Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers:

Abstract

It has been a long time since anyone has taken seriously the possibility that a literary source might ever be identified for Chaucer's Cook's Tale. The reason for this is not simply that this tale has been preserved only in what appears to be an accidentally truncated form.1 Even at fifty-eight lines long, it remains a substantial “stub,” and it provides a number of potential clues to the nature of the story that Chaucer probably intended to tell.2 Indeed, it defines its dramatis personae and its thematic concerns so fully as to create what is actually quite a detailed profile for the identity of its source, and it is perhaps precisely because this profile is so detailed that it has always seemed so difficult to find an exact enough match for it among all the classical or medieval stories that Chaucer is likely to have known. In other words, it is not an absence of evidence that explains the mysteriousness of the tale's origins, but an absence of suitable suspects—a lack of any text that seems even likely to have inspired what survives of the tale. In his essay on the Cook's Tale for the original Chaucer Sources and Analogues volume, Earl D. Lyon declared that searching for any possible precedent for the tale in the corpus of extant medieval stories “will … prove fruitless,” a formulation by which he seems to imply not just that his own search had yielded no results, but also that it was never going to do so: or, to put it another way, that it had been a wild goose chase all along.3 This negative conclusion—that there is probably no point even in looking for a literary source for the tale—now seems to be generally accepted by Chaucerian scholars.However, Lyon's investigation was perhaps unnecessarily circumscribed from the outset by his assumption that the tale Chaucer meant to tell must have been a comical one. “From the tone of the fragment itself,” he writes, “we may be sure that the Cook was going to cap the fabliau of the Reeve with another not unlike it…. We may look, therefore, for a humorous tale.”4 In fact, the juxtaposition of the Cook's Tale's with the Reeve's is no indication in itself that the two tales must have been generically alike, since elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales individual tales are often linked together in such a way as to emphasize the contrasts rather than the continuities between them.5 It is true that some support for Lyon's assumption that the Cook's Tale must have been “humorous” might be sought in the Cook-narrator's own description of his tale as a “litel jape that fil in oure citee” (I 4343).6 Yet “jape” means not just “joke,” but also “trick, deceit, fraud, fraudulent excuse”;7 and this is a semantic range that leaves plenty of scope for all sorts of narrative twists and turns that are anything but “humorous.” In any case, it would perhaps be hazardous to place too much weight on the pilgrim-narrator's own opinion of the story that he tells, given how many of his fellow travellers offer descriptions of their tales that are misleading.8 There is, in fact, nothing intrinsically light-hearted about the Cook's Tale as it stands, and it is at least susceptible to a much less positive spin. Perkyn is explicitly said to be a “roten appul” (I 4406) whose involvement with gambling, theft, “riot,” and prostitution implicitly threaten catastrophe for either himself or his erstwhile master. Indeed, as Helen Cooper points out, after the initial description of Perkyn, the tale's tone becomes “pervasively moral,” so that “of the last thirty-two lines of the piece (4391–422), fifteen are proverbs or similar generalizations of practical or moral wisdom.” From this perspective, “if this [tale] were to be a fabliau, it would scarcely be a typical one.”9The apparently widespread consensus that Chaucer intended the Cook's Tale to be fabliau-like is challenged even more directly by V. A. Kolve. He acknowledges the possibility that “the extant text may be little more than a preface to … a fabliau celebration, perhaps, of ingenious fraud and the art of the narrow escape”; but he goes on to note that “modern critics indeed write as if this were the only possible continuation of the tale,” whereas “medieval scribes read the tale very differently, as the several spurious conclusions that have come down to us bear witness.”10 For example, the two fifteenth-century scribes of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 141 and Chicago, University Library MS 564 endowed the tale with a rudimentary ending by imagining this remarkably gloomy outcome for Perkyn and his friends: And thus with horedom and bryberyeTogether thei vsed till thei honged hyeFor who so evel byeth shal make a sory taleAnd thus I make an ende of my tale.11 Another fifteenth-century scribe, the copyist of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686, offers a conclusion that is slightly fuller, but not so very different in spirit: What thorowe hymselfe and his felawe that soughtVnto a myschefe bothe þey were broght.The tone ydampned to preson perpetually,The tother to deth for he couthe not of clergye.And therfore yonge men, lerne while ye may.12 What is striking about both of these late medieval interpretations of what Chaucer might have intended for the Cook's Tale is their assumption, firstly, that Perkyn's career points unambiguously towards an inevitable death sentence, and, secondly, that the story therefore begs to be read as a cautionary tale. The assumptions made by late medieval scribes about what Chaucer intended are not necessarily compelling, of course, but they inhabited a world that was rather more like his than ours is today, and their thinking does at least demonstrate that it is by no means unreasonable to imagine that Chaucer's plans for the Cook's Tale might have been much more bleakly moralistic than most modern critics have been prepared to consider.13Having failed to find any appropriate source among all medieval literature's extant “humorous” stories, Lyon went on to suggest what is certainly a more parsimonious explanation for the Cook's Tale's apparent lack of any identifiable literary source. He argues simply that it never had one: in this tale Chaucer was “fictionalizing contemporary people and events.” In the new Sources and Analogues volume that supersedes the one in which Lyon's essay appeared, John Scattergood accepts this suggestion, arguing that “perhaps when Chaucer says that he will tell of something that ‘fil in oure citee’ (4343) he means, literally, that the story will be based on something which actually occurred in London.”14 There is some evidence to support the possibility that the name Chaucer gives the Cook, “Hogge of Ware” (I 4336), reflects that of a real-life personality,15 but this does not necessarily mean that the tale that Chaucer gave him to tell must also have been based on real-life personalities. It is true too that Chaucer carefully provides the Cook's Tale with what appears to be a realistic London setting, and that the Cook's Tale reveals the influence of “contemporary legal documents relating to apprenticeship—instructions, oaths, and indentures—and contemporary satirical poetry.”16 Yet what none of these contexts provides is a specific plot on which the Cook's Tale might have been modeled. They give us an indication of how Chaucer might have made whatever story he chose to tell thematically relevant to the London of his day, but they provide no basis for imagining the actual sequence of events that it contained.Important though the London setting might be for our understanding of how Chaucer might have wanted to use the Cook's Tale in the context of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, this hardly means that the pattern on which the story was based must itself have been located in London. When Chaucer did use literary sources, he almost always altered their original geographical and temporal settings. After all, the Miller's and Reeve's Tales that precede it are just as precisely located as the Cook's Tale itself—in Oxford and Cambridge, respectively—but none of their identified sources and analogues have any connection with either of these two towns. In the Nun's Priest's Tale Chaucer suppresses the originally Greek settings of the two stories illustrating the force of dreams that he extracts from Holcot's Wisdom commentary;17 and in the Franklin's Tale the distinctively Atlantic setting of a story that he specifically characterizes as a “Breton lay” is an alteration to the model that he found in the work of Giovanni Boccaccio.18 In other words, it is much more likely that the London setting of the Cook's Tale is Chaucer's addition to his source than that it provides any evidence for the nature of that source.Lyon asserts that “the London underworld was rich in story stuff,” but acknowledges that “published records contain no evident source or analogue of the Cook's Tale.”19 Similarly, Scattergood argues that the Cook's Tale is likely to have been based on “something which actually occurred in London,” but is apparently unable to suggest even a single example of the kind of incident that he thinks might have served as the original basis of the tale. To conclude in this way that the inspiration for the tale lies in some recent event without being able to say what that event might have been is hardly very much of an advance on the argument that the tale must have been based on a “humorous” story that cannot now be identified. Yet there is an additional reason for doubting the assumption that the Cook's Tale is principally based on real events as opposed to literary sources: it would have been a striking departure from Chaucer's usual practice for him to have made use of topical material in this way.20 Not a single one of the extant tales can be shown to have been constructed as a dramatization of any real event. The appeal of postulating a historical rather than a literary source for the Cook's Tale is easy to see, since it would make the tale seem to support the historicizing agendas characteristic of the last two decades of Chaucerian studies. Nevertheless, for Chaucer to have used the Cook's Tale as an opportunity to dramatize “something which actually occurred in London” is simply not something for which his other extant works provide any precedent.The one comparison that Scattergood does make is with the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, which, like the Cook's Tale, has a London setting. Yet this hardly provides any telling support for the argument that the Cook's Tale must have been based on a real-life event, since it has never been shown that the Canon's Yeoman's Tale itself was based on any such event. In other words, this is a case of trying to explain “ignotum per ignocius,” to use an expression that happens to occur in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale itself (VIII 1457). Like the Cook's Tale, this tale lacks any identified source, but that is perhaps not entirely surprising given how little of it consists of anything like episodic narrative.21 It is perhaps an interesting coincidence that, of all the Canterbury Tales, it is the two London tales whose origins are currently most obscure, but it is not necessarily the case that the coincidence is at all significant—let alone a justification for what seems like a very large leap to the deduction that Scattergood eventually goes on to make: that “Chaucer, when he dealt with contemporary London affairs, preferred to use material he knew at first hand or local stories he had heard.”22In this essay I follow a rather different line of thought. I suggest that the clues provided by the Cook's Tale in its current state might be interpreted as pointing to a distinct set of thematic emphases, and to a corresponding set of literary contexts, that have not yet been adequately explored in relation to the tale. On that basis, I identify one story in particular that seems to me to fit with some appropriateness into the gap that the extant fragment leaves. As it happens, this is a story both alluded to and told in literary texts that we know Chaucer read, since they demonstrably served as sources for material that appears elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. However, I am well aware that in suggesting a precise source for the Cook's Tale, even as a hypothesis, I run the risk of making the whole of the rest of my argument seem to depend on the validity of this suggestion. There are, of course, no certainties in such matters. Unless the missing portion of Chaucer's Cook's Tale suddenly re-emerges in some archive somewhere, there is simply no question of anyone being able to construct a case for the identity of the tale's source that is so secure as to be beyond all reasonable doubt; and I would not want my broader argument to be lost to an expectation that it should be. This essay is intended to present a view of the Cook's Tale's possible intellectual origins, generic affiliations, and ultimate purposes that is at least as plausible as any of the interpretations of the tale that have been offered up to now. I would hope that it is made just that little bit more compelling (rather than otherwise) by the fact that, unlike Lyon or Scattergood, I can point to one particular story—within the larger cultural tradition whose relevance I am attempting to emphasize—that could reasonably be interpreted as the actual and specific pattern on which Chaucer intended the Cook's Tale to be based. Yet, whether or not the story I identify does eventually come to be generally accepted as the best candidate to be regarded as the Cook's Tale's source, it is adduced here principally as a means of supporting the argument for the particular importance to the tale of certain thematic emphases and literary contexts that have perhaps been neglected up to now.The central figures in what survives of the Cook's Tale are clearly Perkyn the riotous apprentice and the unfortunate London victualler who eventually ejects him from his shop. It would be logical enough to assume that the tale in its complete form would have gone on to explore the nature of the relationship between these two men: that is, the relationship between a guildmaster and his apprentice. This is clearly no blood relationship, but it was traditionally emphasized that a master nevertheless stood in loco parentis to his charge. As Kolve observes, “the bill of indenture that bound [the apprentice] to his master often defined their relationship as being like that of father and son.” Indeed, “the master assumed responsibility for the apprentice's moral training as well as his instruction in the craft, and it was understood to be his duty, not merely his right, to chastise the boy.”23 In other words, the guildmaster is understood to be a figurative father, and thus, like other fathers in medieval society—figurative or otherwise—to be responsible for imposing moral discipline on the young people in his charge. It is precisely Perkyn's master's failure to impose any such discipline that is the focus of the Cook's Tale as it stands. In this way, it seems designed to link the guildmaster with some of the other Chaucerian fathers who struggle to govern their unruly sons. Just like the Franklin, whose son (like the apprentice) is said to love dice, the London master tries to rebuke his unruly charge by continually “snybbing” him (that is, by “telling him off”): [Cook:] This joly prentys with his maister bood,Til he were ny out of his prentishood,Al were he snybbed bothe erly and late.(CkT, I 4399–401)[Franklin:] I have my sone snybbed, and yet shal,For he to vertu listeth nat entende;But for to pleye at dees, and to despendeAnd lese al that he hath is his usage.(SqT, V 688–91) “Snybbing” clearly has little effect on either of the wayward youths, and it is perhaps implicit that both the Franklin and the guildmaster ought to have been able to chastise their “children” rather more harshly and effectively than they do. The potentially catastrophic consequences of the failure to impose a sufficiently rigorous regime, both for the children and for the parents concerned, are explicitly emphasized by the narrator of the Physician's Tale, who offers parents this bleak warning: Ye fadres and ye moodres eek also,Though ye han children, be it oon or mo,Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce,Whil that they been under youre governaunce.Beth war, if by ensample of youre lyvynge,Or by youre necligence in chastisynge,That they ne perisse; for I dare wel seyeIf that they doon, ye shul it deere abeye.(PhysT, VI 93–100) This passage might be compared with the Cook-narrator's description of the effects of Perkyn's depredations on the master's shop: For often tyme he foond his box ful bare.For sikerly a prentys revelourThat haunteth dys, riot, or paramour,His maister shal it in his shoppe abye.(CkT, I 4390–93) Here, the overall tone is somewhat less dramatic, and there is no suggestion that anyone is going to “perisse” as a result of “necligence in chastisynge,” but it is nevertheless made clear that that guildmaster, like the negligent parents imagined by the Physician-narrator, will himself somehow “pay for” his failure to govern his charges. The same verb, abeyen (to pay for), is used in each case.24 In all three of the tales that I have just cited, it is implicit that children (and perhaps especially teenage children) are innately immoral beings whose behavior needs to be strictly and vigilantly policed by their guardians. It also seems to be assumed that the responsibility for doing so falls most heavily on the head of the household in which the children live: that is, on their paterfamilias.This perspective might explain to some extent why Chaucer's depiction of fatherhood generally seems so indifferent, or even downright pessimistic. As Derek Brewer puts it, “Chaucer's imagination is simply not bothered by father-figures,” and “the direct presentation of fathers in Chaucer's poetry, though rare, tends to show them as stern and disagreeable.”25 It is certainly true that Chaucer's biological fathers are, as a group, relatively unsympathetic. For example, Criseyde's father, Calkas, abandons her to face the consequences of his betrayal and flight from Troy—which makes him, as he later admits, a “sterne … cruel fader” (Tr, IV, 94). The Emperor of Rome in the Man of Law's Tale embroils his daughter in an arranged marriage so ill-fated that it moves the narrator to apostrophize him as “Imprudent Emperour of Rome, allas!” (II 309). Then there is Walter in the Clerk's Tale, who callously deprives his children of their mother in order to serve what even the Clerk-narrator describes as his “crueel purpos” (IV 734), his elaborate plot to test his wife's fidelity. Even if there are some rather less prominent moments in Chaucer's oeuvre when he does seem to admit the possibility of a more hopeful and benign kind of fatherhood, these seem to be merely the exceptions that prove the rule. For instance, the respectful affection that he displays for the mathematical abilities of “little Lewis, my son” at the beginning of his Treatise on the Astrolabe ultimately looks more like a means than an end—an essentially fictional device for excusing what he calls his “rude endityng” and his “superfluitee of wordes.”26 Similarly, although the Tale of Melibee acknowledges Melibee's grief for the injuries done to his daughter, this hardly amounts to any very profound consideration of father-love, especially when it apparently serves mainly as an opportunity to rehearse the Senecan commonplace that “The wise man shal nat take to greet disconfort for the deeth of his children” (VII 984). What is ultimately most striking about Chaucer's attitude to fatherhood is how little room he affords the idea that the relationship between a father, or a father-figure, and the children in his care might actually be emotionally rewarding, inspiring, and even happy. Instead, his depiction of paternal experience is marked by a persistent anxiety—an obsession with fatherhood's moral and social responsibilities apparently so profound as to exclude its affective dimensions almost entirely.27It might be argued that in stressing paternal discipline to the extent that he does, Chaucer was simply reflecting commonplaces inherited from biblical and classical texts. For example, in Proverbs 23:13–14, the Bible clearly warns against the hazards of what the Physician calls “necligence in chastisynge”: noli subtrahere a puero disciplinam si enim percusseris eum virga non morietur./ tu virga percuties eum et animam eius de inferno liberabis.Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.28 And Aristotle's Ethics makes it quite clear that fathers are relatively more responsible than mothers for imposing discipline on their children: [A father] is responsible for the existence of his children, which is thought the greatest good, and for their nurture and upbringing. These things are ascribed to ancestors as well. Further, by nature a father tends to rule over his sons, ancestors over descendants, a king over his subjects…. Parents love their children as soon as these are born, but children love their parents only after time has elapsed and they have acquired understanding or perception. From these considerations it is plain why mothers love more than fathers do.29 There are also a number of parallels that might be adduced from the work of other medieval vernacular poets. For instance, the pessimistic assessment of parenthood provided by Eustache Deschamps in the Miroir de Mariage is at least as anxious as the three passages from Chaucer that I have just quoted: Quant tu aras et fille et fil,Lors te croistera cusançon:S'ilz sont grans et font meffaçon,Et ilz mœurent honteusement,Tu seras tousjours en tourment.(lines 2020–24)When you have sons and daughters, then your anxiety will increase; if they're grown-up and do wrong, and die a shameful death, then your torment will be eternal.30 This formulation closely parallels the suggestion in the Physician's Tale that badly brought-up children might “perisse” as a result of their uncorrected wickedness, to their parents' regret. Similarly, one of the speakers in Chardri's Petit Plet tries to console his interlocutor for the untimely death of all his children by suggesting that they might have turned out to be prodigals who would have caused him only grief: Beau duz sire, vus avez tort,Car vus ne savez a chef de turSi il ert sages u hasardur,E quant il ne vus verra,Dunc frad iceo ke lui plerra.Meuz vaut, si il n'ad nul sens,Ke vostre eir moerge par tens,Car vus serriez tute sa vieSuvent dolent por sa folie.Good sir, you've got it wrong, for you don't know whether your child would eventually turn out to be a wise man—or a prodigal [more literally: “a dice-player”], who, when you weren't in sight, would do exactly what he pleased. If your heir lacked sense, it would be much better if he died young, since otherwise you'd be grieving for his foolishness all his life.31 However, it seems to me that the densest accumulation of parallels for Chaucer's patterns of thought on parenthood actually lie in medieval Latin—and specifically in the widely circulated Wisdom commentary of the Dominican friar Robert Holcot.32 The likelihood of Chaucer's familiarity with at least parts of this long and intriguing work was long ago demonstrated by Robert Pratt in an essay that focused mainly on Chaucer's apparent use of Holcot's remarks on the significance of dreams.33 I would suggest that Holcot's influence might also be detectable in Chaucer's handling of the theme of paternal responsibility. Much of chapter 3 and chapter 4 of the deutero-canonical Book of Wisdom (which is the subject of Holcot's commentary) is taken up with a consideration of the way in which the wicked are punished, not just in their own lives, but in the lives of their children—and particularly in the case of the children of adultery: “For the children that are born of unlawful beds, are witnesses of wickedness against their parents in their trial,” as Wisdom puts it (Sap. 4:6: “ex iniquis enim omnes filii qui nascuntur testes sunt nequitiae adversus parentes in interrogatione sua”). In Holcot's reading of these chapters, anxiety about the children of adultery often seems to leak out, as it were, into an anxiety about parents' responsibility for the morality of their children generally (even those children that are not the products of adultery). In Lectio 41, in the context of a discussion of the children of adultery—and specifically of Ezekiel 18:20, “filius non portabit iniquitatem patris” (the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father)—he remarks: Frequenter mala educatio est in causa et imitatio scelerorum paternorum. Est enim homini connaturale illos imitari a quibus informationem & educationem accipit.Very often a bad upbringing is the cause of [children's bad behavior]; and it is an imitation of the parents' evil deeds—for it is a natural instinct in any man to copy those from whom he acquired instruction and upbringing. A little later on in the same Lectio he argues that: Patet huius criminis periculum ex prolis peruerse procreatione que solet esse frequenter mala & inhonesta. Tum propter parentum imitationem, tum propter defectum castigationis, quia tales pueri vel dimittuntur cum matre que non castigat filium, vel cum extraneis personis que de moribus pueri nihil curant, vnde fiunt insolentes, ingrati, degeneres & viciosi.It is clear that the danger of adultery lies in the production of a perverse progeny that is often accustomed to be wicked and dishonest. Whether it is due to imitating their parents, or to a lack of castigation—since such boys are often committed to the care either of mothers who do not punish their sons, or of other persons unrelated to them who care little about their morals—as a result of this such boys become insolent, ungrateful, degenerate, and vicious. This analysis corresponds very directly with some of what Chaucer's Physician, in particular, says about parental responsibility, even right down the level of phrasing. Compare, for example, Holcot's “tum propter parentum imitationem, tum propter defectum castigationis” with Chaucer's Physician's “by ensample of youre lyvynge,/Or by youre necligence in chastisynge” (VI 97–98; my emphasis). Like the Physician, Holcot emphasizes that parents who neglect their responsibilities will ultimately pay very dearly for it—directly and personally. In Lectio 37, we find him analyzing the various miseries incurred by those who “reject wisdom and discipline” (as the Book of Wisdom puts it).34 According to Holcot: Quinta miseria istorum infidelium est quod damnificantur in propagationibus. Unde subdit: “Nequissimi filij eorum.” Deus enim in homine potentiam generandi & certum modum instituit, & est talis vt fiat etiam infra limites coniugii prolis propagatio ad laudem Dei.35 Illi autem homines qui prolem gignunt & eam peruersis informationibus & exemplis corrumpunt, bonum naturale prolis amittunt, & hoc seipsos confundunt.The fifth misery of such unbelievers is that they are punished by means of their children. This is why the book refers to “their wicked children.” For God established in humankind both the power to reproduce and a safe means of doing so: i.e., that the generation of children should occur indeed within the boundaries of marriage so as to honor God. Those, however, who produce children, and corrupt them with wicked teaching and by setting bad examples, they forfeit the benefit that children naturally confer, and in this way bring about their own destruction. Holcot's tone here is at least as monitory as the Physician's, and his suggestion that negligent parents “seipsos confundunt” (bring destruction upon themselves) certainly resembles the Physician's warning that “ye shul it deere abeye” (VI 100). The implication of Holcot's logic—that wicked children are inevitably the proof (as well as the punishment) of their parents' wickedness—perhaps also explains to some extent why the Franklin is apparently so anxious about his son's supposed lack of virtue, and also so keen to emphasize his willingness to subject the boy to reproof. The Franklin is concerned about his son's virtue not just because of his snobbery about rank, but because his son's morality might be read as a reflection not just on his son's legitimacy but also on his own morality (or so a reading of Holcot might suggest).Holcot also makes it quite clear that such responsibility extends to those who stand in loco parentis—that is, to those who (like the guildmaster of the Cook's Tale) are only fathers in a figurative sense. In Lectio 46, he argues that: Proles indisciplinata rependit parentibus confusionem. Et huius ratio est ista: quando discipulus male respondit et errat in dictis suis sicut ignorans, presumptio quedam est contra magistrum suum qui eum tenebatur docuisse, vnde verecundiam facit magistro discipulus ignorans, & famulus inutilis facit verecundiam domino suo qui eum tenetur curialiter educare; [eodem] modo parentes tenentur esse magistri et quasi domini filiorum.Undisciplined children repay their parents with trouble. And the reason for it is this: just as when a pupil gets something wrong and gives a faulty answer that makes him look ignorant, there is a certain presumption against the master who is supposed to have taught him, so that an ignorant pupil shames his master, and a useless servant shames the lord who was supposed to educate him in the ways of the court; in the same way parents are held to be masters and, as it were, lords of their children. The specific point made here is that parents stand in relation to their children as teachers do to their pupils or lords to their dependants. But the implication is that the converse is also true: that lords and teachers are, when it comes to the moral welfare of their cha