Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"The Former Age" is a short lyric poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century), written in Middle English and belonging to the tradition of the classical *laus temporis acti* — praise of a lost golden age drawn largely from Boethius and Ovid. The poem describes a prehistoric humanity living in innocent simplicity: people ate acorns and drank spring water, the earth yielded grain untilled, and no one knew trade, warfare, metalworking, or spices. This primeval society is characterized above all by the absence of institutions — no lords, no taxes, no ships, no armies, no palaces — and by a corresponding moral purity: no pride, envy, avarice, or treachery among people who slept peacefully in caves and woods. The poem's central argument is that the fall from this golden state was caused specifically by the discovery of metal and gems, which unleashed covetousness and with it tyranny, war, and murder. Chaucer ends with a direct, bitter lament that the present age is defined entirely by greed, deceit, treason, and violent crime. The poem is notably compressed and morally stark, treating the classical golden-age topos not as nostalgic pastoral but as pointed social criticism of 14th-century commercial and political life.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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