d his father to Cologne in
1338, and on that occasion have been first "taken notice of" by king
and queen, if he was not born till two or more years afterwards. If,
on the other hand, he was born in 1328, both events MAY have taken
place. On neither supposition is there any reason for believing that
he studied at one--or at both--of our English Universities. The poem
cannot be accepted as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by
a mere dramatic assumption) declares:--

Philogenet I call'd am far and near,
Of Cambridge clerk;

nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the "Clerk,"
who is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury
Pilgrims, is an Oxonian. The enticing enquiry as to so WHICH of the
sister Universities may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, be
allowed to drop, together with the subsidiary question, whether
stronger evidence of local colouring is furnished by the "Miller's"
picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the
"Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken by
two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at Cambridge. Equally baseless
is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, that he
completed his academical studies at Paris--and equally futile the
concomitant fiction that in France "he acquired much applause by his
literary exercises." Finally, we have the tradition that he was a
member of the Inner Temple--which is a conclusion deduced from a piece
of genial scandal as to a record having been seen in that Inn of a fine
imposed upon him for beating a friar in Fleet-street. This story was
early placed by Thynne on the horns of a sufficiently decisive dilemma:
in the days of Chaucer's youth, lawyers had not yet been admitted into
the Temple; and in the days of his maturity he is not very likely to
have been found engaged in battery in a London thoroughfare.

We now desert the region of groundless conjecture, in order with the
year 1357 to arrive at a firm though not very broad footing of facts.
In this year, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (whom it would be too great an effort
of scepticism to suppose to have been merely a namesake of the poet) is
mentioned in the Household Book of Elizabeth Countess of Ulster, wife
of Prince Lionel (third son of King Edward III, and afterwards Duke of
Clarence), as a recipient of certain articles of apparel. Two similar
notices of his name occur up to the year 135