Nor is this devout theologian always accurate in his references to Bible history. His allusions to Old Testament stories are full of mistakes, as, for instance, when he speaks (in _Book of Duchesse_, l. 738) of Samson slaying himself with a pillar for love of Delila. It was not an age of nice scholarship, or care for detail. Men used stories as they found them, and repeated them as they happened to remember them, and no one was hyper-critical enough to refer to the original. More than half a century after Chaucer's death Caxton translates the _Æneid_, not from the Latin of Virgil, but from "a little book in French," and Gawain Douglas, the most scholarly of all the Scottish poets of the early sixteenth century, regards it as a moral allegory of the soul's progress, cast in the form of an epic. But while Chaucer's occasional mistranslations of Latin words and misrenderings of classical legends cannot be said to disprove his residence at one of the universities, they certainly cannot be said to support Leland's statement, and the probability is that he early became attached to the court. The reign of Edward III witnessed a marked increase in the prosperity of the merchant class. The members of the great trade guilds were men of wealth and importance and there is nothing surprising in finding a vintner's son one of the household of Elizabeth, wife of the king's son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In fact the seals of John Chaucer and Agnes his wife show that both bore arms. In 1357 we find, from the royal accounts, that Geoffrey Chaucer was provided with a paltok (cloak) costing four shillings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of shoes, valued at three shillings, and in December of the same year he received a grant of 2_s._ 6_d._ "for necessaries against the feast of the Nativity" (Chaucer Soc., _Life Records of Chaucer_, p. xiv). The _Canterbury Tales_ give abundant proof that their author had a keen eye for the niceties of dress, and at seventeen he had doubtless a proper appreciation of new shoes and red and black breeches. Two years later (1359) he served in the French wars and was taken prisoner at "Retters," a place which has been variously identified as Retiers, near Rennes, and Rethel, near Reims. He was liberated in March 1360, Edward III paying £16 (over £200 of our money) towards his ransom, which looks as if he were considered a person of some importance. Apparently he returned to court life in England, and to the duties of _valettus camerae regis_. A valet of the King's Chamber had to "make beddis, to beare or hold torches, to sett boardis, to apparell all chambres, and such othir seruices as the Chamberlain, or Vshers of the Chambre, comaunde or assigne, to attend the Chambre, to watch the King by course, to go in messages, etc." (_Life Records_, Pt. II, p. xi), and holders of the office must have had ample opportunity of acquiring the wisdom of Placebo:--