One day, new ways wake up as traditions. In the 1950s, CS Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia; in it, the affairs of Narnia were discussed by a parliament of owls; the books sold well; and somewhere along the way “parliament” became the “correct” collective for owls.
Lewis took his legislature from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parlement of Foules”, a 1382 poem thought to celebrate the betrothal of King Richard II to the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Anne of Bohemia.
The second part of the poem has a birds’ parliament convened for choosing mates:
For this was on seynt Valentynes day Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make.
The saint gets four references in the poem, and one in “The Complaint of Mars”, probably written three years later.
It is clear enough from the quote that St Valentine’s Day for romantics was not invented by Chaucer but merely made popular by him. By the turn of the 15th century, it was a courtly celebration. On the day in 1400, the French King Charles VI held a court of love, “La cour amoureuse”, in Paris.
Charles was known as Charles the Beloved and as Charles the Mad. His daughter Isabella was Richard’s second wife after Anne died of the plague. As for Richard, his reign went pretty much from go to woe; he is said to have starved to death in captivity on 14 February, upon the acquiescence of his successor and cousin and the year his father-in-law was holding his court of love.
It is not for naught that St Valentine is not only the patron saint of romantic love, but also of the mentally ill and the happy family.
A happy family is necessarily a tradition. As Tolstoy reminds us:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
In our times, the new way to look at the tradition of the happy family is best traced to the Brady Bunch, a success story which has become its own mildly pejorative collective noun. Florence Henderson, the actress who played matriarch, was born on 14 February 1934.
