This review was commissioned by and published in the New Zealand Listener in February 2018.
To enjoy this book fully, I recommend pretending it’s being read to you by Maggie Smith when she’s playing her Downton Abbey character Violet Crawley.
Chaucer’s People, like Violet, takes no prisoners and surges forward at all times with a serene sense of its own rightness. It’s nominally a medieval social history centred around The Canterbury Tales, a long poem about pilgrims travelling to Canterbury written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. 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.
From almost the first page, I fell for Picard’s Violet-like charm. 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 later that 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 happens to find personally interesting. In different hands this could have been dire, but Picard brings her eye for intriguing detail to bear with great effect. In an interview with The Guardian, she said: “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 focusses 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 different characters in the Tales to provide a much-needed framing structure, 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 us 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 bite-sized pieces’ that I’ve let it stand.”
Chaucer’s People has, perhaps, a niche audience. But if you can find someone who’s studied the Tales and has a soft spot for English eccentrics, they will love every single page.
