Spatial History:Estres, Edges, and Contents Matthew Boyd Goldie The house of fame opens with the narrator saying he fell asleep because he was as "wery" as a pilgrim who has traveled "myles two" to the shrine of Saint Leonard.1 Scholarship, from Walter W. Skeat's at the end of the nineteenth century, to H. M. Smyser's in 1941, to Tony Davenport's more recently, has questioned which St. Leonard's is being referred to, along with the cause of the pilgrim's weariness, since two miles is a short distance. Criticism has also explored the significance of Saint Leonard, a patron of prisoners, and a potential penile pun on the pilgrim traveling to St. Leonard's "To make lythe of that was hard."2 Skeat interpreted the lines as earnest, construing that "The difficulty was not in the walking two miles, but in doing so under difficulties, such as going barefoot for penance." Smyser offered one identification of the shrine as at Stratford atte Bowe, which he measured as "two miles and a fraction from Aldgate—nearly, but not quite, three miles," adding "Chaucer's mile was the same as ours, so far as I can tell." Davenport links the name of the shrine to a hermitage west of Windsor Castle, a place of pilgrimage, and suggests Chaucer's possible familiarity with it.3 All of these interpretations seem overly dogged in their pursuit of realist measurement or overly strained in their focus on bawdiness. They come closer to the meaning of the two-mile reference when they focus on tone, which invites the audience to hear these lines as either a [End Page 379] light joke or even not a joke at all, and not as opaque or overly sententious. The lines sound a characteristically self-deprecating note on Chaucer's part; the narrator is like someone worn out from walking a relatively short distance. The dreamer simply states that he fil on slepe wonder sone,As he that wery was forgoOn pilgrymage myles twoTo the corseynt Leonard. HF, 114–17 Such an interpretation is not meant to simplify Chaucer, a poet more capable than most of making a significant point within a light turn of phrase, but takes its cues from the lines' rhetorical structure. The reference is indirect. It does not designate a person who is actually worn out. Rather, the narrator is like someone who has traveled the distance to St. Leonard's; readers tend to miss that it is a simile. The important thing about the tone is that it is casual, implying a distance that Chaucer's audience could appreciate with some easy familiarity. Chaucer references miles in several of his works, and his uses of distance are almost invariably as impassive as they are in The House of Fame. Allusions to miles tend understandably to cluster in the Canterbury Tales—half a mile, a mile, a mile or two, over a mile, three miles, and many miles—although the statement most tonally similar to that in The House of Fame occurs in Book V of Troilus and Criseyde when Pandarus suggests to Troilus that they find some entertainment to relieve Troilus of his worries. He proposes that they go to Sarpedon's house "nat hennes but a myle."4 My point does not lie, however, in the actual measure of distance but rather in the nonchalance. The informality suggests a sense of space that was routine, so my question is: What were the characteristics of a familiar area? What spatial markers constituted the local in Chaucer's England? The following discussion proposes frameworks with which to analyze space in late medieval England with a particular focus on local area.5 [End Page 380] Space needs to be historicized, which presents a challenge, because our understandings and our very sense of space have altered over time. The difficulties of historicizing space are due in part to changes in spatial measure across history (chains, stades, furlongs, miles, leagues) and to different means or instruments of measurement (stars, maps, chains, quadrants, compasses). People's habitual range of distance has also altered and continues to vary depending on physical ability, economics...