The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. III.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.
ADDITIONAL NAMES GIVEN BY DUCHESNE.
Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Chancer : for Chaucer. "The name of Le Chaucier (Calceolarius) may have arisen from some serjeantry connected with the tenure of land.[1] The family of Chaucer, Chaucier, Chaucers or Chasurs was seated in the Eastern Counties, and some members were in trade in London. Richard le Chaucer was of London 1328; John Chaucer in 1349 (Riley, Liber Albus 438: Nicholas, Life of Chaucer, 94). Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet, was probably a kinsman of Bartholomew Chaucer, who possessed estates in Cambridge, Hunts, Herts, and Essex, in 1312 (Parl. Rot. i. 449)."—The Norman People. There is some mention of the family during the previous century in Essex and Cambridgeshire.
Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, the "father of English poetry," was born about 1328 at Woodstock, where he long had his principal residence in an old quadrangular stone house, of which some remains existed in our own time. He began life at Court, as Valettus hospitii, or Esquire of the Body to the King; and received from him a grant of twenty marks yearly as Comptroller of the customs of wool; a lucrative office, as it was then the principal article of export in the port of London. Edward III. also employed him abroad; and in 1372 a mission which was "probably connected with the financial straits of the Crown" took him to Italy, where, at the brilliant court of the Viscontis, he attended the marriage of the Duke of Clarence with the Duke of Milan's daughter Violante, and met Petrarch, Boccacio, and Froissart. He served in the French campaign of 1350, during which he was taken prisoner; but after his release at the treaty of Bretigny he never again bore arms; and in 1389 and 1390 we find him acting in the peaceful and (as one might suppose) uncongenial capacity of Clerk of the Works to Richard II. His first poem had been written many years before, when he was not yet thirty:—a young man of "a fair and beautiful complexion and full red lips," wearing a forked beard; graceful and majestic in his deportment, and clad in a dark-coloured doublet and hood; a knife and pencase at his girdle. His last and greatest work, "The Canterbury Tales," of which the design had been suggested by the Decameron, engaged the ten closing years of his life, and was left unfinished at his death. His final words of farewell, "The Gode Counsaile of Chaucer," were written "upon his dethe bed, leying in his gret anguyse," but tranquil and peaceful to the end. "No poetry was ever more human than his; none ever came more frankly and genially home to its readers. The first note of his song is a note of freshness and gladness. 'Of ditties and of songes glad, the which he for my sake made, the land fulfilled is all over,' Gower makes Love say in his lifetime; and the impression of gladness remains just as fresh now that four hundred years have passed away."—Green.
He had married one of the domicellae (maids of honour) of Queen Philippa, her namesake Philippa de Roet, daughter and co-heir of a knight of Hainault, and sister of Catherine Swinford, who in 1369 became the wife of John of Gaunt. This connexion brought him into close alliance with the Lancastrian party; for he paid assiduous court to his Royal patron and brother-in-law, became warmly attached to him, and was necessarily involved in his disgrace. He probably lost his office of Comptroller when, in consequence of the riot in London, he had to betake himself to flight; and he did not live to see the turn of the tide that would have borne him back to fortune. He died in the very year of Henry IV.'s accession, and was buried in the chapel of St. Blaise (now called Poet's Corner) in Westminster-Abbey. The honours and rewards that should have been his now fell to the share of his only son, Sir Thomas, who, in the first beginning of the new reign, was appointed to the high office of Chief Butler of England; further became Constable of the castles of Knaresborough and Wallingford, Keeper of Knaresborough Forest for life, and received from Henry IV.'s Queen Woodstock and three other Oxfordshire manors "for his good service." He married Maud, the younger of the two daughters and co-heirs of Sir John de Burghersh, who brought him Ewelme in Oxfordshire with Donnington in Berkshire; and had, besides all the rest, inherited a considerable fortune. "Sum say," writes Leland, "that this Chaucer was a marchant man, and had about £1000 by the yere, and that wollesakkes be yn Ewelme in token of marchandise;" which was probably true, as his father had been Comptroller of the customs of wool in the port of London. He died in 1434, and Maud his wife in 1437, leaving an only child, Alice, as the sole inheritrix. She was three times married; first to Sir John Phelip; then to Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and lastly to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, at one time the greatest and most powerful man in the kingdom. Her three husbands must have succeeded each other without waste of time, for, when her father died—she being then twenty-five years of age—she was already the wife of the third. "For love of her, and the commoditie of her landes, he fell much to dwelle in Oxfordshire and Barkshir;" and translated and improved the manor-house of Ewelme, "that took name of a great poole afore the maner-place, and elmes growing about yt.... The inner parte of the house is sett within a faire mote, and is buildyd richly of bricke and stone. The hall hath great barres of iron overthwart yt insteade of crosse beames. The parlour by yt is exceeding faire and lightsome, and soe bee all the lodgings there."—Leland. Only a portion of the offices is now left. The Duke and Duchess also built the beautiful parish church, endowed a free school and founded a hospital for thirteen poor men, "to be called God's house, or the house of alms," at Ewelme. Nearly the whole of Alice's life was spent in her old home, for when the unhappy Duke, captured at sea while making his escape to France in 1447, was beheaded in Dover roads, his widow was suffered to remain undisturbed in her inheritance, and survived him for twenty-eight years. She was not buried with him, but "lyes at Ewelme under a rich tumbe of alabaster, with an image in the habit of a Woves" (vowed nun) "crowned." This tomb—one of the stateliest to be found within the four seas—is yet in excellent preservation. It is surmounted by a gorgeous canopy terminating in tapering finials, that is encircled with angels in adoration; while others, placed in decorated niches, and holding shields charged with the arms of De la Pole, Chaucer, and Roet, surround the splendid altar on which rests the figure of the Duchess, her folded hands lifted in prayer. She is robed in mediaeval pomp, with her coronet on her head, and the Garter round her arm; but, in a low crypt underneath, a second effigy, seen through eight double arches that half screen it from view, shows her lying wrapped in her shroud, or the shrouding veil of some religious sisterhood. On the vaulting of this crypt is painted the Assumption of the Virgin. Close by, on an altar tomb covered with armorial bearings, are two fine brasses representing her father and mother. Sir Thomas's feet rest on a unicorn, which appears to have been the crest of the Chaucers; hers on a lion couchant, la quene fourchee, that of Burghersh.
The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk left an only son, John de la Pole, who married Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, one of the sisters of Edward IV., and thus entailed upon his posterity the fatal title to the Crown that sealed the doom of his house. Edmund, the third Duke, after having been upwards of sixteen years a close prisoner in the Tower, was executed by order of Henry VIII. in 1513: and his brother Richard, the last of the name, long an exile from England, died in 1524, fighting under a foreign banner at the battle of Pavia.