It was probably written c. 1536–38, since it makes references to events in 1534 and 1536 – e.g. the Lincolnshire Rebellion – and borrows from The Plowman's Tale and the 1532 text by William Thynne of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, which is cited by page and line.
A "comely priest" joins the narrator in criticism of the church, recommending that he read some anticlerical and prognosticatory lines in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose (Benson ed., 7165ff.
However, Bale changed the ascription of authorship for Curiam Veneris (his Latin name for The Courte of Venus) to Robert Shyngleton/Singleton ("Robertus Shyngleton, astrorum et theologie peritus, sacerdos, composuit") in his notes in Index Britanniae scriptorum, although his later, 1559 edition of the Illustriam kept it as Chaucer's.
Bale recorded that Shyngleton was said to have written a Treatise of the Seven Churches; Of the Holy Ghost; Comment on Certain Prophecies; and Theory of the Earth, which was dedicated to Henry VII and has elsewhere been called Of the Seven Ages of the World.
Thomas Wyatt the Elder was also suggested as the author of The Pilgrim's Tale in the sixteenth century, and five of the poems in The Courte of Venus are definitely his.
Others have speculated that some real Chaucerian poems may have been included in some versions of The Courte of Venus, but those that have survived are not Chaucer's, except perhaps the Prologue, but this is only a remote possibility.
Russell Fraser speculates the following: "About the time of Anne Boleyn's fall in 1536, and concurrent with the Lincolnshire rebellion, Sir Thomas Wyatt recast a number of his poems.