i8o Chaucer and Henry, Earl of Derby 



Elizabeth, and with an army commanded, under him, by the 

 Earl of Stafford,^ Edward III having written : 'Our Irish domin- 

 ions have been reduced to such utter devastation, ruin, and 

 misery, that they may be totally lost if our subjects there are 

 not immediately succored.'^ In November, 1366, he returned,^ 

 the crowning" act of his viceroyalty having been the holding of 

 the Parliament of Kilkenny on Feb. 18 of that year,* the statute 

 of which was long regarded as a masterpiece of colonial legis- 

 lation.^ Now it is significant that on June 20, 1367, Chaucer 

 received his annuity from the king. What more likely, then, 

 than that he, whom Lionel had entrusted with dispatches for 

 England a few months before the latter's departure for Ireland, 

 should have been retained by his master during his residence 

 in Ireland, and that the services performed there should have 

 warranted recognition by the king on his return?® This con- 

 jecture is corroborated by the proof, adduced by Sypherd,'^ that 

 Chaucer, when, in his House of Famc,^ he described a house of 



^ Gilbert, p. 217 ; cf. Beltz, pp. 33-2,6. His chief officers were James, 

 Earl of Ormonde, Sir John Carew, and Sir William de Windsor, whom 

 Lionel left behind to represent him in 1366, and who married Alice 

 Ferrers in 1376. 



^ For a picture of warfare in Ireland at that time, see Kervj-n 15. 167 ff. ; 

 Gilbert, pp. 221-4. 



^ Eld. Hist. 3. 241 ; cf. Cal. Pat. Rolls for Oct. 26, 1366. 



* Statutes and Ordinances, and Acts of the Parliament of Ireland^ 

 ed. Berry, i. 430. 



^Ramsay i. 488. 



"If this be granted, there will result a curious parallel between the 

 sojourns of Chaucer and Spenser in Ireland. The later poet, Chaucer's 

 immediate successor in greatness, his disciple, and, so to say, his grave- 

 neighbor in Westminster Abbey, was, like him, a courtier, a bearer of 

 dispatches (as early as 1579, and perhaps in 1577; see Diet. Nat. Biog. 

 53- 387), and finally, by 1580, when he was about 28, an attendant upon 

 the Lord Deputy to Ireland, during his stay in which he met and married 

 his wife, and where he obtained material for his poetry. 



"Studies in Chaucer's House of Fame, pp. 140-2, 151-4. 



' 1936 ff. : 



And al this hous, of wliiche I rede, 

 Was made of twigges, falwe, rede. 

 And grene eek, and som weren whyte, 

 Swiche as men to these cages, thwyte. 

 Or maken of these paniers. 

 Or elles hottes or dossers. 



