What Is a Wall?

Walls figure in our imaginations and political consciousness as potent images of protection and division. From Hadrian's Wall separating Roman Britain from Scotland to the Great Wall of China; from the Berlin Wall to Trump's imagined wall between the United States and Mexico, walls function across time as markers of identity. Chaucer was far more familiar with defensive walls than most of us are today: for much of his life he inhabited a walled city (London) and indeed lived above the walls at Aldgate; he was part of a besieging army against a walled city (Reims) in 1359; he was in Navarre in 1366 when the king (Charles the Bad) was desperately fortifying cities against an invasion; he lived through the Rising of 1381 when the walls of London and of the Tower were breached. Yet in Chaucer's poetry, walls are often walls of wonder, canvases for frescoes, symbols of the mind, surfaces on which sound resounds and shadows play. Across his texts, he is consistently interested in the inability of walls to create effective divisions, and in the productive importance of moving through walls. In Chaucer's texts, the “wal” is often not what it seems.

In later medieval culture, it was perfectly possible to have a clear boundary without a wall: everyone knew where one London ward or parish ended and another began without the need for any physical marker. Equally, walls were not necessarily boundaries at all. Cooling Castle, built for John Cobham in the 1380s, was fronted by imposing walls that were merely a façade as they were open at the back. Walls constantly recur in Chaucer's writing, often in descriptions of walled cities that are being attacked. There are many references to defensive walls not working to keep the city safe, or to keep people out. For instance, Theseus “rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (1.990) of Thebes, as a prelude to his total destruction of the city. Later on, Palamon sadly refers to the “waste [devastated] walles wyde” (1.1331) of Thebes.