BLAUNCHE. Blanche of Lancaster was the second daughter, and co-heiress with her sister Maude, of Henry, duke of Lancaster, one of the richest men in fourteenth-century England. Edward III applied to Pope Innocent V for a dispensation for her marriage to John of Gaunt, who was her third cousin. Blanche's age at her marriage has been disputed. If she was born in 1340, she was nineteen when she married John of Gaunt and twenty-eight when she died in 1368. If she was born in 1347, she was twelve when she married Gaunt and twenty-one years old when she died. Scholars believed that she died of the plague in 1369, but John N. Palmer has shown that the chronicles confuse the events of 1368 and 1369 and that Blanche died on September 12, 1368.

The portrait of "good, faire White," BD 831-1041, although idealized, is possibly a portrait of Blanche. However, similar portraits of ideal women appear in Machaut's Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne 302-383 and Le Remede de Fortune 52-352. Queen Alceste mentions Chaucer's poem on the death of Blanche the Duchess, LGW F 418, LGW G 406. Skeat (I: 59) and Anderson suggest that Blanche requested a translation of Guillaume de Deguilleville's Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine from Chaucer, who obliged with his ABC. [Alceste: Alcione]

Blanche's name appears once, in the catalogue of Chaucer's works, LGW F 418, LGW G 406.