father held the rank of knighthood -- rejecting the hypotheses
that make him a merchant, or a vintner "at the corner of Kirton
Lane" -- it is plain, from Chaucer's whole career, that he had
introductions to public life, and recommendations to courtly
favour, wholly independent of his genius. We have the clearest
testimony that his mental training was of wide range and
thorough excellence, altogether rare for a mere courtier in those
days: his poems attest his intimate acquaintance with the
divinity, the philosophy, and the scholarship of his time, and
show him to have had the sciences, as then developed and
taught, "at his fingers' ends." Another proof of Chaucer's good
birth and fortune would he found in the statement that, after his
University career was completed, he entered the Inner Temple -
- the expenses of which could be borne only by men of noble
and opulent families; but although there is a story that he was
once fined two shillings for thrashing a Franciscan friar in Fleet
Street, we have no direct authority for believing that the poet
devoted himself to the uncongenial study of the law. No special
display of knowledge on that subject appears in his works; yet
in the sketch of the Manciple, in the Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales, may be found indications of his familiarity with the
internal economy of the Inns of Court; while numerous legal
phrases and references hint that his comprehensive information
was not at fault on legal matters. Leland says that he quitted the
University "a ready logician, a smooth rhetorician, a pleasant
poet, a grave philosopher, an ingenious mathematician, and a
holy divine;" and by all accounts, when Geoffrey Chaucer
comes before us authentically for the first time, at the age of
thirty-one, he was possessed of knowledge and
accomplishments far beyond the common standard of his day.