Chaucer says he had been armed twenty-seven years; this means, according to the then prevalent mode of speaking of such matters, that in 1359, twenty-seven years before the date of the deposition, 1386, Chaucer had _first_ borne arms. He says also, he was in France, in one of the military expeditions of the time. Now as 1359 is the very year in which Edward took a great army into that country, and as for three years before and for ten years after, there was no other such expedition set on foot, and as when fresh ones were despatched we know the poet was not concerned in them, but was differently engaged--why, on the whole, the inference is irresistible, that it was in Edward's expedition of 1359 that Chaucer first became a soldier. And that expedition was one calculated to test most searchingly his possession of the soldier's best quality, fortitude, though not at all calculated to make him enamoured of the vocation. The expedition throughout exhibited to him only the shades of military life, without a glimpse of its sunshine. A more formidable army had never perhaps left the English shores--certainly had never left it to meet so melancholy a fate; it comprised a hundred thousand men, and filled a thousand ships during the passage from coast to coast. And if for a time it seemed as irresistible as it had promised to be, that was because no army came forth to meet it. From Calais Edward moved on through Artois to Picardy; and thence to Rheims, which he besieged with the intention, it is said, of having himself crowned king of France in the cathedral, the usual place of coronation for the sovereigns of the country. But the garrison was brave, the place strong, and the season winter. In the end he raised the siege, and marched into Burgundy, and then, turning towards Paris, he moved forwards till the dismayed Parisians beheld an English army encamped without their walls. The French, however, had learned wisdom from the success with which they had often defended their fortified places, and from the failure that attended their efforts in the open field. So they were not to be drawn outside the walls of the capital, not even by a challenge; and at the same time Edward was quite unable to force his way in; so, harassed by insufficient supplies of provisions, he presently retreated towards Brittany. Every step of his way was marked by falling horses and men, who died from hunger or the intolerable fatigue to which they were subjected. No wonder that the spirits of the troops sank, and that Edward's own mind was so affected that he became superstitious, and yielded, beneath the terror of a great storm, the peace that not all the miseries of his own subjects, and the infinitely greater miseries they had inflicted on the French people, could wring from him. On the 8th of May, 1360, the treaty of Bretigny was concluded; Bretigny being a village near to Chartres. Of the greater part of the horrors of the expedition Chaucer was an eyewitness and