Some time after 1370, and before 1381, according to Mr. Turner’s calculation, but in 1360 according to others, Chaucer married a lady who, according to documents taken from Rymer, had been one of the “domicellæ,” damsels, or, in modern court phrase, maids of honour to Queen Philippa. Mr. Turner places the marriage within those limits, on the following grounds:—Chaucer, in his “Treatise on the Astrolabe,” dates an observation as made in 1391, and mentions his son Lewis as being then ten years old. A grant to the queen’s damsel, on quitting her service, is dated 1370, and made to her by her maiden name. The “Astrolabe” and the grant together furnish conclusive evidence in favour of Mr. Turner’s limits; but the current story of the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster having concocted the match, can only be reconciled with the earlier date, as the duchess died in 1369. It is unnecessary to enumerate those various grants made to Chaucer by Richard II., which bear on no other events of his life. An important document of the year 1398, states that the king had ordered Chaucer to expedite several urgent affairs for him, as well in his absence as in his presence, in various parts of England. As a security against alarms expressed by Chaucer respecting suits and other molestations, Richard granted him a protection from arrest, injury, violence, or impediment, for two years. Richard was deposed in August of the following year. In October, Henry IV. confirmed Richard’s donations, with an additional annuity of forty marcs. The last document as to Chaucer is an indenture of lease to him, dated 24th December, 1399, of a tenement in the Priory Garden of Westminster, for a term of fifty-three years. Chaucer, therefore, was active at the end of 1399, and seems, from the length of his lease, still to have thought himself a good life, as he well might, if his age were only sixty; but his biographers (probably because they traced him in no later documents, and thought seventy-two a good old age) in the absence of any other positive evidence, than the date on a monument erected in the sixteenth century, have fixed his death in 1400.