Captain Thin

Perhaps you’ve heard of Paul Strohm’s recent book The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and The Year that Made the Canterbury Tales. And perhaps you’ve read the picture he paints of Chaucer’s living quarters during that time.

Noisy. Cramped. Dingy. And foul smelling. These are the primary descriptors we can apply to the scene, according to reports. The Spectator has a lovely summary of it all.

“Chaucer occupied a single bare room of about 16’ x 14’. The only natural light would come from ‘two (or at most four) arrow slits’ tapering through the five-foot thickness of these walls (the towers were a defensive feature) to an external aperture of four or five inches. ‘Light, even at midday, would have been extremely feeble. Arrangement for a small fire might have been possible. Waste would be hand-carried down to the ditch that lapped against the tower and dumped there.’

You can imagine how cosy it was in winter. And the noise! Chaucer slept directly over the main London thoroughfare. Every morning at first light the portcullis would go rattling up, and thereafter ‘the creak of iron-wheeled carts in and out of the city, drovers’ calls, and the hubbub of merchants and travellers pressing for advantage on a wide but still one-laned road, probably made sleep impossible, five-foot walls or no five-foot walls’. That’s if he could hear anything over the incessant bong-bonging of bells from each of the three churches within a couple of hundred feet of his front door.

Meanwhile ‘a stench wafted from the open sewer known in its northern extension as Houndsditch that ran (or festered) just outside the city wall’; Houndsditch was so called because of the many dead dogs dumped there. In addition to rotting garbage, dead dogs, and faecal waste from the next-door Holy Trinity Priory (‘a populous foundation’, Strohm tells us jauntily), you’d find ‘the occasional human corpse’. ‘And then,’ Strohm adds with excellent tact, ‘there was the matter of felons’ and traitors’ rotting heads…’ This was an occupational hazard of living in a gatehouse tower.”

It provides some remarkable insight on the conditions Chaucer had to put up with as he wrote his remarkable poetry.

Still, not everyone is pleased with the description Strohm is painting of Chaucer’s home. And surely the most significant person disputing the account is… Chaucer himself?

“FOR THE RECORD MY PLACE IN ALDGATE DOTH SMELLE GREAT AND YS WELL APPOINTED WYTH IKEA FURNITURE, THANKE YOW,” Chaucer (ahem) tweeted earlier today. “Herkeneth, goode folk of @ProfileBooks and @VikingBooks – MY PLACE AT ALDGATE YS LOVELYE AND DOTH NAT SMELLE BAD. YT YS COZY NAT CRAMPED.”

FOR THE RECORD MY PLACE YN ALDGATE DOTH SMELLE GREAT AND YS WELL APPOINTED WYTH IKEA FURNITURE, THANKE YOW. #chaucerstale #paulstrohm #lies

— Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC) January 22, 2015

Seriously, the person (people?) behind Chaucer Doth Tweet—ie, “Le Vostre GC”—is doing great work today. Some more examples:

“YF MYNE APARTMENT YN ALDGATE WERE REALLYE THAT BAD HOW KOUDE ICH SLEEPE YNOUGH TO WRITE ALL THOSE DREAM VISIOUNS?”

“MYNE APARTMENT YN ALDGATE NYS NAT ‘CRAMPED’ – ICH AM A PIONEER OF THE ‘TINYE HOUS’ MOVEMENT.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also note here that “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.” It is, appropriately enough, HouseofFame.Blogspot.ca.

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“Similarly, we wouldn’t publish cartoons likely to dismay or outrage mainstream followers of other religions​….”

So wrote David Studer, CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards and Practices, in an email explaining why the news broadcaster will not be publishing offensive cartoons of Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo, the magazine targeted by Islamists in Paris yesterday in a brutal attack that left 12 dead.

Studer’s email, the CBC News report tells us, was simply a reminder of “CBC’s long-established policy” on publishing images offensive to religious believers. The meaning is clear: the CBC’s historical practice is to not publish images that could reasonably be deemed offensive to particular religious groups.

Based on that declaration, we would expect that the CBC has never published images that would “dismay” Christians, right?

Yeah, not really. A quick search for Andres Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ” shows up a couple of hits on CBC. In case you’re unaware of this “work of art,” it features a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.

There’s a picture of it on a Q entry from July 21, 2010: http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2010/07/21/is-art-replacing-religion/

CBC screen grab taken January 8, 2015.

A year later, CBC published another image of “Piss Christ,” this time on its main news site (see here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/french-museum-reopens-after-crucifix-art-attacked-1.1075952) . The news story in question? Someone offended by it had damaged the work. So apparently it’s okay to portray an image offensive to Christians when a member of that faith violently reacts to it. But not so much if the offended in question are Muslims.

CBC screen grab taken January 8, 2015.

“We are being consistent with our historic journalist practices around this story,” David Studer writes on the CBC’s decision not to publish Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Mohammed, “not because of fear, but out of respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of the mass of Muslim believers about images of the Prophet.”

It might be consistent with their journalist practices when it comes to Islam but clearly it’s not when it comes to Christianity.

Now, I’m not saying CBC should pull the “Piss Christ” images from its site. I certainly find them objectionable as a Christian, but I recognize we live in a country that allows freedom of speech. Instead, I’m simply pointing out a clear double-standard.

Kudos to CBC’s Neil Macdonald for disagreeing publicly with the stance of his network. His report “Religion, Satire and where we draw the line” clearly spells out the difference in action. He was not allowed to show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed. But a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Christ? Apparently that’s just fine.

CBC can say it’s simply respecting its historic practice of not publishing images offensive to members of religious groups. But when we actually examine those historic practices for ourselves, we see it’s simply not the case.

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