weight to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in
question. Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in Chaucer's
biography and the question of his works are affected by one another.

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Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of the
fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the year of
his death. In other words, it covers rather more than the interval
between the most glorious epoch of Edward III's reign--for Crecy was
fought in 1346--and the downfall, in 1399, of his unfortunate successor
Richard II.

The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be the test
of greatness--but in Edward III's time as in that of Henry V, who
inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory,
there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. It is only of a small
population that the author of the "Vision concerning Piers Plowman" could
have gathered the representatives into a single field, or that Chaucer
himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though
not altogether exhausting, the chief national character-types. In the
year of King Richard II's accession (1377), according to a trustworthy
calculation based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total
number of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and a
half. A quarter of a century earlier--in the days of Chaucer's boyhood--
their numbers had been perhaps twice as large. For not less than four
great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6) had swept over the
land, and at least one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the
inhabitants of the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the
obstinate epidemic--"the foul death of England," as it was called in a