Geoffrey Chaucer, whose father, John Chaucer, a prosperous London wine merchant with some influence in the court of Edward III, had by 1357 been placed as a seventeen-year-old page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster and wife of the king’s third son, Lionel.

During military service in France in 1359, Chaucer had been captured near Reims but had been ransomed by the Crown.

Chaucer is believed to have studied, in the early 1360s, at the Inns of Chancery and the Inns of Court, and possibly at Oxford, as further preparation for an administrative career at court.

He marries Philippa de Roet, an aristocratic lady, in 1366.

Chaucer by 1367 becomes a yeoman, or valet (vallectus), in the household of King Edward; in 1368, he is mentioned as the king's armiger (esquire).

Blanche, duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of Gaunt, Edward’s fourth son, dies in 1368.

Chaucer in late 1369 or early 1370 writes “The Book of the Duchess,” an elegy for Blanche cast as a traditional French dream-vision and written in eight-syllable lines rhymed in couplets, a form characteristic of French poetry.