I have now been a court-man al my lyf. And god it woot,[8] though I unworthy be, I have stonden in ful greet degree Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat; Yet hadde I never with noon of hem debaat. I never hem contraried,[9] trewely; I woot wel that my lord can[10] more than I. What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable; I say the same, or elles thing semblable.[11] A ful gret fool is any conseillour, That serveth any lord of heigh honour, That dar presume, or elles thenken it, That his conseil sholde passe his lordes wit. Nay, lordes been no foles,[12] by my fay. (_Marchantes Tale_, l. 1492, etc.) In 1366 a pension was granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of the Queen's Chamber, and it is usually thought that this indicates Chaucer's marriage about this time, since in 1381 the money was paid "to Geoffrey Chaucer, her husband." Philippa seems to have been the sister--the Chaucer Society suggests, the sister-in-law--of Katherine Swynford, who became John of Gaunt's third wife, and this connection possibly helps to explain the consistent kindness shown to Chaucer by the House of Lancaster. Various attempts have been made to show that the marriage was an unhappy one. Some of these will be noticed later in treating of Chaucer's women, here it may suffice to say that although it is true that he paints a sufficiently gloomy picture of married life in the _Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton_, that neither the host nor the merchant are happy in their choice, and that the _Lenvoy_ which concludes the _Clerkes Tale_ warns husbands that if they expect to find their wives patient Griseldas they will certainly be disappointed, we have to remember that the shrewish wife was as stock a comic convention of those days as the shrewish mother-in-law of later times, and when it comes to taking away the character of Philippa Chaucer on the ground that her husband complains in the _Hous of Fame_ that he is unaccustomed to be awakened gently, it is impossible not to feel that she is receiving unnecessarily harsh treatment. Equally slight is the evidence for his suffering from an unhappy love affair. In the _Parlement of Foules_ (ll. 89, 90) he speaks of himself as Fulfild of thought and besy hevinesse; For bothe I hadde thing which that I nolde,[13] And eek I ne hadde that thing that I wolde, and commentators have leaped to the conclusion that he is here referring to his wife and a lady of high rank for whom he sighed in vain. In the same way when, in the _Book of the Duchesse_, he speaks of having suffered for eight years from a sickness which one physician alone can cure, this is taken as an unmistakable reference to the same unrequited passion. But we have nothing to show that in these passages Chaucer is revealing his actual feelings. To be crossed in love is proper to every poet, and if his wife might have been justly annoyed when in 1382--at least sixteen years after his marriage--he wrote