VALENTYN, VALENTYNE, VALENTYNES. Three martyrs named Valentine, who have nothing to do with love, are commemorated on February 14. Two of them were beheaded on February 14: a priest of Rome, whose shrine was established near the Flaminian Way, and the other, a bishop of Terni, to whom a basilica was dedicated in the eighth century. The earliest passions of the two Valentines were written in the sixth or seventh centuries. The third is Valentine of Rhetie, a seventh-century itinerant bishop, buried near Merano in the Italian Tyrol. Jacobus de Voragine recounts a life of St. Valentine in Legenda aurea XLII, and a life appears in the South-English Legendary 16 (late thirteenth century).

Spring begins when the sun enters the zodiacal sign Aries. Many birds mate in February and in some western European countries flowers bloom by February 23. Chaucer seems to have been the first author in English to connect St. Valentine's Day with the mating birds, and the Parlement of Foules appears to be the first Valentine poem. The chronology of the Valentine poems of Graundson, Gower, and Clanvowe is uncertain. The poet lists The Book of St. Valentynes Day, probably The Parlement of Foules among those he retracts, ParsT 1086. The Complaint of Mars is sung by a bird on St. Valentine's Day, Mars 13-14. On the first day of May the birds sing to St. Valentine, LGW F 108-146, LGW G 89-1330.

Valentyn occurs in a medial position, PF 683; Valentyne occurs in a medial position, Mars 13, and in final rhyming position, LGW F 145, LGW G 131. Valentynes, the ME genitive case, appears in ParsT 1086, and four times in medial positions, PF 309, 322, 386; Compleynt d'amours 85.