William Morris
repeatedly acknowledges his debt to Geoffrey Chaucer in The Life and Death of Jason, produced the great Kelmscott Chaucer
with Edward Burne-Jones in 1896, and had his narrator William Guest declare in News from Nowhere that he ‘fairly felt
as if [he] were living in the fourteenth century’. He might, therefore, have been very
interested in a curious academic-administrative practice adopted at Oxford
University in the 1920s.
When
Professor George Gordon returned to Oxford from Leeds University to take over
as Merton Professor of English Literature in 1922, he set up a postgraduate
seminar which was attended by such students as C.S. Lewis and Nevill Coghill,
who would become Oxford luminaries themselves in due course. A decision was taken – whether by Gordon
himself or by the postgraduates, I’m not sure – to keep the minutes of each
meeting in Chaucerian verse, and some of these minutes survive, including some fine
lines by Coghill describing Lewis’s paper on Edmund Spenser on 9 February 1923:
‘Then to Sir Lewis turned the Professour/(That was our tales juge and
governour)’, and so on.
Minutes in
Chaucerian verse – what an admirable and learned idea! And how apt, one would think, given Morris’s
own Chaucerian passion, to the various international Morris Societies today. So I commend this old Oxford practice to the
Morris Society committees, although they might in turn object that, in certain
moods, Morris would accuse Chaucer of betraying English by his excessive
openness to French and Italian literary traditions. In which case they would then be obliged to take
one further philological step backwards and have their minute-makers write up
their notes in Gawain-style
alliterative verse or Anglo-Saxon or even in Old Icelandic itself.
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