amerae Regis"--Valet or Yeoman of the King's
Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of
personal attendance--the making of beds, the holding of torches, the
laying of tables, the going on messages, etc.--were usually bestowed
upon young men of good family. In due course of time a royal valet
usually rose to the higher post of royal squire--either "of the
household" generally, or of a more special kind. Chaucer appears in
1368 as an "esquire of less degree," his name standing seventeenth in a
list of seven-and-thirty. After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by
the lower, but several times by Latin equivalents of the higher, title.
Frequent entries occur of the pension or salary of twenty marks granted
to him for life; and, as will be seen, he soon began to be employed on
missions abroad. He had thus become a regular member of the royal
establishment, within the sphere of which we must suppose the
associations of the next years of his life to have been confined. They
belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the English
people and for the Plantagenet dynasty, whose glittering exploits
reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms. At home,
these years were the brief interval between two of the chief
visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier
the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor.
It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their
children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the
year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a
princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first
wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost
again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the
Plantagenets and representative of legitimate right, Don Pedro the
Cruel, whose daughter the inconsolable widower was to espouse in 1372,
and whose "tragic" downfall Chaucer afterwards duly lamented in his
"Monk's Tale":--

O noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain,
Whom fortune held so high in majesty!

As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been quenched in
the sickness which was the harbinger of death; and his younger brother,
John of Gaunt, though already known for his bravery in the field (he
commanded the reinforcements sent to Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun
to play the prominent part in politics wh