1. For the brawl, see Lister M. Matheson, “Chaucer’s Ancestry: Historical and Philological Re-Assessments,” Chaucer Review 25 (1991): esp. 179–81. Other information on Chaucer’s ancestry is collected in Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C Olson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966)—henceforth, abbreviated CLR—pp. 1–8, and on his children, pp. 541–46. On the career of the especially distinguished Thomas,
2. see additionally Martin B. Ruud, Thomas Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1926),
3. and the supplementary information in A. C Baugh, “Kirk’s Life Records of Thomas Chaucer,” PMLA 47 (1932): 461–515.
4. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10–13 and 21–23.
5. Crow and Olson, CLR, pp. 13–18.The manuscript is in the British Library, London, Addit. 18632; on it, see M. C. Seymour, “The Manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 4 (1974): 275–76.