Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records--partly of the
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence
of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few
references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate
successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily
forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree
of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with
regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now
accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process
which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour
stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited
number of results has been safely established, and others have at all
events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of
conclusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages; and
even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through
a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to
sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.

A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written. They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately in
view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose services to
the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar,
would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he not
been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date
of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date
Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the