INTRODUCTION
Geoffrey Chaucer is our greatest comic poet, and this study is an effort to discern that special gifts and accidents that made him so, ripening in him a full comic vision, at once essentially English and yet rooted in the whole culture of fourteenth-century Christendom.

BIOGRAPHICAL (I)
(1340-1370)
In October 1386 a dispute as to the right to bear arms was heard before Sir John de Derwentwater in the Refectory of Westminster Abbey.