ich he was afterwards to fill.
But his day was at hand, and the anti-clerical tenour of the
legislation and of the administrative changes of these years was in
entire harmony with the policy of which he was to constitute himself
the representative. 1365 is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and
1371 that of the dismissal of William of Wykeham.

John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much
the same age as Chaucer, and like him now in the prime of life.
Nothing could accordingly be more natural than that a more or less
intimate relation should have formed itself between them. This
relation, there is reason to believe, afterwards ripened on Chaucer's
part into one of distinct political partisanship, of which there could
as yet (for the reason given above) hardly be a question. There was,
however, so far as we know, nothing in Chaucer's tastes and tendencies
to render it antecedently unlikely that he should have been ready to
follow the fortunes of a prince who entered the political arena as an
adversary of clerical predominance. Had Chaucer been a friend of it in
principle, he would hardly have devoted his first efforts as a writer
to the translation of the "Roman de la Rose." In so far, therefore,
and in truth it is not very far, as John of Gaunt may be afterwards
said to have been a Wycliffite, the same description might probably be
applied to Chaucer. With such sentiments a personal orthodoxy was
fully reconcileable in both patron and follower; and the so-called
"Chaucer's A. B. C.," a version of a prayer to the Virgin in a French
poetical "Pilgrimage," might with equal probability have been put
together by him either early or late in the course of his life. There
was, however, a tradition, repeated by Speght, that this piece was
composed "at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer
for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." If so,
it must have been written before the Duchess's death, which occurred in
1369; and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twenty-three
initial letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleaf inserted
in the Book of the pious Duchess,--herself, in the fervent language of
the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this world with
the Virgin's holy name.

In the autumn of 1369, then, the Duchess Blanche died an early death;
and it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his marriage
with her ha