Lionel of Antwerp

Geoffrey Chaucer, whose father, John Chaucer, a prosperous London wine merchant with some influence in the court of Edward III, had by 1357 been placed as a seventeen-year-old page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster and wife of the king’s third son, Lionel.

During military service in France in 1359, Chaucer had been captured near Reims but had been ransomed by the Crown.

Chaucer is believed to have studied, in the early 1360s, at the Inns of Chancery and the Inns of Court, and possibly at Oxford, as further preparation for an administrative career at court.

He marries Philippa de Roet, an aristocratic lady, in 1366.

Chaucer by 1367 becomes a yeoman, or valet (vallectus), in the household of King Edward; in 1368, he is mentioned as the king's armiger (esquire).

Blanche, duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of Gaunt, Edward’s fourth son, dies in 1368.

Chaucer in late 1369 or early 1370 writes “The Book of the Duchess,” an elegy for Blanche cast as a traditional French dream-vision and written in eight-syllable lines rhymed in couplets, a form characteristic of French poetry.

King Edward III bestows upon his sons the first ducal coronets (smaller gold crowns that, in England, come to be worn by the five orders of nobility under the king: dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons) in 1362.

French historian and poet Jean Froissart is twenty-three-years old in 1360 when he begins work on his “Chronicles,” an account of European affairs beginning in 1325.

Borrowed from the work of his elder contemporary Jean Le Bel for the period up to 1356; he bases his account of subsequent events on eyewitness reports.

A writer of lyric poetry as well as a historian, Froissart expresses the courtly view of life in “Meliador,” a long Arthurian verse romance.

What little is known of Froissart's life comes mainly from his historical writings and from archival sources which mention him in the service of aristocrats or receiving gifts from them.

Although his poems have also been used in the past to reconstruct aspects of his biography, this approach is in fact flawed, as the 'I' persona which appears in many of the poems should not be construed as a reliable reference to the historical author.

Froissart comes from Valenciennes in the County of Hainaut, situated in the western tip of the Holy Roman Empire, bordering France.

Earlier scholars have suggested that his father was a painter of armorial bearings, but there is actually little evidence for this.

Other suggestions include that he began working as a merchant but soon gave that up to become a cleric.

For this conclusion there is also no real evidence, as the poems which have been cited to support these interpretations are not really autobiographical.

By about age twenty-four, Froissart leaves Hainault and enters the service of Philippa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III of England, in 1361 or 1362.

This service, which will have lasted until the queen's death in 1369, has often been presented as including a position of court poet and/or official historiographer.

Based on surviving archives of the English court, Croenen has concluded instead that this service did not entail an official position at court, and probably was more a literary construction, in which a courtly poet dedicated poems to his 'lady' and in return received occasional gifts as remuneration.

Froissart takes a serious approach to his work.

He travels in England, Scotland, Wales, France, Flanders and Spain gathering material and firsthand accounts for his Chronicles.

He travels with Lionel, Duke of Clarence, to Milan to attend and chronicle the duke's wedding to Violante, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, in May 1368.

At this wedding, two other significant writers of the Middle Ages are present: Chaucer and Petrarch.