The English Origins of Valentine's Day
Good morning. It’s February 14 - Valentine’s Day. The provenance of this commemoration is murky, but we can infer a few things with some certainty:
The way we celebrate this non-holiday (one still has to go to work) cannot be attributed solely to the nation’s florists – or even to that great Kansas City institution, Hallmark Cards, which began mass-producing valentines exactly 100 years ago this winter. Nor does it really have all that much to do, directly, with martyred Christian saints or ancient Rome.
No, the credit – or, depending on one’s current romantic status, the blame – may accrue to a trailblazing English bard of unsurpassed accomplishment:
“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.”
That is the song sung by Ophelia in Act IV of Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare around 1600. But this idea was not originally Shakespeare’s. The first written record associating Valentine’s Day with romantic love came more than two centuries earlier in a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, who penned “Parliament of Fowls” in 1381 or 1382.
It is counterintuitive, but we know more about the earlier poet than the later one. We know when he was born and when he died and where he lived. We know that he spoke Latin and French, was versed in the classics, and that his father was a London vintner who had ambitions for his son. We know that these filial ambitions were realized: Geoffrey Chaucer became a soldier who was once captured by the French, a diplomat who traveled to Spain and Italy, a customs official, a clerk entrusted with building and maintenance of several royal residences, and a forestry official.
Oh, and in his spare time, he managed to save the English language – my first cousin Christopher Cannon has produced the definitive work on this subject – and become a famous and enduring poet and author.
“Chaucer yet found time to write thousands of lines,” notes Chris’s fellow Chaucer scholars Martin Crow and Virginia Leland, “among them some of the best poetry in England.”
His first major poem, “The Book of the Duchess,” is about love; it’s an elegy to Blanche, the first wife of Chaucer’s friend John of Gaunt, the 1st Duke of Lancaster.
Likewise, notes the elegant storyteller Steve King, who writes daily about the history of literature, “The Parliament of Fowls” was also a patron poem. Set on February 14, it honors the wooing and wedding of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia.
But it was not all sweetness and light in 14th century England. Three or four knights with whom Chaucer had worked – but who ran afoul of the Duke of Gloucester during a bloody power struggle between Parliament and the king – were marched through the streets of London on their way to their executions. Chaucer captured this sad sight in a poem called “The Man of Law’s Tale.”
As for the Valentine’s Day ode, Steve King writes the following:
“The English court would have found laughs, if not lessons, in Chaucer's poem. Richard's marriage to Anne seems to have been a happy one. His relationship to Parliament was less so, and he and many of his appointees - but not Chaucer - would eventually lose their power, if not their heads, because of it.”
