In every thing, I wot, there lies measure:
For though a man forbid all drunkenness,
He biddeth not that every creature
Be drinkless altogether, as I guess.

Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day of his birth
(whenever it befell) to the year 1357. His earlier biographers, who
supposed him to have been born in 1328, had accordingly a fair field open
for conjecture and speculation. Here it must suffice to risk the
asseveration, that he cannot have accompanied his father to Cologne in
1338, and on that occasion have been first "taken notice of" by king and
queen, if he was not born till two or more years afterwards. If, on the
other hand, he was born in 1328, both events MAY have taken place. On
neither supposition is there any reason for believing that he studied at
one--or at both--of our English Universities. The poem cannot be accepted
as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by a mere dramatic
assumption) declares:--

Philogenet I call'd am far and near,
Of Cambridge clerk;

nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the "Clerk," who
is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury Pilgrims, is an
Oxonian. The enticing enquiry as to so WHICH of the sister Universities
may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, be allowed to drop, together
with the subsidiary question, whether stronger evidence of local colouring
is furnished by the "Miller's" picture of the life of a poor scholar in
lodgings at Oxford, or by the "Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of
a Trumpington walk taken by two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at
Cambridge. Equally baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's