To begin with the idea of Douglas as a Scottish Chaucerian is to pre-empt a complicated issue, not least by making Chaucer central to Douglas's projects. Gavin Douglas was the third son of the Earl of Angus, a Scottish aristocrat before he was a prelate of the universal church. His ambitions were Scottish; he sought his advancement there. His university training in Paris gave him a grounding in scholasticism while he shared with his university acquaintances the newer learning, historical and literary. He knew the latest editions of Virgil and the most recent research into Scotland's past. Scotland's status as a nation and Scotland's place in European vernacular culture (or equally vernacular literature's place in Scotland) occupied him throughout his life. He went to Chaucer for the literary idiom he needed, but he fought both Chaucer's interpretation of Virgil and his elevation of love as a premier subject. His humanist ambitions reveal themselves in numerous ways, none of which apparently contradicted the human ambitions he revealed as a Douglas. His working life as a poet probably occupied a dozen or so years, from about 1501 (The Police of Honour) to 1513 (the translation of the Aeneid).