[In 'The Assembly of Fowls' — which Chaucer’s 'Retractation' describes as 'The Book of Saint Valentine’s Day, or of the Parliament of Birds' — we are presented with a picture of the mediaeval 'Court of Love' far closer to the reality than we find in Chaucer’s poem which bears that express title.
We have a regularly constituted conclave or tribunal, under a president whose decisions are final. A difficult question is proposed for the consideration and judgment of the Court — the disputants advancing and vindicating their claims in person.
The attendants upon the Court, through specially chosen mouthpieces, deliver their opinions on the cause; and finally a decision is authoritatively pronounced by the president — which, as in many of the cases actually judged before the Courts of Love in France, places the reasonable and modest wish of a sensitive and chaste lady above all the eagerness of her lovers, all the incongruous counsels of representative courtiers.
So far, therefore, as the poem reproduces the characteristic features of procedure in those romantic Middle Age halls of amatory justice, Chaucer’s 'Assembly of Fowls' is his real 'Court of Love;' for although, in the castle and among the courtiers of Admetus and Alcestis, we have all the personages and machinery necessary for one of those erotic contentions, in the present poem we see the personages and the machinery actually at work, upon another scene and under other guises.
The allegory which makes the contention arise out of the loves, and proceed in the assembly, of the feathered race, is quite in keeping with the fanciful yet nature-loving spirit of the poetry of Chaucer’s time, in which the influence of the Troubadours was still largely present.
It is quite in keeping, also, with the principles that regulated the Courts, the purpose of