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An idiosyncratic history of medieval English life is for lovers of the Tales.
To enjoy Chaucer’s People fully, pretend it’s being read to you by Maggie Smith as her Downton Abbey character, Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. Like Violet, this book takes no prisoners and surges forward with a serene sense of its own rightness. It’s nominally a medieval social history centred around The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s lengthy 14th-century poem about pilgrims travelling to Canterbury. If you don’t already know and love the Tales and have a solid grounding in medieval European history, this is not the book for you. Author Liza Picard refuses to stop for beginners.
I fell for Picard’s Lady Violet-like charm almost straight away. Here’s the opening sentence of the chapter on the Wife of Bath: “She really came from ‘beside Bath’, probably one of the Cotswold villages, not Bath itself, but she has gone down in history as the Wife of Bath, and it seems pointless to correct her address now.” And from the same page: “Hose are always shown in contemporary pictures as smoothly encasing the leg, which I assumed was an artistic licence until I caught sight of a modern young woman whose jeans were tighter than skin-tight, and certainly encased her legs smoothly, leaving little room for wrinkles.”
Chaucer’s People is an idiosyncratic history. It eschews any kind of academic authority or appeal to popularity in favour of a brisk trot through those parts of medieval English life that Picard finds personally interesting, as she has done in her four previous books on various periods of London’s history.
In different hands, this could have been dire, but Picard brings her eye for
intriguing detail to bear with great effect. As she told the Guardian, “I am not a properly trained historian. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.” She writes, she says, to please herself and focuses on primary sources rather than other people’s research.
The result is a compendium of interesting tidbits. Chaucer’s People is grouped loosely around the Tales characters to provide a much-needed framework, although even so, Picard repeats herself a few times. This is not a book to be read in one sitting, but rather to be dipped in and out of.
In the chapter on the Cook, Picard gives several pages of medieval recipes. “I have tried to keep the feeling of the language … Medieval English used the word ‘him’ for he, she, it and them. The recurrent command to ‘smite him in gobbets’ is so much more vivid than ‘cut it into bitesized pieces’ that I’ve let it stand.”
Chaucer’s People has, perhaps, a niche audience. But anyone who has studied the Tales and has a soft spot for English eccentrics will love every single page.
CHAUCER’S PEOPLE: Everyday Lives in Medieval England, by Liza Picard (Orion Publishing , $37.99)
“I am not a properly trained historian. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.”