trade. Of course, during the Hundred Years War, the practice of ransoming prisoners brought into the knightly life a business dimension, instantly becoming wealthy by looting effectively.
Courtly love norms in Chaucer's times are not a reliable guide to the actual love and marriage conditions. Marriages were negotiated on purely commercial grounds with great excitement; that was also the reason for the many child-marriages. A woman could inherit property but she needed a husband to defend it. Divorce was simple, but for rich people who had a bigger reputation. The idealized woman of courtly love that was put on a pedestal that the knight adored contrasts with the common practice of beating women, sisters and girls.
The idealization perhaps was the natural result of the unbearable hardness of the present. The medieval castle has little private life, and men's physical exercise, drink, and war are kept away from women and they are confined to intolerable boredom that often encourages furtive debauchery. Because marriage was hostile to romantic love, the courtly tradition idealized illicit love. Even when Troilus becomes aware that Criseyde is to be handed over to the Greek camp in exchange for the Trojan prince Antenor, he is not making their love public. That would make them both a man and a woman at once.
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