The father of the poet, John Chaucer, was a citizen of London, a prosperous vintner, or wine-merchant. The date of the poet's birth is unknown, that he died an old man in 1400 is certain. His birth year was for long given as 1328, when his father was scarcely 16, and was unmarried. The date 1328 for the poet's birth must be wrong, and the year 1340 is uncertain. In a trial of 1386, to decide whether the Scropes or Grosvenors had the better right to blazon the famous "Bend Or," Chaucer was described as "of the age of forty years and more, having borne arms for twenty-seven years". "And more" is vague, we cannot be certain that it means "just over forty years of age," though that (as far as I have observed) is the usual meaning in old records of ages of witnesses. In some cases, on the other hand, they are given most incorrectly. Chaucer's own remarks about his "eld" in late poems, tell us little; at 40 Thackeray wrote of himself as if he "lay in Methusalem's cradle". As, in 1386, Chaucer had borne arms for twenty-seven years, that takes us back to 1359, when he went, under the standard of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, on a far from triumphant expedition of Edward III against France. He is unlikely, at that date (1359) to have been under 15 years of age; he may have been born as late as 1343, or anywhere between 1340 and 1343. The household accounts of the wife of the Duke of Clarence prove that Chaucer was a member of her household, and, in 1357, she, and Chaucer, were staying with John of Gaunt, at Hatfield, in Yorkshire. In the campaign of 1359, when Chaucer bore arms, Edward III failed to take Rheims and Paris: he wasted the country vainly, and made peace, at Bretigny, in 1360. Somewhere and somehow Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French, whether in a skirmish, or while foraging, or when visiting his lady, or absorbed in a book, or meditating the Muse, and contending with the difficulties of rhyme. His captors thought that there was money in his case, or they would have knocked him on the head. There _was_ money. Edward III paid, sixteen pounds, whether as the whole or as part of his ransom (1 March, 1360). The sum (equivalent to our £200) was not then insignificant for a youth not of noble birth, though, in 1368, an Esquire.