The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Court is that
of "Valettus" to the King, or, as a later document of May, 1368, has it,
of "Valettus Camerae 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