The Christmas after the treaty of Bretigny was spent by Edward and his court with great splendour at Woodstock. When the holidays were over, the king went to Winchester, where he had summoned his Parliament to meet him on the 24th of January, 1361. He told them all the articles of the peace concluded between him and the King of France, with which they expressed themselves entirely satisfied. On the last day of January the Archbishop of Canterbury celebrated the mass of the Holy Trinity in the presence of the Court and Parliament, returning thanks for the peace. After the mass, torches were lighted and crosses held up over the Eucharist, the King and his sons standing up in the presence of the French hostages. Then all those lords who had not yet sworn to keep the peace took their oath, and signed a solemn declaration that they would observe all the conditions. The Black Prince was now thirty-one years of age, and still unmarried. Struck, it is said, by the beauty of his cousin, Joan of Kent, he obtained the consent of his father to marry her. Joan was of the blood royal of England, being daughter of Edmund, Earl of Kent, son of Edward I. She had already been twice married, and was now a widow, and thirty-three years of age, somewhat older than the Black Prince. Her great beauty had won for her the name of the Fair Maid of Kent, and there is no reason to suppose that she had lost any of her charms at the time of her marriage to the Black Prince. The marriage took place on the 10th October, 1361, and in the following year, on the 14th July, Edward III. solemnly invested the Black Prince with the principality of Aquitaine and Gascony, giving him the title of Duke of Aquitaine. The peace and prosperity of England was disturbed in 1362 by a second outbreak of the plague, which lasted from August till May. It was not so destructive as it had been the first time; but it seems to have been more fatal amongst the higher ranks of society. Amongst others, the king's cousin, the Duke of Lancaster, died of it. He left behind him only two daughters; the elder had been married to the Earl of Hainault, and the younger, Blanche, had married, in 1359, Edward's third son, John of Gaunt. Blanche, on the death of her elder sister, became heiress of all her father's great wealth, and it is in her right that John of Gaunt became Duke of Lancaster. This marriage of John of Gaunt has a special interest to us, as it is said to have inspired one of Chaucer's earliest poems, the _Assembly of Foules; or, The Parliament of Birds_. The origin of the connexion between Chaucer and John of Gaunt is not known, but it seems to have begun early in the poet's life.