ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1390 Geoffrey Chaucer, traveling on official business, was waylaid and robbed near the “Fowle Ok” in Kent, losing £20 of the King’s money. Three of Chaucer’s poems, all most probably dating from the last decade of his life, declare similar intentions: The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, Fortune, and Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan. In these poems Chaucer treats the essential parts of any petition, the complaint and the request for a remedy, with great freedom, voicing them in a variety of unexpected ways. Fortune makes repeated references to the Pleintif’s “beste frend,” at lines 32, 40, 48, and 50, as well as in the Envoy; but can no longer determine either the identity of this person or his significance in the case. By contrast, Chaucer addresses Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan throughout to the friend named in its title, in the form—new to English poetry at the time—of a familiar epistle.
