John Lydgate was born at Lydgate, Suffolk, ca. 1370 (cf. Chaucer's birth in the 1340s, and death in 1400). Around 1385 he was admitted to Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, in Suffolk and ordained to the priesthood in 1397. In the early 1400s, he studied at Oxford, and lived most of his life outside the cloister until returning to Bury St. Edmunds around 1434. The Fall of Princes (based on Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium) was written between 1431-8. He died ca. 1450 and was buried in Bury St. Edmunds. His literary output was prodigious, some 145,000 lines; as Derek Pearsall has observed, this is "twice as much as Shakespeare, three times as much as Chaucer, and there can be no sense in which this works to his advantage" (John Lydgate, p. 4).