[12] Green was the favourite colour of the time.
[13] Astrolabe: a machine used at sea to measure the distances of stars. The quadrant now in use has superseded the astrolabe.
[14] Thomas Chaucer was born in or about 1367, and died in 1434. Elizabeth Chaucer’s noviciate was paid for by John of Gaunt in 1381. If Elizabeth Chaucer was about 16 in 1381 she would have been born about 1365; and, therefore, as far as dates are concerned, either Thomas or Elizabeth may well have been elder children of the poet: the chances being that he married in 1361-64. Moreover, John of Gaunt’s interest in both of these persons, Thomas Chaucer and Elizabeth Chaucer, gives this a colour of probability. At the same time Chaucer seems to have been no uncommon name.
Chaucer’s exceptional notice of his little son Lewis who must have been born in 1381, the year of Elizabeth’s novitiate, since Chaucer describes him as being ten years old in his treatise on the astrolabe in 1391, may have been due to the appearance of a ‘Benjamin’ rather late in life.
[15] On the hypothesis, of course, that Chaucer married a Roet.
[16] For many new and curious facts about Chaucer, see my Chaucer for Schools, “Chaucer’s Court Life and Position.”
[17] In these cases, the sum received on the marriage of the ward was legally a fine on the marriage.
[18] See Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘Chaucer’.
[19] See Chaucer for Schools, p. 22, for further details.
[20] I have assumed that Thomas Chaucer was Geoffrey Chaucer’s son, as there is no proof to the contrary, and a probability in point of dates that he was.