In his seminal Self-Crowned Laureates, Richard Helgerson singles out this remark of Yeats's about Spenser to illustrate the modern antipathy toward laureate poetics. In the anachronistic assumption that Spenser was England's first poet laureate, Yeats detects an alignment with power that to many seems deeply embedded within the Elizabethan poet's authorial ideology. Yet, from a wider perspective, this anachronism is simply a misplaced point of origin. The first “salaried moralist among the poets” – if one counts a royal annuity as a salary – did not postdate Spenser but predated him by nearly 200 years, arriving in the form of John Lydgate, monk of Bury St. Edmunds, 1371–1449. Chaucer and Hoccleve received annuities earlier, but these were prima facie for their work as civil servants rather than as poets. Gower wore a Lancastrian collar but does not seem to have been on the king's payroll other than for his annual grant of two pipes of wine, and no known evidence relates the collar or grant to his literary activity.