and wanted a large sum of money for some purpose, perhaps to buy land or
improve it. Or his surrender of the annuity may have been made by
arrangement with the King, who may have wished to give an annuity to a
comparatively new esquire, and who may have recompensed Chaucer in some
other way.

Every fact that we have would fit into the theory that Chaucer led a
prosperous and important life (in a business and financial way) from
1374 to the end of his life. Certainly he must have received a large
amount of money in that time; we have no evidence of his having lost
any; we know of nothing in his character which would lead us to suppose
him a spendthrift or inefficient in financial affairs.

I do not wish to maintain that he was always prosperous, but only that
the facts do not warrant us in assuming that he was constantly on the
verge of ruin in the years when, so far as we know, he held no office.

In connection with the Piers Plowman controversy, I have been struck
with Mr. Jusserand's insistence that Chaucer did not touch upon social
or political matters in his poems. That was, as Mr. Manly has indicated,
very probably due to a theory of the proper subject matter of poetry-an
idea current in his time and enunciated by Alan Cliartier most
distinctly. But back of that may have been in Chaucer's case certain
peculiar traits of character. Chaucer was in direct connection with the
court and with the city at the time when political enmity between two
main factions was very bitter-so bitter that in 1386 it led to the
killing of Simon de Burley and Sir Nicholas Brembre as well as
less-known men like Beauchamp and Salesbury and Berners, and to the
flight of men like Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere, and again in
1392 led to the execution of the Earl of Arundel, the murder of