Our club has many literary and artistic connections. During the late 1930s George Orwell, a local resident, attended several home games. Post war David Lodge wrote about his favourite team; Stanley Roy Badmin painted scenes from The Valley. Recently a new find has added another famous literary admirer. Unfortunately, we only have a scrap of the original manuscript written by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1600), who was clerk of works at the nearby royal residences in Greenwich. It appears he wrote The Charlton Tales in the 1380s. Readers of this forum who have studied the history of our native language, will immediately recognise the text as Middle English, before the Great Vowel Shift gave us our modern standard. Herewith Chaucer's poem:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
Than longen folk to gan to fotball metches.
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Lundon, to Charlton they wende,
The blisful addickes for to see
To skorre hir gols - one, two, thri.
And shortly for to tellen, as it was
Were it by aventure, or sort, or cas,
The sothe is this, the red boyes won the game.
What, welcome be that, in Goddes name.
Sadly nothing more exists of the original manuscript, but at least we now know what Chaucer did on his Saturday afternoons. Note in the last few lines that even when the team was winning, the author thanked the Lord when the match was over. So, nothing has changed much over the past six centuries!
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I guess Chaucer and the other pilgrims would have taken in a game on their way to Canterbury.
The museum will be changing our display to reflect this.
I had heard about this fragment but it is largely ignored by Chaucer scholars due to its incomplete nature.
(BTW isn't there another fragment, now lost, which talked of Chaucer organising Ox-cart trips from London to The Valley - a sort of proto-type Valley Express if you- will but at the pace of Oxen?).
Anyway, perhaps your finding will re-emerge as a document worthy of further study now that you have provided context and I look forward to seeing the forthcoming museum display.