Chaucer, Alice Perrers, and Cecily Chaumpaigne

THIRTY years ago I wrote a paper describing Chaucer as a protege of the influential Alice Perrers and contended that among other favors Dame Alice, favorite of aged King Edward III, may have granted rent-free the house above Aldgate to Chaucer in 1374.1 My suggestion that the king's mistress was one of the poet's patrons has not won universal attention. Alice's recent biographer, Mr. F. George Kay, does not even mention my paper in his Lady of the Sun (1966).2 But the late Fred N. Robinson, in revising his famous edition of Chaucer's works, saw merit in my reasoning. In 1957 Robinson stated that "For a part, at least, of the favors that the young poet received during the reign of Edward III it has been plausibly suggested, though documentary evidence seems to be lacking, that he was indebted to the influence of the King's mistress, Dame Alice Perrers. Although neither my name nor the title of my paper appears anywhere in Robinson's edition, his reference presumably is to my findings since no one else, so far as I know, had entertained this idea before me. In 1946 I promised to add a word someday on Chaucer's connections with Dame Alice; therefore I now will endeavor to support my theory, partly by "documentary evidence" on the source of Chaucer's "favors" and partly by official testimonials on the close relationships between Chaucer and both Alice Perrers and Cecily Chaumpaigne (Champain, etc.). About 1930, forty-five years ago, I read a note of 1829 by the editor Thomas Amyot, who then reproduced an English translation of the contemporary chronicle in London, British Library, Harley MS 6217. Amyot there stated that Alice Perrers's earlier surname was "Chawpeneys" (an Anglicization of Chaumpaigne). Although teaching duties and writing other compositions have delayed the issuance of my further statements until now, I then immediately thought of Cecily Chaumpaigne, who on May 1, 1380, released the poet from a charge of "de raptu meo."4 Whether the poet, let us say, ravished or abducted Cecily has long been a major question in Chaucer's biography, with most American scholars holding that in the fourteenth century "raptus" meant the act of kidnapping, and with British critics maintaining the word referred to sexual experience. In weighing these two divergent views, the identity of Cecily is a highly relevant