The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson

Sir Nicholas Brembre, a grocer and future Mayor of London, would lend one thousand marks at a time; but when Sir Nicholas and his chums decided not to stump up, as they did in 1382, the King had no choice but to call off his campaign. Thus was political power transferred to a rising class. The Peasants’ Revolt failed, like so many proletariat insurrections, but a successful linguistic revolution took place nonetheless, and it was led, like all successful revolutions, by the bourgeoisie.

      Chaucer’s choice of English was a function of a power shift from King and court to the affluent moneymen of London. A ‘gentleman’ might not become an alderman, but the aldermen and sheriffs of London were increasingly keen on recognition; and, as ever, the sons and daughters of the nobility were willing to marry money.

      As London’s guilds or ‘misteries’ grew more powerful, so power was contested more bitterly between them. They weren’t one homogeneous mass of wealth creators. They were divided with Sienese rivalrousness into grocers and drapers and mercers and fishmongers, and so on. The victuallers were engaged in chronic and bloody feuds with the drapers, and in the battle for power the factions of merchants would line up behind different nobles and indeed different royal houses.

      In 1387 Richard II, Chaucer’s ultimate patron, was almost deposed by a bunch of nobles (backed by the drapers) and some of Chaucer’s allies, such as the poet Thomas Usk, were executed, along with top grocer and leading moneybags, Sir Nicholas Brembre. Chaucer seems at this stage to have been relegated to Greenwich, where he served as MP for Kent, and at one point he was given the unobtrusive job of deputy forester in Somerset, where he is thought to have concentrated on his poetry. With the return of Richard and Gaunt he was restored, taking up the grand-sounding post of Clerk of the King’s Works, overseeing repairs to the royal palaces. But in 1399 it was all over.

      Richard II was deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (who was to become Henry IV, part one), and again, the London merchants were behind it. Like so many other kings and governments down the ages, Richard had decided to take on the moneymen. He decided to punish the City, for its role in the recent revolt, by interfering with its ancient constitution. He appointed a Warden to govern the place – infringing the charter of liberty bestowed on London by the Conqueror himself – and tried to restrict the term of the Mayor to one year.

      The City wasn’t having it. When Richard asked Henry who had come to arrest him, the usurper replied (or so Froissart tells us), ‘For the most part, Londoners.’ London merchants switched sides to protect their prerogatives.

      Gaunt was dead. Poor weak King Richard II was starved to death, aged thirty-three, in captivity; and there are some who think Chaucer himself was put to death. Out of favour with the new regime, hounded by Arundel, the new archbishop, for the allegedly irreligious tone of The Canterbury Tales, he may have been quietly ‘slaughtered’ – to use the word of his friend and contemporary, Hoccleve.

      It is a fascinating theory, but apart from that one word of Hoccleve, there just isn’t enough evidence to support it. The new king had in fact just confirmed his pension, and throughout his career Chaucer had shown a feline ability to flit between the warring worlds of court and the guilds – and to take money from princes and merchants alike – without notably falling foul of anyone. He was buried in Westminster Abbey for his public service (not for his poetry); and yet his literary legacy was permanent.

      He took two great linguistic streams, Germanic and Romance, and fused them. Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry. Let me offer one final reason why English was the natural vehicle for a poet interested in pentameter couplets: with two parallel streams of vocabulary it was uniquely rich in rhyme, and the pleasure and magic was often to take a Norman-French-Latinate word and find an English rhyme; or even more satisfyingly, you could take a sensible Latinate word and find a raunchy English pun.

      Take the word queynte, which seems to come from the Latin cognitus, meaning clever or learned, and which happens to be a variant spelling for an Anglo-Saxon four-letter-word that looks like a Danish king.

      One day Nicholas, the clever clerk from The Miller’s Tale, takes advantage of the absence of a husband to go and visit a young wife: ‘Whil that her housbonde was at Oseneye, as clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte; and prively he caught her by the queynte …’

      What worked for poetry worked for everyday life. With a dual or hybrid nature, English gave its users a flexibility like no other. They could go for the Latinate topspin or the Anglo-Saxon smash. They could be pompous or they could be blunt. They could talk about remuneration or pay, economies or cuts, redundancies or sackings, and ever since Chaucer English has been like a gigantic never-quite-setting omelette into which fresh ingredients can be endlessly poured. The Oxford English Dictionary now has 600,000 words and the Global Language Monitor calculates that there are one million English lexemes.

      To give you the relevant comparisons, Chinese dialects together can muster about half a million; Spanish 225,000; Russian 195,000; German 185,000; French 100,000 and Arabic 45,000. English is the international language of air traffic control, business, the UN and there is no other language capable of conveying ‘the offside trap’ with comparable succinctness.

      Of course it makes us very proud that this grammar – honed and simplified by the despised mediaeval English peasantry – has become the grammar of the modern world. It pleases us to think that we invented it, we hold the copyright, and that we are somehow the best exponents of writing it. We laugh when we pick up a menu in Vietnam and discover ‘pork with fresh garbage’. Tears of patronising joy run down our cheeks when a Japanese menu offers ‘strawberry crap’; and yet any such feelings should be immediately qualified by the reflection that one in four eleven year olds is still functionally illiterate in London; and of the 1.4 billion people who speak English across the world, many have long since exceeded the average Briton in proficiency.

      English has slipped the surly bonds of England and become Globish, a vast syncretic unifier of our human culture. The best we can say is that the whole adventure really got going in the fourteenth century, that the adoption of English as a respectable literary language culminated with Chaucer – and that it could only have happened in London.

      There is one last reason why we should be thankful for Chaucer, and it is not just to do with the language he wielded, but the kind of stuff he wrote. With his bawdy, his mockery, his self-mockery, his pricking of hypocrisy and his terrible puns he is the worshipful fader and first foundeur not just of our Englissh, but of something we like to see in our characters.