Geoffrey Chaucer was not a rapist

Geoffrey Chaucer is innocent! The fourteenth-century diplomat, customs collector and sometime poet has long been dogged by unsubstantiated sexual assault allegations. The suspicion arose, quite naturally, when a women testified that Chaucer had not raped her. After all, if he hadn’t raped her, why would she bother repudiating the claim? The only logical explanation (to a certain kind of mind) was that a voiceless, victimised woman had been paid to withdraw sexual harassment charges levelled against a prominent, powerful … poet?

As it turns out, the young Cecilia Chaumpaigne, a servant in the Chaucer household, had been the co-defendant with Chaucer in a charge of unlawful employment recruitment. In the wake of the Black Death (and the absence of a working holiday visa program), labour had become scarce in fourteenth-century London, and employers were hard-pressed to fill staffing needs. Chaumpaigne’s former employer, one Thomas Staundon, accused Chaucer of “raping” Chaumpaigne, alleging that Chaucer had poached her with an offer of better wages. Chaumpaigne countered that she had definitely left Staundon’s service before going to work for Chaucer. Case closed. The lady, it turned out, did protest too little.

Regular readers of this column will remember that the Latin word raptus, from which our word rape is derived, had its origins in the idea of carrying away, whether for worse or for better: “a raptor is a bird that carries away its prey; the rapture is the moment following the second coming of Christ when the saved will be carried away to heaven”. But memories are short, knowledge of etymology is limited, and accusations of sexual assault are pure feminist gold. And so the fourteenth-century court document in which a young woman certified that Chaucer had not raped her, first uncovered in 1873, was milked by feminist scholars for the next 149 years. Now that we know the full story, Chaucer can only be cancelled for his poetry.

The rehabilitation of the father of English poetry, however, is far from final. The two (male) historians who only this year uncovered the key documents clearing Chaucer emphasised that their findings “will not undo the countless advances feminist colleagues have made in our field”. Before publishing their work, they “invited three leading feminist Chaucerians to think through some of the implications of the new evidence for our field”. They concluded that (thank Gaia) “the new documents will not change the course charted by feminist scholarship to expose the shortcomings of the late medieval hegemonic order”. And they dutifully lamented the “often invisible fate of medieval servant women”.

Oh, and they reassured the BBC’s History Extra magazine that “we cannot rule anything out … there is a strong likelihood that this one case was not about rape, and that obviously doesn’t mean that Chaucer wasn’t a rapist”. Since, you know, he could still have been a rapist. Or a pedophile. Or a sodomite (though these days that would count in his favour). Yes, there’s still hope—more hope, at least, that Chaucer might have been a rapist than that he was a slave trader, an anti-vaxxer, or a climate change denier. Who knows what foul historical misdeeds may lurk unread in the Chaucer files? About the only thing we do know for certain is that two very nervous male medievalists are desperate to avoid being cancelled themselves.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/12/geoffrey-chaucers-unknowable-foul-deeds/

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