On May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne brought a deed of release into the Chancery of Richard II and had it enrolled on the close rolls . In this deed Chaumpaigne released the poet Geoffrey Chaucer from “all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause” . The deed had been witnessed three days earlier by several prominent members of the court of Richard II.

Five and a half centuries after Lydgate's bold assertion in the Troy Book that Chaucer “Gan oure tonge firste to magnifie, / And adourne it with his elloquence” his claim is still endorsed in Chaucer scholarship. In a landmark article of 1966 Derek Brewer describes a Chaucer who “began a revolution in poetic diction”; in 1981 John Fisher remains sure that Chaucer “naturalized in English a new poetic mode and language.” This essay describes the interesting modern resonance in E. K.'s (...) sixteenth-century claim that John Lydgate was Chaucer's “scholler.” It notices the extent to which Chaucer's scholars have been, and still often remain, studiously Lydgatian; and it attempts to describe the mechanism that produces such a remarkable continuity between fifteenth- and twentieth-century opinion. (shrink)