A year later (May 1382) to his controllership of wool was added that of petty customs. This probably meant a substantial increase of income, but the poet, who found his original duties sufficiently irksome, does not seem to have looked with favour upon a corresponding increase in office hours. In February 1385 he was granted the privilege of appointing a permanent deputy to perform his official duties. Professor Skeat suggests that the expressions of gratitude towards the queen which are inserted in the later version of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, point to the probability that he owed this unusual concession to her intervention.
About this time Chaucer seems to have given up his house over Aldgate and to have moved to Greenwich. The lease of the Aldgate house was made over to a certain Richard Foster in 1386, and in the Lenvoy a Scogan (written probably about 1393) Chaucer contrasts the lot of his friend,
... that knelest at the stremes heed
Of grace, of alle honour and worthinesse,
with his own fate at the other end of the same stream,
Forgete in solitarie wildernesse,
and adds two footnotes to explain that he is referring in the first place to Windsor and in the second to Greenwich. If the description in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women is not mere poetic fiction, it would seem that the poet had a pleasant country house and garden in his “solitarie wildernesse,” and that he cultivated the excellent habit of sleeping out of doors in the summer.
Meanwhile his activity found scope in various directions. He had been appointed a Justice of the Peace for Kent in 1381, and in 1386 he entered Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for the same county. In August of this year Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt, went to Spain, and during his absence his brother and rival, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, succeeded in establishing his ascendancy over the king. Chaucer felt the change at once. He was deprived of both his controllerships, and the money loss must have been considerable. In 1387 his wife died, so that her pension must also have lapsed. Evidently the poet was in straits, for in 1388 he was driven to raising money on his pensions and allowances, making them over to John Scalby of Lincolnshire. His abstinence, as we have seen, was “lyte,” and the necessity for retrenchment must have been extremely galling.
The fall of Gloucester in 1389 swept away the clouds which had darkened the poet’s sky. Once more we find him filling one office after another, and engaged in such useful and prosaic occupations as superintending the repairs done to the banks of the Thames or the erection of scaffolds in Smithfield for the king and queen to view the tournament held there in May 1390. One of his appointments was that of Clerk of the Works to his Majesty, which gave him charge of the fabric of the Tower, Westminster Palace, Windsor Castle, and other royal residences. He was commissioner of the roads between Greenwich and Woolwich, and the post of sub-forester of North Pemberton Park (in Somerset) must have given him ample opportunity for studying
The bilder ook, and eek the hardy asshe;
The piler elm, the cofre unto careyne;[18]
The boxtree piper;[19] holm[20] to whippes lasshe;
The sayling firr;[21] the cipres, deth to pleyne;[22]
The sheter ew,[23] the asp for shaftes pleyne,[24]
if not—