“ENVOY TO BUKTON” (“LENVOY DE
CHAUCER A BUKTON”) GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(1396) Chaucer’s envoy (ENVOI), or verse letter, to
Bukton is a short poem surviving in a single manu-
script (where it is called “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Buk-
ton”). There is some question as to who “Bukton” was:
One candidate is Sir Robert Bukton, squire to Queen
Anne and later to Richard II; the other, more likely,
candidate is Sir Peter Bukton of Holdernesse, steward
to the earl of Derby, future King Henry IV. The poem is
in the conventional French lyric form of a ballade and
consists of three eight-line STANZAs with a fi nal eight-
line envoy, or address to Bukton. Like Chaucer’s
“ENVOY TO SCOGAN,” this poem probably owes much to
the tradition of verse epistles dating back to the Latin
satirist Horace. Certainly the tone of Chaucer’s poem is
gently satiric, like that of Horace.
“Envoy to Bukton” is a mock-serious condemnation
of marriage, warning Bukton against his impending
wedding with a good deal of lighthearted raillery. Mar-
riage, the poem’s speaker says, is folly or “dotage” (l.
8). It is for the “Unwys” (l. 27) or else for a “doted fool”
(l. 13). It is a kind of hellish bondage, the “chayne / Of
Sathanas, on which he gnaweth evere” (ll. 9–10), and a
man should take his cue from Satan, who would never
willingly be bound again if he were ever able to break
out of his bonds. Only a fool would rather be chained
up than free. A man who marries is his “wyves thrall”
(l. 20), and would be better off to be taken prisoner in
Frisia than caught in the trap of marriage. The speaker
ends by advising Bukton to read “The WIFE^ OF BATH’S^
TALE” if he wants an authority on marriage, and then he
prays that Bukton may live his life in freedom, for it is
“ful hard” to be bound.
At least this is what the speaker seems to be saying.
But part of Chaucer’s wit and jesting tone in this poem
stems from his deliberately slippery language. He
begins the poem with an anecdote about Pilate’s ques-
tion to Christ, “What is truth?” Chaucer interprets
Christ’s failure to answer to mean “No man is al trew, I
gesse” (l. 4). Of course, the poet’s “gesse” about Christ’s
meaning is completely wrong, but he goes on to apply
that conclusion to his own situation: He has promised
to speak of the sorrow and woe in marriage, he says,
but now claims that he must go back on his word. He
doesn’t dare say anything bad about marriage, he says,
for fear he’ll fall into the trap again himself. He follows
this up by declaring that he will not say that marriage is
the chain of Satan. He then alludes to St. Paul’s words
in 1 Corinthians 7.9, that it is better to marry than to
burn, and then goes on to twist Paul’s words in 1 Cor.
7.27–28 to emphasize the “bondage” and “tribulation”
that Paul mentions as a part of marriage. The poet fol-
lows up the authority of St. Paul by an allusion to the
fi ctional authority of the Wife of Bath. Thus Chaucer
technically never says anything bad about marriage nor
directly condemns it. He tells us what he will not say
and alludes to authorities, one of which he misinter-
prets and the other of which is his own fi ctional cre-
ation. The “Envoy to Bukton” thus becomes an exercise
in how to say something without actually saying it.
The poem seems clearly to have been written after
the death of Chaucer’s wife in 1387, since he implies
that he is unmarried. The allusion to the Wife of Bath
suggests that “Envoy to Bukton” must have been writ-
ten after the composition of “The Wife of Bath’s Pro-
logue,” and at a time when that prologue was well
known. But an allusion to the Frisians may be the most
direct clue to the date of “Bukton,” since it is known
that an expedition was undertaken against the Frisians
in 1396. The chronicler Jean Froissart mentions that
the Frisians had a reputation for brutality toward pris-
oners, whom they would kill rather than ransom,
which explains the allusion in the poem.
Most early scholarship on “Envoy to Bukton” was
concerned with establishing the identity of Bukton.
More recently, this kind of scholarship has considered
who made up Chaucer’s audience and what his short
poems show us about his role in society. Other recent
criticism has focused on the poem’s speaker: Some see
the narrator as displaying a dissolute nature, while oth-
ers believe the whole poem is simply a game. Other
recent discussions have cited the poem as an example
of writing about the unreliability of language in the
search for truth, a theme related to the late medieval
philosophical concept of nominalism.
The “Envoy to Bukton” may well cause us to wonder
just what Chaucer’s own views on marriage were, but
the poem really does not give us a clue. It is clearly not
a serious text, and Chaucer playfully says nothing that164 “ENVOY TO BUKTON”