The Poet's Tale by Paul Strohm

Author:Paul Strohm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

In Westminster

Had Chaucer, accepting this position, any notion of how many embarrassments lay in store for him there? Whether or not, for the next two critical months his residence would be Westminster, and Parliament would be the horizon of his experience.

Westminster was still separate from London in those days, with a half mile of clogged footpaths discouraging travel between the two. The easiest way to get there was by water taxi, but this route was hampered by tides, river traffic, expense, and overbearing boatmen. It was more a village than a city, though boasting fine structures like Westminster Abbey itself, a flourishing monastery in those days, the royal palaces, and stately Westminster Hall. Especially when the courts were in session, the king and his entourage were in the palace, and Parliament was meeting, Westminster became a crowded, exciting, and raucous place. Although enjoying only some three thousand permanent residents, it doubled or tripled its size on such occasions, with an influx of a thousand or more (including retinues of leading ecclesiasts and lords) at Parliament time, augmented by a half thousand semipermanent members of the royal household, another half thousand lawyers, accountants, and scribes on the payrolls of the chancery and the exchequer, not to mention minstrels, tapsters, prostitutes, and other roving members of the service and entertainment industries. The profit-making citizens of Westminster were, in effect, at the parliamentarians’ service, practicing various schemes of predation and entrapment to earn their livelihood at the expense of these hardworking but also fun-seeking visitors. Westminster enjoyed the status of a “liberty”—liberated, that is, from the strict curfews, antiprostitution ordinances, and restraints upon trade and consumption typical of the straighter-laced London upon which it nearly abutted. To be sure, the precincts of Charing Cross to the east and Southwark across the river were wilder still, with licensed and unlicensed brothels, unregulated brew pubs galore, and every kind of con game imaginable. But Westminster itself was very nearly an open city, and that is how the visiting MPs would have found it.

A look inside Georgetown bars, and Pimlico equivalents, when the U.S. Congress or the British Parliament are in session still gives a hint of the goings-on that might be expected when so many well-funded, short-term out-of-towners arrive on such a basis. Think of 250 potentially rowdy parliamentarians away from home, on expense accounts. Chaucer, for example, would continue to receive pay as a controller until just after the end of Parliament; during Parliament he would receive 4s. a day for his expenses as shire knight, a home county supplement of 6d. a day, and any contribution Kent might make to his parliamentary expenses, totaling something above £20, a sum equivalent to more than half his normal annual earned income. He was probably living in a shared room somewhere and husbanding his threatened livelihood, but some of his fellow parliamentarians were living large.

The expense account of the four London representatives to the 1388 Cambridge Parliament survives in the Letter-Books, and it is an eye-opener.

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