Chaucer was probably himself of East Anglian origin. His grandfather Robert and John his father were both of Ipswich and London, and when he was kidnapped by his mother’s family “Thomas Stace of Ipswich” is the kidnapper. There are two events of his young life known to us, and both suggest that he was at Cambridge. One of these we hear about from his evidence in the famous Scrope and Grosvenor suit in 1386. An upstart knight--Sir Robert Grosvenor--whose name Chaucer had never heard before, had displayed the arms of the Scropes, and Chaucer testifies in the Court of Chivalry action which ensues that he had often seen Henry le Scrope use the proud armorials “azure, a bend or” in the French wars where they had been companions in arms twenty-seven years before (1359). Now this great Yorkshire family were connected with Cambridge from Chaucer’s time: Richard le Scrope, the son of his old comrade, was chancellor of the university in 1378.[165] Two members of the same family were chancellors in the next century, and the intermarriage of the Scropes with the Gonvilles is recorded there to this day in Scrope or “Scroope Terrace.”[166] Is it not probable that Geoffrey Chaucer knew Henry Scrope at Cambridge and formed there the friendship which moved him to testify in his behalf thirty years later? This conjecture does not become less probable when we turn to the other incident in his early life, which came to light in 1866 with a fragment of the household accounts of the wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence. Here the name of Geoffrey Chaucer is mentioned (in 1357) as that of a junior member of her household. His early connexion with the house of Edward is therefore an historical fact like his later friendship with John of Gaunt. Now in 1352 Lionel Plantagenet had married Elizabeth de Burgh the grand-daughter and namesake of the founder of Clare Hall Cambridge. The “gret colledge” about which Chaucer tells us in the _Reeves Tale_ is called “Soler Hall” and “Soler Hall,” so Caius records, was the ancient name for Clare. Remembering, however, the incomplete condition of Clare and of other foundations at this date the present writer supposes the “gret colledge” to have been King’s Hall, the first imposing architectural undertaking in the university and the building which must _par excellence_ have attracted attention in the middle of the xiv century.[167] It may also have been Chaucer’s own college, and in this connexion it is worthy of notice that with the exception of the half-dozen “minor scholars” at Pembroke, King’s Hall was at this time the only college which educated lads in their teens.