Chaucer's Works, Volume 5 — Notes to the Canterbury Tales (part 4)

653. 'My chance is seven; yours is five and three.' This is an allusion to the particular game called hazard, not to a mere comparison of throws to see which is highest. A certain throw (here seven) is called the caster's chance. This can only be understood by an acquaintance with the rules of the game. See the article Hazard in Supplement to Eng. Cyclopaedia, or in Hoyle's Games. See the note to B. 124; and see the Monkes Tale, B. 3851. Compare—'Not unlyke the use of foule gamesters, who having lost the maine by [i. e. according to] true iudgement, thinke to face it out with a false oath'; Lyly's Euphues and his England, ed. Arber, p. 289.

656. In the Towneley Mysteries, p. 241, when the soldiers dice for Christ's garments, one says—

'I was falsly begyled withe thise byched bones,

Ther cursyd thay be.'

The readings are:—E. Cp. bicched; Ln. becched; Hl. bicched; Hn. Cm. bicche; Pt. and old edd. thilk, thilke (wrongly). Besides which, Tyrwhitt cites bichet, MS. Harl. 7335; becched, Camb. Univ. Lib. Dd. 4. 24; and, from other MSS., bicched, bicchid, bitched, bicche. The general consensus of the MSS. and the quotation from the Towneley Mysteries establish the reading given in the text beyond all doubt. Yet Tyrwhitt reads bicchel, for which he adduces no authority beyond the following. 'Bickel, as explained by Kilian, is talus, ovillus et lusorius; and bickelen, talis ludere. See also Had. Junii Nomencl. n. 213. Our dice indeed are the ancient tesserae (κύβοι) not tali (ἀστράγαλοι); but, both being games of hazard, the implements of one might be easily attributed to the other. It should seem from Junius, loc. cit., that the Germans had preserved the custom of playing with the natural bones, as they have different names for a game with tali ovilli, and another with tali bubuli.'

I find in the Tauchnitz Dutch Dictionary—'Bikkel, cockal. Bikkelen, to play at cockals.' Here cockal is the old name for a game with four hucklebones (Halliwell), and is further made to mean the hucklebone itself. But there is nothing to connect bicched with Du. bickel, and the sense is very different. From the article on Bicched in the New Eng. Dict., it appears that the sense is 'cursed, execrable,' and is an epithet applied to other things besides dice. It is evidently an opprobrious word, and seems to be derived from the sb. bitch, opprobriously used. There is even a quotation in which the verb bitch means to bungle or spoil a business. We may explain it by 'cursed bones.'

662. pryme, about nine o'clock; see notes to A. 3906, B. 2015. Here it means the canonical hour for prayer so called, to announce which bells were rung.

664. A hand-bell was carried before a corpse at a funeral by the sexton. See Rock, Church of Our Fathers, ii. 471; Grindal's Works, p. 136; Myre's Instructions for Parish Priests, l. 1964.

666. That oon of them, the one of them; the old phrase for 'one of them.' knave, boy.

667. Go bet, lit. go better, i. e. go quicker; a term of encouragement to dogs in the chase. So in the Legend of Good Women, 1213 (Dido, l. 290), we have—

'The herd of hertes founden is anoon,

With "hey! go bet! prik thou! lat goon, lat goon!"'

In Skelton's Elynour Rummyng, l. 332, we have—'And bad Elynour go bet.' Halliwell says—'Go bet, an old hunting cry, often introduced in a more general sense. See Songs and Carols, xv; Shak. Soc. Pap. i. 58; Chaucer, C. T. 12601 [the present passage]; Dido, 288 ; Tyrwhitt's notes, p. 278; Ritson's Anc. Pop. Poetry, p. 46. The phrase is mentioned by [Juliana] Berners in the Boke of St. Alban's, and seems nearly equivalent to go along.' It is strange that no editor has perceived the exact sense of this very simple phrase. Cf. 'Keep bet our good,' i. e. take better care of my property; Shipmannes Tale, B. 1622.

679. this pestilence, during this plague. Alluding to the Great Plagues that took place in the reign of Edward III. There were four such, viz. in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6. As Chaucer probably had the story from an Italian source, the allusion must be to the first and worst of these, the effects of which spread nearly all over Europe, and which was severely felt at Florence, as we learn from the description left by Boccaccio. See my note to Piers Plowman, B. v. 13.

684. my dame, my mother; as in H. 317; Piers Plowman, B. v. 37.

695. avow, vow; to make avow is the old phrase for to vow. Tyrwhitt alters it to a vow, quite unnecessarily; and the same alteration has been made by editors in other books, owing to want of familiarity with old MSS. It is true that the form vow does occur, as, e. g. in P. Plowm. B. prol. 71; but it is no less certain that avow occurs also, and was the older form; since we have oon auow (B. 334), and the phrase 'I make myn avou,' P. Plowman, A. v. 218; where no editorial sophistication can evade giving the right spelling. Equally clear is the spelling in the Prompt. Parv.—'Avowe, Votum. Awowyn, or to make awowe, Voveo.' And Mr. Way says—'Auowe, veu; Palsgrave. This word occurs in R. de Brunne, Wiclif, and Chaucer. The phrase "performed his auowe" occurs in the Legenda Aurea, fol. 47.' Those who are familiar with MSS. know that a prefixed a is often written apart from the word; thus the word now spelt accord is often written 'a corde'; and so on. Hence, even when the word is really one word, it is still often written 'a uow,' and is naturally printed a vow in two words, where no such result was intended. Tyrwhitt himself prints min avow in the Knightes Tale, A. 2237, and again this avow in the same, A. 2414; where no error is possible. See more on this word in my note to l. 1 of Chevy Chase, in Spec. of Eng. 1394-1579. I have there said that the form vow does not occur in early writers; I should rather have said, it is by no means the usual form.

698. brother, i. e. sworn friend; see Kn. Tale, A. 1131, 1147. In l. 704, yboren brother means brother by birth.

709. to-rente, tare in pieces, dismembered. See note to l. 474 above.

713. This 'old man' answers to the romito or hermit of the Italian text. Note an old (indefinite), as compared with this oldë (definite) in l. 714.

715. Tyrwhitt, in his Glossary, remarks—'God you see! 7751 [D. 2169]; God him see! 4576 [B. 156]. May God keep you, or him, in his sight! In Troilus, ii. 85, it is fuller:—God you save and see!' Gower has—'And than I bidde, God hir see!' Conf. Amant. bk. iv. (ed. Chalmers, p. 116, col. 2, or ed. Pauli, ii. 96). In Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, ed. Stallybrass, i. 21, we find a similar phrase in O. H. German:—'daz si got iemer schouwe'; Iwain, l. 794. Cf. 'now loke the owre lorde!' P. Plowman, B. i. 207. See also l. 766 below.

727. This is a great improvement upon the Italian Tale, which represents the hermit as fleeing from death. 'Fratelli miei, io fuggo la morte, che mi vien dietro cacciando mi.'

Professor Kittredge, of Harvard University, informs me that ll. 727-733 are imitated from the first Elegy of Maximian, of which ll. 1-4, 223-8 are as follows:—

'Almula cur cessas finem properare senectus?

Cur et in hoc fesso corpore tarda sedes?

Solue, precor, miseram tali de carcere uitam;

Mors est iam requies, uiuere poena mihi....

Hinc est quod baculo incumbens ruitura senectus

Assiduo pigram uerbere pulsat humum.

Et numerosa mouens certo uestigia passu

Talia rugato creditur ore loqui:

"Suscipe me, genetrix, nati miserere laborum,

Membra uelis gremio fessa fouere tuo."'

Cf. Calderon, Les Tres Justicias en Una; Act ii. sc. 1.

731. leve moder, dear mother Earth; see 'genetrix' above.

734. cheste. Mr. Jephson (in Bell's edition) is puzzled here. He takes cheste to mean a coffin, which is certainly the sense in the Clerk's Prologue, E. 29. The simple solution is that cheste refers here, not to a coffin, but to the box for holding clothes which, in olden times, almost invariably stood in every bedroom, at the foot of the bed. 'At the foot of the bed there was usually an iron-bound hutch or locker, which served both as a seat, and as a repository for the apparel and wealth of the owner, who, sleeping with his sword by his side, was prepared to protect it against the midnight thief'; Our English Home, p. 101. It was also called a coffer, a hutch, or an ark. The old man is ready, in fact, to exchange his chest, containing all his worldly gear, for a single hair-cloth, to be used as his shroud.

743. In the margin of MSS. E. Hn. and Pt. is the quotation 'Coram canuto capite consurge,' from Levit. xix. 32. Hence we must understand Agayns, in l. 743, to mean before, or in presence of. Cf. B. 3702.

748. God be with you is said, with probability, to have been the original of our modern unmeaning Good bye! go or ryde, a general phrase for locomotion; go here means walk. Cp. 'ryde or go,' Kn. Tale, A. 1351. Cf. note to l. 866.

771. The readings are:—E. Hn. Cm. an .viij.; Ln. a .vij.; Cp. Pt. Hl. a seuen. The word eighte is dissyllabic; cf. A. S. eahta, Lat. octo. Wel ny an eighte busshels = very nearly the quantity of eight bushels. The mention of florins is quite in keeping with the Italian character of the poem. Those coins were so named because originally coined at Florence, the first coinage being in 1252; note in Cary's Dante, Inferno, c. xxx. The expression 'floreyn of florence' occurs in The Book of Quintessence, ed. Furnivall, p. 6. The value of an English florin was 6s. 8d.; see note to Piers Plowman, B. ii. 143. There is an excellent note on florins in Thynne's Animadversions on Speght's Chaucer, ed. Furnivall, p. 45.

781. In allusion to the old proverb—'Lightly come, lightly go.' Cotgrave, s. v. Fleute, gives the corresponding French proverb thus:—'Ce qui est venu par la fleute s'en retourne avec le tabourin; that the pipe hath gathered, the tabour scattereth; goods ill gotten are commonly ill spent.' In German—'wie gewonnen, so zerronnen.'

782. wende, would have weened, would have supposed. It is the past tense subjunctive.

790. doon us honge, lit. cause (men) to hang us; we should now say, cause us to be hanged. 'The Anglo-Saxons nominally punished theft with death, if above 12d. value; but the criminal could redeem his life by a ransom. In the 9th of Henry I. this power of redemption was taken away, 1108. The punishment of theft was very severe in England, till mitigated by Peel's Acts, 9 and 10 Geo. IV. 1829.'—Haydn, s. v. Theft.

793. To draw cuts is to draw lots; see Prologue, 835, 838, 845. A number of straws were held by one of the company; the rest drew one apiece, and whoever drew the longest (or the shortest) was the one on whom the lot fell. The fatal straw was the cut; cf. Welsh cwtws, a lot. In France, the lot fell on him who drew the longest straw; so that their phrase was—'tirer la longue paille.'

797. So in the Italian story—'rechi del pane e del vino,' let him fetch bread and wine.

806-894. Here Chaucer follows the general sense of the Italian story rather closely, but with certain amplifications.

807. That oon, the one; that other, the other (vulgarly, the tother).

819. conseil, a secret; as in P. Plowman, B. v. 168. We still say—'to keep one's own counsel.'

838. rolleth, revolves; cf. D. 2217, Troil. v. 1313.

844. So the Italian story—'Il Demonio ... mise in cuore a costui,' &c.; the devil put it in his heart; see vol. iii. p. 441.

848. leve, leave. 'That he had leave to bring him to sorrow.'

851-878. Of this graphic description there is no trace in the Italian story as we now have it. Cf. Rom. and Juliet, v. 1.

860. al-so, as. The sense is—as (I hope) God may save my soul. That our modern as is for als, which is short for also, from the A. S. eall-swá, is now well known. This fact was doubted by Mr. Singer, but Sir F. Madden, in his Reply to Mr. Singer's remarks upon Havelok the Dane, accumulated such a mass of evidence upon the subject as to set the question at rest for ever. It follows that as and also are doublets, or various spellings of the same word.

865. sterve, die; A. S. steorfan. The cognate German sterben retains the old general sense. See l. 888 below.

866. goon a paas, walk at an ordinary foot-pace; so also, a litel more than paas, a little faster than at a foot-pace, Prol. 825. Cotgrave has—'Aller le pas, to pace, or go at a foot-pace; to walk fair and softly, or faire and leisurely.' nat but, no more than only; cf. North of England nobbut. The time meant would be about twenty minutes at most.

888. In the Italian story—'amendue caddero morti,' both of them fell dead; see vol. iii. p. 442.

889. Avicen, Avicenna; mentioned in the Prologue, l. 432. Avicenna, or Ibn-Sina, a celebrated Arabian philosopher and physician, born near Bokhara A.D. 980, died A.D. 1037. His chief work was a treatise on medicine known as the Canon ('Kitâb al-Kânûn fi'l-Tibb,' that is, 'Book of the Canon in Medicine'). This book, alluded to in the next line, is divided into books and sections; and the Arabic word for 'section' is in the Latin version denoted by fen, from the Arabic fann, a part of any science. Chaucer's expression is not quite correct; he seems to have taken canon in its usual sense of rule, whereas it is really the title of the whole work. It is much as if one were to speak of Dante's work in the terms—'such as Dante never wrote in any Divina Commedia nor in any canto.' Lib. iv. Fen 1 of Avicenna's Canon treats 'De Venenis.'

895. Against this line is written, in MS. E. only, the word 'Auctor'; to shew that the paragraph contained in ll. 895-903 is a reflection by the author.

897. The final e in glutonye is preserved by the caesural pause; but the scansion of the line is more easily seen by supposing it suppressed. Hence in order to scan the line, suppress the final e in glutonye, lay the accent on the second u in luxúrie, and slur over the final -ie in that word. Thus—

O glút | oný' | luxú | rie and hás | ardrýë ||

904. good' men is the common phrase of address to hearers in old homilies, answering to the modern 'dear brethren.' The Pardoner, having told his tale (after which Chaucer himself has thrown in a moral reflection), proceeds to improve his opportunity by addressing the audience in his usual professional style; see l. 915.

907. noble, a coin worth 6s. 8d., first coined by Edward III. about 1339. See note to P. Plowman, B. iii. 45.

908. So in P. Plowman, B. prol. 75, it is said of the Pardoner that he 'raughte with his ragman [bull] rynges and broches.'

910. Cometh is to be pronounced Com'th, as in Prol. 839; so also in l. 925 below.

920. male, bag; see Prol. 694. Cf. E. mail-bag.

935. The first two syllables in peravénture are to be very rapidly pronounced; it is not uncommon to find the spelling peraunter, as in P. Plowman, B. xi. 10.

937. which a, what sort of a, how great a, what a.

945. Ye, for a grote, yea, even for a groat, i. e. 4d.

946. have I, may I have; an imprecation.

947. so theech, a colloquialism for so thee ich, as I may thrive, as I hope to thrive. The Host proceeds to abuse the Pardoner.

951. This is a reference to the 'Invention of the Cross,' or finding of the true cross by St. Helen, the mother of Constantine; commemorated on May 3. See Chambers, Book of Days, i. 586; Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints.

962. right ynough, quite enough; right is an adverb. Cf. l. 960.

NOTES TO GROUP D.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue.

There is nothing whatever to connect this Prologue with any preceding Tale. In MS. E. and most others, it follows the Man of Law's Tale, which cannot be right, as that Tale must be followed by the Shipman's Prologue. Curiously enough, that Prologue does follow the Man of Law's Tale in the Harleian MS., but the Wife of Bath's Tale is made to follow next, in place of the Shipman's Tale.

In MS. Pt., and several others, the Wife's Prologue follows the Merchant's Tale; such is the arrangement in edd. 1532 and 1561. This is possible, as the Merchant's Tale ends a Fragment, and the Wife's Prologue begins one; but it is easier to fit the lines at the end of the Merchant's Tale to the Squire's Prologue. In the Royal MS. 18. C. 2, and in MSS. Laud 739 and Barlow 20, there is an attempt to introduce the Wife's Prologue by some spurious lines which are printed in vol. iii. p. 446. I just note that we have a genuine Epilogue to the Merchant's Tale (see E. 2419-2440); which is quite enough to put the above lines out of court.

MS. Ln. has a different arrangement. It gives eight spurious lines at the end of the Squire's Tale, and then four more spurious lines to link them with the Wife's Prologue; see vol. iii. p. 446.

In the Ellesmere MS. there are numerous quotations in the margin, as will be noted in due course. In the Essays on Chaucer, pp. 293, the Rev. W. W. Woollcombe has shewn that the passages which seem to be taken from John of Salisbury are really taken from Jerome, whom John copied, verbally, at some length. I may add, that I came independently to the same conclusion; indeed, it becomes obvious, on investigation, that such was the case. Chaucer's chief sources for this Prologue are: Jerome's Epistle against Jovinian, and Le Roman de la Rose. I quote the former (frequently) from Hieronymi Opus Epistolarum, edited by Erasmus, printed at Basle in 1524.

1. auctoritee, authoritative text, quotable statement of a good author. 'Though there were no written statement on the subject, my own experience would enable me to speak of the evils of marriage.' Cf. the character of the Wife in the Prologue, A. 445-476. Lines 1-3 are imitated from Le Rom. de la Rose, 13006-10.

6. So in A. 460, with she hadde for I have had; see note to that line.

7. The alternative reading (in the footnote) does not agree with l. 6. MS. E. is quite right here. Probably MS. Cm. would have given us the same reading, but it is here mutilated.

11. In E., a sidenote has:—'In Cana Galilee'; from John, ii. 1.

12-13. In E., a sidenote has:—'Qui enim semel iuit ad nuptias, docuit semel esse nubendum.' This is from Hieronymi lib. i. c. Jovinianum; Epist. (ut supra), t. ii. p. 29. But the edition has uenit for iuit, and semel docuit.

14-22. This also is from Jerome, as above (p. 28):—'Siquidem et illa in Euangelio Iohannis Samaritana, sextum se maritum habere dicens, arguitur a domino, quod non sit uir eius. Vbi enim numerus maritorum est, ibi uir, qui proprie unus est, esse desiit.' Cf. John, iv. 18.

23-25. In the margin of E. we find:—'Non est uxorum numerus diffinitus.' About 15 lines after the last quotation, we find in Jerome:—'non esse uxorum numerum definitum.' This is immediately preceded (in Jerome) by a quotation from St. Paul (1 Cor. vii. 29), which is also quoted in the margin of E.

28. In the margin of E.—'Crescite et multiplicamini'; Gen. i. 28. The text was suggested by the fact that Jerome quotes it near the beginning of his letter (p. 18). Soon after (p. 19), he quotes Matt. xix. 5, which Chaucer quotes accordingly in l. 31.

33. bigamye. 'Bigamy, according to the canonists, consisted not only in marrying two wives at a time, but in marrying two spinsters successively.'—Bell.

octogamye, marriage of eight husbands. This queer word is due to Jerome, and affords clear proof of Chaucer's indebtedness. 'Non damno digamos, imò nec trigamos; et (si dici potest) octogamos'; p. 29. Cf. 'A dodecagamic Potter,' in a note to 'And a polygamic Potter,' in Shelley's Prologue to Peter Bell the Third.

35. here, hear; a gloss in E. has 'audi.' See 1 Kings, xi. 3.

44. Tyrwhitt says that, after this verse, some MSS. (as Camb. Dd. 4. 24, Ii. 3. 26, and Egerton 2726) have the six lines following:—

'Of whiche I have pyked out the beste

Both of here nether purs and of here cheste.

Diverse scoles maken parfyt clerkes,

And diverse practyk in many sondry werkes

Maken the werkman parfyt sekirly;

Of five husbondes scoleryng am I.'

He adds—'if these lines are not Chaucer's, they are certainly more in his manner than the generality of the imitations of him. Perhaps he wrote them, and afterwards blotted them out. They come in but awkwardly here, and he has used the principal idea in another place:—

For sondry scoles maken sotil clerkes;

Womman of many scoles half a clerk is'; E. 1427.

I beg leave to endorse Tyrwhitt's opinion; the six lines are certainly genuine, and I therefore repeat them, in a better spelling and form.

Of whiche I have y-piked out the beste,

Bothe of hir nether purs and of hir cheste.

Diverse scoles maken parfit clerkes;

Divers praktyk in many sondry werkes

Maketh the werkman parfit sekirly;

Of fyve housbondes scolering am I.

I know of no other example of scoler-ing, i. e. young scholar.

46. In the margin of E. is here written—'Si autem non continent, nubant'; from 1 Cor. vii. 9.

47. In the margin of E. is a quotation from Jerome, p. 28; but it is really from the Vulgate, 1 Cor. vii. 39; viz.—'Quod si dormierit uir eius, libera est; cui uult, nubat, tantum in Domino.' Cf. Rom. vii. 3.

51-52. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 28, and 1 Cor. vii. 9, here quoted in the margin of E.

54. 'Primus Lamech sanguinarius et homicida, unam carnem in duas diuisit uxores'; Jerome (as above), p. 29, l. 1; partly quoted here in the margin of E. Cf. Gen. iv. 19-23. 'There runs through the whole of this doctrine about bigamy a confusion between marrying twice and having two wives at once.'—Bell. See the allusions to Lamech in F. 550, and Anelida, 150.

55-56. In the margin of E. is:—'Abraham trigamus: Iacob quadrigamus.' Discussed by Jerome, p. 19, near the bottom.

61. 'Ecce, inquit [Iouinianus], Apostolus profitetur de uirginibus Domini se non habere praeceptum; et qui cum autoritate de maritis et uxoribus iusserat, non audet imperare quod Dominus non praecepit.... Frustra enim iubetur, quod in arbitrio eius ponitur cui iussum est'; &c.—Jerome (as above), p. 25.

65. See 1 Cor. vii. 25, here quoted in the margin of E.

69. 'Si uirginitatem Dominus imperasset, uidebatur nuptias condemnare, et hominum auferre seminarium, unde et ipsa uirginitas nascitur'; Jerome, p. 25.

75. Tyrwhitt aptly quotes from Lydgate's Falls of Princes, fol. xxvi:—

'And oft it happeneth, he that hath best ron

Doth not the spere like his desert possede.'

We must conclude that a dart or spear was the prize given (in some games) to the best runner. That dart here means 'prize,' appears from another proof altogether. For in the margin of E. we here find a quotation from Jerome, p. 26, which runs in a fuller form, thus:—'Proponit ἀγωνοθέτης praemium, inuitat ad cursum, tenet in manu uirginitatis brauium, ... et clamitat, ... qui potest capere, capiat.' The word brauium, i. e. prize in a race, is borrowed from the Vulgate, 1 Cor. ix. 24, where the Greek has βραβεῖον. 'Catch who so may,' in l. 76, represents 'qui potest capere, capiat.' Hence cacche here means 'win.'

81. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 7, here quoted in E.

84. 'Haec autem dico secundum indulgentiam'; 1 Cor. vii. 6.

87. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 1, here quoted in E.

89. tassemble, for to assemble, to bring together.

Cf. 'qui ignem tetigerit, statim aduritur,' &c.—Jerome, p. 21.

91. Cf. 'Simulque considera, quod aliud donum uirginitatis sit, aliud nuptiarum'; Jerome (as above), ii. 22.

96. preferre is evidently a neuter verb here, meaning 'be preferable to.'

101. tree, wood; alluding to 2 Tim. ii. 20.

103. a propre yifte, a gift peculiar to him; see 1 Cor. vii. 7, here quoted in E.

105. See Rev. xiv. 1-4, a line or two from which is here quoted in E.

110. fore, track, course, footsteps; glossed 'steppes' in MS. E. Some MSS. have the inferior lore, shewing that the scribes understood the word no better than the writer of the note in Bell's Chaucer, who says—'Harl. MS. reads fore, which is probably a mere clerical error.' Wright, however, correctly retains fore. It occurs again in D. 1935, q. v., where Tyrwhitt again alters it to lore. Bradley gives ten examples of it, to which I can add another, viz. 'he folowede the fore of an oxe,' Trevisa, ii. 343 (repeated from the example in i. 197, which Bradley cites). A. S. fōr, a course, way; from faran (pt. t. fōr), to go. Cf. Matt. xix. 21, which is quoted in Cp. and Pt.

115. 'Et cur, inquies, creata sunt genitalia, et sic a conditore sapientissimo fabricati sumus, &c. ... ipsa organa ... sexus differentiam praedicant'; Jerome (as above), p. 42.

117. I give the reading of E., which seems much the best. For wight, Cm. has wyf. Hn. has: And of so parfit wys a wight y-wroght; which is also good. But Cp. Pt. Ln. have: And of so parfyt wise and why y-wrought. Hl. has: And in what wise was a wight y-wrought. The last reading is the worst.

128. ther, where, wherein. With l. 130, cf. 1 Cor. vii. 3, where the Vulgate has 'Uxori uir debitum reddat.'

135. 'Nunquam ergo cessemus a libidine, ne frustra huiuscemodi membra portemus'; Jerome, p. 42.

144. hoten, be called; A. S. hātan. The sense is—'Let virgins be as bread made of selected wheaten flour; and let us wives be called barley-bread; nevertheless Jesus refreshed many a man with barley-bread, as St. Mark tells us.' Chaucer makes a slight mistake; it is St. John who speaks of barley-loaves; see John vi. 9 (cf. Mark vi. 38). For hoten, Tyrwhitt, Wright, Bell, and Morris, all give the mistaken reading eten, which misses the whole point of the argument; but Gilman has hoten. There is no question as to what the Wife should eat, but only as to her condition in life. It is the Wife herself who is compared to something edible.

The comparison is from Jerome (as above), p. 21:—'Velut si quis definiat: Bonum est triticeo pane uesci, et edere purissimam similam. Tamen ne quis compulsus fame stercus bubulum: concedo ei, ut uescatur et hordeo.'

147. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 20, here quoted in E.

151. daungerous, difficult of access; cf. l. 514.

155. In the margin of E.—'Qui uxorem habet, et debitor dicitur, et esse in praeputio, et seruus uxoris,' &c. From Jerome (as above), p. 26.

156. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 28, here quoted in E.

158. Alluding to 1 Cor. vii. 4, here quoted in E.

161. Alluding to Eph. v. 25, here quoted in E.

167-168. What, why. to-yere, this year; cf. to-day. 'To-yere, horno, hornus, hornotinus'; Catholicon Anglicum. The phrase is still in use in some of our dialects.

170. another tonne. This expression is probably due to Le Roman de la Rose, 6839:—

'Jupiter en toute saison

A sor le suel de sa maison,

Ce dit Omers, deus plains tonneaus,' &c.

This again is from Homer's two urns, sources of good and evil (Iliad, xxiv. 527), as quoted by Boethius, bk. ii. pr. 2. See note in vol. ii. p. 428 (l. 53). It is suggested that the Pardoner has been used to a tun of ale, and now he must expect to have a taste of something less pleasant. Cf. l. 177.

One of Gower's French Balades contains the lines:—

'Deux tonealx ad [Cupide] dont il les gentz fait boire;

L'un est assetz plus douls que n'est pyment,

L'autre est amier plus que null arrement.'

180. The saying referred to is written in the margin of Dd., as Tyrwhitt tells us. It runs:—'Qui per alios non corrigitur, alii per ipsum corrigentur.' With regard to its being written in Ptolemy's Almagest, Tyrwhitt quaintly remarks:—'I suspect that the Wife of Bath's copy of Ptolemy was very different from any that I have been able to meet with.' The same remark applies to her second quotation in l. 326 below. I have no doubt that the Wife is simply copying, for convenience, these words in Le Roman de la Rose, 7070:—

'Car nous lisons de Tholomee

Une parole moult honeste

Au comencier de s'Almageste,' &c.

Jean de Meun then cites a passage of quite another kind, but the Wife of Bath did not stick at such a trifle. The Almagest is mentioned again in the same, l. 18772.

As to the above saying, cf. Barbour's Bruce, i. 121, 2; and my notes to the line at pp. 545 and 612 of the same. 'Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum'; cf. Rom. de la Rose, 8041; Robert of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, 8086.

183. Almageste. The celebrated astronomer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, who flourished in the second century, wrote, as his chief work, the μεγάλη σύνταξις τῆς ἀστρονομίας. This work was also called, for brevity, μεγάλη, and afterwards μεγίστη (greatest); out of which, by prefixing the Arab. article al, the Arabs made Al-mejisti, or Al-magest.

197. Here wér-e is made dissyllabic. For The three, Hl. has Tuo; which is clearly wrong.

199. In the margin of E. is written part of the last sentence in Part I. of Jerome's treatise:—'hierophantas quoque Atheniensium usque hodie cicutae sorbitione castrari; et postquam in pontificatum fuerint electi, uiros esse desinere.' Probably quoted to emphasize the sense of uiros.

207-210. Imitated from Le Rom. de la Rose, 13478-82.

218. Dunmowe, in Essex, N. W. of Chelmsford. Tyrwhitt refers us to Blount's Ancient Tenures, p. 162, and adds:—'This whimsical institution was not peculiar to Dunmow; there was the same in Bretagne. "A l'Abbaie Sainct Melaine, près Rennes, y a, plus de six cens ans sont, un costé de lard encore tous frais et non corrumpu; et neantmoins voué et ordonné aux premiers, qui par an et jour ensemble mariez ont vescut san debat, grondement, et sans s'en repentir."—Contes d'Eutrap, t. ii. p. 161.' See P. Plowman, C. xi. 276, and my long note on the subject.

220. fawe, fain; a variant form of fain, A. S. fægen, fægn. See Havelok, 2160; Alisaunder, ed. Weber, 1956; &c.

221. Here occurs the first reference to the Aureolus Liber de Nuptiis, written by a certain Theophrastus, who is mentioned below (l. 671), and in E. 1310. Jerome gives a long extract from this work in his book against Jovinian (so frequently cited above), and has thus preserved a portion of it; and John of Salisbury transferred the whole extract bodily to his Policraticus. It it clear that Chaucer used the work of Jerome rather than that of John of Salisbury. The extract from Theophrastus occurs not far from the end of the first book of the epistle against Jovinian; and near the beginning of it occur the words—'de foro ueniens quid attulisti?'—Jerome (as above), p. 51. This probably suggested the present line, as it is a question put by a wife to her husband.

226. and bere hem, i. e. and wrongly accuse them, or make them believe.

227. Tyrwhitt quotes two corresponding lines from Le Roman de la Rose:—

'Car plus hardiment que nulz homs

Certainement jurent et mentent.'

He refers to l. 19013; but in Méon's edition, these are ll. 18336-7.

229. Cf. Le Rom. de la Rose, 9949:—'Ce ne di-ge pas por les bonnes.'

231. wys, cunning. In MSS. E. and Hn. the caesural pause is marked after wyf. The line, as it stands, is imperfect, and only to be scanned by making the pause after wyf occupy the space of a syllable. The reading wys-e gets over the difficulty, but is hardly what we should expect; it is remarkable that E. Hn. and Cm. all read wys, without a final e; cf. wys in A. 68, 785, 851. The only justification of the form wys-e would be to consider it as feminine; and such seems to be the case in Gower, Conf. Am., ed. Pauli, i. 156:—'His doughter wis-e Petronel-le.' if that she can hir good, if she knows what is to her advantage.

232. 'Will make him believe that the chough is mad.' In the New E. Dict., s. v. Chough, Dr. Murray shews that the various readings cou, cowe, kowe, &c. tend to prove that cow in this passage may well mean 'chough' or 'jackdaw' rather than 'cow.' This solves the difficulty; for the allusion is clearly to one of the commonest of medieval stories, told of various talking birds, originally of a parrot.

Very briefly, the story runs thus. A jealous husband, leaving his wife, sets his parrot to watch her. On his return, the bird reports her misconduct. But the wife avers that the parrot lies, and tries to prove it by an ingenious stratagem. The husband believes his frail wife's plot, and promptly wrings the bird's neck for telling stories, under the impression that it has gone mad.

I formerly explained this in The Academy, April 5, 1890, p. 239. In the no. for April 19, p. 269, Mr. Clouston referred me to his paper on 'The Tell-tale Bird' printed in the Chaucer Society's Originals and Analogues, p. 439, with reference to the Manciple's Tale, which relates a similar story. See the account of the Manciple's Tale in vol. iii. p. 501. It is the story of the Husband and the Parrot, in the Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

This line of Chaucer's seems to have attracted attention, though there is nothing to shew how it was understood. Thus, in Roy's Rede me and be nott Wrothe, ed. Arber, p. 80, we find:—

'Because they canne flatter and lye,

Makynge beleve the cowe is wode.'

In Awdelay's Fraternyte of Vacabondes (E. E. T. S.), p. 14, we find: 'Gyle Hather is he, that wyll stand by his Maister when he is at dinner, and byd him beware that he eate no raw meate, because he would eate it himself. This is a pickthanke knaue, that would make his Maister beleue that the Cowe is woode.' Palsgrave, in his French Dictionary, p. 421, has:—'I am borne in hande of a thyng; On me faict a croyre. He wolde beare me in hande the kowe is woode; il me veult fayre a croyre de blanc que ce soit noyr.' The spelling coe for 'jackdaw' occurs in Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, l. 468. See also Hoccleve's Works, ed. Furnivall, p. 217, where 'Magge, the good kowe' is an obvious error for 'Magge the wode kowe,' since 'Magge' is a name for a mag-pie. This I also explained in The Academy, April 1, 1893, p. 285.

233. 'And she will take witness, of her own maid, of her (the maid's) assent (to her truth).' This is part of the proof of the correctness of the interpretation of the preceding line. For, in most of the versions of the tale above referred to, the lady is aided and abetted by a maid who is in her confidence.

235. Here Chaucer takes several hints from the book of Theophrastus as quoted by Jerome; see note to l. 221. Thus (in Jerome, as above, p. 51) we find:—'Deinde per noctes totas garrulae conquestiones:—Illa ornatior procedit in publicum; haec honoratior ab omnibus: ego in conuentu feminarum misella despicior. Cur aspiciebas uicinam? Quid cum ancillula loquebaris?' It is continued at l. 243; cf. 'Non amicum habere possumus, non sodalem.' Next, at l. 248; cf. 'Pauperem alere difficile est, diuitem ferre tormentum.' Next, at l. 253; cf. 'Pulchra cito adamatur.... Difficile custoditur quod plures amant.' Jean de Meun also quotes from Theophrastus plentifully, mentioning him by name in Le Rom. de la Rose, l. 8599; see the whole passage. 'Caynard, obsolete, adapted from F. cagnard, sluggard (according to Littré, from Ital. cagna, bitch, fem. of cane, dog). A lazy fellow, a sluggard; a term of reproach. (1303) Rob. of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, l. 8300: A kaynarde ande an olde folte [misprinted folle]. (About 1310) in Wright's Lyric Poems, xxxix. 110 (1842): This croked caynard, sore he is a-dred.'—New Eng. Dict. (where the present passage is also quoted).

246. See A. 1261, and the note. Wright here adds two more examples. He says—'In the satirical poem of Doctor Double-ale, [in Hazlitt's Early Pop. Poetry, iii. 308], we have the lines:—

Then seke another house,

This is not worth a louse;

As dronken as a mouse.

Among the Letters relating to the Suppression of Monasteries (Camden Soc.), p. 133, there is one from a monk of Pershore, who says that his brother monks of that house "drynk an bowll after collacyon tell ten or xii. of the clock, and cum to mattens as dronck as mys."'

248. See note to l. 235 above; so again, for l. 253, cf. Le Rom. de la Rose, 8617-8638.

255. Cf. Ovid, Heroid. xvi. 288:—

'Lis est cum forma magna pudicitiae.'

257. Probably Chaucer was thinking of a passage in Theophrastus, following soon after that quoted in the note to l. 235. 'Alius forma, alius ingenio, alius facetiis, alius liberalitate sollicitat.' But Theophrastus is referring to the accomplishments of the wooers rather than of the women wooed. Cf. Le Rom. de la Rose, ll. 8629-36—'S'ele est bele,' &c.

263. Clearly from Le Rom. de la Rose, l. 8637—

'Car tor de toutes pars assise

Envis eschape d'estre prise.'

265. Immediately after, we have—

'S'ele rest lede, el vuet à tous plaire;

... vuet tous ceus qui la voient.'

269. See in Hazlitt's Proverbs: 'Joan's as good as my lady in the dark.'

271. 'It is a hard matter to control a thing that no one would willingly keep.' Simply translated from Theophrastus (see note to l. 235), who has—'Molestum est possidere, quod nemo habere dignetur.'

272. helde, a variant form of holde, hold, keep; from A. S. healdan. As Chaucer usually has holde (see D. 1144), helde is probably used for the sake of the rime. Note that it is the only example of a rime in -elde in the whole of the Canterbury Tales; indeed, the only other example is in Troil. ii. 337-8. We find the same rime in King Horn, l. 911:—

'Mi rengne thu schalt welde,

And to spuse helde

Reynild mi doghter.'

275. Again from Theophrastus (near the beginning):—'Non est ergo uxor ducenda sapienti. Primum enim impediri studia philosophiae,' &c.

277. welked, withered; see C. 738, and Stratmann.

278. Chaucer quotes this, as from Solomon, in the Pers. Tale, I. 631, and explains it there more fully; and again, in the Tale of Melibeus, B. 2276. An Anglo-French poet named Herman wrote a poem 'on the three words, smoke, rain, and woman, which, according to Solomon, drive a man from his house; and it appears from the poem that it was composed at the suggestion of Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1147.'—T. Wright, Biographia Brit. Literaria, Anglo-Norman Period, p. 333. See also my note to P. Plowman, C. xx. 297, quoted in the note to B. 2276 above, at p. 207.

282. This again is from Theophrastus (see note to l. 235):—'Si iracunda, si fatua, si deformis, si superba, si foetida; quodcunque uitii est, post nuptias discimus.'

285. Immediately after the last quotation there follows:—'Equus, asinus, bos, canis, et uilissima mancipia, uestes quoque et lebetes, sedile lignum, calix et urceolus fictilis probantur prius, et sic emuntur: sola uxor non ostenditur, ne ante displiceat, quàm ducatur.'

293. Next follows:—'Attendenda semper eius est facies, et pulchritudo laudanda.... Vocanda "domina," celebrandus natalis eius, ... honoranda nutrix eius, et gerula, seruus, patrimus, et alumnus,' &c. Cf. Le Rom. de la Rose, 13914.

303-306. Next follows:—'et formosus assecla, et procurator calamistratus, et in longam securamque libidinem exectus spado: sub quibus nominibus adulteri delitescunt.'

Chaucer has merely taken the general idea, and given it a form peculiarly adapted to his sketch. That he really was thinking of this passage is clear from the fact that, in the margin of E., appears this note—'Et procurator calamistratus.'

311. of our dame, of the mistress, i. e. of myself.

312. Seint Iame, St. James; see A. 466, and the note.

320. Alis, Alice; A. F. Alice, Alys, Aleyse; Lat. Alicia. Skelton rimes Ales with tales; Elinour Rummyng, 351-2.

322. at our large, free, at large; we now drop our. Cf. A. 1283.

325. See notes to ll. 180, 183. We need not search in Ptolemy for this saying.

327. who hath the world in honde, i. e. who has abundant wealth. Cf. l. 330. The sense of the proverb is, that the wisest man is he who is contented, who cares nothing that others are much richer than himself. Cf. 1 Tim. vi. 6, 8; and the proverb—'Content is all.' In the margin of E. is written the Latin form of the saying:—'Inter omnes altior existit, qui non curat in cuius manu sit mundus.'

333. werne, forbid, refuse. The idea is from Le Roman de la Rose, l. 7447:—

'Moult est fox qui tel chose esperne,

C'est la chandele en la lanterne;

Qui mil en i alumeroit,

Ja mains de feu n'i troveroit.

Chascun set la similitude,' &c.

It was quite a proverbial phrase, as the last line shews. It occurs, for example, in Alexander and Dindimus, ed. Skeat, l. 233, and in the original Latin text of the same. Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere used the device of 'a lighted candle, by which others are lighted, with the motto Non degener addam'; i. e. I will add without loss.—Mrs. Palliser, Historic Devices, p. 263. Cicero (De Officiis, i. 16) quotes three lines from Ennius containing the same idea.

342. From 1 Tim. ii. 9, here quoted in the margin of E.

350. his, its. The pronoun is here neuter, and is the same in all the MSS. Tyrwhitt altered it to hire (her), but needlessly. But in l. 352, the sex of the cat is defined. As to the singed cat, 'that, as they say, does not like to roam,' see The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Crane, (Folk Lore Soc.), 1890, pp. 219, 241.

354. goon a-caterwawed, go a-caterwauling. I explain the suffix -ed as put for -eth, A. S. -að, as in on huntað, a-hunting; where -að is a substantival suffix. I have given several examples of this curious substitution in the note to C. 406, q. v. Cotgrave has: 'Aller à gars, to hunt after lads; (a wench) to go a caterwawling.' And see Caterwaul in the New Eng. Dict.

357. Clearly from Le Rom. de la Rose, 14583:—

'Nus ne puet metre en fame garde,

S'ele meisme ne se garde:

Se c'iert Argus qui la gardast,

Qui de ses cent yex l'esgardast, ...

N'i vaudroit sa garde mès riens:

Fox est qui se garde tel mesriens.'

As to Argus, see Ovid, Met. i. 625.

362. Here Chaucer again quotes largely from Hieronymus c. Iouinianum, lib. ii.; in Epist. (Basil. 1524), ii. 36, 37. Many of the passages are cited from the Vulgate, but they are all found in this treatise of Jerome's, which furnishes the real key. Jerome says:—'Per tria mouetur terra, quartum autem non potest ferre; si seruus regnet, et stultus si saturetur panibus, et odiosa uxor (see l. 366) si habeat bonum uirum, et ancilla si eiciat dominam suam. Ecce et hic inter malorum magnitudinem uxor ponitur'; p. 37. Really quoted from Prov. xxx. 21-23.

371. Again from Jerome, p. 37: 'Infernus, et amor mulieris, et terra quae non satiatur aqua, et ignis non dicit "satis est."' Really from Prov. xxx. 16, where the A. V. has 'the grave' instead of 'hell.' Note that Jerome here has amor mulieris, though the Vulgate has os uuluae. The passage is quoted in E., with dicent for dicit.

373. wylde fyr, wild fire; i. e. fiercely burning fire, probably with reference to lighted naphtha or the like. Chaucer again uses the term in the Pers. Tale, I. 445. Greek fire was of a like character. In the Romance of Rich. Coer de Lion, l. 2627, we find:—

'King Richard, oute of hys galye,

Caste wylde-fyr into the skye,

And fyr Gregeys into the see,

And al on fyr wer[en] the[y] ...

The see brent all off fyr Gregeys.'

Thus the Greek fire, at any rate, was not quenched by the sea. See La Chimie an moyen âge, par M. Berthelot, p. 100.

376. From Jerome (p. 36):—'Sicut in ligno uermis, ita perdit uirum suum uxor malefica.' Quoted in the margin of E., with perdet for perdit. Cf. 'Sicut ... uermis ligno,' Prov. xxv. 20 (Vulgate); not in the A. V.

378. Jerome has (p. 39):—'Nemo enim melius scire potest quid sit uxor uel mulier, illo qui passus est.' (Quoted in E.)

386. byte and whyne, i. e. both bite (when in a bad temper) and whine or whinny as if wanting a caress (when in a good one). It is made clearer by the parallel line in Anelida, l. 157, on which see my note in vol. i. p. 535.

389. Cf. our proverb—'first come, first served.' Hazlitt quotes the medieval Lat. proverb—'Ante molam primus qui venit, non molat imus.' And Mr. Wright quotes the French proverb of the fifteenth century—'Qui premier vient au moulin premier doit mouldre.' Cotgrave, s. v. Mouldre, has the same; with arrive for vient, and le premier for premier.

392. hir lyve, i. e. during their (whole) life. With ll. 393-6, cf. Le Rom. de la Rose, 14032-42.

399. colour, pretext; as in Acts, xxvii. 30.

401. In the margin of Cp. and Ln. is the medieval line: 'Fallere, flere, nere, dedit Deus in muliere.' Pt. has the same, with statuit for dedit.

406. grucching, grumbling; mod. E. grudge. Hl. has chidyng.

407. Suggested by the complaint of a jealous man to his wife, in Le Roman de la Rose, 9129:—

'Car quant ge vous voil embracier

Por besier et por solacier,' &c.

414. 'Everything has its price.'

415. This proverb has occurred before; see A. 4134. Lydgate quotes it in st. 2 of a poem with the burden—'Lyk thyn audience, so utter thy langage'; see Polit., Relig., and Love Poems, ed. Furnivall, p. 25, l. 15. John of Salisbury says:—'Veteri celebratur prouerbio: quia uacuae manus temeraria petitio est'; Policraticus, lib. v. c. 10.

418. Cf. l. 417. Bacon was considered as a common food for rustics. Cf. 'bacon-fed knaves'; 1 Hen. IV. ii. 2. 88. It is not worth while to discuss the matter further.

430. conclusioun, purpose, aim, object.

432. Wilkin was evidently, like Malle or Malkin, a name for a pet lamb or sheep; see B. 4021. In this line (if mekely be trisyllabic, and lok'th monosyllabic), the word our-e is dissyllabic, which is not common in Chaucer.

433. ba, kiss; see note to A. 3709.

435. spyced conscience, scrupulous conscience; see note to A. 526.

446. Peter, by St. Peter; cf. Hous of Fame, 1034, 2000; also G. 665, and the note; and B. 1404. I shrewe you, I beshrew you.

460. This story is from Valerius Maximus; Pliny tells it of one Mecenius. In the margin of E., the reference is exactly given, viz. to 'Valerius, lib. 6. cap. 3,' which is quite right. I quote the passage: 'Egnatii autem Metelli longe minori de caussa; qui uxorem, quod vinum bibisset, fuste percussam interemit. Idque factum non accusatore tantum, sed etiam reprehensore caruit; unoquoque existimante, optimo illam exemplo violatae sobrietatis poenas pependisse.'—Valerii Maximi lib. vi. c. 3. Cf. Pliny, xiv. 13; Tertullian, Apologeticus, 6. Chaucer twice quotes again the same chapter; see notes to ll. 642, 647.

464. moste I thinke, I must (needs) think. For moste, Cm. has muste, Ln. must. So also moste = must, in l. 478.

467. From Le Roman de la Rose, 13656:—

'Car puis que fame est enyvree

Il n'a point en li de deffense.'

Cf. Ovid, Art. Amat. iii. 765; &c.

469. Cf. Le Roman de la Rose, 13136:—

'Par Diex! si me plest-il encores:

Quant ge m'i sui bien porpensée,

Moult me délite en ma pensée,

Et me resbaudissent li membre,

Quant de mon bon tens me remembre,

Et de la jolivete vie

Dont mes cuers a si grant envie.'

And again, just above, l. 13128:—

'Més riens n'i vaut le regreter;

Qui est alé, ne puet venir,' &c.

These lines form part of the speech of La Vieille, on whom the Wife of Bath is certainly modelled; cf. note to A. 461.

483. Ioce, in Latin Judocus, a Breton saint, whose day is Dec. 13, and who died in A. D. 669. Alban Butler says that his hermitage became a famous monastery, which stood in the diocese of Amiens, and was called St. Josse-sur-mer. This part of France became familiar to many Englishmen in the course of the wars of Edward III. See, however, Le Testament de Jean de Meung, 461-4, which I take to mean:—'When dame Katherine sees the proof of Sir Joce, who cares not a prune for his wife's love, she is so fearful that her own husband will do her a like harm, that she often makes for him a staff of a similar bit of wood'; F. 'Si li refait sovent d'autel fust une croce.' It is obvious that Chaucer has copied this in l. 484, and that he here found his rime to croce.

484. 'I made a stick for him of the same wood'; i. e. I retaliated by rousing his jealousy; compare the last note. Croce, a staff, O. F. croce, F. crosse; see Croche in the New E. Dictionary. Cf. Prompt. Parv., p. 103, note 5; and my note to P. Plowm. C. xi. 92.

487. In Hazlitt's Proverbs is given—'To fry in his own grease,' from Heywood; it is explained to mean 'to be very passionate,' but means rather 'to torment oneself.' He also quotes, from Heywood:—

'She fryeth in hir owne grease, but as for my parte,

If she be angry, beshrew her angry harte.'

See also Rich. Coer de Lion, 4409; Lydgate's Temple of Glas, ed. Schick, pp. 14, 94.

492. The story is given by Jerome, in the treatise so often quoted above. 'Legimus quendam apud Romanos nobilem, cum eum amici arguerent quare uxorem formosam et castam et diuitem repudiasset, protendisse pedem, et dixisse eis: Et hic soccus quem cernitis, uidetur uobis nouus et elegans, sed nemo scit praeter me ubi me premat.'—Hieron. c. Iouinianum, lib. i.: Epist. ii. 52 (Basil. 1524). John of Salisbury has the same story, almost in the same words, but gives the name of the noble Roman, viz. P. Cn. Graecinus. See his Policraticus, lib. v. c. 10. Chaucer alludes to it again below, in E. 1553.

495. She went thrice to Jerusalem; see A. 463.

496. 'Across the arch which usually divides the chancel from the nave in English churches was stretched a beam, on which was placed a rood, i. e. a figure of our Lord on the cross.'—Bell.

498. In the margin of E. is the note:—'Appelles fecit mirabile opus in tumulo Darij: vnde in Alexandro, libro sexto.' There is a similar sidenote at C. 16; see note to that line. This tomb of Darius is due to fiction. The description of it occurs (as said) in the sixth book of the Alexandreid, a vast poem in Latin, by one Philippe Gualtier de Chatillon, a native of Lille and a canon of Tournay, who flourished about A. D. 1200. According to this poet, the tomb was the work of a Jewish artist named Apelles. See Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, ii. 353-5, and G. Douglas, ed. Small, i. 134.

503. There is a parallel passage in Le Rom. de la Rose, 14678-99.

514. daungerous, sparing, not free; cf. l. 151.

517. Wayte, observe, watch; 'observe what thing it is that we have a difficulty in obtaining.'

521. 'With great demur (or caution) we set forth all we have to sell.' With daunger implies that the seller makes a great difficulty of selling things, i. e. drives a hard bargain, and makes a great favour of it. Withoute daunger means without opposition, or without resistance; Gower, C. A. v. ii. p. 40.

Outen, put out, set out or forth, is from A. S. ūtian, verb, a derivative of ūt, out. Both here and in G. 834, Tyrwhitt needlessly alters the reading to uttren, against all the MSS. The note in Bell's Chaucer says—'Difficulty in making our market makes us bring out all our ware for sale'; which is utterly remote from the true sense, and would be the conduct of a reckless, not of a cautious woman. Compare the next two lines.

522. 'A great throng of buyers makes ware dear (because there is then great demand); and offering things too cheaply makes people think they are of little value (because there is then too ready a supply).' Hence the wise woman is careful not to be in too great a hurry to sell; and such is the meaning of l. 521. It is further implied that, when she gets her expected price, she does not hold out for a higher one.

552. From Le Rom. de la Rose, 9068, which again is from Ovid. 'Spectatum ueniunt, ueniunt spectentur ut ipsae'; Art. Amat. i. 99.

553. 'How could I know where my favour was destined to be bestowed?'

555. From Le Rom. de la Rose, 13726:—

'Sovent voise à la mestre eglise,

Et face visitacions,

A noces, à processions,

A geus, à festes, à karoles,' &c.

556. vigilies, festivals held on the eves or vigils of saints' days. See note to A. 377.

557. For preching, Cm. has prechyngis, and Hl. prechings; but all the rest have preching, which I therefore retain. To preching means 'to any place where a sermon was being preached'; much as we say 'to church.' But the sermons were often given in the open air. The Wife's object was to go wherever there was a concourse of people, in order to shew her best clothes. Women still go 'to church' for a like reason. Wycliff speaks strongly of the evil of pilgrimages; see his Works, ed. Matthew, p. 279; ed. Arnold, i. 83.

558. 'The miracle-plays were favourite occasions for people to assemble in great numbers.'—Wright. Wright refers to a tale among his Latin Stories, p. 100. See the Sermon against Miracle-Plays, in Reliquiae Antiquae, ii. 42; reprinted in Mätzner's Sprachproben, ii. 224.

559. 'And wore upon (me) my gay scarlet gowns.' The use of upon without a case following it is curious; but see D. 1018, 1382 below.

The word gyte occurs again in A. 3954, where Simkin's wife wears 'a gyte of reed,' i. e. a red gown. Nares shews that it is used thrice by Gascoigne, and once by Fairfax. The sense of 'robe' will suit the passage there quoted. Skelton has gyte in Elynour, l. 68, where the sense of 'robe' or 'dress' is certain. It is clearly the same word as the Lowland Scotch gyde, a dress, robe; see note to A. 3954 (p. 118). That the word meant both 'veil' and 'gown' appears from the fact that Roquefort explains the derived O. F. wiart as a veil with which women cover their faces; whilst Godefroy explains its variant form guiart as a dress or vestment.

560. The sense is; 'the worms, moths, and mites never fretted them (i. e. my dresses) one whit; I say it at my peril.' There is no difficulty, and the reading is quite correct. Yet Tyrwhitt altered peril to paraille, which he explains by 'apparel,' and Wright actually explains perel, in the Harl. MS., in the same way! Such an explanation turns the whole into nonsense, as it could then only mean: 'the worms, &c. never devoured themselves (!) at all upon my apparel.' Tyrwhitt evidently took it to mean 'never fed themselves upon (i. e. with) my apparel'; but it is impossible that frete hem could ever be so interpreted. Frete can only mean 'devoured,' and it requires an accusative case; this accusative is hem, which can only refer to the gytes or 'gowns.' And this leaves no other sense for peril except precisely 'peril,' which is of course right. Upon my peril is clearly a phrase, with the same sense as 'at my peril.' The phrase is no recondite one; cf. Rich. III. iv. i. 26, where we find 'on my peril'; and again, 'upon his peril,' in Antony, v. 2. 143; Cymbeline, v. 4. 189.

566. of my purveyance, owing to my prudence, or prudent foresight; cf. l. 570. Purveyance, providence, and prudence are mere variants; from Lat. prouidentia.

572. From Le Rom. de la Rose, 13354:—

'Moult a soris povre secors,

Et fait en grant peril sa druge,

Qui n'a c'ung partuis à refuge.

Tout ainsinc est-il de la fame,' &c.

In Kemble's Solomon and Saturn, p. 57, several parallel proverbs are given; e.g.—

'Mus miser est antro qui tantum clauditur uno.'

'Dolente la souris qui ne seit c'un pertuis.'

He refers us to Collins' Dict. of Span. Proverbs, p. 36; MS. Harl. 3362, fol. 40; Grüter, Florilegium Ethico-politicum, p. 32; G. Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, p. 67; MS. Proverbs, Corp. Chr. Cam. no. 450; MS. Harl. 1800, fol. 37 b. The proverb in Herbert is—'The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken'; cf. Hazlitt's Proverbs, p. 380.

575. 'I made him believe'; see above. enchanted, bewitched, viz. with philtres or love-potions; according to an old belief. See Othello, i. 2. 63-79. Cf. also Le Rom. de la Rose, 13895:—'Si croi que m'aves enchantee'; and the note to D. 747 (p. 311).

581. Red occurs so frequently as an epithet of gold, that association of gold with blood was easy enough. See note to B. 2059 (p. 196).

602. a coltes tooth, the tooth of a young colt. Cf. 'Young folks [are] most apt to love ... the colt's evil is common to all complexions'; Burton, Anat. of Mel. pt. 3. sec. 2. mem. 2. subsec. 1. 'Your colt's tooth is not cast yet'; Hen. VIII. i. 3. 48. And see A. 3888, E. 1847.

603. Gat-tothed; see note to A. 468.

604. 'I bore the impress of the seal of saint Venus.'

609, 610. Venerien, influenced by Venus; Marcien, influenced by Mars; cf. ll. 611, 612.

613. ascendent, the sign in the ascendant (or just rising in the east) at my birth. This sign was Taurus, which was also called 'the mansion of Venus.' When Mars was seen in this sign when ascending, it shewed the influence of Mars on Venus. Cf. the 'Compleint of Mars.'

In the margin of E. is a Latin note, referring us to 'Mansor Amphorison' 19'; followed by a quotation. The reference is to a treatise called 'Almansoris Propositiones,' which begins with the words:—'Aphorismorum compendiolum, mi Rex, petiisti,' &c. Hence 'Amphorison' 19' is an error for 'Aphorismorum 19.' This treatise is printed in a small volume entitled 'Astrologia Aphoristica Ptolomaei, Hermetis, ... Almansoris, &c.; Ulmae, 1641.' In this edition, the section quoted (at p. 66) is not 19, but 14; and runs thus:—'Cuicunque fuerint in ascendente infortunae, turpem notam in facie patietur.' With 'infortunae,' we must supply 'planetae'; and the object of this quotation is, clearly, to explain l. 619. Still more to the point is a remark in sect. 74 of a treatise printed in the same volume, entitled 'Cl. Ptolomaei Centum Dicta'; where we find—'Quicunque Martem ascendentem habet, omnino cicatricem in facie habebit.'

Immediately after the above, in the margin of E., is a second quotation, with a reference in the words:—'Hec Hermes in libro fiducie; Amphoriso. 24o.' Here 'Amphorismo' should be 'Aphorismo.' The quotation occurs in a third treatise, printed in the same volume as the other two already mentioned, with the title 'Hermetis centum Aphorismorum liber.' In this printed edition, the section quoted is not the 24th, but the 25th; and runs thus:—'In natiuitatibus mulierum, cum fuerit ascendens aliqua de domibus Veneris, Marte existente in eis [vel e contrario], erit mulier impudica. Idem erit, si Capricornum habuerit in ascendente.' Here 'aliqua ... Veneris' means 'one of the mansions of Venus; her two mansions being Taurus and Libra.' The former is expressly referred to in l. 613, and is therefore intended.

In sect. 28 of the same treatise, we find:—'Cum fuerit interrogatio pro muliere, simpliciter accipe significationem à Venere.' Hence Venus is the planet that ruled over women.

'The woman that is born in this time [i. e. under Taurus] shall be effectuall ... she shall have many husbands and many children; she shall be in her best estate at xvi years, and she shall have a sign in the middest of her body.'—Shepherdes Kalender, ed. 1656, sig. Q 5.

618. The phrase 'la chambre Venus' occurs in Le Rom. de la Rose, 13540.

621. wis, surely, certainly: 'for, may God so surely be my,' &c.

624. 'Ne vous chaut s'il est cors ou lons'; Rom. de la Rose, 8554.

634. on the list, on the ear. Such is the sense of lust in the Ancren Riwle, p. 212, l. 7, where the editor mistakes it. In Sir Ferumbras, l. 1900, mention is made of a man striking another 'on the luste' with his hand. The original sense of A. S. hlyst is the sense of 'hearing'; but the Icel. hlust commonly means 'ear.' Cf. E. listen. For on the list, Hl. Cm. and Tyrwhitt have with his fist; but Tyrwhitt, in his note on the line, inclines to the reading here given, and quotes from Sir T. More's poem entitled 'A Merry Jest of a Serjeant,' the lines:—

'And with his fist

Upon the lyst

He gave hym such a blow.'

This juvenile poem is printed at length in the Preface to Todd's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, ed. 1827, i. 64.

640. 'Although he had sworn to the contrary'; see a similar use of this phrase in A. 1089; and the note at p. 65.

642. Romayn gestes, the 'Roman gests,' in the collection called Gesta Romanorum, or stories of a like character. The reference, however, in this case is to Valerius Maximus, lib. vi. c. 3, as is certified by the note in the margin of E., viz. 'Valerius, lib. vi. fol. 19.' The passage is: 'Horridum C. quoque Sulpicii Galli maritale supercilium. Nam uxorem dimisit, quod eam capite aperto foris versatam cognouerat.'

647. This story is from the same chapter in Valerius. The passage is: 'Jungendus est his P. Sempronius Sophus, qui coniugem repudii nota affecit, nihil aliud quam se ignorante ludos ausam spectare.'

648. someres game, summer-game; called somer-game in P. Plowman, B. v. 413; and, in later English, a summering; a rural sport at Midsummer. The great day was on Midsummer eve, and the games consisted of athletic sports, followed usually by bonfires. See Brand's Pop. Antiquities; Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, bk. iv. c. 3. § 22; the description of the Cotswold Games in Chambers, Book of Days, i. 714; the word Summering in Nares' Glossary, &c. They were not always respectably conducted.

'Daunces, karols, somour-games,

Of manye swych come many shames.'

Rob. of Brunne, Handl. Synne, l. 4684.

'As the common sorte of vnfaythfull women are wonte to goe forth vnto weddynges and may-games'; Paraphr. of Erasmus, 1549; Tim. f. 8. Stubbes is severe upon May-games and Whitsun-games; see his Anatomy of Abuses, ed. Furnivall (Shak. Soc.), p. 149.

651. See Ecclus. xxv. 25:—'Give the water no passage; neither a wicked woman liberty to gad abroad.' The Latin version is here quoted in the margin of E.

655. This is clearly a quotation of some old saying, as shewn by the metre, which here varies, and becomes irregular. There is a slightly different version of it in Reliquiae Antiquae, i. 233:—

'Who that byldeth his howse all of salos,

And prikketh a blynde horsse over the falowes,

And suffereth his wif to seke many halos,

God sende hym the blisse of everlasting galos!'

The proverb implies that these three things are the signs of a foolish man. Salwes are osiers; the osier is commonly called sally in Shropshire, and the same name is given to all kinds of willows. It is not from the Lat. salix directly, but from the native A. S. sealh, which is merely cognate with salix, not borrowed from it. The three foolish things to do are; to build a house all of osiers, to spur a blind horse over a fallow-field, and to allow a wife to go on a pilgrimage. To go on a pilgrimage is here called 'to seek hallows,' i. e. saints, or saints' shrines; and the expression was a common one; cf. A. 14. 'Gone to seke hallows' occurs in Skelton, i. 426, l. 7, ed. Dyce; and the editor quotes two more examples at p. 337 of vol. ii.

659. 'I do not care the value of a haw for his proverbs.' In l. 660, nof stands for ne of; see footnote.

662. 'Si het quicunques l'en chastoie'; Rom. de la Rose, 10012.

669. This book was evidently a MS. containing several choice extracts from various authors; see l. 681.

671. Valerie. This refers to a treatise which Mr. Wright attributes to Walter Mapes, entitled Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum, and common in manuscripts; the subject is, De non ducenda uxore. See Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, 1840, ii. 188, note. 'As to the rest of the contents of this volume, Hieronymus contra Jovinianum, and Tertullian de Pallio are sufficiently known; and so are the letters of Eloisa and Abelard, the Parables of Solomon, and Ovid's Art of Love. I know of no Trotula but one, whose book Curandarum aegritudinum muliebrium, ante, in, et post partum, is printed int. Medicos antiquos, Ven. 1547. What is meant by Crisippus, I cannot guess.'—Tyrwhitt.

Theofraste, Theophrastus, i. e. the treatise mentioned above; see note to l. 221. It is frequently quoted above; see notes to ll. 221, 235, 257, 271, 282, 285, 293, 303. He is called Theofrates in Le Roman, l. 8599.

676. Tertulan, Tertullian. I do not quite understand why Tyrwhitt (see note to l. 671) singled out his treatise De Pallio, which is a treatise recommending the wearing of the Greek pallium in preference to the Roman toga. Quite as much to the present purpose are his treatises De Exhortatione Castitatis, dissuading a friend from marrying a second time; and De Monogamia and De Pudicitia, much to the same purport.

677. Crisippus, Chrysippus. There were at least two of this name: (1) the Stoic philosopher, born B.C. 280, died 207, praised by Cicero (Academics) and Horace. Also (2) the physician of Cnidos, in the time of Alexander the Great, frequently mentioned by Pliny. It is highly probable that neither the Wife of Bath nor Chaucer knew much about him. The poet certainly caught the name from Jerome's treatise against Jovinian, near the end of bk. i.; Epist. i. 52. We there find:—'Ridicule Chrysippus ducendam uxorem sapienti praecipit, ne Iouem Gamelium et Genethlium uiolet.'

Helowys, Heloise, niece of Fulbert, a canon in the cathedral of Paris, was secretly married to the celebrated Abelard, a proficient in scholastic learning. She afterwards became a nun in the convent of Argenteuil, of which she was, in course of time, elected the prioress. Thence she removed, with her nuns, to the oratory of the Paraclete, near Troyes, where the last twenty years of her life were spent. She died in 1164, and was buried in Abelard's tomb. I have no doubt at all that Chaucer derived his knowledge of her from the short sketch of her life given in Le Roman de la Rose, ll. 8799-8870, where the title of 'abbess' (F. abéesse) is conferred upon her. Only a few lines above, we find the name of Valerius, who (it is there said, at l. 8727) declared that a modest woman was rarer than a phœnix; and again, at l. 8759, we find: 'Si cum Valerius raconte'; and, at l. 8767:—

'Valerius qui se doloit

De ce que Rufin se voloit

Marier,' &c.

This identifies Valerius as being the very one, whose name Walter Mapes assumed; as is explained above (note to l. 671).

As to Trotula, I may here observe, in addition to what is said in the note to l. 671, that Warton mentions a MS. in Merton College, with the title 'Trottula Mulier Salerniterna de passionibus mulierum'; another copy (which I have seen) is in the Camb. Univ. Library. He adds—'there is also extant, "Trottula, seu potius Erotis medici muliebrium liber"; Basil. 1586; 4to.' See Warton, Hist. E. Poet. 1840, ii. 188, note.

692. peintede, depicted; alluding to the fable in Æsop, where a sculptor represented a man conquering a lion. The lion's criticism was to the effect that he had heard of cases in which the lion conquered the man. So likewise, the Wife's view of clerks differed widely from the clerk's view of wives. In the margin of E. is the note—'Quis pinxit leonem?' The fable is amongst the 'Fables of Æsop' as printed by Caxton, lib. iv. fab. 15; see Jacobs' edition, i. 251. In his note upon the sources of this fable, Mr. Jacobs refers us to—'Romulus, iv. 15. Man and Lion (statue). I. Lôqman, 7; Sophos, 58. II. Plutarch, Apophth., Laced. 69; Scol. Eurip., Kor., 103; Aphth. 38; Phaedrus, App. Burm., p. 20; Gabr., i. (not in Babrius); Avian, 24. III. Ademar, 52; Marie, 69; Berach., 56; Wright, ii. 28. IV. Kirch., i. 80; Lafontaine, iii. 10; Rob., Oest. V. Spectator, no. 11; L. 100, J. 84; Croxall, 30 (Lion and Statue).'

It is well put by Steele, in The Spectator, no. 11: 'Your quotations put me in mind of the Fable of the Lion and the Man. The Man, walking with that noble Animal, shewed him, in the Ostentation of Human Superiority, a Sign of a Man killing a Lion. Upon which the Lion said very justly, We Lions are none of us Painters, else we could shew you a hundred Men killed by Lions, for one Lion killed by a Man.' Observe that here, as in Chaucer, the reference is to a painting, not to sculpture.

696. all the mark of Adam, all beings made like Adam, i. e. all males. This idiomatic expression is cleared up by reference to F. 880, where merk means 'image' or 'likeness'; see that passage.

697. The children of Mercurie are the clerks, and those of Venus are the women; see ll. 693, 694. See below.

699, 700. Here the reference is to astrology. The whole matter is explained in a side-note in E., which is copied from § 2 of Almansoris Astrologi Propositiones (see note to l. 613 above), and requires some correction. It should run as follows:—'Vniuscuiusque planetarum septem exaltacio in illo loco esse dicitur, in quo substantialiter patitur ab alio contrarium, veluti Sol in Ariete, qui Saturni casus est. Sol enim habet claritatem, Saturnus tenebrositatem.... Et sic Mercurius in Virgine, qui casus est Veneris. Alter [scilicet Mercurius] namque significat scientiam et philosophiam. Altera vero causat alacritates et quicquid est saporiferum corpori.' I take this to mean, that the sign which is called the 'exaltation' of one planet (in which it exhibits its greatest influence) is also the 'dejection' of another which is there weakest. Thus the sign Virgo was the 'exaltation' of Mercury; but it was also the 'dejection' of Venus, whose 'exaltation' was in Pisces. For the dejection of every planet occurs in the sign opposite to that in which is its exaltation; and Virgo and Pisces are opposite. The word casus is here used in the astrological sense of 'dejection.' It further follows that Pisces was the 'depression' of Mercury, which Chaucer expresses by the term desolat. The note also tells us that the planet Mercury implies 'science and philosophy'; whilst Venus implies 'lively joys and whatever is agreeable to the body.'

Venus is again alluded to as being in her exaltation in Pisces, in F. 273. Gower refers to Virgo as being the exaltation of Mercury; Conf. Amant. iii. 121.

715. Eva, Eve. The spelling Eva is frequently contrasted with that of Ave, the salutation of Gabriel to Mary. Tyrwhitt says:—'Most of the following instances are mentioned in the Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum de non ducenda uxore. See also Rom. de la Rose, 9140, 9615, et suiv.' In Méon's edition of Le Rom. de la Rose, Deianira is mentioned in l. 9235, and Samson in l. 9243; I do not quite make out Tyrwhitt's numbering of the lines.

721. Cf. the Monkes Tale, B. 3205, 3256.

725. Cf. the Monkes Tale, B. 3285, 3310.

727. From Jerome against Jovin., lib. i. (near the end); Epist. i. 52. 'Socrates Xantippen et Myron neptem Aristidis duas habebat uxores ... Quodam autem tempore cum infinita conuicia ex superiori loco ingerenti Xantippae restitisset, aqua perfusus immunda, nihil amplius respondit, quàm, capite deterso: Sciebam (inquit) futurum, ut ista tonitrua hymber sequeretur.' The story is thus told by Erasmus, as translated by Udall. 'Socrates, after that he had within dores forborne his wife Xantippe, a greate while scoldyng, and at the last beyng wearie, had set him doune without the strete doore, she beyng moche the more incensed, by reason of her housbandes quietnesse and stilnesse, powred down a pisse-bolle upon him out of a windore, and al beraied him. But upon soche persones as passed by, laughing and hauing a good sport at it, Socrates also, for his part, laughed again as fast as the best, saiyng: Naie, I thought verie well in my minde, and did easily prophecie, that after so great a thonder would come a raine.'—Udall, tr. of Erasmus' Apophthegmes, Socrates, § 59.

733. These instances are also from Jerome, some twenty lines further on (same page). 'Quid referam Pasiphaën, Clytemnestram, et Eriphylam; quarum prima deliciis diffluens, quippe regis uxor, tauri dicitur expetisse concubitus: altera occidisse uirum ob amorem adulteri: tertia prodidisse Amphiarãum, et saluti uiri monile aureum praetulisse.' This passage is quoted, almost in the same words, in the margin of E. As to Eriphyle, Chaucer shews that he possessed further information, as he mentions Thebes. He consulted, in fact, the Thebaid of Statius, bk. iv, where we learn that Eriphyle betrayed her husband Amphiaraus, for a golden necklace; he was thus forced to accompany Polynices to the siege of Thebes, where he perished by being swallowed up by an earthquake. Chaucer again calls him Amphiorax in Anelida, 57, and in Troilus, ii. 105, v. 1500. Cf. Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, part 3.

747. Tyrwhitt says:—'In the Epistola Valerii, in MS. Reg. 12. D. iii. [in the British Museum], the story is told thus: "Luna virum suum interfecit quem nimis odivit: Lucilia suum quem nimis amavit. Illa sponte miscuit aconita: haec decepta furorem propinavit pro amoris poculo." Lima and Luna in many MSS. are only distinguishable by a small stroke over the i, which may easily be overlooked where it is, and supposed where it is not.' However, the right name is neither Lima nor Luna, but Liuia (Livia), which is easily confused with either of the other forms. Livia poisoned her husband Drusus (son of Tiberius), at the instigation of Sejanus, A. D. 23. See Ben Jonson's Sejanus, Act ii. sc. 1. Lucia (or rather Lucilia) was the wife of Lucretius the poet; see Tennyson's poem of Lucretius (Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, ii. 369).

757. This is a stock story, told of various people. Tyrwhitt says that it occurs in the Epistola Valerii, of one Pavorinus, and that the story begins:—'Pavorinus flens ait Arrio.' Lounsbury (Studies in Chaucer, ii. 369) referring to the same story, gives the name as Pacuvius. It is, in fact, one of the stories in the Gesta Romanorum (tale 33), where it is ascribed to Valerius. (By Valerius is, of course, meant the Epistola Valerii of Walter Mapes, where it duly appears, as Tyrwhitt notes, and may be found in MS. Reg. 12. D. iii; as is observed by Sir F. Madden, in a note to Warton's Hist. E. Poet., ed. Hazlitt, 1871, i. 250. It does not refer to Valerius Maximus, as I have ascertained.)

In the Gesta, it is told of Paletinus, who lamented to his friend Arrius that a certain tree in his garden was fatal, for three of his wives had, successively, hung themselves upon it. Arrius at once begged to have some slips of it; and Paletinus 'found this remarkable tree the most productive part of his estate.'

The story is really from Cicero, De Oratore, lib. ii. 69; 278. 'Salsa sunt etiam, quae habent suspicionem ridiculi absconditam; quo in genere est illud Siculi, cum familiaris quidam quereretur, quod diceret, uxorem suam suspendisse se de ficu. Amabo te, inquit, da mihi ex ista arbore, quos seram, surculos.'

Thus the original story only mentions one wife. This is just how stories grow.

A similar story is ascribed to Diogenes. 'When he [Diogenes] had on a time espied women hanging upon an olive-tree, and there strangled to death with the halters: Would God (said he) that the other trees had like fruite hanging on them!'—Udall, tr. of Erasmus' Apophthegmes, Diogenes, § 124.

766. The horrible story of 'the Widow of Ephesus' is of this character, but not quite so bad, as her husband died naturally. See Wright's introduction to his edition of The Seven Sages, p. lxvi; and the text of the same, pp. 84-9. It occurs in John of Salisbury, Policraticus, viii. 11. And see Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Crane, 1890, p. 228; Clouston's Pop. Tales, i. 29.

769. Alluding, doubtless, to Jael and Sisera; see note to A. 2007.

775. 'I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon, than to keep house with a wicked woman'; Ecclus. xxv. 16. Cf. Prov. xxi. 19.

778. From Prov. xxi. 9; and ll. 780, 781 seem to have been suggested by the following verse (xxi. 10).

782. This is from Jerome, near the end of bk. i. of his treatise against Jovinian (p. 52):—'Scribit Herodotus, quod mulier cum ueste deponat et uerecundiam.' This again is from Herodotus, bk. i. c. 8, where it is told as a saying of Gyges:—ἅμα δὲ κιθῶνι ἐκδυομένῳ, συνεκδύεται καὶ τὴν ἀιδῶ γυνή.

784. From Prov. xi. 22.

799. breyde, started, woke up. The A. S. verb bregdan is properly a strong verb, with the pt. t. brægd; so that the true form of the pt. t. in M. E. is breyd, without a final e. But it was turned into a weak verb, with the pt. t. breyd-e (as here), by confusion with such verbs as seyd-e, deyd-e, leyd-e, and the like. It is remarkable that our author is inconsistent in the use of the form for the pt. t. In his earlier poems, he has the older form abrayd, riming with sayd (pp.), Book of the Duch. 192; or abreyd, riming with seyd (pp.), Ho. of Fame, 110. But in the Cant. Tales, we find only the weak form breyd-e, riming with seyd-e, preyd-e, and deyd-e, B. 3728; with seyd-e, leyd-e, B. 837; and with seyd-e, A. 4285, F. 1027. Also abreyd-e, riming with seyd-e, deyd-e, A. 4190, E. 1061.

816. This is one of the ways in which our MSS. have perished.

824. Cf. 'from Hulle to Cartage'; A. 404; and see C. 722.

844. now elles, now otherwise; i. e. and so you may; I defy you.

847. Sidingborne, Sittingbourne, about forty miles from London, and beyond Rochester, which is mentioned in the Monk's Prologue, B. 3116.

The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe.

For a discussion of the source of this Tale, see vol. iii. p. 447.

A very similar story occurs in Gower's Confessio Amantis, bk. i. (p. 89, Pauli's edition), where the hero of the story is named Florent, and is said to have been a grandson of the Roman Emperor Claudius.

It also occurs in the Book of Ballymote, an Irish MS. of the fourteenth century. The Irish text was printed, together with a translation by Dr. Whitley Stokes, in The Academy, Apr. 23, 1892, p. 399. Dr. Stokes claims for the Tale a Celtic origin. See also The Academy, Apr. 30, 1892.

Chaucer's Tale has been modernised by Dryden. This later version contains many spirited lines, but lacks the grace of the original. It is interesting as a commentary, and is worth comparison.

This Tale has been well edited, with notes, in Mätzner's Altenglische Sprachproben, i. 338.

857. The author of the spurious Pilgrim's Tale, which, it is said, William Thynne wished to insert in his edition of Chaucer, has plagiarised from the opening lines of the Wife of Bath's Tale in the coolest manner. I quote some of his lines, for comparison, from Thynne's Animadversions, &c., ed. Furnivall, Appendix I., p. 79, ll. 85-98:—

'The cronikis old from kynge Arthur

He could rehers, and of his founder

Tell full many a whorthy story.

Wher this man walked, there was no farey

Ner other spiritis, for his blessynges

And munbling of his holy thinges

Did vanquyche them from euery buch and tre:

There is no nother incubus but he;

For Chaucer sathe, in the sted of the quen elfe,

"Ther walketh now the limitour himself."

For whan that the incubus dyd fle,

Yt was to bringe .vii. worse than he;

And that is the cause there beyn now no fareys

In hallis, bowris, kechyns, ner deyris.'

For a general discussion of the legends about King Arthur, see the essay in vol. i. (p. 401) of the Percy Folio MS., ed. Hales and Furnivall. In Malory's Morte Arthure we have an example of a fairy in Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay, who was 'put to scole in a nonnery; and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye'; bk. i. cap. 2.

860. elf-queen, Proserpine, according to Chaucer; see E. 2229; also B. 754, 1978, and the notes.

861. Hence the 'fairy-rings,' as Dryden tells us:—

'And where the jolly troop had led the round,

The grass unbidden rose, and mark'd the ground.'

On the subject of Fairies, see Keightley's Fairy Mythology, and similar works. Tyrwhitt notes that few old authors tell us so much about them as Gervase of Tilbury.

866. limitours, limiters; see A. 209, and the note; D. 1711; P. Plowman, B. v. 138, C. xxiii. 346; Massingberd, Eng. Reformation, p. 110.

868. The number of mendicant friars in England, during the latter half of the fourteenth century, was indeed large. In Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 400, we read that 'now ben mony thousand of freris in Englond'; and, at p. 511, that they were, 'as who seith, withoute noumbre.' In P. Plowman, C. xxiii. 269, Conscience accuses the friars of waxing 'oute of numbre,' and reminds them that 'Hevene haveth evene numbre, and helle is withoute numbre.'

869. The occurrence here of three consecutive lines (869-871) in which the first foot is deficient, consisting only of a single accented syllable, is worth notice. The way in which Tyrwhitt 'amends' these lines is most surprising. He inserts and five times, and his first line defies scansion, though I suppose he made hall's a monosyllable, and kichen-es trisyllabic, whereas it plainly has but two syllables. Here is his result.

'Blissing halles, chambres, kichenes, and boures,

Citees and burghes, castles highe and toures,

Thropes and bernes, shepenes, and dairies,

This maketh that ther ben no faeries.'

Note that he actually seems to have read dairies and faeries as riming dissyllabic words! In which case the last of these four lines would have but four accents! But the rime merely concerns the two final syllables of those quadrisyllabic words. The riming of the two former syllables is unessential, and for the purpose of rime, accidental and otiose.

MS. Pt. admits and before boures; and MS. Hl. admits and before toures and dairies (which does not alter the character of the lines). With these exceptions, all the seven MSS. omit all the five and's inserted by Tyrwhitt; and, in fact, they are all of them superfluous.

For the benefit of those who are but little acquainted with this peculiarity of Middle English metre, I cite four consecutive lines of a similar character from Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, ll. 1239-1242:—

'Drogh | the brydyl from his horses hede,

Let | hym goon, and took no maner hede,

Thorgh | the gardyn that enclosed was,

Hym | to pasture on the grene gras.'

There are plenty more of the same kind in the same poem; e. g. 1068, 1081, 1082, 1089, 1103, 1107, 1116, 1120, 1122, 1123, 1140, 1141, 1151, &c., &c., all printed in Specimens of English from 1394-1579, ed. Skeat, pp. 28-34. For similar lines in Hoccleve, see the same, p. 16, st. 604, l. 6; st. 605, l. 2; p. 20, st. 622, l. 2; p. 21, st. 624, l. 4.

871. Thropes = thorpes, villages; see E. 199.

shipnes, stables, or cow-houses; see A. 2000. 'Shippen, Shuppen, a cow-house'; E. D. S. Gloss. B. 1. 'Shippen, an ox-house'; id. B. 6. 'Shuppen, a cow-house'; id. B. 7; 'Shippen, a cow-house'; id. B. 15.

875. undermeles, for undern-meles, undern-times. For the time of undern, see note to E. 260. Meel (pl. meles) is the A. S. mǣl, a time. The time referred to, in this particular instance, seems to be the middle of the afternoon; or simply 'afternoons,' as opposed to 'mornings.' For this sense, cf. 'Undermele, Postmeridies,' in the Prompt. Parv. Nares, s. v. under-meal, gives other instances; but he fails to realise the changeable sense of the word; and is quite wrong in saying (s. v. undertime) that the last-named word is unconnected with undern. He also wrongly dissociates undern from arndern and orndern.

876. 'All religious persons were bound, if possible, to recite the divine office ... at the proper hour, in the choir; but secular priests, not living in common, and friars, being by their rule obliged to walk about within their limitation, to beg their maintenance, were allowed to say it privately,... as they walked.'—Bell. Cf. B. 1281.

880. incubus. Milton (P. R. ii. 152) speaks of Belial as being, after Asmodai, 'the fleshliest incubus.' Mr. Jerram's note on the line says: 'Some of the ejected angels were believed not to have fallen into hell, but to have remained in the middle of the region of air (P. R. ii. 117), where in various shapes they tempt men to sin. It was said that they hoped to counteract the effects of Christ's coming by engendering with some virgin a semi-demon, who should be a power of evil. In this way Merlin, and even Luther, were reported to have been begotten.' See the Romance of Merlin, ed. Wheatley, ch. i. pp. 9, 10; and the poem of Merlin in the Percy Folio MS.

881. Tyrwhitt and others adopt the reading no dishonour, as in the old black-letter editions; and MS. Cm. has the reading non. At first sight, this looks right, but a little reflection will incline us rather to adopt the reading of nearly all the MSS., as given in the present text. For to say that the friar was an incubus, and yet did women no dishonour, is contradictory. The meaning is, possibly, that the friar brought upon women dishonour, and nothing more; whereas the incubus never failed to cause conception. Lounsbury (Studies in Chaucer, i. 257) adopts the reading here given, but interprets it thus:—'The dishonour of a woman is, in the eyes of the Wife of Bath, to be reckoned not as a crime, but as a peccadillo.' (See the whole passage.) The subject will hardly bear further discussion; but it is impossible to ignore the repeated charges of immorality brought against the friars by Wyclif and others. Wyclif says—'thei slen wommen that withstonden hem in this synne'; Works, ed. Matthew, p. 6.

884. fro river, i. e. he was returning from hawking at the river-side. See B. 1927, and the note.

887. maugree hir heed, lit. 'in spite of her head,' i. e. in spite of all she could do, without her consent. Cf. A. 1169, 2618; also I. 974, where we find:—'if the womman, maugree hir heed, hath been afforced.' Mätzner remarks that, in some cases, we find a part of the head referred to, instead of the whole head. Hence the expressions: maugre his nose, Rob. of Gloucester, 2090 (p. 94, ed. Hearne); maugree thyne yen, Ch. C. T., D. 315; maugree hir eyen two, id., A. 1796; maugree my chekes, Allit. Poems, ed. Morris, C. 54; m. here chekis, P. Plowman, B. iv. 50; &c.

909. lere, learn; as in B. 181, 630, C. 325, 578, &c. But the right sense is 'teach.' See l. 921.

twelf-month, &c. 'There seems to have been some mysterious importance attached to this particular time of grace,' &c.—Bell. I think not. The solution is simply, that it takes an extra day to make the date agree. If we fix any date, as Nov. 21, 1890, the space of a year afterwards only brings us to Nov. 20, 1891; if we want to keep to the same day of the month, we must make the space include 'a year and a day.' This is what any one would naturally do; and that is all. Cf. A. 1850, and the note. 'Year and Day, is a time that determines a right in many cases;... So is the Year and Day given in case of Appeal, in case of Descent after Entry or Claim,' &c.; Cowell, Intrepreter of Words and Terms. See l. 916 below; and cf. Eight days, i. e. a week, in the New Eng. Dictionary.

922. cost, coast, i. e. region; as in 1 Sam. v. 6; Matt. viii. 34, &c.

924. The scansion is—Two cré-a-túr-es áccordínge in-fére.

925. Cf. Gower, Conf. Amant. i. 92:—

'To som woman it is plesaunce

That to another is grevaunce'; &c.

929-30. Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 9977-94. For y-plesed, Tyrwhitt and Wright read y-preised, contrary to the seven best MSS.; which gives an imperfect rime. preysed rimes with reysed (D. 706).

940. galle, sore place. 'Galle, soore yn man or beeste'; Prompt. Parv. 'Let the galled jade wince'; Hamlet, iii. 2. 253.

clawe means 'to scratch'; and to clawe upon the galle is to scratch or rub a sore. This may be taken in two ways; hence the difficulty about the reading in l. 941, where E. Cm. have kike, i. e. kick, whilst Hn. Hl. have like, and Cp. Pt. Ln. have loke or he seith us soth. The last of these three variations gives no sense, and is certainly wrong; but either of the other readings will serve. I take them in order.

(1) kike, kick. Here the sense is:—'if any one scratch us on a sore place (and so hurt us), we shall kick, because he tells us the truth (too plainly).' This goes well with the context, as it answers to the repreve us of our vyce in l. 937.

(2) like, like (it), be pleased. Here the sense is:—'if any one stroke us on a sore place (and so soothe the itching), we shall be pleased, because he tells us the truth (or what we think to be the truth).' But I feel inclined to reject this reading, because it gives so forced a sense to the words—for he seith us sooth. There is, however, no difficulty about the use of claw in the sense of 'to rub lightly, so as to soothe irritation'; for which see examples in the New English Dictionary. It is particularly used in the phrase to claw one's back, i. e. to soothe, flatter; but the word galle suggests a place where friction would rather hurt than soothe.

I leave it to the reader to settle this nice question.

949. rake-stele, the handle of a rake. The word stele is still in use provincially. 'Stale, any stick, or handle, such as the stick of a mop or a fork'; South Warwickshire; E. D. S. Gl. C. 6. 'Stale [stae·ul], s. handle; as, mop-stale, pick-stale, broom-stale'; Elworthy's West Somerset Words. And see Steal in Ray's Glossary; Stele in Nares; Steale in Halliwell; &c. Cf. A. 3785; P. Plowman, C. xxii. 279. Golding translates Ovid's hastile (Metam. vii. 676) by 'Iaueling-steale.' The e is 'open'; cf. A. S. stela; hence the rime with hele (A. S. helan) is perfect.

950. 'Car fame ne puet riens celer'; Rom. de la Rose, 19420. See also the same, 16549-70.

952. Ovyde; see Metamorph. xi. 174-193. But Chaucer seems to have purposely altered the story, since Ovid attributes the betrayal of the secret to Midas' barber, not his wife; and again, Ovid says that the barber dug a hole, and whispered it into the pit. Chaucer's version is an improved one. Cf. Troil. iii. 1389.

961. Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 16724-32.

968. Dryden is plainer, and less polite:—'But she must burst or blab.' Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 16568-9.

972. bitore, bittern; bumbleth, makes a bellowing noise, which is also expressed by bumping or booming. Note that MS. Cm. has bumbith. Owing to the loud booming note of the male bittern, it is called in A. S. rāre-dumle or rāre-dumbla, from rārian, to roar; see Wright's Glossaries. In provincial English, it is called a butter-bump, or a bumble; or, from its frequenting moist places, a bog-bumper, a bog-drum, or a bull o' the bog; see Swainson's Provincial Names of British Birds, E. D. S., p. 146. It was formerly thought that the cry was produced by the bird plunging its bill into mud and then blowing, as in the present passage; others thought that it put its bill into a reed, a view taken by Dryden, as he here has the line:—'And, as a bittern bumps within a reed.' Sir T. Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, bk. iii. c. 27, controverts these notions, and attributes the note to the conformation of the bird's organs of voice. 'The same contradiction of the common notion is given, from personal experience, by the Rev. S. Fovargue, in his New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors, pp. 19-21'; note to Sir T. Browne, ed. S. Wilkin. The same editor further refers us to papers by Dr. Latham and Mr. Yarrell in the Linnaean Transactions, vols. iv, xv, and xvi. See Prof. Newton's Dict. of Birds.

981. There is not much 'remnant' of the tale; Ovid adds that some reeds grew out of the pit, which, when breathed upon by the South wind, uttered the words which had been buried.

992. This reminds us of Chaucer's own vision of Alcestis and her nineteen attendant ladies in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.

997. Cf. Gower, Conf. Amantis, i. 93:—

'In a forest, there under a tree

He sigh where sat a creature,

A lothly womannish figure,

That, for to speke of flesshe and boon,

So foul yet sigh he never noon.'

Also, in the Marriage of Sir Gawaine, st. 15:—

'And, as he rode over a more,

Hee see a lady where she sate

Betwixt an oake and a greene hollen [holly];

She was cladd in red scarlett....

Her nose was crooked and turnd outward,

Her mouth stood foule a-wry;

A worse formed lady than shee was

Neuer man saw with his eye.'

1004. can, know; but the form is singular, to agree with folk. Cf. the proverb—'older and wiser'—in Hazlitt's Collection; and see A. 2448.

1018. wereth on, wears upon (her), has on; cf. l. 559 above.

calle, caul; a close-fitting netted cap or head-dress, often richly ornamented; see Fairholt, Costume in England, s. v. Caul.

1021. pistell, (1) an epistle, as in E. 1154; hence (2), a short lesson, as here.

1024. holde his day, kept his time, come back at the specified time. hight, promised.

1028. 'Queen Guenever is here represented sitting as judge in a Court of Love, similar to those in fashion in later ages.... Fontenelle (in the third volume of his works, Paris, 1742) has given a description of one of the fantastic suits tried in these courts.... The best source of information on these strange follies is a book entitled Erotica, seu Amatoria, Andreæ Capellarii Regis, &c., written about A.D. 1170, and published at Dorpmund in 1610.'—Bell.

1038. Cf. Gower, Conf. Amantis, i. 96:—

'That alle women levest wolde

Be soverein of mannes love,' &c.

So also in the Marriage of Sir Gawaine, st. 28:—

—'a woman will have her will,

And this is all her cheef desire.'

1069. The scansion is—'Shold' ev'r | so foul | e dis | pará | ged be.'

1074. It is curious to note how Chaucer seems to have felt that romance-writers were constrained to describe feasts, a duty which he usually evades. Cf. A. 2197, B. 419, 1120, E. 1710, F. 278. In fact, the original business of the minstrel was to praise his lord's bounty, especially on grand occasions.

1081. So in Gower's Conf. Amantis, i. 100:—

'But as an oule fleeth by nighte

Out of all other briddes sighte,

Right so this knight, on daies brode,' &c.

This line, for a wonder, is unaltered by Dryden in his paraphrase.

1085. walweth, rolls from side to side, turns about restlessly; cf. Leg. Good Wom. 1166; Troil. i. 699; Rom. Rose, 2562.

1088. Fareth, pronounced as Far'th; cf. tak'th in 1072.

1090. dangerous, distant, unapproachable; see D. 151.

1109. Gentilesse. See my notes (in vol. i. 431, 553) on R. R. 2190, and Gentilesse. Compare Boethius, bk. iii. pr. 6 and met. 6; Roman de la Rose, ed. Méon, 6603-6616, and 18807-19096; and see B. 2831.

1114. Cf. privee n'apert in l. 1136; 'in private and in public.'

1117. wol we, desires that we; see 1130 below.

1121. Cf. Balade of Gentilesse, ll. 16, 17.

1128. Cf. Dante, Purgat. vii. 121:—

'Rade volte risurge per li rami

L'umana probitate: e questo vuole

Quei che la dâ, perchè da lui si chiami.'

Cary's translation is:—

'Rarely into the branches of the tree

Doth human worth mount up: and so ordains

He who bestows it, that as His free gift

It may be called.'

Marsh notes that similar sentiments occur in the Canzone prefixed to the fourth Trattato in Dante's Convito.

1135. The general sense is—'if gentle conduct were naturally implanted in a particular family, none of that family could ever behave badly.' Cf. ll. 1150, 1151.

'Were virtue by descent, a noble name

Could never villanise his father's fame.'

Dryden's paraphrase.

1140. Chaucer's tr. of Boethius, bk. ii. pr. 7. 43, mentions 'the mountaigne that highte Caucasus.' This is probably where he got the name from. Cf. Shakespeare's 'frosty Caucasus'; Rich. II. i. 3. 295. The whole passage is imitated from another place in Boethius, where Chaucer's translation has:—'Certes, yif that honour of poeple were a natural yift to dignitees, it ne mighte never cesen ... to don his office, right as fyr in every contree ne stinteth nat to eschaufen and to ben hoot'; bk. iii. pr. 4. 44-8. In l. 1139, Dryden merely alters in to to.

1142. lye, i. e. blaze. 'Hevene y-leyed wose syth,' whoever sees heaven in a blaze; Relig. Antiq. i. 266. The sb. lye, a flame, occurs in P. Pl. C. xx. 172. Cf. A. S. lȳg, līg, flame.

1146-56. Much altered and expanded in Dryden.

1158. Cf. Rom. of the Rose, 2181:—

'For vilany makith vilayn;

And by his dedis a cherl is seyn.'

1165. 'Incunabula Tulli Hostilii agreste tugurium cepit: ejusdem adolescentia in pecore pascendo fuit occupata: validior aetas imperium Romanum rexit, et duplicavit: senectus excellentissimis ornamentis decorata in altissimo majestatis fastigio fulsit.'—Valerius Maximus, lib. iii. c. 4 (De Humili Loco Natis). Cf. Livy, i. 22; Dionysius Halicarnasseus, iii; Ælian, xiv. 36.

1168. Senek, Seneca. Boece, Boethius; see note to 1109.

1184. Ll. 1183-1190 are imitated from the following; 'Honesta, inquit [Epicurus], res est laeta paupertas. Illa uero non est paupertas, si laeta est. Cui enim cum paupertate bene conuenit, diues est. Non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est.'—Seneca, Epist. ii. § 4. This passage is quoted by John of Salisbury, Policraticus, l. vii. c. 13.

Othere clerkes also includes Epicurus, whose sentiments Seneca here expresses; see Diogenes Laertius, x. 11. MS. E. here quotes the words 'honesta res est laeta paupertas' in the margin, and refers to 'Seneca, in epistola.' It also has:—'Pauper est qui eget, eo quod non habet; sed qui non habet, nec appetit habere, ille diues est; de quo intelligitur id Apocalypsis tertio [Rev. iii. 17]—dicis quia diues sum.' With l. 1187 cf. Rom. de la Rose, 18766:—'Et convoitise fait povrece.'

1191. All the editions adopt the reading is sinne, as in all the MSS. except E. and Cm. (the two best); see footnote, p. 354. But surely this is nonsense, and exactly contradicts l. 1183.

1192. In the margin of MS. E. are quoted two lines from Juvenal, Sat. x. 21,22:—'Cantabit uacuus coram latrone uiator; Et nocte ad lumen trepidabit arundinis umbram.' The latter of these lines should come first, and the usual readings are motae (not nocte), lunam, and trepidabis. However, it is only the other (and favourite) line that is here alluded to. The same line is quoted in Piers Plowman, B. xiv. 305; and is alluded to in Chaucer's tr. of Boethius, bk. ii. pr. 5. 129-130. In Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, ii. 364, is the remark:—'For it is said comounli, that a wey-goer, whan he is voide, singith sure bi the theef.'

1195. In the margin of E. is written:—'Secundus philosophus: Paupertas est odibile bonum, sanitatis mater, curarum remocio, sapientie reparatrix, possessio sine calumpnia.' This is the very passage quoted, even more fully, in Piers Plowman, B. xiv. 275 (C. xvii. 117). Tyrwhitt's note is—'In this commendation of Poverty, our author seems plainly to have had in view the following passage of a fabulous conference between the emperor Adrian and Secundus the philosopher, reported by Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, lib. x. cap. 71. "Quid est paupertas? Odibile bonum, sanitatis mater, remotio curarum, sapientie repertrix, negotium sine damno, possessio absque calumnia, sine sollicitudine felicitas." What Vincent has there published seems to have been extracted from a larger collection of Gnomae under the name of Secundus, which are still extant in Greek and Latin. See Fabricius, Bib. Gr., l. vi. c. x, and MS. Harl. 399.' Thus l. 1195 is a translation of Paupertas est odibile bonum, so that the proposal by Dr. Morris (Aldine edition of Chaucer, vol. i. p. vi) to adopt the reading hatel from MSS. Cp. Pt. Ln. instead of hateful, is founded on a mistake. The expression is contradictory, but it is so intentionally. 'Poverty is a gift which its possessors hate' is, of course, the meaning. Dryden well explains it:—

'Want is a bitter and a hateful good,

Because its virtues are not understood.'

1196. This translates 'remotio curarum.'

1197. This translates 'sapientie reparatrix,' not 'repertrix.'

1199. elenge, miserable, hard to bear. Elenge is also spelt alenge, alinge, alange; see Alange in the New English Dictionary, though the proper form is rather alenge. It is a derivative of the intensive A. S. prefix ǣ and lenge, a secondary form of lang, long; so that A. S. ǣlenge meant protracted, tedious, wearisome, as in Alfred's tr. of Boethius, xxxix. 4. But it was confused with the M. E. elend, strange, foreign, and so acquired the sense of 'strange' as well as 'trying' or 'miserable.' See Elynge in the Gl. to P. Plowman, and the note to P. Pl. C. i. 204; also Mätzner's note to the Land of Cokayne, l. 15.

1200. This line translates 'possessio absque calumnia.' The E. challenge is, in fact, derived from calumnia, through Old French.

1202. Understand him: 'maketh (him) know his God and himself'; see Dryden's paraphrase. Against this line, in the margin of MS. E., is written:—'Unde et Crates ille Thebanus, proiecto in mari non paruo auri pondere, Abite (inquit) pessime male cupiditates! Ego uos mergam, ne ipse mergar a uobis.' Probably Chaucer once intended to introduce this story into the text. It relates, apparently, to Crates of Thebes, the Cynic philosopher, who flourished about B. C. 320.

1203. spectacle, i. e. an optic glass, a kind of telescope. In the modern sense, the word was used in the plural, as at present. From Lydgate's London Lickpenny, st. 7, we learn that 'spectacles to reede' was, in his time, one of the cries of London. Cf. prospectyves, i. e. perspective glasses, in F. 234. Chaucer is here thinking of a passage in Le Roman de la Rose, where the E. version (l. 5551) has:—

'For infortune makith anoon

To knowe thy freendis fro thy foon.'

This, again, is from Boethius, bk. ii. pr. 8. 22-33. Compare Chaucer's poem on Fortune, ll. 9, 32, 34, and my notes upon these lines; vol. i. pp. 383, 544.

1208. See note to l. 1276 below; and cf. D. 1.

1210. Compare C. 743, and the note.

1215. For also, Tyrwhitt reads also so, against all authority, as he admits. The text is right as it stands. Eld-e is dissyllabic, the final e being preserved by the cæsura; and also means no more than 'so.' I suspect this is quoted from some French proverb. Dryden alters 'filth' to 'ugliness.'

1224. repair, great resort, viz. of visitors.

1234. 'I care not which of the two it shall be.' Cf. Gower, Conf. Amantis, i. 103:—

'Chese for us bothe, I you praie,

And what as ever that ye saie,

Right as ye wolle, so wol I.

My lord, she saide, grauntmercy.

For of this word that ye now sain,

That ye have made me soverein,

My destinè is overpassed'; &c.

1260. toverbyde, to over-bide, to outlive. Tyrwhitt substitutes to overlive, from the black-letter editions. Gra-ce is dissyllabic.

1261. shorte, shorten; see D. 365.

The Friar's Prologue.

1276. auctoritees; a direct reference to l. 1208 above. This goes far to show that the Friar's Tale was written immediately after the Wife's Tale. The Friar says, quite truly, that the Wife's Tale contains passages not unlike 'school-matter,' or disquisitions in the schools. Such a passage is that in ll. 1109-1212. Tyrwhitt shews that auctoritas was the usual word applied to a text of scripture; Bell adds, that it was applied, as now, to any authority for a statement. We might very well translate auctoritees by 'quotations.'

1284. mandements, 'citations, or summonses, addressed to those accused of breaches of the canons, to appear and answer in the archdeacon's court'; Bell. Hence the name somnour, i. e. a server of summonses.

1285. tounes ende (whence the name Townsend); we should now say, 'at the entry to every town'; cf. l. 1537. The Somnour was often opposed with violence, and was a very unpopular character.

1294. The limiters had to cultivate the art of flattery, because they lived by begging from house to house.

* After this line all the MSS. (except Hl.) wrongly insert lines 1307, 1308 (on p. 359). Perhaps the poet himself introduced these lines here at first, and afterwards perceived how much better they came in after l. 1306. It is not an important matter.

1296. MS. Hl. has:—'Our host answerd and sayd the sompnour this'; which cannot be right.

The Freres Tale.

With respect to the source of this Tale, see vol. iii. p. 450.

1300. erchedeken. As to the duties of the archdeacon, here described, compare A. 655, 658. He enforced discipline by threats of excommunication, and inflicted fines for various offences. Compare Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 166.

1305. I. e. he punished church-reeves if they did ill, and all cases in which wills or contracts had been wantonly violated. 'Lakke of sacraments' refers, chiefly, to the neglect of the precept to communicate at Easter; also to neglect of baptism, and, possibly, of matrimony, as that was also a 'sacrament' in the church of our fathers.

1307-8. These two lines occur here in MS. Hl. only; see note to 1294 above.

1309. Usury was prohibited by the Canon Law; cf. P. Plowman, C. vii. 239.

1314. 'No fine could save the accused from punishment.'

1315. 'The neglect to pay tithes and Easter offerings came under the archdeacon's jurisdiction, as the bishop's diocesan officer. The friar does not scruple to make an invidious use of this subject at the expense of the parochial clergy, because, being obliged by his rule to gain his livelihood by begging, he had no interest in tithes.'—Bell.

1317. Alluding to the shape of the bishop's crosier. In P. Plowman, C. xi. 92, the crosier is described as having a hook at one end, by which he draws men back to a good life, and a spike at the other, which he uses against hardened offenders. On the crosier, see Rock, Church of Our Fathers, ii. 181. The bishop dealt with such offenders as were contumacious to the archdeacon.

1321. For the character of a Somnour, see A. 623.

1323. espiaille, set of spies; see note to B. 2509, p. 213.

1324. taughte, informed; the final e is not elided.

1327. wood were, should be, were to be as mad as a hare. See 'As mad as a March hare' in Hazlitt's Proverbs.

1329. The mendicant orders were subject only to their own general or superior, not to the bishops. In the piece called Jack Upland (§ 11), Jack asks the friars—'Why be ye not vnder your bishops visitations, and leegemen to our king?'—British Poets, ed. Chalmers, 1810; i. 567.

1331. terme, i. e. during the term.

1332. Peter, by saint Peter. 'The summoner's repartee is founded upon the law by which houses of ill-fame were exempted from ecclesiastical interference, and licensed.'—Bell. 'Stewes, are those places which were permitted in England to women of professed incontinency.... But king Henry VIII., about the year 1546, prohibited them for ever.'—Cowel's Interpreter. Cock Lane, Smithfield, contained such houses; see my notes to P. Plowman, C. vii. 366, 367.

1343. approwours, agents, men who looked after his profits. From the O. Fr. approuer, apprower, to cause to profit, to enrich; from the O. Fr. sb. prou, profit, whence also E. prowess. Miswritten as approver in the seventeenth century, though distinct from approve (from approbare). See the New Eng. Dictionary. Tyrwhitt has the spelling approvers.

1347. Cristes curs, i. e. excommunication.

1349. atte nale, put for atten ale, lit. at the ale, where ale is put for 'ale-house.' Atten is for A. S. æt tham, where tham is the dat. neut. of the def. article. The expression is common; as in 'fouhten atten ale,' fought at the ale-house, P. Plowman, C. i. 43; 'with ydel tales atte nale,' id. C. viii. 19. 'Thou hast not so much charity in thee as to goe to the Ale with a Christian'; Two Gent. of Verona, ii. v. 61. So also atte noke, for atten oke, at the oak; see note to P. Pl. C. vii. 207.

1350. See John, xii. 6; and cf. the Legend of Judas Iscariot, printed (from MS. Harl. 2277) in Early Eng. Poems, ed. Furnivall, 1862; p. 107.

1352. duetee (Cp. dewete) is trisyllabic; see l. 1391. It is a coined word, having no Latin equivalent. The spelling duete occurs, in Anglo-French, in the Liber Albus, p. 211, l. 23.

1356. Sir Robert; the title of Sir was usually given to one of the secular clergy; cf. note to B. 4000, p. 248.

1364. hir, her; so in E. Hn., but other MSS. have thee. The reading given is the better. The Somnour fined the man, but let the woman go; and then said that he let her go out of friendship for the man. This is intelligible; but the reading thee gives no sense to the words for thy sake.

1365. 'You need not take any more trouble in this matter.'

1367. bryberý-es (four syllables), i. e. modes of robbery. So in MSS. Hn. Cm. Cp. MSS. Hl. Pt. Ln. have bribours, which will not scan, unless (as in Hl.) we also read Certeinly, giving a line defective in the first foot. Tyrwhitt inserts many before mo, to fill up the line.

1369. dogge for the bowe, a dog used to accompany an archer, to follow up a stricken deer; see the next line. The docility of such a dog is alluded to in E. 2014.

1373. 'And, because such acquaintance brought him in the chief part of all his income.'

1377. ribybe. In l. 1573, she is called 'an old rebekke.' So in Skelton's Elinour Rummyng, l. 492:—'There came an old rybybe.' And Ben Jonson speaks of 'some good ribibe ... you would hang now for a witch'; The Devil is an Ass, i. 1. 16. But probably Skelton and Ben Jonson merely took the word from Chaucer. A ribybe was, properly, a two-stringed Moorish fiddle; see note to A. 3331. Gifford's note on the passage in Ben Jonson, says:—'Ribibe, together with its synonym rebeck, is merely a cant term for an old woman. A ribibe, the reader knows, is a rude kind of a fiddle, and the allusion is, probably, to the inharmonious nature of its sounds.' Halliwell suggests some (improbable) confusion between vetula and vitula.

I suspect that this old joke, for such it clearly is, arose in a very different way, viz. from a pun upon rebekke, a fiddle, and Rebekke, a married woman, from the mention of Rebecca in the marriage-service. For Chaucer himself notices the latter in E. 1704, which see. Observe that the form rebekke, as applied to the fiddle, is a corrupt one, though it is found in other languages. See rebebe in Godefroy's O. F. Dictionary, and rebec in Littré.

1378. Cause and wolde are dissyllabic; and brybe, to rob, is a verb. But the editors ignore such elementary facts. The old editions insert haue a before brybe; and the modern editions insert han a; which, as Wright observes, is not to be found in the MSS!

1381. See A. 103, 104, 108; and, for courtepy, A. 290.

1382. hadde upon, had on; cf. D. 559, 1018.

1384. 'Well overtaken, well met.' So in Partonope of Blois, 6390: 'Syr, wele atake!' Cf. G. 556.

1394. for the name, because of the disgrace attaching to the very name. The Friar is severe.

1405. sworn-e, a plural form; the word sworn being here used adjectivally. See note to A. 1132, p. 66.

1408. venim, spite. wariangles, shrikes. According to C. Swainson (Provincial Names of British Birds), this is the Red-backed Shrike (Lanius collurio), called in Yorkshire the Weirangle or Wariangle. Some make it the Great Grey Shrike (Lanius excubitor). Thus Ray, in his Provincial Words, ed. 1674, p. 83, gives warringle as a name for the Great Butcher-bird in the Peak of Derbyshire. 'This Bird,' says Willughby, 'in the North of England is called Wierangle, a name, it seems, common to us with the Germans, who (as Gesner witnesseth) about Strasburg, Frankfort, and elsewhere, call it Werkangel or Warkangel, perchance (saith he) as it were Wurchangel, which literally rendered signifies "a suffocating angel."' So also, the mod. G. name is Würgengel, as if from würgen and Engel. But this is a form due to popular etymology, as will presently appear. Cotgrave has 'Pie engrouée, a Wariangle, or a small Woodpecker'; but a wariangle is really a Shrike; indeed Cotgrave also has: 'Arneat, the ravenous birde called a Shrike, Nynmurder, Wariangle'; which is correct. In the Wars of Alexander, ed. Skeat, l. 1706, the word wayryngle occurs as a term of abuse, signifying 'a little villain'; this is probably the same word, and answers to a dimin. form of A. S. wearg (Icel. vargr, O. H. G. warg, warc), a felon, with the suffix -incel, as seen in A. S. rāp-incel, a little rope, hūs-incel, a little house. Bradley cites, as parallel forms, the O. H. G. warchengil (see below), and the M. L. G. wargingel, which are probably formed in a similar way. The epithet 'little felon' or 'little murderer' agrees with other names for the shrike, viz. 'butcher-bird,' 'murdering-bird,' 'nine-murder,' nine-killer,' so called because it impales beetles and small birds on thorns, for the purpose of pulling them to pieces. This is why I take venim to mean 'spite' rather than 'poison' in this passage.

Schmeller, in his Bavarian Dict., ii. 999, says that the Lanius excubitor is called, in O. H. G. glosses, Warchengel (Graff, i. 349); also Wargengel, Würgengel, and Würger.

1413. north contree. This is a sly joke, because, in the old Teutonic mythology, hell was supposed to be in the north. Wright refers us, for this belief, to his St. Patrick's Purgatory. See my note to P. Plowman, C. ii. 111, about Lucifer's sitting in the north; cf. Isaiah, xiv. 13, 14; Milton, P. L. v. 755-760; Myrour of our Lady, ed. Blunt, p. 189. In the Icelandic Gylfaginning, we find—'niðr ok norðr liggr Helvegr,' i. e. downwards and northwards lies the way to hell. Cf. l. 1448.

1428. laborous is right; offyc-e is trisyllabic.

1436. A proverbial expression; still in use in Lancashire and elsewhere; see N. and Q., 7 S. x. 446, 498. Cf. 'a taker and a bribing [robbing] feloe, and one for whom nothing was to hotte nor to heauie.' Udall, tr. of Erasmus' Apophthegmes; Cicero, § 50.

'Their loues they on the tenter-hookes did racke,

Rost, boyl'd, bak'd, too too much white, claret, sacke,

Nothing they thought too heavy nor too hot,

Canne followed Canne, and pot succeeded pot.'

John Taylor; Pennilesse Pilgrimage.

Of course the sense is—'too hot to hold.' Tyrwhitt quotes a similar phrase from Froissart, v. i. c. 229, 'ne laissoient riens a prendre, s'il n'estoit trop chaud, trop froid, ou trop pesant.'

1439. 'Were it not for my extortion, I could not live.'

1451. 'What I can thus acquire is the substance of all my income.' See note to A. 256; and Feck in the New Eng. Dictionary.

1456. Read ben'cite; and observe the rime: prey-e, sey ye. Pronounce: (prei·yə, sei·yə), where (ə) represents the obscure vowel, or the a in China.

1459. Such questions were eagerly discussed in the middle ages; see l. 1461-5.

1463. make yow seme, make it seem to you. Tyrwhitt has wene (for seme), which occurs in MS. Cp. only.

1467. iogelour, juggler; for their tricks, see F. 1143. Wright says:—'The jogelour (joculator) was originally the minstrel, and at an earlier period was an important member of society. He always combined mimicry and mountebank performances with poetry and music. In Chaucer's time he had so far degenerated as to have become a mere mountebank, and as it appears, to have merited the energetic epithet here applied to him.' Cf. my note to P. Plowman, C. xvi. 207.

1472. Read abl' is. MS. Hl. has:—'As most abíl is our-e pray to take.' Cf. F. habile, for which Cotgrave gives one meaning as 'apt unto anything he undertakes.'

1476. pryme, 9 A.M., a late time with early risers. See note to B. 4045, p. 250.

1483-91. Cf. Boeth. bk. iv. pr. 6. 62-71; Job, i. 12; ii. 6.

1502. I suspect this to be an allusion to a story similar to that entitled 'A Lay of St. Dunstan' in the Ingoldsby Legends.

1503. This probably alludes to some of the legends about the apostles. Thus, in The Lives of Saints, ed. Horstmann, p. 36, l. 72, some fiends are represented as doing the will of St. James the Greater; and in the same, p. 368, l. 50, a fiend says of St. Bartholomew:—'He mai do with us al that he wole, for bi-neothe him we beoth.' Cf. Acts, xix. 15.

1508. 'The adoption of the bodies of the deceased by evil spirits in their wanderings upon earth, was an important part of the medieval superstitions of this country, and enters largely into a variety of legendary stories found in the old chroniclers.'—Wright. Bell quotes from Hamlet, ii. 2:—'The spirit that I have seen May be the devil,' &c.

1509. renably, reasonably. The A. F. form of 'reasonable' was resnable (as in the Life of Edw. the Confessor, l. 1602); and, by the law that s became silent before l, m, and n (as in isle, blasmer, disner, E. isle, blame, dine), this became renable. See note to P. Plowman, C. i. 176.

1510. Phitonissa; this is another spelling of pythonissa, which is the word used, in the Vulgate version of 1 Chron. x. 13, with reference to the witch of Endor. In 1 Sam. xxviii. 7, the phrase is mulier pythonem habens. The witch of Endor is also called phitonesse in Gower, Conf. Amant. bk. iv, ed. Pauli, ii. 66; Barbour's Bruce, iv. 753; Skelton's Philip Sparowe, l. 1345; Lydgate's Falls of Princes, bk. ii. leaf xl, ed. Wayland; Gawain Douglas, prol. to the Æneid, ed. Small, ii. 10, l. 2; and in Sir D. Lyndesay's Monarchè, bk. iv. l. 5842. And see Hous of Fame, 1261. Cf. πνεῦμα Πύθωνος, Acts, xvi. 16.

1518. in a chayer rede, lecture about this matter as in a professorial chair, lecture like a professor; cf. l. 1638. The fiend is satirical.

1519. Referring to Vergil's Æneid, bk. vi, and Dante's Inferno.

1528. This much resembles A. 1132, q.v.

1541. for which, for which reason; stood, stood still, was stuck fast.

1543. In Brand's Popular Antiquities, ed. Ellis, ii. 15, 'Heit or Heck' is mentioned as being 'a well-known interjection used by the country people to their horses.' Brand adds that 'the name of Brok is still, too, in frequent use amongst farmers' draught oxen.' In the Towneley Mysteries, p. 9, is the exclamation 'hyte!' The word for 'stop!' was 'ho!' like the modern whoa! This explains a line in Gascoigne's Dan Bartholmew of Bathe, ed. Hazlitt, i. 136:—'His thought sayd haight, his sillie speache cryed ho.' Bell notes that 'Hayt is still the word used by waggoners in Norfolk, to make their horses go on'; and adds—'Brok means a badger, hence applied to a gray horse, myne owene lyard boy (l. 1563). Scot is a common name for farm-horses in East-Anglia; as in A. 616.' In the Towneley Mysteries, p. 9, names of oxen are Malle, Stott (doubtless miswritten for Scott), Lemyng, Morelle, and White-horne. The Craven Glossary says hyte is used to turn horses to the left; whilst the Ger. hott! or hottot! is used to turn them to the right. In Shropshire, 'ait or 'eet, said to horses, means 'go from me'; see Waggoners' Words in Miss Jackson's Shropsh. Wordbook.

1548. MS. Hl. has—'her schal we se play.' Tyrwhitt has pray, which gives a false rime, for it should be prey-e; see l. 1455, and the note to l. 1456. The six MSS. all have a pley.

1559. thakketh (pronounced thakk'th) his hors, pats, or strokes his horses; to encourage them. From A. S. þaccian, to stroke (a horse), Gregory's Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, p. 303, l. 10. So also in A. 3304. (Not to thwack, or whack.)

1560. I adopt the reading of MSS. E. and Hn. MSS. Cm. Pt. Ln. have:—'And they bigunne to drawe and to stoupe,' which throws an awkward accent on the former to. MS. Hl. has:—'And thay bygon to drawen and to stowpe.' But I take to-stoupe to be a compound verb, with the sense 'stoop forward'; though I can find no other example of its use. Being uncommon, it would easily have been resolved into two words, and this would necessitate the introduction of to before drawen. Bigonne usually takes to after it, but not always; cf. 'Iapen tho bigan,' B. 1883.

1563. twight, pulled, lit. 'twitched.' 'Liard, a common appellative for a horse, from its grey colour, as bayard was from bay (see A. 4115). See P. Plowman, C. xx. 64 [and my note on the same]. Bp. Douglas, in his Virgil, usually puts liart for albus, incanus, &c.'—T. Other names of horses are, Favel for a chestnut, Dun for a dun horse, Ferrand for an iron-gray, and Morel, i. e. mulberry-coloured, for a roan.

1564. I give the reading of MSS. Hn. Cp. Pt. Ln., and of the black-letter editions. MS. Hl. has 'I pray god saue thy body and seint loy'; for which Cm. has 'the body,' as if 'the' were the original reading, and 'body' a supplied word. I take se-ynt to be dissyllabic, as in A. 120, 509, 697, D. 604. As to seint Loy, the patron-saint of goldsmiths, farriers, smiths, and carters, see note to A. 120.

1568. Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 10335-6: 'car ge fesoie Une chose, et autre pensoie.'

1570. upon cariage, by way of quitting my claim to this cart and team; a satirical reflection on his failure to win anything by the previous occurrence. Cariage was a technical term for a service of carrying, or a payment in lieu of it, due from a tenant to his landlord or feudal superior; see the New Eng. Dictionary, s. v. Carriage, I. 4. The landlord used to claim the use of the tenant's horses and carts for his own service, without payment for the use of them; and the tenant could only get off by paying cariage. This difficult use of the word is exemplified by two other passages in Chaucer, one of which is in the Cant. Tales, I. 752; q.v. The other is in his Boethius, bk. i. pr. 4, l. 50, where he says:—'The poeple of the provinces ben harmed outher by privee ravynes, or by comune tributes or cariages,' where the Lat. text has uectigalibus.

1573. rebekke, old woman; lit. Rebecca; see note to l. 1377 above.

1576. Twelve pence was a considerable sum in those days; being equivalent to something like fifteen shillings of our present money.

1580. winne thy cost, earn your expenses.

1582. viritrate, a term of contempt for an old woman. Cf. 'thou olde trot,' addressed to an old woman; Thersites, in Hazlitt's Old Plays, i. 415. Jamieson gives trat, an old woman; with three examples from G. Douglas. Levins (1570) has: 'Tratte, anus.'

1591. wisly, certainly. I ne may, I cannot (come).

1593. go, walk; as usual, when used with ryde.

1595. axe a libel, apply to have a written declaration of the complaint against me, i. e. a copy of the indictment.

1596. procutour, proctor, to appear on my behalf. Only MS. Hl. has the full form procuratour; the rest have procutour or procatour, as suitable for the metre. These forms are interesting, as furnishing the intermediate step between procurator and proctor. So, in the Prompt. Parv., we find 'proketowre, Procurator,' and 'prokecye, Procuracia'; whence, by loss of e, proctor and proxy. there is dissyllabic, as in A. 3165, and frequently.

1613. Seinte Anne, saint Anna, whose day is July 26. In Luke, ii. 36, is mentioned 'Anna the prophetess.' At the commencement of the apocryphal gospel of Mary, we are told that the virgin's 'father's name was Joachim, and her mother's Anna.' This is the saint Anna here alluded to. See B. 641; G. 70; and Cursor Mundi, l. 10147. Hence it became a common practice to give a girl the name of Mary Ann, which combined the name of the virgin with that of her mother.

1617. I payde, and which I paid.

1618. lixt, liest; a common form; see P. Plowman, C. vii. 138 (B. v. 163); Plowman's Crede, 542.

1630. stot, properly a stallion (as in A. 615), or a bullock; also applied, as in the Cleveland Glossary, to an old ox. Here it clearly means 'old cow,' as a term of abuse.

1635. by right; because the old woman really meant it; cf. l. 1568.

1644. leve, grant. Tyrwhitt wrongly has lene, lend. The difference between these two words, which are constantly confused (being written leue, lene, often indistinguishably) is explained in my note to P. Plowman, B. v. 263. Leue (grant, permit) is usually followed by a dependent clause; but lene (lend, grant, give) by an accusative case.

1647. I supply and to fill up the line. This and appears in all the modern editions, but without authority, and without any notice that the MSS. omit it. Yet it neither appears in any one of our seven MSS. nor in MSS. Dd., Ii., or Mm. Neither does it appear in the black-letter editions. Indeed MS. E. marks the scansion thus: After the text of Crist | Poul | and John; as if the word 'Poul' occupied a whole foot of the verse. And I can readily believe that the line was meant to be so scanned.

1657. See Ps. x. 9. sit, short for sitteth.

1661. See 1 Cor. x. 13. over, above, beyond.

1662. For Christ as a 'knight,' see P. Plowman, C. xxi. 11; Ancren Riwle, p. 390.

1663. For Somnours, several MSS. have Somnour. MS. Cm. is defective; MS. Dd. supports the reading which I have given. It is immaterial, as thise Somnours includes the particular Somnour who was one of the party.

The Sompnour's Prologue.

1676. The words of St. Paul, 2 Cor. xii. 4, have suggested numerous accounts of revelations made to saints regarding heaven and hell. In Bede's Eccl. History, bk. iii. c. 19, we are told how St. Furseus saw a vision of hell; so also did St. Guthlac, as related in his life, cap. 5. A long vision of purgatory is recounted in the Revelation to the Monk of Evesham, ed. Arber; and another in the account of St. Patrick's Purgatory, in the Lives of Saints, ed. Horstmann. Long descriptions of hell are common, as in the Cursor Mundi, l. 23195, and Hampole's Pricke of Conscience, l. 6464. But the particular story to which Chaucer here alludes is, probably, not elsewhere extant.

1688. Possibly Chaucer was thinking of the wings of Lucifer, greater than any sails, as described in Dante's Inferno, xxxiv. 48; whence also Milton speaks of Satan's 'sail-broad vans,' P. L. ii. 927. A carrik or carrack is a large trading-ship, and we have here the earliest known example of the use of the word in English; see Carrack in the New Eng. Dictionary.

1690-1. Cf. Rom. of the Rose, 7577-8; in vol. i. p. 257.

1695. Line 2119 of the House of Fame is: 'Twenty thousand in a route'; here we have the same line with the addition of freres. Both lines are cast in the same mould, both being deficient in the first foot. Thus the scansion is: Twen | ty thou | sand, &c. In order to conceal this fact, Tyrwhitt reads: 'A twenty thousand,' &c., against all authority; but Wright, Bell, Morris, and Gilman all allow the line to stand as Chaucer wrote it, and as it is here given. The black-letter editions do the same. It is a very small matter that all the copies except E. have on for in; as the words are equivalent, I keep in (as in E.), because in is the reading in the Hous of Fame.

The Somnours Tale.

For further remarks about this Tale, see vol. iii. p. 452.

It is principally directed against the Frere; see the description of him in the Prologue, A. 208.

1710. Holderness is an extremely flat district; it lies at the S. E. angle of Yorkshire, between Hull, Driffield, Bridlington and Spurn Point; see the Holderness Glossary, E. D. S. 1877. We find that Chaucer makes no attempt here, as in the Reeve's Tale, to imitate the Yorkshire dialect.

1712. to preche. The friars were popular preachers of the middle ages. They were to live by begging, and were therefore often called the Mendicant Orders; see l. 1912, and the notes to A. 208, 209. The friar of our story was a Carmelite; see note to l. 2116.

1717. trentals. A trental (from Low Lat. trentale, O. F. trentel) was an office of thirty masses, to be said on so many consecutive days, for the benefit of souls in purgatory. It also meant, as here, the sum paid for the same to the priest or friar. See Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 299, 374; ed. Matthew (E. E. T. S.) pp. 211, 516; and the poem entitled St. Gregory's Trental, in Religious, Political, and Love Poems, ed. Furnivall, p. 83.

1722. possessioners. This term seems to have been applied (1) to the regular orders of monks who possessed landed property, and (2) to the beneficed clergy. I think there is here particular reference to the latter, as indicated by the occurrence of preest in l. 1727, curat in 1816, and viker and persone in l. 2008. The friars, on the contrary, were supposed to have no endowments, but to subsist entirely upon alms; they contrived, however, to evade this restriction, and in Pierce the Plowman's Crede, there is a description of a Dominican convent built with considerable splendour. I take the expression 'Thanked be god' in l. 1723 to be a parenthentical remark made by the Somnour who tells the story, as it is hardly consistent with the views of the friars. As to the perpetual jealousies between the friars and the possessioners, see P. Plowman, B. v. 144.

1728. It was usual (as said in note to l. 1717) to sing the thirty masses on thirty consecutive days, as Chaucer here remarks. But the friar says they are better when 'hastily y-songe'; and it would appear that the friars used occasionally to sing all the thirty masses in one day, and so save a soul from twenty-nine days of purgatory; cf. ll. 1729, 1732. In English Gilds, ed. Toulmin Smith, p. 8, we have an example of this. The wardens are there directed to summon the Minorite Friars to say the dirge, 'and on the morwe to seie a trent of masses atte same freres.'

In Jack Upland, § 13, we find: 'Why make ye [freres] men beleeue that your golden trentall sung of you, to take therefore ten shillings, or at least fiue shillings, woll bring souls out of hell, or out of purgatorie?'

1730. oules. The M. E. forms oule, owel, owul, as well as A. S. awul, awel, are various spellings of E. awl, which see in the New Eng. Dict. Hence oules means awls or piercing instruments. In the Life of St. Katherine, l. 2178, the tormentors torture the saint with 'eawles of irne,' i. e. iron awls. In Horstmann's South-English Legendary (E. E. T. S.), St. Blase is tormented with 'oules kene,' which tore his flesh as when men comb wool (p. 487, l. 84); hence he became the patron saint of wool-combers. Similar tortures were applied by fiends in the medieval descriptions of hell. See Ancren Riwle, p. 212; St. Brandan, ed. Wright, pp. 22, 48.

'There are the furies tossing damnèd souls

On burning forks.'

Marlowe, Faustus, Act v. sc. 4.

1734. qui cum patre. 'This is part of the formula with which prayers and sermons are still sometimes concluded in the Church of England.'—Bell. In a sermon for Ascension Day, in Morris's O. E. Homilies, ii. 115, we have at the end an allusion, in English, to Christ, after which follows:—'qui cum patre et spiritu sancto uiuit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum.' Such was the usual formula.

1740. The friars often begged in pairs; in this way, each was a check upon the other as regarded the things thus obtained. In Jack Upland, § 23, we find the friars are asked:—'What betokeneth that ye goe tweine and tweine togither?' Langland tells us how he met two friars; see P. Plowman, C. xi. 8.

1741. tables, writing tablets. In Horman's Vulgaria, leaf 81, we read:—'Tables be made of leues of yuery, boxe, cyprus, and other stouffe, daubed with waxe to wrytte on.' And again, in the same:—'Poyntellis of yron, and poyntyllis of syluer, bras, boon, or stoone.' This is a survival of the use of the Roman waxed tablet and stilus.

1743. Jack Upland (§ 20) asks the friar:—'Why writest thou hir names in thy tables that yeueth thee mony?' The usual reason was, that the donors might be prayed for; see l. 1745. Cf. l. 1752.

1745. Ascaunces, as if, as though, as if to promise. In G. 838, q.v., it means 'you might suppose that,' or 'possibly.' In Troilus, i. 205, it means 'as if to say'; Boccaccio's Italian has quasi dicesse. It also occurs in Troilus, i. 292; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, fol. 136 b (Tyrwhitt); Tale of Beryn, 1797; Palladius on Husbandry, vi. 39; Sidney's Arcadia, ed. 1622, p. 162; and in Gascoigne's Works, ed. Hazlitt, i. 113, where the marginal note has 'as who should say.' See the New Eng. Dictionary, where the etymology is said to be unknown.

I have since found that it is a hybrid compound. The first part of it is E. as, used superflously and tautologically; the latter part of it is the O. F. quanses, 'as if,' first given in a dictionary by Godefroy in 1889, with six examples, and three other spellings, viz. qanses, quainses, and queinsi. Godefroy refers us to Romania, xviii. 152, and to Foerster's edition of Cliges, note to l. 4553. Kilian gives Mid. Du. 'quantsuys, quasi'; borrowed from O. French, without any prefix.

1746. Nothing came amiss to the friars. They begged for 'corn, monee, chese,' &c.; see Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, p. 304. And in Skelton's Colin Clout, l. 842, we read of the friars:—

'Some to gather chese;

Loth they are to lese

Eyther corne or malte;

Somtyme meale and salte,

Somtyme a bacon-flycke,' &c.

1747. Goddes here translated the French expression de Dieu, meaning 'sent from God.' Tyrwhitt says that the true meaning of de Dieu 'is explained by M. de la Monnoye in a note upon the Contes de D. B. Periers, t. ii. p. 107. Belle serrure de Dieu: Expression du petit peuple, qui raporte pieusement tout à Dieu. Rien n'est plus commun dans la bouche des bonnes vieilles, que ces espèces d'Hébraïsmes: Il m'en conte un bel écu de Dieu; Il ne me reste que ce pauvre enfant de Dieu. Donnez-moi une bénite aumône de Dieu. See goddes halfpeny in l. 1749. (The explanation by Speght, and in Cowel's Interpreter, s. v. kichell, seems to be, as Tyrwhitt says, an invention.)

kechil, a little cake. The form kechell occurs in the Ormulum, l. 8662; answering to the early A. S. coecil, occurring as a gloss to tortum in the Epinal Glossary, 993; different from A. S. cīcel (for cȳcel), given as cicel in Bosworth's Dictionary. The cognate M. H. G. word is küechelīn (Schade), O. H. G. chuochelīn, double dimin. from O. H. G. kuocho (G. Kuchen), a cake; see Kuchen in Kluge. The E. cake is a related word, but with a difference in vowel-gradation.

trip, 'a morsel.' 'Les tripes d'un fagot, the smallest sticks in a faggot'; Cotgrave.

1749. masse-peny, a penny for saying a mass. Jack Upland, § 19, says:—'Freer, whan thou receiuest a peny for to say a masse, whether sellest thou Gods body for that peny, or thy prayer, or els thy travell?'

1751. 'dagon, a slip, or piece. It is found in Chaucer, Berners, and Steevens' Supp. to Dugdale, ii. ap. 370, applied in each instance to a blanket'; Halliwell. Cf. M. E. dagge, a strip of cloth.

1755. hostes man, servant to the guests at the convent. Hoste seems here to mean 'guest,' which is one of the meanings of O. F. hoste (see Cotgrave). This sense is rare in M. E., but it occurs in the Romance of Merlin, ed. Wheatley, iii. 684, last line but one. Because he 'bare the bag,' this attendant on the friars was nicknamed Iscariot; cf. John, xii. 6. 'Thei leden with hem a Scarioth, stolen fro is eldris by thefte, to robbe pore men bi beggynge'; Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, p. 49.

1768. the gode man, the goodman, or master of the house. MS. Hl. has housbond-man, and MSS. Cp. Ln. bonde man; all with the same sense. place, house; cf. note to B. 1910; p. 184.

1770. Deus hic, God be here; 'the ordinary formula of benediction on entering a house'; Wright.

1775. A fine realistic touch; the friar made himself quite at home.

1778. go walked, gone on a walk. For go walked, as in all the seven MSS., Tyrwhitt substitutes y-walked, suppressing this characteristic idiom. See note to C. 406; p. 272.

1792. glose, gloss, interpretation, as distinguished from the text.

1794. Cf. 2 Cor. iii. 6. In the margin of E., 'Litera occidit, &c.'

1804. Kissing was an ordinary form of salutation.

1810. It was usual, I believe, to use a form of deprecation of this sort in reply to praise. The sense is—'but I am aware that I have defects, and may God amend them.'

1816. curats, parish clergy; cf. note to l. 1722.

1820. Cf. 'thou shalt catch men'; Luke, v. 10; 'fishers of men,' Matt. iv. 19; Rom. Rose, (E. version), 7492.

1824. 'For (the sake of the) holy Trinity.' Seint-e is feminine.

1825. pissemyre, ant. Cf. 'as angry as a wasp,' in Heywood's Proverbs.

1832. Ie vous dy, I tell you. A common phrase; see King Alisaunder, ed. Weber, l. 79; Rom. of the Rose, 7408 (in vol. i. p. 254).

1834. ire (Lat. ira) is one of the seven deadly sins; hence the friar's sermon against it, in ll. 2005-2088.

1842. 'But I hope no animal is ever killed on my account.' A strong hint that he always expected some special provision to be made for him.

1845. Cf. John, iv. 34; Job, xxiii. 12.

1853. toun, village; or, precincts of this farm-house.

1857. Visions of saints being carried to heaven are not uncommon. Bede relates one, of Saint Earcongota; Eccl. Hist. bk. iii. c. 8.

1859. fermerer, the friar who had charge of the infirmary. Put for enfermerer, from O. Fr. enfermerier (Godefroy). So also fermorie, an infirmary, in P. Pl. B. xiii. 108.

1862. maken hir Iubilee, keep their jubilee; i. e. having served fifty years in the convent, they have obtained certain privileges, one of which was to go about alone; see note to l. 1740. Tyrwhitt refers us to Ducange, s. v. Sempectæ.

1864. trikling, so E. Hn.; Cm. trynkelynge (probably by error); rest trilling. Cf. B. 1864.

1866. 'Nothing but a thanksgiving would have been appropriate for a child dying in infancy, of whose translation to paradise the friar pretends that he had seen a vision'; Bell.

1872. burel (Pt. Hl. borel) folk, lay folk, the laity. 'The term seems to have arisen from the material of their clothing, which was not used by the clergy'; Wright. Cf. borel, in D. 356; borel men, i. e. laymen, in B. 3145; and borel clerkes, lay clerks, learned laymen, in P. Plowman, B. x. 286.

1877. See Luke, xvi. 19, 20.

1880. In the margin of E., 'Melius est animam saginare quam corpus.' Jean de Meun, in his Testament, 346, says of misers: 'Amegrient leurs ames, plus que leurs cors n'engressent.'

1881. See 1 Tim. vi. 8.

1885. See Exod. xxxiv. 28.

1890. See 1 Kings, xix. 8.

1894. See Levit. x. 9.

1906. mendinants, mendicant friars. Tyrwhitt has mendiants, but, in his notes, admits that mendinants is the right reading, as he found the word to be 'constantly so spelled in the Stat. 12 Rich. II. capp. 7, 8, 9, 10.' The same spelling occurs repeatedly in P. Plowman; see note to P. Pl. C. xvi. 3. See Mendiener, to beg, in Godefroy's O. Fr. Dictionary.

1911. 'The thridde deceyt of thise ordris is that thei passen othere in preyeris, bothe for tyme thei preyen and for multitude of hem'; Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, p. 317.

1915-7. See note to C. 505; p. 278.

1923. See Matt. v. 3. by freres, (1922), concerning friars. Certainly, there is no 'text' to this effect; but the friar trusted to find it in a maner glose, in some kind of comment on the text.

1926. An allusion to possessioners; see note to l. 1722.

1929. Iovinian. I think this is the same Jovinian as is mentioned in D. 675; for Chaucer frequently quotes the treatise by Jerome against this heretic. Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 30, refers in a footnote to 'Jovinian, the enemy of fasts and of celibacy, who was persecuted and insulted by the furious Jerome.' The other Jovinian was a fabulous Roman emperor, who was awhile deposed, like Nebuchadnezzar, for his pride and luxury, as related in the Gesta Romanorum, cap. 59 (or chapter 23 in the English version).

walkinge as a swan, i. e. with slow and stately gait. Jerome (Contra Iovin. i. 40) calls Jovinian 'iste formosus monachus, crassus, nitidus, et quasi sponsus semper incedens.'

1931. 'All as full of wine as a bottle in the buttery.'

1932. For gret, ed. 1550 has lytle; but, as Tyrwhitt remarks, the expression is ironical.

1933. Davit is put for David, for the rime. MSS. E. Hn. Ln. have Dauit; Cm. dauith; Cp. Hl. dauid; Pt. davyd.

1934. Lo but is the reading of MS. E. But the right reading is probably buf, not but. The readings are; E. but; Hn. Cm. Ln. buf; Cp. buff; Pt. boþ (wrongly); Hl. boef; ed. 1550, bouffe. This gives the line in the following form:—

Lo, 'buf!' they seye, 'cor meum eructavit!'

Here the interjectional 'buf!' is probably intended to represent the sound of eructation. We find baw! as an interjection of strong contempt in P. Plowman, C. xiii. 74, xxii. 398.

Ps. xlv (xliv in the Vulgate) begins, in Latin, with the words Cor meum eructauit uerbum bonum; and the Somnour here takes eructauit in the most literal sense.

1935. fore, path, course; such is certainly the right reading, as in D. 110, on which see the note.

1937. See James, i. 22.

1938. at a sours, at a soaring, in her rise, in her upward swoop. The same word as source of a river; from F. source, O. F. sorse, the fem. pp. of the verb which arose from Lat. surgere. Most likely, this is the origin of the later souse, v., in the sense 'to swoop downward'; see Pope, Epilogue to Satires, Dial. ii. 15; Sh. K. John, v. 2. 150; Spenser, F. Q. i. 5. 8. See my note on the House of Fame, l. 544. In the Book of St. Alban's, fol. d 1, back, we find: 'Iff your hawke nym the fowle a-lofte, ye shall say, she toke it at the mount or at the souce'; where the r is dropped.

1939. their, for the eir, the air; see footnote.

1943. Seint Yve; see the note to B. 1417 (p. 172), with which this line entirely coincides.

1944. 'If thou wert not our brother, thou wouldst not fare well'; see l. 1951.

1947. welden, wield, have the full use of.

1963-5. These lines are quoted by the friar as (supposed) ejaculations by Thomas.

1968. In the margin of MS. E., 'Omnis virtus unita fortior est seipsa dispersa.' Compare the fable in Æsop about the difficulty of breaking a bundle of sticks; and see Boeth. bk. iii. pr. 11. 37-40.

1973. See Luke, x. 7. In the margin of MS. E., 'Dignus est operarius mercede, &c.'

1980. 'In the life of Thomas of India.' For this construction, see note to F. 209. St. Thomas the apostle is often so called, because he is said to have preached in India; and perhaps the tradition is true; see my note on P. Plowman, C. xxii. 165, and especially the remarks in Marco Polo, ed. Yule, ii. 292. Cf. note to E. 1230 (p. 353).

The mention of the 'building up of churches' refers to a well-known legend of St. Thomas, who built churches with the money given to him by King Gondoforus for the purpose of building a palace.

'Churchene he arerde mani on, and preostes he sette there.'

Legends of Saints, ed. Horstmann, p. 381.

The story is prettily told in Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art.

Cf. 'Seyn Tomas of Ynde'; Amis and Amiloun, 758, in Weber, Met. Rom. ii. 401. So also in The Assumption of our Lady, 775; in King Horn, ed. Lumby, p. 96; Political and other Poems, ed. Furnivall, p. 112, l. 19, p. 123, l. 278, p. 139, l. 735.

How intent the friars were on building fine churches and convents for their own use, appears from Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, pp. 5, 14; Pierce the Plowman's Crede, 191; Jack Upland, § 10, and § 33; Skelton's Colin Clout, 936; &c.

1986. 'As will be best for thee.' Tyrwhitt has the for thy; but thy is right. I find in the New E. Dict., s. v. Best, 8 b, a quotation from Sir E. Sandys, Europae Speculum (1637), 247: 'I have also, to my best, avoyded that rashnesse.' Cf. 'for your beste,' in B. 2427.

1989. 'Be not as a lion in thy house, nor frantick among thy servants'; Ecclus. iv. 30. In the margin of MS. E. is the Vulgate version (Ecclus. iv. 35):—'Noli esse sicut leo in domo tua, euertens domesticos tuos, et opprimens subiectos tibi.'

1993. hir, her; so in all the MSS. but Pt., which has yre. Tyrwhitt has wrongly taken ire as the reading, and Wright and Bell follow him, without giving any notice that MS. Hl. reads hir! But it makes all the difference; hir means 'thy wife'; cf. ll. 1994-2004, all of which lines are robbed of their meaning by this insidious and uncalled-for alteration. Even ed. 1550 and ed. 1561 have her.

It is easily seen how the error crept in, viz. from confusion with the friar's sermon against ire; but that does not really begin till we come to l. 2005.

As this passage has been so grossly misunderstood, I annex an outline of the sense intended. 'Beware of thy wife; she is like the snake in the grass; remember how many men have lost their lives through their wives. But your wife is a meek one; then why strive? No serpent is so venomous as a provoked woman.' The fact is, that this passage is imitated from Le Roman de la Rose, 16779, &c., where the author bids us beware of women, as being like Vergil's 'snake in the grass.' See next note. With ll. 2001-3 cf. Rom. de la Rose, 9832-6.

1995. Cf. 'latet anguis in herba'; Vergil, Ecl. iii. 95. See F. 512, 513. But Chaucer took this at second-hand, viz. from Le Roman de la Rose, l. 16793; and combined it with another passage from the same, 9832-6, which, in its turn, is copied from Ovid, Ars Amat. ii. 376:—'Nec breuis ignaro uipera laesa pede Femina quam,' &c.

2002. tret, short for tredeth, treads. Cm. has trat. Cf. hit, hideth, F. 512; rit, rideth, A. 974; &c.

2003. Cf. 'furens quid foemina possit'; Vergil, Æn. v. 6.

'Nulla uis flammae tumidique uenti

Tanta, nec teli metuenda torti

Quanta cum coniux uiduata taedis

Ardet et odit.'Seneca, Medea; iii. 567.

2005. Here begins the sermon against ire. See the Persones Tale, I. 533. oon, &c., 'one of the chief of the seven Deadly Sins'; all of which are described in the Persones Tale; see I. 387.

After l. 2004, MS. Hl. has two spurious lines, for which see the footnote. It is probable, however, that they are reminiscences of two genuine lines; for they occur in Le Rom. de la Rose, 16536-8. There are two more such after l. 2012, where the sense of grate is not obvious.

2007. himself, i. e. the sinner. See Pers. Tale, I. 557.

2009. homicyde; see this, in full, in the Pers. Tale, I. 564-579.

2010. 'Ire comth of pryde'; I. 534.

2017. 'Potestat, a chief magistrate'; Halliwell. 'Podestà, a potestate, a mayor'; Florio. See Malory, Morte Arth. bk. v. c. 8.

2018. Senek, Seneca. The story is given in Seneca's De Ira, i. 16, beginning:—'Cn. Piso fuit memoria nostra, uir a multis uitiis integer, sed prauus,' &c. It ends:—'Constituti sunt in eodem loco perituri tres, ob unius innocentiam.' This Piso was a governor of Syria under Tiberius. Precisely the same story is told, of the emperor Heraclius, in the Gesta Romanorum, cap. cxl. Warton gravely describes it in the words—'The emperor Eraclius reconciles (!) two knights.'

2030-1. Wright says these two lines are not in Tyrwhitt, but he is mistaken. His note was meant to refer to the spurious lines (in MS. Hl.) after l. 2037; the former of which is repeated from l. 2030.

2043. 'This story is also in Seneca, De Ira, lib. iii. c. 14. It differs a little from one in Herodotus, lib. iii.' [capp. 34, 35].—Tyrwhitt. Seneca's story begins:—'Cambysen regem nimis deditum uino Praexaspes unus ex carissimis monebat.'

2048. Here MS. Hl. inserts two more spurious lines, for the fourth time; see the footnote.

2061. MSS. E. Hn. Cp. Ln. Dd. all insert ful, which is necessary to the rhythm. MSS. Pt. Hl. omit it, and actually read dronk-e (!), with an impossible final e. Tyrwhitt has dranke, omitting ful, and even Wright, Bell, and Morris have dronk-e, with the same omission. Owing to the carelessness of scribes, who often added an idle final e, such forms as dranke, dronke are not very astonishing. But it would be very curious to know how these editors scanned this line.

2075. Placebo. 'The allusion is to an anthem in the Romish church, from Ps. cxvi. 9, which in the Vulgate [Ps. cxiv. 9] stands thus: Placebo Domino in regione uiuorum. Hence the complacent brother in the Marchant's Tale is called Placebo.'—Tyrwhitt. Being used in the office for the dead, this anthem was familiar to every one; and 'to sing Placebo' came to mean 'to be complaisant'; as in Bacon, Essay 20. See Pers. Tale, I. 617; and see my notes to P. Plowman, C. iv. 467 (B. iii. 307), B. xv. 122.

2079. This story is also from Seneca, De Ira, lib. iii. c. 21. Cf. Herodotus, i. 189, 202; v. 52. In these authorities, the river is called the Gyndes; and in Alfred's translation of Orosius, bk. ii. c. 4, it is the Gandes. 'Sir John Maundeville (Travels, cap. 5) tells this story of the Euphrates.'—Wright.

2085. he, i. e. Solomon; see Prov. xxii. 24, 25.

2090. as Iust as is a squire, as exact (i. e. upright) as a square. He means that he will deal out exact justice, and not condone the sick man's anger without appointing him a penance for it. A squire is a measuring-square, or T-square, as explained in my Dictionary; it is used for measuring right angles with exactitude. For the use of the word, see Shak. L. L. L. v. 2. 474; Spenser, F. Q. ii. 1. 58; Minshew's Dict.; Romaunt of the Rose, 7064; Floris and Blancheflur, ed. Lumby, 325. Cotgrave gives: 'A l'esquierre, justly, directly, evenly, straightly; by line and levell, to a haire.' Godefroy, s. v. esquarre, refers us to the O. F. translation of 1 Kings, v. 17; 'e que tuz fussent taillie a esquire.' Lydgate has: 'By compas cast, and squared out by squyers'; Siege of Troye, ed. 1555, fol. F 5, back, col. 1.

2095. 'Thei [the friars] cryen faste that thei haf more power in confessioun then other curatis; for thei may schryve alle that comen to hem, bot curatis may no ferther then her owne parischens'; Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 374. Cf. Rom. Rose, 6390-8 (vol. i. 238).

2098. So in I. 1008: 'but-if it lyke to thee of thyn humilitee.'

2105. 'The pavements were made of encaustic tiles, and therefore must have been rather expensive.'—Wright. See my note to Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, l. 194; and Our English Home, p. 20.

2107. 'For the sake of Him who harried hell'; see note to A. 3512; p. 107.

2116. Elie, Elias, Elijah. Elisee, Eliseus, Elisha. There was great strife among the four orders of friars as to the priority of their order. The Carmelites, who took their name from mount Carmel (see 1 Kings, xviii. 19, 20), actually pretended that their order was founded by the prophet Elijah when he retired to mount Carmel to escape the wrath of Ahab; and by this unsurpassable fiction secured to themselves the credit of priority to the rest. It is therefore clear that the friar of Chaucer's story was a Carmelite, as no other friar would have alluded to this story. See Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 353; Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, 382.

2119. for seinte charitee; a common expression. It occurs in the Tale of Gamelin, 513; with which Chaucer was familiar. Cf. B. 4510.

2126. your brother. This alludes to the letters of fraternity, which friars were accustomed to grant, under the conventual seal, to such laymen as had given them benefactions or were likely to leave them money in their wills. The benefactors received in return a brotherly participation in such spiritual benefits as the friars could confer. Thus, in Jack Upland, §§ 28, 29, we find:—'Why be ye [friars] so hardie to grant, by letters of fraternitie, to men and women, that they shall haue part and merite of all your good deeds, and ye weten neuer whether God be apayed with your deeds because of your sin?... What betokeneth that yee haue ordeined that, whan such one as ye haue made your brother or sister, and hath a letter of your seale, that letter mought be brought in your holy chapter, and there be rad, or els yee will not pray for him?' See Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 377, 420; ed. Matthew, p. 4. Such lay brethren were usually dressed for burial in a friar's habit; see Milton, P. L. iii. 479; Rock, Church of our Fathers, i. 487. A benefactor could even thus belong to all the orders of friars at once; cf. P. Plowman, C. x. 343 (B. vii. 192). This gives point to the question in l. 1955 above.

2156. His meynee, i. e. the menials of the sick man.

2159. His companion was in the nearest inn; see l. 1779.

2162. court, the house of the lord of the manor. 'The larger country-houses consisted generally of an enclosed court, from which circumstance this name was usually given to the manorial residence, and it has been preserved to modern times, as a common term for gentlemen's seats.'—Wright. Cf. P. Plowman, C. xxiii. 344. It was also called a place; see note to B. 1910; p. 184.

2164. 'Of ech sich privat seete, by licence of the pope, ben maad, some chapeleyns of houshold, summe chapeleyns of honour,' &c.; Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 511. 'Frere, what charity is this, to be confessors of lords and ladies,' &c.; Jack Upland, § 37. And see Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, p. 333; P. Plowman, B. v. 136-142, xx. 341-345.

2185. maister. The hypocrite here declines to be called 'master,' though he had allowed the good wife to call him so twice without reproof; see ll. 1800, 1836; and cf. l. 1781. At the same time, he declares that he had gained the title of Master in the schools. As he was the prior or principal of his convent (see ll. 2260, 2265, 2276) he may have been 'capped,' or have received the degree of Master of Divinity. 'Also capped freris, that ben calde maystres of dyvynite, have her chaumber and servise as lordis or kynges.... And what cursidenesse in this ... to gete hym a cappe of maysterdome, by preyer of lordis and grete giftis,' &c.; Wyclif's Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 376. An LL.D. of Edinburgh is 'capped,' or has a doctor's cap momentarily laid upon his head, when he receives his degree; as I know by experience.

See also Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, ll. 498, 574.

2187. See Matt. xxiii. 7, 8.

2196. See Matt. v. 13.

2205. 'How does it seem to me?' Read think'th.

2209. 'I consider him to be in a kind of frenzy'; cf. 2240, 2292.

2219. Shewe here means 'to propose' or 'propound.'

2235. See Chaucer's own explanation of the method of propagation of a sound, in the Hous of Fame, 782-821. He seems to have taken it from Boethius, De Musica, i. 14; see vol. iii. p. 260.

2238. my cherl, i. e. my serf; as being his dependant. It probably implies vassalage.

2244. Cf. A. 100. Although the squire was not above winning 'a new gown,' he was probably a young man of (future) equal rank with the lord of the manor. In fact, his scornful boldness proves it.

2247. goune-cloth. 'In the middle ages, the most common rewards, and even those given by the feudal landholders to their dependants and retainers, were articles of apparel, especially the gown or outward robe.... Money was comparatively very scarce in the middle ages; and as the household retainers were lodged and fed, clothing was almost the only article they wanted.'—Wright.

2259. 'The regular number of monks or friars in a convent had been fixed at twelve, with [i. e. besides] their superior; in imitation, it is said, of the number of twelve apostles and their divine master. The larger religious houses were considered as consisting of a certain number of convents. Thus Thorn, speaking of the abbot of St. Augustine's at Canterbury, says:—Anno Domini m.c.xlvi, iste Hugo reparavit antiquum numerum monachorum istius monasterii, et erant lx. monachi professi praeter abbatem, hoc est, quinque conuentus in universo.—Decem Scriptores, col. 1807.'—Wright. That is, this house consisted of sixty-one members, the abbot and five convents of twelve each. The smaller (single) convents were also called cells, and the principal, the prior; see A. 172, and note that, in A. 167, the Monk is said, not to be an abbot, but to be fit to be an abbot. The expression 'his covent,' in l. 2261, shews that the friar confessor was the prior or head of his cell.

2279. 'Yif a frere be a maister, or a riche frere in-mong hise bretheren, he shal be loutid and worshipid more then Cristis lawe techith,' &c.; Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew, p. 306.

2281. This implies that the squire, with the rest, had heard the friar preach in church that morning, and had been greatly bored by the sermon.

2289. I supply the word as, which is plainly wanted. MS. Hl. supplies elles, but I believe as to be right. The way in which the second as came to be dropped in this line, is very curious. It arose from misunderstanding the spelling of Ptolemy.

The occurrence of an unpronounceable P at the beginning of Ptolomee made the scribes think something must be omitted. Hence several of them introduced a stroke through the p, which stood as an abbreviation for 'ro,' and this turned it into Protholomee, which looked right, but made the second as superfluous. Thus MSS. Cp. Hl. both have 'protholome,' with the mark of abbreviation; in MSS. E. Hn. Dd. it is expanded into 'Protholomee' at length. We again find the scribes in the same difficulty in D. 324. A still stranger spelling is plotolomee, for which see vol. iii. p. 359, l. 18. Cf. the note on Ptolemy in the same volume, at p. 354.

NOTES TO GROUP E.

The Clerkes Prologue.

1. clerk. See the description of him, Prol. A. 285.

3. were newe spoused, who should be (i. e. is) newly wedded; see Rom. de la Rose, (F. version), 1004; in vol. i. p. 136.

6. See Eccles. iii. 1; 'To every thing there is a season,' &c.

7. as beth, pray be. The word as, nearly equivalent to 'I pray,' is sometimes used thus with the imperative mood. Since as is short for al-so, it means literally even so, just so. Cp. as keep, A. 2302; as sende, A. 2317; as doth, F. 458; 'as beth not wroth with me,' Troil. and Cress. v. 145; 'as go we seen,' i. e. pray let us go to see, id. 523; see also A. 3777. See Mätzner, Engl. Gram. ii. 2. 505.

10. A French proverb. 'Ki en jeu entre jeu consente,' i. e. approves of; Le Roux de Lincy, Proverbes Français, ii. 85.

18. Heigh style, lofty, learned, somewhat pedantic style; see l. 41.

22. yerde, control, governance; lit. yard, rod; so we say 'under the rod.' Cf. B. 1287, and the note at p. 169.

27. Padowe, Padua, in the N. E. of Italy. Petrarch resided at Arqua, two miles from Padua. He died July 18, 1374. See vol. iii. p. 454; vol. i. p. xxv.

33. of poetrye, with his poetry. Of is similarly used in l. 34.

34. Linian; 'the canonist Giovanni di Lignano, once illustrious, now forgotten, though several works of his remain. He was made Professor of Canon Law at Bologna in 1363, and died at Bologna in 1383'; Morley's English Writers, v. 339. Tyrwhitt first pointed out the person here alluded to, and says—'there is some account of him in Panzirolus, de Cl. Leg. Intrepret. l. iii. c. xxv:—Joannes, a Lignano, agri Mediolanensis vico, oriundus, et ob id Lignanus dictus,' &c. One of his works, entitled Tractatus de Bello, is extant in MS. Reg. 13 B. ix [Brit. Mus.]. He composed it at Bologna in the year 1360. He was not however a mere lawyer. Chaucer speaks of him as excelling in philosophy, and so does his epitaph in Panzirolus. The only specimen of his philosophy that I have met with is in MS. Harl. 1006. It is an astrological work, entitled Conclusiones Judicii composite per Domnum Johannem de Lyniano super coronacione Domni Urbani Pape VI. A.D. 1387,' &c. Lignano is here said to be near Milan, and to have been the lawyer's birthplace. In l. 38, Chaucer speaks of his death, showing that Chaucer wrote this prologue later than 1383.

43. proheme, proem, introduction. Petrarch's treatise (taken from Boccaccio's Decamerone, Day x. Novel 10) is entitled 'De obedientia ac fide uxoria Mythologia.' It is preceded by a letter to Boccaccio, but this is not here alluded to. What Chaucer means is the first section of the tale itself, which begins thus:—'Est ad Italiae latus occiduum Vesulus, ex Apennini iugis mons unus altissimus.... Padi ortu nobilissimus, qui eius a latere fonte lapsus exiguo orientem contra solem fertur, mirisque mox tumidus incrementis.... Liguriam gurgite uiolentus intersecat; dehinc Aemiliam, atque Flaminiam, Venetiamque discriminans ... in Adriaticum mare descendit.' Pemond, Piedmont. Saluces, Saluzzo, S. of Turin. Vesulus, Monte Viso. See the description of the route from Mont Dauphin to Saluzzo, by the Col de Viso, in Murray's Guide to Switzerland and Piedmont. Cf. Vergil, Aen. x. 708.

51. To Emelward, towards Aemilia. Tyrwhitt says—'One of the regions of Italy was called Aemilia, from the via Aemilia, which crossed it from Placentia [Piacenza] to Rimini. Placentia stood upon the Po. Pitiscus, Lex. Ant. Rom. in v. Via Aemilia. Petrarch's description ... is a little different.' See note above. Ferrare, Ferrara, on the Po, not far from its mouth. Venyse, rather the Venetian territory than Venice itself.

54. 'It seems to me a thing irrelevant, excepting that he wishes to impart his information.'

56. this, contraction for this is (see footnote); common.

The Clerkes Tale.

57. In many places this story is translated from Petrarch almost word for word; and as Tyrwhitt remarks, it would be endless to cite illustrative passages from the original Latin; see further in vol. iii. p. 453. The first stanza is praised by Professor Lowell, in his Study Windows, p. 208, where he says—'What a sweep of vision is here!' Chaucer is not quite so close a translator here as usual; the passage in Petrarch being—'Inter caetera ad radicem Vesuli, terra Salutiarum, uicis et castellis satis frequens, Marchionum arbitrio nobilium quorundum regitur uirorum.'

82. leet he slyde, he allowed to pass unattended to, neglected. So we find 'Let the world slide'; Induction to Taming of the Shrew, l. 5; and 'The state of vertue never slides'; The Sturdy Rock (in Percy's Reliques). See March's Student's Manual of Eng. Lang. p. 125, where the expression is noted as still current in America. Petrarch has—'alia pene cuncta negligeret.' With ll. 83-140, cf. Shakesp. Sonnets, i-xvii.

86. flockmele, in a flock or troop; Pet. has 'cateruatim.' 'Treuly theder came flockemele the multitude of tho blessyd sowlys':—Monk of Evesham, ed. Arber, c. 55; p. 107. Palsgrave's French Dict. has—'Flockmeale, par troupeaux'; fol. 440, back. Cf. E. piece-meal; we also find wukemalum, week by week, Ormulum, 536; lim-mele, limb from limb, Layamon, 25618; hipyllmelum, by heaps, Wycl. Bible, Wisdom xviii. 25: Koch, Eng. Gramm. ii. 292.

99. 'Although I have no more to do with this matter than others have who are here present.' Observe that the Marquis is addressed as ye, not thou, the former being a title of respect.

103-105. These three lines are not in the original.

106. We should have expected to find here us lyketh ye, i. e. you are pleasing to us; but we really have an instance of a double dative, so that us lyketh yow is equivalent to 'it pleases us with respect to you.' The nominative case is ye, the dative and accusative yow or you. Yow leste, it may please you, in l. 111, is the usual idiom.

107. and ever han doon, and (both you and your doings) have ever brought it about. Such is the usual force of doon; cf. ll. 253, 1098.

115. Cf. Barbour's Bruce, ed. Skeat, i. 266-8.—M.

118-119. Expanded from—'uolant enim dies rapidi.'

121. still as stoon; Latin text, 'tacita.' Cf. F. 171.

129. we wol chese yow, we will choose for you.

147. Ther, where. This line is Chaucer's own.

157. Bountee, goodness. streen, race, stock. Petrarch has—'Quicquid in homine boni est, non ab alio quam a Deo est.'

168. As, as if. This line, in Petrarch, comes after l. 173. Lines 174, 175 are Chaucer's own.

172. as ever, &c., as ever I may thrive, as I hope to thrive.

190-196. Expanded from—'Et ipse nihilominus eam ipsam nuptiarum curam domesticis suis imposuit, edixitque diem.'

197-203. Expanded from—'Fuit haud procul a palatio uillula paucorum atque inopum incolarum.'

211-217. Sometimes Chaucer translates literally, and sometimes he merely paraphrases, as here. Lines 215-217 are all his own.

220. rype and sad corage, a mature and staid disposition. Petrarch has—'sed uirilis senilisque animus uirgineo latebat in pectore.'

223. spinning; i. e. she spun whilst keeping the sheep; see a picture of St. Geneviève in Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art. Line 224 is Chaucer's.

227. shredde and seeth, sliced and sod (or boiled). Lat. 'domum rediens oluscula et dapes fortunae congruas praeparabat, durumque cubiculum sternebat,' &c.

229. on lofte, aloft. She kept up her father's life, i. e. sustained him. His death is recorded in l. 1134.

234. For this line the Latin has only the word transiens.

237. in sad wyse, soberly; Lat. 'senili grauitate.'

242. Here the people means the common people; Lat. 'uulgi oculis.' In the next line he is emphatic, meaning that his eyes were quicker to perceive than theirs.

253. hath don make, hath caused to be made. Lat. 'Ipse interim et anulos aureos et coronas et balteos conquirebat.' Chaucer inserts asure, the colour of fidelity; see F. 644, and note. For balteos he substitutes the English phrase broches and ringes; cf. P. Plowm. B. prol. 75.

257. Scan—Bý | a maýd | e lýk | to hír | statúrë. ||

259. Here Chaucer apparently omits a sentence, namely:—'Uenerat expectatus dies, et cum nullus sponsae rumor audiretur, admiratio omnium uehementer excreuerat.' But he has, in fact, given us this above, in ll. 246-8.

260. undern (lit. the intervening or middle period) has two meanings in the Teutonic tongues; (1) mid-forenoon, i. e. originally 9 A. M.; and (2) mid-afternoon, originally 3 P. M. In this passage it is clearly the former that is meant; indeed in l. 981, where it occurs again, the original has 'proximae lucis hora tertia,' i. e. 9 A. M. In this passage, the original has hora prandii, meaning luncheon-time, which in Chaucer's time would often be 9 A. M.; see note to B. 1396, at p. 171; and cf. Ælfric's Homilies, ed. Thorpe, ii. 77. See note to Piers Pl. B. vi. 147; and see Undern in the Glossary.

But it may be noted here, that the sense of undern is variable. Sometimes it meant the period from 9 to 12, or the middle of that period, i. e. about 10.30 or 11. Sometimes, the period from 3 to 6 P. M., or the middle of it, i. e. about 4.30 or 4. In modern E. dialects, it means about 4 P. M. See B. 4412, D. 875.

260-294. Expanded and improved from the following short passage: 'Hora iam prandii aderat, iamque apparatu ingenti domus tota feruebat. Tum Gualtherus, aduentanti ueluti sponsae obuiam profecturus, domo egreditur, prosequente uirorum et matronarum nobilium caterua. Griseldis omnium quae erga se pararentur ignara, peractis quae agenda domi erant, aquam e longinquo fonte conuectans paternum limen intrabat: ut, expedita curis aliis, ad uisendam domini sui sponsam cum puellis comitibus properaret.'

322. governeth, arrange, dispose of. Observe the use of the plural imperative, as a mark of respect. When the marquis addresses Griseldis as ye, it is a mark of extreme condescension on his part; the Latin text has tu and te.

337-343. Expanded from—'insolito tanti hospitis aduentu stupidam inuenere; quam iis uerbis Gualtherus aggreditur.'

350. yow avyse, consider the matter; really a delicate way of expressing refusal. Compare the legal formula le roy s'avisera for expressing the royal refusal to a proposed measure.

364. For to be deed, even if I were to be dead, were to die; Lat. 'et si me mori iusseris, quod moleste feram.'

375-376. These characteristic lines are Chaucer's own. So are ll. 382, 383.

381. corone, nuptial garland; Lat. 'corona.' See Brand's Pop. Antiq. ed. Ellis, ii. 123.

388. snow-whyt; Lat. 'niueo.' Perhaps Spenser took a hint from this; F. Q. i. 1. 4. In the Leg. of Good Women, l. 1198, Chaucer calls a horse paper-whyt.

393. Repeated, slightly altered, from l. 341.

409. thewes, mental qualities. So also in E. 1542; Gower, Conf. Amant. lib. vii. sect. 1 (ed. Pauli, iii. 85); Spenser, F. Q. i. 9. 3; i. 10. 4; ii. 1. 33, &c. 'The common signification of the word thews in our old writers, is manners, or qualities of mind and disposition.... By thews Shakespeare means unquestionably brawn, nerves, muscular vigour (Jul. Caes. i. 3; 2 Hen. IV, iii. 2; Hamlet, i. 3). And to this sense, and this only, the word has now settled down; the other sense, which was formerly so familiar in our literature, is quite gone out and forgotten. [With respect to theawe = sinew, in Layamon, l. 6361] Sir F. Madden remarks (iii. 471):—"This is the only instance in the poem of the word being applied to bodily qualities, nor has any other passage of an earlier date than the sixteenth century been found in which it is so used." It may be conjectured that it had only been a provincial word in this sense, till Shakespeare adopted it'; Craik's English of Shakespeare; note on Jul. Caesar, i. 3. 81.

412. embrace, hold fast; 'omnium animos nexu sibi magni amoris astrinxerat.' Compare Tennyson's Lord of Burleigh with ll. 394-413.

413. Nearly identical with Troil. i. 1078.

421. royally; alluding to the royal virtues of Griseldis.

429. Not only the context, but the Latin text, justifies the reading homlinesse. Feet is fact, i. e. act. The Latin is—'Neque uero solers sponsa muliebria tantum haec domestica, sed, ubi res posceret, publica etiam obibat officia.' Lines 432-434 are Chaucer's own.

444. 'Although it would have been liefer to her to have borne a male child'; i. e. she would rather, &c. The Latin has—'quamuis filium maluisset.'

449-462. Expanded from—'Cepit (ut fit) interim Gualtherum, cum iam ablactata esset infantula (mirabilis quaedam quàm laudabilis, [aliter, an mirabile quidem magis quam laudabile,] doctiores iudicent) cupiditas satis expertam charae fidem coniugis experiendi altius [aliter, ulterius], et iterum atque iterum retentandi.'

452. tempte, make trial of, prove; see ll. 1152, 1153 below. sadnesse, constancy, equanimity.

483. Note Walter's use of the word thee here, and of thy twice in the next stanza, instead of the usual ye. It is a slight, but significant sign of insult, offered under pretence of reporting the opinion of others. In l. 492 we have your again.

504. thing, possession. Lat. 'de rebus tuis igitur fac ut libet.'

516. a furlong wey or two, the distance of one or two furlongs, a short distance, a little. The line simply means—'a little after.'

525. stalked him; marched himself in, as we should say. This use of him is remarkable, but not uncommon.

533-539. Lat. 'Iussus sum hanc infantulam accipere, atque eam—Hîc sermone abrupto, quasi crudele ministerium silentio exprimens, subticuit.' Compare 'Quos ego—'; Vergil, Aen. i. 135.

540-546. Lat. 'Suspecta uiri fama; suspecta facies; suspecta hora; suspecta erat oratio; quibus etsi clare occisum iri dulcem filiam intelligeret, nec lachrymulam tamen ullam, nec suspirium dedit.' Mr. Wright quotes this otherwise, putting dulce for dulcem, and stopping at intelligeret.

547-567. Chaucer expands the Latin, and transposes some of the matter. Lines 561-563 precede ll. 547-560 in the original, which merely has—'in nutrice quidem, nedum in matre durissimum; sed tranquilla fronte puellulam accipiens aliquantulum respexit & simul exosculans benedixit, ac signum sanctae crucis impressit, porrexitque satelliti.'

570. After That in this line, we ought, in strict grammar, to have ye burie in the next line, instead of the imperative burieth. But the phrase is idiomatic, and as all the seven best MSS. agree in this reading, it is best to retain it. Tyrwhitt alters That but to But if.

579. Somwhat, in some degree. But Petrarch says differently—'uehementer paterna animum pietas mouit.'

582-591. Lat. 'Iussit satelliti obuolutam pannis, cistae iniectam, ac iumento impositam, quiete omni quanta posset diligentia Bononiam deferret ad sororem suam, quae illic comiti de Panico nupta erat,' &c.

586. 'But, under penalty of having his head cut off'; lit. of cutting off his head.

589. Boloigne, Bologna, E. by S. from Modena, and a long way from Saluzzo. Panik answers to the de Panico in note to l. 582; Boccaccio has Panago. I observe in the map the river Panaro flowing between Modena and Bologna; perhaps there is some connexion between the names. Tyrwhitt has Pavie (Pavia) in his text, but corrects it in the notes.

602. in oon, in one and the same state: ever in oon, always alike, continually; so also in l. 677. Cf. Kn. Ta. 913 (A. 1771).

607. This must mean—'no accidental sign of any calamity.'

612. A knave child, a male child, boy; as in Barbour's Bruce, xiii. 693; English Gilds, ed. T. Smith, p. 30.

615. merië; three syllables; cf. A. 1386, B. 4156. Ll. 621-623 are Chaucer's own.

625. sikly berth, hardly bear, dislike. Lat. 'populum aegre ferre,' &c.

643. Lat. 'ne te inopinus et subitus dolor turbet.'

645-651. Expanded from—'Dixi (ait) et repeto, nihil possum seu uelle, seu nolle, nisi quae tu; neque uero in ijs filiis quicquam habeo, praeter laborem.'

663. plesancë, three syllables; stabl', one syllable.

666. 'The pain of death is not to be compared to the pleasure of your love.' Lat. 'nec mors ipsa nostro fuerit par amori.' Cf. ll. 817, 1091.

687. ever lenger, &c., i. e. ever the longer (he thinks of it) the more he wonders. In the more, the word the is for A. S. þý.

700. And he; cf. And ye, l. 105.

701-707. Expanded from—'sed sunt qui, ubi semel inceperint, non desinant; immo incumbant, haereantque proposito.'

704. a stake; cf. Macb. v. 7. 1; Jul. Caesar, iv. 1. 48.

714. more penible, more painstaking; Lat. 'obsequentior.'

719. 'She made it clear that no wife should of herself, on account of any worldly anxiety, have any will, in practice, different from that of her husband.'

722. sclaundre, ill fame, ill report concerning Walter. See l. 730.

738. message, a messenger; Lat. 'nuncios Romam misit.' So in Old English we find prisoun or prison for prisoner; Piers Pl. B. vii. 30.

772. anon, immediately. It was not uncommon in olden times for girls to be married at twelve years of age. The Wife of Bath was first married at that age; see D. 4.

797. Lat. 'magna omnis fortuna seruitus magna est; non mihi licet, quod cuilibet liceret agricolae.'

850. were agrees with the word clothes following; cf. it ben, Piers Plowm. B. vi. 56. She did not really bring her husband even the dower of her old clothes, as they had been taken from her. Lines 851-861 are all Chaucer's own, and shew his delicacy of touch.

866. Lat. 'neque omnino alia mihi dos fuit, quam fides et nuditas.'

871. Probably suggested by Job, i. 21. So l. 902 is from Job, iii. 3.

880-882. These lines are Chaucer's own; l. 880 is characteristic of him. The phrase in l. 880 seems to have been proverbial. Cf. 'I walke as werme, withoute wede'; Coventry Mysteries, p. 28. But Chaucer got it from Le Roman de la Rose, 445; see his translation, l. 454; vol. i. p. 112.

888-889. The latter part of l. 888, and l. 889, are Chaucer's own.

903. lyves, alive; a lyves creature, a creature alive, a living being. Lyves is an adverb, formed like nedes, from the genitive case of the substantive. There are other instances of its use.

'Yif I late him liues go'; Havelok, 509.

i. e. if I let him go away alive. And again lyues = alive, in Piers Pl. B. xix. 154. Nearly repeated from Troil. iv. 251-2.

910. After this line, Chaucer has omitted the circumstance of Janicola's preserving his daughter's old clothing; 'tunicam eius hispidam, et attritam senio, abditam paruae domus in parte seruauerat.' See l. 913.

911. Agayns, towards, so as to meet. To go agayns, in M. E., is to go to meet. So also to come agayns, to ride agayns (or agayn). See Agayn in Glossary to Spec. of Eng. (Morris and Skeat); and Barbour's Bruce, xiv. 420. Ll. 915-917 are Chaucer's own.

916. 'For the cloth was poor, and many days older now than on the day of her marriage.'

932. 'Men speak of Job, and particularly of his humility.' Cf. Job, xl. 4, xlii. 1-6.

934. Namely of men, especially of men, where men is emphatic. The whole of this stanza (932-938) is Chaucer's.

938. but, except, unless; falle, fallen, happened; of-newe, newly, an adverbial expression. It means then, 'unless it has happened very lately.' In other words, 'If there is an example of a man surpassing a woman in humility, it must have happened very lately; for I have never heard of it.'

939. Pars Sexta. This indication of a new part comes in a fitting place, and is taken from Tyrwhitt, who may have found it in a MS. But there is no break here in the Latin original, nor in any of the MSS. of Chaucer which I have consulted. erl of Panik; Lat. 'Panicius comes.'

940. more and lesse, greater or smaller; i. e. everybody. So also in the Frank. Tale, 'riveres more and lesse'; F. 1054. So also moche and lyte, great and small, Prol. 494; moste and leste, greatest and least, A. 2198. Spenser has, F. Q. vi. 6. 12,—

''Gainst all, both bad and good, both most and least.'

941. alle and some, i. e. all and one, one and all. See Morris's Eng. Accidence, sect. 218, p. 142.

960. wommen; some MSS. have womman, as in Tyrwhitt. But MS. E. is right. Petrarch uses the word foeminas, not foeminam.

965. yvel biseye, ill provided; lit. ill beseen. The word yvel is pronounced here almost as a monosyllable (as it were yv'l), as is so commonly the case with ever; indeed generally, words ending with el and er are often thus clipped. A remarkable instance occurs in the Milleres Tale (A. 3715), where we not only have a similar ending, but the word ever in the same line—

'That trewë love was ever so yvel biset.'

See also yvel apayed in line 1052 below. The converse to yvel biseye, is richely biseye, richly provided or adorned, in l. 984 below.

981. Lat. 'Proximae lucis hora tertia comes superuenerat'; see note to l. 260.

995-1008. These two stanzas are Chaucer's own, and are so good that they must have been a later addition; Prof. Ten Brink suggests the date 1387 (Eng. Lit. ii. 123, Eng. version). In MS. E. the word Auctor is inserted in the margin, and l. 995 begins with a large capital letter. At the beginning of l. 1009 is a paragraph-mark, shewing where the translation begins again. unsad, unsettled. Cf. Shakesp. Cor. i. 1. 186, Jul. Caesar, i. 1. 55; Scott, Lady of the Lake, v. 30.

999. 'Ever full of tittle-tattle, which would be dear enough at a halfpenny.' See n. to l. 1200. Iane, a small coin of Genoa (Janua); see Rime of Sir Thopas, B. 1925. The first stanza (995-1001) is supposed to be uttered by the sober and discreet part of the population; see l. 1002.

1031. lyketh thee, pleases thee. The marquis addresses her as thou, because all suppose her to be a menial.

1039. mo, lit. more; but also used in the sense of others, or, as here, another. The modern phrase would be, 'as you did somebody else.' The extreme delicacy of the hint is admirable. This use of mo is common in Chaucer; see the Glossary. So also, in Specimens of English, ed. Morris and Skeat, we have, at p. 47, l. 51—

'Y sike for vnsete;

Ant mourne ase men doþ mo';

i. e. I sigh for unrest, and mourn as other men do. And on the next page, p. 48, l. 22, we have

'Mody meneþ so doþ mo,

Ichot ycham on of þo';

i. e. 'The moody moan as others do; I wot I am one of them.' In l. 240 of How the Good Wife taught her Daughter, pr. with Barbour's Bruce, ed. Skeat, we find—'And slanderit folk vald euir haue ma,' i. e. would ever have others like themselves. Somewhat similar is the expression oþer mo, where we should now say others as well; Piers Plowman, C. v. 10, xxii. 54. A somewhat similar use of mo occurs in Tudor English. 'It fortuned Diogenes to ... make one among the moo at a dyner.'—Udall, tr. of Erasmus' Apophthegmes (1564), bk. i. § 91. So also:—'that he also, emong the mo [i. e. the rest] might haue his pleasure'; id. bk. ii. § 13. Tyrwhitt's suggestion that Chaucer has licentiously turned me into mo for the mere sake of getting a rime, in which he has hitherto been followed by nearly every editor, is only to be repudiated. It may well have been with the very purpose of guarding against this error that, in the Ellesmere and Hengwrt MSS., the original Latin text is here quoted in the margin—'unum bona fide te precor ac moneo: ne hanc illis aculeis agites, quibus alteram agitasti.' Chaucer, who throughout surpasses his original in delicacy of treatment, did not permit himself to be outdone here; and Boccaccio also has the word altra. The use of me would have been a direct charge of unkindness, spoiling the whole story. See l. 1045 and l. 449.

1049. gan his herte dresse, addressed his heart, i. e. prepared it, schooled it. The M. E. dresse is our modern direct; both being from Lat. dirigere.

1053. Here we may once more note the use of the word thy, the more so as it is used with a quite different tone. We sometimes find it used, as here, between equals, as a term of endearment; it is, accordingly, very significant. See l. 1056.

1066. that other, the other, the boy.

1071. non, any, either. The use of it is due to the preceding nat.

1079. Professor Morley, in his English Writers, v. 342, aptly remarks here—'And when Chaucer has told all, and dwelt with an exquisite pathos of natural emotion all his own upon the patient mother's piteous and tender kissing of her recovered children—for there is nothing in Boccaccio, and but half a sentence in Petrarch, answering to these four beautiful stanzas (1079-1106)—he rounds all, as Petrarch had done, with simple sense, which gives religious meaning to the tale, then closes with a lighter strain of satire which protects Griselda herself from the mocker.'

1098. 'Hath caused you (to be) kept.' For the same idiom, see Kn. Tale, A. 1913; Man of Law's Tale, B. 171, and the note. Cf. 'Wher I have beforn ordeyned and do mad [caused to be made] my tombe.' Royal Wills, ed. Nichols, p. 278.

1133. His wyves fader, i. e. Janicola. This circumstance should have been mentioned before l. 1128, as in the original.

1140. For of (Ellesmere MS.) the other MSS. read in.

1141. auctour, author, i. e. Petrarch, whom Chaucer follows down to l. 1162. Ll. 1138-1141 are Chaucer's own, and may be compared with his poem on the Golden Age (vol. i. 380).

1144. importable, intolerable; Lat.—'huius uxoris patientiam, quae mihi uix imitabilis uidetur.' Of course ll. 1147-8 are Chaucer's.

1151. 'Receive all with submission.' Fr. en gré, gratefully, in good part. sent, sendeth; present tense, as in Piers Plowman, C. xxii. 434. The past tense is sente, which would not rime.

1152. 'For it is very reasonable that He should prove (or test) that which He created.'

1153. boghte, (hath) redeemed. See St. James, i. 13.

1162. Here Petrarch ends his narrative, and here, beyond all doubt, Chaucer's translation originally ended also. From this point to the end is the work of a later period, and in his best manner, though unsuited to the coy Clerk. He easily links on his addition by the simple expression lordinges, herkneth; and in l. 1170, he alludes to the Wife of Bath, of whom probably he had never thought when first translating the story.

We can thus understand the stanza in the footnote, on p. 424. It is genuine, but was rejected at the time of adding ll. 1163-1212. It was afterwards expanded into The Monkes Prologue, with the substitution of the patient Prudence for the patient Griselda; see B. 3083-6.

1177. Here the metre changes; the stanzas are of six lines; and all six stanzas are linked together. There are but three rimes throughout; -ence in the first and third lines of every stanza, -aille in the second, fourth, and sixth, (requiring eighteen rimes in all), and -inde in the fifth line. It is a fine example even from a metrical point of view alone.

1188. Chichevache, for chiche vache, i. e. lean cow. The allusion is to an old fable, of French origin, which describes a monstrous cow named Chiche Vache as feeding entirely upon patient wives, and being very lean in consequence of the scarcity of her diet. A later form of the fable adds a second beast, named Bicorne (two-horned), who, by adopting the wiser course of feeding upon patient husbands, was always fat and in good case. Mr. Wright says—'M. Achille Jubinal, in the notes to his Mystères inédits du xv Siècle, tom. i. p. 390, has printed a French poetical description of Chichevache from a MS. of the fourteenth century. In the French miracle of St. Geneviève, of the fifteenth century (Jubinal, ib. p. 281), a man says satirically to the saint,

"Gardez vous de la chicheface,

El vous mordra s'el vous encontre,

Vous n'amendez point sa besoigne."'

A poem by Lydgate on Bycorne and Chichevache is printed in Mr. Halliwell's Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, p. 129 (Percy Society); see Morley's English Writers, vi. 107, and his Shorter English Poems, p. 55. In his Étude sur G. Chaucer, p. 221, M. Sandras refers us, for information about Chicheface, lit. 'thin face' or 'ugly face' (of which Chiche vache was a perversion), to the Histoire Littéraire de France, vol. xxiii. Dr. Murray refers us to Montaiglon, Poésie franç. 15e et 16e siècles (1855), ii. 191. The passage in Chaucer means, 'Beware of being too patient, lest Chichevache swallow you down.'

1189. Folweth Ekko, imitate Echo, who always replies.

1196. The forms chamail, kamail, a camel, occur in the A. F. Romance of King Horn, ed. Brede and Stengel, l. 4177. For the M. E. camayl, see Rich. Cuer de Lion, 2323; Cursor Mundi, 3304 (Trin. MS.).

1200. 'Always talk (or rattle) on, like a mill' (that is always going round and making a noise). 'Janglinge is whan men speken to muche biforn folk, and clappen as a mille, and taken no kepe what they seye'; Ch. Persones Tale, De Superbia (I. 406). Palsgrave's French Dict. has—'I clappe, I make a noyse as the clapper of a mill, Ie clacque.'

'Thou art as fulle of clappe, as is a mille.'

Hoccleve, de Regimine Principum, ed. Wright, p. 7.

Cf. 'As fast as millwheels strike'; Tempest, i. 2. 281.

1204. aventaille, the lower half of the moveable part of a helmet which admitted air; called by Spenser the ventail, F. Q. iv. 6. 19; v. 8. 12; and by Shakespeare the beaver, Hamlet, i. 2. 230. It is explained, in Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare, that the moveable part of the helmet in front was made in two parts, which turned on hinges at the sides of the head. The upper part is the visor, to admit of vision, the lower the ventail, to admit of breathing. Both parts could be removed from the face, but only by lifting them upwards, and throwing them back. If the visor alone were lifted, only the upper part of the face was exposed; but if the ventail were lifted, the visor also went with it, and the whole of the face was seen. Compare Fairfax's Tasso, vii. 7:—

'But sweet Erminia comforted their fear,

Her ventail up, her visage open laid.'

So also in Hamlet. With reference to the present passage, Mr. Jephson says that and eek his aventaille is a perfect example of bathos. I fail to see why; the weapon that pierced a ventail would pass into the head, and inflict a death-wound. The passage is playful, but not silly.

1206. couche, cower. Hence the phrase—'to play couch-quail'; see Skelton, ed. Dyce, ii. 348.

1211. 'As light as a leaf on a linden-tree' was an old proverb. See Piers Pl. B. i. 154.

The Marchauntes Prologue.

1213. Weping and wayling; an expression caught from l. 1212, and linking this Prologue to the foregoing Tale. Yet in fourteen MSS. the Merchant's Tale is separated from the Clerk's; Trial Forewords, by F. J. Furnivall (Chaucer Soc.), p. 28.

1221-2. What, why. at al, in every respect; like Lat. omnino.

1227. This theme is enlarged upon in Lenvoy de Chaucer à Bukton, a late minor poem (vol. i. 398).

1230. Seint Thomas. Whenever this Apostle is mentioned, he is nearly always said to be of India, to distinguish him, it may be, from Saint Thomas of Canterbury. See D. 1980, and the note. Some account of the shrine of St. Thomas, of the manner of his death, and of miracles wrought by him, is given in Marco Polo, bk. iii. ch. 18. Colonel Yule tells us that the body of St. Thomas lay at Mailapúr, a suburb of Madras. The legend of St. Thomas's preaching in India is of very high antiquity. St. Jerome speaks of the Divine Word being everywhere present in His fulness 'cum Thomâ in India, cum Petro Romae,' &c.; Sci. Hieronomi Epist. lix., ad Marcellam. Gregory of Tours (A. D. 544-595) speaks of the place in India where the body of St. Thomas lay before it was transported to Edessa in the year 394. See the whole of Colonel Yule's long note upon the subject; and the account of Saint Thomas in Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art.

The Marchantes Tale.

For remarks on the sources of this Tale, see vol. iii. p. 458. The modern version by Pope may be compared, though it was a juvenile performance. Cf. Lydgate, Minor Poems, p. 28.

This Tale frequently adopts passages from the Tale of Melibeus, which was doubtless written several years before it. See also the article by Dr. Köppel in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, vol. 86, p. 39.

1246. Pavye, Pavia. I suppose that Chaucer had no special reason for locating the tale in Lombardy.

1248-52. For sixty, some MSS. have lx.; the scribes of MSS. Hl. and Ln. wrongly have fourty, which looks as if they took lx. to mean xl. I see no point in turning the former sixty (in 1248) into fourty, as Wright does, on the pretence that the first twenty years of his life did not count. Sixty was considered a great age (l. 1401).

1251. seculeer, secular; as distinguished from the monks and friars. Chaucer probably speaks ironically, meaning that these holy orders were as bad as the rest. See l. 1322.

1267-1392. The whole of this passage presents the arguments that prevailed with January; as shewn by the words For which (i. e. wherefore) in l. 1393. That is to say, Chaucer here purposely keeps reasons against marriage out of sight, reserving them for ll. 1521-1565, 1659-1681. Hence the opinion in l. 1269, that a man should marry when old, is not Chaucer's opinion at all.

1270. 'The fruit of his treasure,' i. e. purchased with his own wealth. A queer reason, and not Chaucer's. Cf. l. 1276.

1277. sit wel, is very fit. Palsgrave has: 'It sytteth, it becometh, il siet.'

1284. For blisful, MS. Hl. wrongly has busily.

1294. Theofraste, Theophrastus. The allusion is to the Liber Aureolus Theophrasti de Nuptiis, partly preserved by St. Jerome, who quotes a long extract from it in his tractate Contra Iovinianum, lib. i. John of Salisbury quotes the same passage, almost word for word, in his Polycraticus, lib. viii. c. 11. The point discussed is:—'an uir sapiens ducat uxorem.' Amongst other things, he has a passage answering to ll. 1296-1304 below. 'Quod si propter dispensationem domus ... ducuntur uxores: multo melius seruus fidelis dispensat, obediens auctoritati domini, et dispensationi eius obtemperans quàm uxor.... Assidere autem aegrotanti magis possunt amici et uernulae beneficiis obligati, quàm illa quae nobis imputat lachrymas suas, et haereditatis spe uendit illuuiem.' Cf. Lounsbury, Studies, ii. 366.

1305-6. These two lines occur in E. Cm., and are doubtless correct. The MSS. vary considerably; see Six-Text, Pref. p. 70.

Hn.—And if thow take a wyf she wole destroye

Thy good substance, and thy body annoye.

N.B. The words in italics are added in a later hand.

Hl.—And if that thou take a wif be war

Of oon peril which declare I ne dar.

Neither of these lines will scan. MSS. Harl. 7335 and Bodley 686 nearly agree with this, but read be wel y-war for be war.

Arch. Seld.—And if thow take a wiff in thin age oolde

Ful lightly maist thow be a cokewoolde.

Pt.—And if thou take a wif that to the is vntrewe

Ful ofte tyme it shal the rẽwe.

So also MS. Harl. 1758, Laud 600 and 739, Lichfield, &c. The black-letter editions of 1550 and 1561 have a much better version of the same, for they omit that and is in the former (too long) line, and insert sore before rewe in the latter (too short) one.

Dd.—And if thow take a wyf of heye lynage

She shal be hauteyn and of gret costage.

So also (according to Tyrwhitt) the Haistwell MS. and MS. Royal 17. D. xv; and, according to Furnivall, MS. Chr. Ch. C. 6.

In six MSS., according to Tyrwhitt, they are omitted; and on this account he omits them, on the plea that they 'form the opening of a new argument,... and consequently would have been cancelled, if he [Chaucer] had lived to publish his work.' But the sense is quite complete in the form in which I give them, from the two best MSS.

1311. Against this line is written, in the margin of MS. E.—'Uxor est diligenda quia donum Dei est: Iesus filius Sirac: domus et diuicie dantur a parentibus, a Domino autem proprie uxor bona uel prudens.' But the reference is wrong; the quotation is not from Ecclesiasticus (or Jesus the son of Sirach), but from Prov. xix. 14. The Vulgate has uxor prudens, omitting bona uel. The whole quotation is from Albertano of Brescia's Liber de Amore Dei (Köppel).

1315. Compare B. 1199, and I. 1068.

1318. This parenthetical line is Chaucer's very own.

1319. 'Sacramentum hoc magnum est'; Eph. v. 32. Marriage, in the Romish Church, is one of the seven sacraments.

1323-35. All from Albertano of Brescia's Liber de Amore Dei (Köppel).

1326. Hl. has body-naked; but all the rest (like the old editions) have bely-naked, which is the usual expression; see examples in Halliwell.

1328. In the margin of E.—'Faciamus ei adiutorium,' &c. From Gen. ii. 18, 24.

1335-6. From Le Roman de la Rose, 16640-4.

1337. Seint-e is feminine; ben'cite is trisyllabic.

1358-61. Of course these lines are genuine; they occur in nearly every MS. but E. and Trin. Coll. R. 3. 3. The scribe of E. slipped from reed in 1357 to rede in 1362; a common mistake. Dr. Furnivall objects that wyse in 1359 is made to rime with wyse in 1360, and rede in 1361 with rede in 1362; the riming words being used in the same sense. This is not the case. The first wyse is plural; the second is singular, and used generally. The first rede means 'advise'; the second, 'read.' To leave them out would give a rime of reed (monosyllable) with rede (dissyllable).

1362. The examples of Rebecca, Judith, Abigail, and Esther are quoted, in the same order and in similar terms, in the Tale of Melibeus; see B. 2288-2291, and the Notes.

1373, 4. Mardochee, Mordecai; in the Vulgate, Mardochaeus. Assuere, Ahasuerus; in the Vulgate, Assuerus; see l. 1745.

1376. In the margin of MS. Hn. is written:—'Seneca: sicut nichil est superius benigna coniuge, ita nichil est crudelius infesta muliere.' This is from Albertano of Brescia, Lib. Consolationis, cap. v. (p. 18). Sundby gives the reference, not to Seneca, but to Fulgentius, Mythologiarum, L. i. c. 27.

1377. bit, biddeth, bids. The passage referred to is in Dionysius Cato, lib. iii. dist. 25, and is given in the margin of MSS. E. Hn. and Dd.,

Uxoris linguam, si frugi est, ferre memento.

Quoted, at second-hand, from Albertano (Köppel).

1380. In the margin of MS. E.—'Bona mulier fidelis custos est, et bona domus.' From Albertano, as above.

1381-2. 'Ubi non est mulier, ingemiscit egens'; Ecclus. xxxvi. 27. Albertano quotes this, but alters egens to eger; hence Chaucer has 'the syke man'; see Köppel's article, p. 42.

1384. See Eph. v. 25, 28, 29, 31.

1385. thou lovest, thou wilt love; the present for the future; in the second instance. There is no real difficulty here, though Tyrwhitt makes one, and alters the text to love thou.

1401. 'On the brink of my grave.' Cf. Ps. xxx. 3, 9; &c.

1407-16. 'Uxorem accipias potius puellam quam uiduam'; from Albertano. See Köppel's article, p. 42.

1412. mo, more in number; T. has more (badly).

1418. 'I like fish when old, preferring a full grown pike to a pikerel; and I like flesh young, preferring veal to beef.'

1424. Wades boot, Wade's boat. Wade was a famous hero of antiquity, to whom Chaucer again alludes in Troil. iii. 614. In the Traveller's Song, l. 22, we find:—'Witta wēold Swǣfum, Wada Hælsingum,' i. e. Witta ruled over the Swabians, Wada over the Hælsings.' Wade is again mentioned in the alliterative Morte Arthure, l. 964. In a translation of Guido delle Colonne, in MS. Laud K. 76, in the Bodleian library, the romance of Wade is mentioned in conjunction with those of Havelok and Horn, both of which are well known; see the whole passage, as cited in Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, in a note to Section III. In Sir Beves of Hamtoun, ed. Kölbing, 2605, we have an allusion to his fight with a fire-drake or fiery dragon. And in Sir T. Malory's Morte Arthur, bk. vii. c. 9, we find:—'were thou as wyghte as euer was Wade or Launcelot.' Speght knew the story, but has not recorded it; his note is:—'Concerning Wade and his bote called Guingelot, as also his straunge exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I pass it over.' On which Tyrwhitt remarks—'Tantamne rem tam negligenter? Mr. Speght probably did not foresee, that posterity would be as much obliged to him for a little of this fabulous matter concerning Wade and his bote, as for the gravest of his annotations.' Tyrwhitt also refers us, for a mention of Wade, to Camden's Britannia, 907, and to Charlton's History of Whitby, p. 40. M. Michel endeavoured to collect the particulars concerning Wade, and published them in a brochure, entitled Wade: Lettre à M. Henri Ternaux-Compans, &c. sur une Tradition Angloise du Moyen Age; Paris, 1837; 8vo. But it does not tell us much more that is helpful, except in furnishing a reference to the Wilkina Saga, capp. 18-20.

After all, the most light is given us by the following sentence in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ed. Vigfusson and Powell, i. 168, with reference to the Lay of Weyland. 'Weyland is trapped by Nidad, king of the Niars, hamstrung, and forced to work for him in his forge on the isle of Seastead in lake Wolfmere. He contrives to slay his tyrant's sons, beguile his daughter [named Bodwild], and by the aid of a pair of wings which he has fashioned to soar away from his prison-house, rejoicing in his revenge.... That the King's daughter had a son by Weyland, the famous Wade (the memory of whose magic boat Wingelock lingered in N. England till the Reformation), we know from Wilkina Saga.'

I entirely differ from M. Michel's extraordinary conclusion about the boat—'Nous avons quelques raisons de croire que ce bateau n'étoit pas d'une course aussi rapide: en effet, dans l'Edda il est dit qu'Odin avoit un valet et une servante nommés Ganglate et Ganglœt, mots qu'on dit signifier marchant lentement.' Of course Ganglati and Ganglöt (as they should be written) mean 'slow-goer,' but this has nothing to do with Guingelot, which is merely a French spelling of some such form as Wingelok. It is obvious that the sole use of a magic boat is to transport its possessor from place to place in a few minutes, like the magic wings of Wade's own father. This is all we need to know, to see the point of the allusion. Old widows, says Chaucer in effect, know too much of the craft of Wade's boat; they can fly from place to place in a minute, and, if charged with any misdemeanour, will swear they were a mile away from the place at the time alleged. Mr. Pickwick, on the other hand, being only a man, failed to set up the plea of an alibi, and suffered accordingly.

1425. broken harm. This is one of the phrases which Tyrwhitt includes in his list as being 'not understood'; nor is it easy. But if we take it in connexion with the context, I think it can be explained. Harm is 'mischief, injury'; broken is 'fragmentary,' as in 'broken meat,' and the like; so that broken harm refers to slight disconnected acts of mischief, or what we should now call 'petty annoyances,' or 'small worries.' Thus the sense is that 'widows know so much about ways of creating small annoyances, that I should never live in peace with one.' Taken all together, ll. 1424-6 simply imply that 'old widows are so full of tricks for deceiving me, and can inflict at pleasure such small but constant annoyances, that I,' &c.

1447. Take him, let him take; see the Exhortation in the Marriage-Service in the Book of Common Prayer; cf. Pers. Tale, I. 939, 940, 861.

1469. Cf. F. 202.

1474. disputisoun, disputation. Many MSS. have disputacioun, which is too long. The form, as Tyrwhitt remarks, is quite correct; see B. 4428, F. 890. Spelt desputeson in Gower, Conf. Amant. i. 90. See disputoison in Godefroy, with the variants in -aison, -eison, -eson, -ison. Compare orison with oration.

1476. Placebo. This name has reference to his complaisant disposition; see note to D. 2075. So, in the Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris, p. 60, we have: 'The verthe zenne is, thet huanne hi alle zingeth Placebo, thet is to zigge: "mi lhord zayth zoth, my lhord doth wel"; and wendeth to guode al thet the guodeman deth other zayth, by hit guod, by hit kuead.'

1485. This quotation is not from Solomon, but from Jesus son of Sirach; see Ecclus. xxxii. 19:—'Do nothing without advice, and when thou hast once done, repent not.' Chaucer follows the Vulgate version; see note to B. 2193, where the quotation recurs.

1516. 'Your heart hangs on a jolly pin,' i. e. is in a merry state. A pin was a name for a wooden peg; and to hang on a pin was to be hung up conspicuously. Palsgrave, p. 844, has: 'Upon a mery pynne, de hayt; as, il a le cueur de hayt'; cf. 'Hait, liveliness, ... cheerfulness' in Cotgrave. Halliwell gives: 'on the pin, on the qui vive.' Later, the phrase became in a merry pin, i. e. in a good humour; but this is thought to refer to the pins or pegs in a 'peg-tankard'; see Pin in Nares. Cowper, in his John Gilpin, has 'in merry pin.'

1523. See Seneca, De Beneficiis, capp. 14-16; Lounsbury, Studies, ii. 270. However, it is really taken from Map's Epistola Valerii, c. 9: 'Philosophicum est: Videto cui des. Ethica est: Videto cui te des.'—Anglia, xiii. 183. Cf. P. Plowman, B. vii. 74, and the note.

1535. chydester, the feminine form of chyder, which is the form used in MSS. Pt. and Hl. I can find no other example; but, in the Romaunt of the Rose, ll. 150, 4266, we find chideresse.

1536. mannish wood, with masculine manners, and mad; virago-like. Certainly the right reading, and found in E. Hn. Cm. Unluckily, Tyrwhitt and others have adopted the nonsensical reading of Pt. and Hl., viz. a man is wood! Cp. Ln. have of maneres wood, which is better, but is clearly a mere substitution for the original mannish. For mannish, masculine, we have Chaucer's own authority; see B. 782, and the note.

1538. 'A metaphor from horses, meaning, No woman is without faults, just as there is no horse which will trot perfectly sound in all respects.'—Bell. From Albertano of Brescia, Liber de Amore Dei: 'Nulla tam bona uxor, in qua non inuenias quod queraris.'—Köppel.

1553. 'I know best where my shoe pinches me.' This story has been already alluded to; see D. 492, and the note.

1558. Tyrwhitt has:—'By him that made water, fire, erthe, and aire.' This will not scan, and the word fire is introduced merely to please the editor, being found in none of the seven MSS., nor in the old editions. When Chaucer wishes to mention all the four elements, he does so; see A. 1246, 2992.

1560-1. From Le Rom. de la Rose, 14055-6:—

'Car cil a moult poi de savoir

Qui seus cuide sa fame avoir.'

1582. Cf. Boeth. bk. v. met. 4. 8; Troil. i. 365; Ayenb. of Inwyt, p. 158.

1584. E. Hn. have se ful many, but the rest omit ful. Scan the line by reading many a in one foot, and making figúr-e trisyllabic, as in B. 3412, E. 16.

1592. voys, fame, general approval.

1609. Read inpossíbl', and wer-e. were, would be.

1640-1. The seven deadly sinnes, for which see the Persones Tale. 'The popular medieval treatises on the seven sins arrange the minor transgressions connected with each as branches of the primary tree.'—Wright. And each of the branches have twigs, as Chaucer himself says; see I. 389. Cf. my note to P. Plowman, C. viii. 70.

1665. forbed-e, may (God) forbid. sente, subj., could send.

1682. This line is incomplete in all the seven MSS. There is a pause at the caesura, so that the word for occupies the whole of the third foot. Tyrwhitt conceals this fact by inserting but before thinne. Cf. D. 1647, and the note.

1684-7. These four parenthetical lines interrupt the story rather awkwardly. They obviously belong to the narrator, the Marchant, as it is out of the question that Justinus had heard of the Wife of Bath. Perhaps it is an oversight.

If we take these lines in this way, it is necessary to read we have in l. 1686, as in Hn. The other MSS. and editions read ye have. I explain 'which we have on honde' as meaning, 'which we are now discussing.' Moreover, the reading we is exactly appropriate after the reading us of l. 1684, where it is difficult to see how us can refer to any but the Canterbury pilgrims.

1693. Maius is a masculine form, because the name of the month is so; see l. 1748.

1702. sacrement, i. e. of marriage; see l. 1319. The couple also used to 'receive the sacrament,' i. e. the eucharist, in the modern sense.

1704. Referring to the prayers in the marriage service, which mention Isaac and Rebecca, and Abraham and Sarah.

1709-52. Quoted by Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, ed. 1871, ii. 354.

1716. Orpheus, the celebrated minstrel, whose story is in Ovid, Met. x. 1-85; xi. 1-66. Mentioned again in the Book of the Duchesse, 569; House of Fame, 1203; Troil. iv. 791. For the minstrelsy at the feast, cf. F. 78.

Amphioun, Amphion, king of Thebes, who helped to build Thebes by the magic of his music; Hyginus, Fab. 6 and 7; cf. Ovid, Met. vi. 221, 271, 402; xv. 427. Already mentioned in connexion with Thebes in A. 1546. (The i is shortened.)

1719. Cf. 'Ther herde I trumpe Ioab also'; Ho. of Fame, 1245. 'Joab blew a trumpet,' 2 Sam. ii. 28; xviii. 16; xx. 22.

1720. Theodomas; also mentioned in the above passage, Ho. of Fame, 1246. As he blew a trumpet at Thebes, when the city was in fear (or danger), he is clearly to be identified with the Thiodamas mentioned in the Thebaid of Statius. He succeeded Amphiaraus as augur, and furiously excited the besiegers to attack Thebes. His invocation was succeeded by a great sound of trumpets (Theb. viii. 343), but Statius does not expressly say that he blew a trumpet himself.

1723. Venus; cf. F. 272-274.

1727. fyrbrond, fire-brand, torch; which she carried as appropriate to the marriage procession. This attribute of Venus is found in Le Roman de la Rose, l. 3434:—

'Ele tint ung brandon flamant

En sa main destre, dont la flame

A eschauffee mainte dame.'

Observe that l. 2250 of the Legend of Good Women runs thus:—'N'Ymenëus, that god of wedding is.' This agrees with line 1730 except as regards the prefixed Ne. The 'fire-brand' reappears in l. 1777 below.

1731. his lyf, i. e. during his life, in all his life.

1732. Marcian. Chaucer is still thinking of his own House of Fame (cf. notes to ll. 1719, 1720), where he had already mentioned Marcian, at l. 985. Martianus Minneus Felix Capella, a native of Carthage, was a writer of the fifth century, and wrote the Nuptials of Philology and Mercury, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. This consists of two books, immediately followed by seven books on the Seven Sciences; see Warton's Hist. E. Poetry, ed. 1871, iii. 77; Smith's Classical Dictionary, s. v. Capella; Lydgate's Temple of Glass, l. 130.

1734. hir; cf. 'he, Theofraste,' in l. 1294; also ll. 1368, 1373. For him (as in E. Cm.), MSS. Hn. Hl. have he (badly).

1745. Assuer, Ahasuerus, as in l. 1374. There is a special reference here to the banquet at which Esther obtained her request; see Esther, v. 6. See further in Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, ed. 1871, i. 288, iii. 142.

1754. For other allusions to Paris and Eleyne, see Parl. of Foules, 290, 291; Book of the Duch. 331.

1783. The word 'Auctor' in the margin of MS. E. signifies that ll. 1783-1794 form a reflection on the subject by the author, who here personates the Marchant. There are similar passages further on, viz. ll. 1866-1874, 2057-2068, 2107-2115, and 2125-2131.

1784. bedeth, proffers; cf. G. 1065. From Boeth. bk. iii. pr. 5. 50.

1785. false hoomly hewe, O false domestic servant! Cp. Pt. Ln. have the reading holy, which doubtless arose, as Wright points out, from missing the mark of abbreviation in the form 'hōly,' i. e. homly. 'Tyrwhitt, however,' he adds, 'adopts this reading, mistakes the meaning of the word hewe, adds of, which is found in none of the MSS.; and in his text it stands false of holy hewe, which he supposes to signify false of holy colour. Conjectural emendations are always dangerous.' Yet Wright silently adopts such emendations over and over again; cf. l. 1812 below. Cf. hoomly fo in ll. 1792, 1794.

1786. 'Like the sly and treacherous snake in the bosom.' This refers to the fable in Phaedrus, lib. iv. fab. 18. But Chaucer probably took it from the Gesta Romanorum, ch. clxxiv. For numerous references, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Crane, 1890, p. 201.

1790. Here the monosyllabic pp. born takes a final e in the definite form, as noticed by Prof. Child; see Ellis, E. E. Pronunc. p. 350, § 32. Cf. her dreint-e lord, Gower, C. A., ii. 105; and see B. 69.

1793. From Boethius, lib. iii. pr. 5:—'Quae uero pestis efficacior ad nocendum, quàm familiaris inimicus?' See vol. ii. p. 63.

1795. his ark diurne, the daily arc of his apparent motion. See Chaucer on the Astrolabe, pt. ii. § 7:—'To knowe the arch of the day'; or, as in l. 7 of the same:—'tak ther thyn ark of the day.'

1797. On thorisonte, upon the horizon; i. e. the time was come for the sun to descend below it.

that latitude; because the apparent motion of the sun depends upon the latitude as well as upon the day of the year; cf. the Treatise on the Astrolabe, pt. ii. § 13.

1799. hemisperie, the hemisphere above the horizon; see the Treatise on the Astrolabe, pt. i. § 18.

1807. ipocras, the usual medieval spelling of Hippocrates; but the name is here given to a prepared drink. Halliwell (s. v. Hippocras) defines it as 'a beverage composed of wine, with spices and sugar, strained through a cloth. It is said to have taken its name from Hippocrates' sleeve, the term [which] apothecaries gave to a strainer.' Long and elaborate recipes for it exist, and may be found in the Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, pp. 125 and 267; and in Halliwell's Dictionary, s. v. ipocras. The shortest is that in Arnold's Chronicle:—'Take a quarte of red wyne, an ounce of synamon, and halfe an unce of gynger; a quarter of an ounce of greynes [i. e. cardamoms], and longe peper, and half a pounde of suger; and brose [bruise] all this, and than put them in a bage of wullen clothe, made therefore [i. e. for the purpose], with the wyne; and lete it hange over a vessel, tyll the wyne be rune thorowe.' All the recipes insist upon the straining, and some direct the use of as many as six straining-bags. See Our English Home, p. 83.

clarree, clarified wine; see note to A. 1471.

vernage, a sweet wine, sometimes red, but more often white; 'grown in Tuscany, and other parts of Italy, and [it] derived its name from the thick-skinned grape, vernaccia (corresponding with the vinaciola of the ancients), that was used in the preparation of it. The wine known as vernaccia in Tuscany was always of a white or golden colour. See Bacci, Nat. Vinor. Hist., pp. 20, 62.'—Henderson, Hist. of Ancient and Modern Wines, 1824; quoted in the Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, p. 203. Florio's Ital. Dict. gives:—'Vernaccia, a kinde of strong wine like malmesie or muskadine, or bastard wine.' Chaucer speaks of it again, in conjunction with malvesye; see B. 1261. For other notices of it, see Babees Book, pp. 125, 267, and the Glossary; Halliwell, s. v. Piment; Gower, C. A., iii. 8; Squyer of Lowe Degree, l. 754. The derivation, sometimes given, of vernage from Verona, is clearly wrong.

1810. dan, i. e. Dominus, a common title; see note to B. 3119.

Constantine. 'Dan Constantine, according to Fabricius, Bibl. Med. Æt. t. i. p. 423, ed. Pat. 4to., wrote about the year 1080. His works, including the treatise mentioned in the text, were printed at Basil, 1536, fol.'—T. He has been mentioned before; see A. 433; and cf. Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, ed. 1871, ii. 368.

1812. nas no-thing eschu, was not at all remiss, or shy. Cm. Ln. read was; the rest nas; but the sense is the same. Tyrwhitt reads—he wolde nothing eschue. Wright says: 'the Harl. MS. reads nas, which seems not to furnish so good a grammatical construction'; accordingly, he reads—he wold nothing eschieu. Morris likewise reads wolde; and Bell reads wold. But the editors are all wrong; for the verb eschew-e will not rime with coitu, and it is clear that they did not know that eschu is here an adjective! Yet it occurs again in the Pers. Tale, Group I, 971; and I subjoin three more examples.

'She is escheue [read eschu] of bothe two.'

Gower, Conf. Amant. ii. 286.

'Yit gooses dounge eschew is.'

Palladius on Husbandry, bk. i. l. 528.

In this passage it rimes with mew-es, pl. sb.

'Her taste is eke eschewe.'—id. bk. iv. l. 586.

Godefroy gives the O. F. adj. eschif, eskif, 'animé de sentiments hostiles, défavorables, mauvais, mécontent, de mauvaise volonté, rétif.' Amongst his examples, we find the spellings eskius, eschius, eskieus, esqueus, eskieu, esquieu, esehieu; where the -s is a case-ending. The O. F. adj. is derived from the adj. which appears as M. H. G. schiech, cognate with E. shy. Chaucer's eschu is, accordingly, just as good an adjective as the mod. E. shy.

1817. travers, curtain, drawn across to form a screen; as in Troil. iii. 674. Ill spelt trauas in the Prompt. Parv., but explained by transversum, which is the Low Latin form. See Way's note; he quotes—"i. trauers du satin vermaille," so that they were sometimes made of crimson satin. In the Kingis Quair, st. 90, we find the form trauerse; in st. 82 it is spelt travesse, and is there applied to a screen which happened to be nearly transparent, as was not the case in our text. See vol. ii. pp. 478, 506.

1819. A note in Bell's Chaucer gives a translation of the form of blessing the nuptial bed to be found in old service-books.

1825. houndfish, dog-fish. I suppose this is the spotted dog-fish, Scyllium catulus, or Scyllium canicula. Randle Holme has: 'Dog fish, or Sea dog fish. It is by the Dutch termed a Flackhund and a Hundfisch; the skin is hard and redish, beset with hard and sharp scales, sharp, and rough and black; the Belly is more white and softer.' Bk. ii. ch. xiv. See Gloss. to the Babees Book; Lydgate, Minor Poems, p. 201.

1840. In the Pers. Tale, Chaucer says just the contrary; see I. 859.

1849. shaketh. Cf. 'The slake skin trembleth upon myn empted body'; Ch. tr. of Boethius, bk. i. met. 1. 12.

1862. From Le Rom. de la Rose, 19931-2.

1879. a penner. 'The penner was a case containing the pens, ink, and other apparatus of writing, which the clerk carried about with him, as the Eastern students do at the present day. As such articles belonged only to clergy and scholars, we understand why the squire Damyan was obliged to borrow one for his use. An early vocabulary entitled Nominale mentions, among the Nomina rerum pertinentium clerico, 'Hoc pennare, a pener.'—Wright. See Wright-Wülcker, Vocab. 682. 15; also 601. 34.

1881. compleynt. See specimens in Chaucer's Compleints of Mars, of Venus, and of Anelida; also the Compleint to his Lady. And cf. F. 943-948.

1883. heng, i. e. which hung; the relative is omitted.

1887. two of Taur, the second degree of Taurus. Tyrwhitt unluckily altered two to ten, on the plea that 'the time given (four days complete, l. 1893) is not sufficient for the moon to pass from the second degree of Taurus into Cancer.' And he then proceeds to shew this, taking the mean daily motion of the moon as being 13 degrees, 10 minutes, and 35 seconds. But, as Mr. Brae has shewn, in his edition of Chaucer's Astrolabe, p. 93, footnote, it is a mistake to reckon here the moon's mean motion; we must rather consider her actual motion. The question is simply, can the moon move from the 2nd degree of Taurus to the 1st of Cancer (through 59 degrees) in four days? Mr. Brae says decidedly, that examples of such motion are to be seen 'in every almanac.'

E.g. in the Nautical Almanac, in June, 1886, the moon's longitude at noon was 30° 22' on the 9th, and 90° 17' on the 13th; i. e. the moon was in the first of Taurus on the former day, and in the first of Cancer on the latter day, at the same hour; which gives (very nearly) a degree more of change of longitude than we here require. The MSS. all have two or tuo, and they are quite right. The motion of the moon is so variable that the mean motion affords no safe guide.

1887-8. The i in gliden, biden (as in M. E. riden, E. ridden) is short.

1921. At-after, immediately after; a compound preposition; see F. 302.

1924. a gentil man, a man of rank, as squires usually were, although in service, and therefore a hewe (1785). Cf. l. 1907, and note to D. 2243.

1932. This proceeding was quite in accordance with ancient custom. See the tale of Eglamore, in the Percy Folio MS., st. 11; and the Ballad of Sir Cauline, st. 9.

1943-4. Misarranged and corrupt in MS. Hl.

1962. precious, over-nice, scrupulous, prim; as in D. 148.

1966. evensong. Only Cp. Ln. have euesong. Perhaps even was pronounced as e'en (een); cf. yest're'en, Hallowe'en. But eve for even is very common.

1971. For Was, only Hn. Hl. have As. The latter seems to afford an easier construction, and is adopted by the editors. But we are bound to take the reading Was, as in most MSS., and explain it. I take it thus:—'Whether it were ... that the heavens stood in such a condition, that it was a fortunate time.' This is quite exact, though one dependent clause on the top of another is not felicitous. The reference is, of course, to the old astrological belief about fortunate positions of the planets; cf. A. 417. See Boeth. bk. iv. pr. 6, 62-71.

1986. Chaucer's favourite line; see note to F. 479.

1991. lete, allowed; A. S. lǣten. MS. Harl. omits him.

2002. visit-è; trisyllabic. See the footnote.

2013. lowe means 'tractable, docile, obedient'; cf. note to D. 1369. 'And after that he had with lacke of vitailles brought those pratlers as lowe as dogge to the bowe'; Udall, tr. of Erasmus' Apophthegmes; Antigonus, § 27. This shews how the dogs were tamed.

2018. lady, lady's. See note to A. 88.

2021. 'Alluding to the Epicurean philosophy.'—Bell. See A. 335-8.

2026. honestly, honourably, worthily; cf. l. 2028.

2032. he, viz. Guillaume de Lorris. There were two authors of Le Roman de la Rose, but the reference is here to the earlier portion of it; see ll. 130-146, 480-512, 645-688 of the English version, where the description of the garden occurs; and for the description of the well mentioned in l. 2036, see ll. 1462-1634 of the same.

2034. 'Hortorum decus et tutela Priapus'; Ovid, Fast. i. 415.

2038. Pluto. In his Introductory Discourse, Tyrwhitt remarks:—'The machinery of the Fairies, which Chaucer has used so happily, was probably added by himself; and indeed, I cannot help thinking that his Pluto and Proserpine were the true progenitors of Oberon and Titania.... This observation is not meant to extend further than the King and Queen of Faery; in whose characters I think it is plain that Shakespeare, in imitation of Chaucer, has dignified our Gothic Elves with the manners and language of the classical Gods and Goddesses. In the rest of his Faery system, Shakespeare seems to have followed the popular superstition of his own time.'

This remark is important; I doubt if the influence of Chaucer upon Shakespeare in this matter has been sufficiently recognised. In both works, the Fairy king and queen have a dispute in hand, which is settled by the assistance of mortals.

Not only here, but in the Hous of Fame, 1509-1511, Chaucer refers us to Claudian as his authority for Pluto and Proserpine; see note to l. 2232 below.

2046. The insertion of smal is necessary; the rime wiket, cliket, being a feminine one.

cliket, (1) a latch, (2) a latch-key; here used in the latter sense. In Shropshire, the word is used of a particular kind of fastening for a gate, which Miss Jackson thus describes. 'An iron link is attached to the gate by means of a staple; this link is terminated by a short hasp-like bolt. On the gate-post is an iron plate, having in it a kind of key-hole, into which the before-mentioned bolt fits, much after the manner of the fastening of a trunk, thus securing the gate.'

2058. scorpion, scorpion; see notes to B. 360, 404; cf. H. 271, and see Chaucer's description of the scorpion in the Book of the Duchesse, ll. 636-641. Vincent of Beauvais, in his Speculum Naturale, bk. xx. c. 160, quotes from the Liber de Naturis Rerum—'Scorpio blandum et quasi virgineum dicitur vultum habere, sed habet in cauda nodosa venenatum aculeum, quo pungit et inficit proximantem.' And see Boeth. bk. ii. pr. 1. 10-14; Ayenb. of Inwyt, p. 62, l. 13.

2080. Soul, sole; cf. the law-phrase femme sole. See P. de Thaun, Bestiary, 1250; Morris, O. E. Misc. p. 22; Ayenb. of Inwyt, p. 226.

2093. Damian, here to be read as Dam-yan, nearly in two syllables. Benignely, favourably; altered by Tyrwhitt to brenningly, without authority; pronounced benign-e-ly, in four syllables.

2107. 'What might it avail thee if thou couldst see to the very horizon?'

2109. 'For it is just as good to be deceived when blind.'

2111. See note to A. 1390.

2115. Cf. 'Of sufferance cometh ease'; in Heywood's Proverbs.

2117. To scan the line, we must read warm-e, and émprentèd. Emprented hath would run much better. The scribes who wrote warm probably pronounced the last word as clikét; but the rime is feminine. And see l. 2121, 2123.

2125. The reference is to the story of Pyramus in Ovid, Met. iv. 55; especially (in l. 2126) to the line—'Quid non sentit amor?'

2127. he, i. e. the lover; used generally. This line answers to l. 742 of the Legend of Good Women:—'But what is that, that love can nat espye'; where love means a lover.

2133. This has to be taken in connexion with ll. 2222-4 below, in which the date is said to be a little before June 12; see note to the line. Consequently, the 'eight days' mentioned in l. 2132 must be the first eight days of June. Again, if we refer to l. 2049, we see that January used to go to the garden 'in the summer season,' which would seem to be intended to begin with June. Accordingly, the month of June is here expressed, in a mere parenthesis, by the phrase 'ere the month of July.' Hence the sense really is—'ere that eight days (of the summer season) were passed, (of the month) before that of July.' And the whole passage merely means—'before the 8th of June was over,' or simply, 'on June 8.' This date precisely agrees with that given, by quite a different method, in ll. 2222-4.

As the month meant is here certainly that of June, as shewn by Mr. Brae in 1851 (see his edition of Chaucer's Astrolabe, pp. 67, 83), Mr. Brae proposed to read Juin for Juil. But this was because he followed Tyrwhitt's text, which has of for er, and therefore reads—

'er that daies eighte

Were passed of the month of Juil, befill,' &c.

And it is the fact, that, with the reading of, we also should have to accept the reading Juin. But we must set against this the fact that no MS. (at least of any authority) reads either Juin or of! Tyrwhitt has made this alteration silently, and Wright and Bell have silently adopted it. Morris also makes the alteration, but prints of in italics to shew that it is not the reading of his MS. These silent conjectural emendations are very troublesome, as they are copied by one editor after another without any enquiry as to the sense of the context.

The Harl. MS., supposed to be followed by Wright, actually has a stop before 'er'; the reading being—'were passid . er the moneth of Iuyl bifille.' The reading bifille (might befal) is probably due to taking Iuyl as the nominative to this verb, whereas bifil is meant to be impersonal, with the sense—'it happened.'

2138-2148. This passage is almost entirely composed of fragments of Solomon's Song. We may compare ll. 2138-2140 with ch. ii. vv. 10, 11, 12; l. 2141 with ch. i. v. 15; l. 2142 with ch. iv. v. 10; l. 2143 with ch. iv. vv. 12, 16; ll. 2144, 2145 with ch. iv. vv. 9, 10; l. 2146 with ch. iv. v. 7.

2194. The first foot is defective (in all seven MSS.). To fill out the line, Tyrwhitt inserts owen before lord; a 'correction' which Wright and Bell silently adopt. There is no hint as to the source of this owen. Thynne's edition (as frequently elsewhere) agrees with the seven MSS.

2200. This drowning in a sack is quite oriental. Cf. 'There yawns the sack, and yonder rolls the sea'; Byron, The Corsair, iii. 8.

2202. wenche. For this word, cf. H. 220, and Ho. of Fame, 206.

2222. in Geminis, in the sign of Gemini. We are also told that he was near his 'declination of Cancer,' i. e. his maximum northern declination, which he obtains when entering Cancer, at the summer solstice. In Chaucer's time, the sun entered Cancer about June 12, and therefore just before that day was in Gemini. Taking this statement in conjunction with the 'eight days' of the summer season mentioned in l. 2132, we may feel sure that the date meant is June 8, just four days before the sun left Gemini, and attained his maximum declination. See my edition of Chaucer's Astrolabe (E. E. T. S.), p. lv., which requires partial correction, as shewn in the note to l. 2132 above.

2224. The 'exaltation' of a planet was the sign in which it was (quite arbitrarily) supposed to exercise its greatest power. The exaltation of Jupiter was Cancer, as Chaucer correctly says.

2227. This notion of identifying Pluto with the king of Fairyland occurs again in the Romance of Sir Orpheo; see Ritson, Met. Rom. ii. 259. Sir Orpheo is the Greek Orpheus, who redeemed Eurydice from 'the kyng of fayrè,' i. e. from Pluto. See the remarks on this poem in Warton, Hist. E. Poet. ed. 1871, i. 31, 32.

The construction of this sentence is awkward. Lines 2231-3 are parenthetical; Pluto is in apposition with This king in l. 2234, and agrees with the verb sette in the same.

2229-30. Tyrwhitt prints these lines differently, thus:—

Folwing his wif, the quene Proserpina,

Which that he ravisshed out of Ethna.

This reading is from MS. Harl. 7335; and T. adds—'In some other MSS. Ethna, by a manifest error of the copyist, has been changed into Proserpina [as in Cp. Pt. Ln.]. The passage being thus made nonsense, other transcribers left out the [second] line, and substituted in its stead—

Eche after other, right as any lyne.'

But it would appear that the line just quoted, which Tyrwhitt pronounces to be a substitution, is really the original reading, and we must not hastily reject it. It is found in E. Cm. and Hl., whilst in Hn. the line has been erased or omitted, and then filled in (in a spurious form) by a later hand.

Wright and Bell have followed Tyrwhitt's lead, and altered the passage accordingly. Morris silently changes the preserpine of the Harl. MS. to Preserpina, and gives the next line in the objectionable form—'Whiche that he ravysched out of Cecilia' (Sicily).

It seems very much better to restore the original reading, especially when we notice that Próserpýne (not Prosérpiná) is the undoubted reading in the House of Fame, 1511, and that quen-e is constantly dissyllabic (see B. 161, 1671, G. 1089), In l. 2264, we again have Próserpýne . The old black-letter editions are not of much value; still they give line 2230 as in my text, except that they wrongly change any into a.

2232. Claudian; Claudius Claudianus, at the close of the fourth century, wrote an epic poem in three books De raptu Proserpinae, which he left unfinished, besides several other works. He is mentioned again in the Ho. of Fame, 449, 1509. The story of Proserpine is also in Ovid, Fasti, iv. 427; and in Gower, C. A., ii. 170.

2240. The line is plainly imperfect, both in sense and rhythm, yet is the same in all seven MSS. and in ed. 1550. They agree in reading:—

Ten hundred thousand telle(n) I can.

Tyrwhitt reads:—

Ten hundred thousand stories tell I can.

He does not tell us where he found the word stories. Wright and Bell silently adopt stories; Morris inserts it between square brackets. It occurs, however, in a parallel line, F. 1412, as well as in a similar passage in the Leg. of Good Women, Prol. A. 274.

2247. From Eccles. vii. 28. Cf. B. 2247, where Chaucer quotes the same passage.

2250. I. e. the author of Ecclesiasticus. This book contains both praise and dispraise of women; see Ecclus. xxiii. 22-26; xxv. 17-26; xxvi. 1-3, 7-16, 22-27; xxxvi. 21-24; xl. 19, 23; xlii. 9-14. The dispraise predominates.

2252. wilde fyr; see A. 4172, and the note.

2264. 'So you shall, if you so wish.'

2265. 'I swear by the soul of my mother's sire'; i. e. by Saturn (Ovid, Fasti, vi. 285). The wisdom of Saturn is referred to in A. 2444. Tyrwhitt altered sires into Ceres, for which I find no authority. Wright notes that Hl. has sires, and Ln. sire; and adds—'Ceres is of course the word intended.' I see no evidence for it; and I do not admit that an editor should alter all that he fails to understand.

2273. visage, pronounced (vizaa·j), the e being elided. We still say 'to face a thing out.' 'Suffolk doth not flatter, face, or feign'; 1 Hen. VI. v. 3. 142; and see Com. Errors, iii. 1. 6; Tam. Shrew, ii. 291; Tw. Nt. iv. 2. 201; &c.

2279-2281. Repeated from B. 2266, 7; so also ll. 2286-2290 is taken from B. 2268, 9.

2283. Cf. The Second Nonnes Tale, G. 512.

2284. Here 'the Romayn gestes' simply means Roman history. The Gesta Romanorum also contains a story of a devoted wife, in ch. vi; the story of Lucretia, ch. cxxxv; and of the faithful wife of Guido, ch. clxxii. But there are other stories of a very different character.

2300. Referring to 1 Kings, xi. 12.

2304. ye, i. e. ye men. So in all the seven MSS. Tyrwhitt alters it to—That he of women wrote. But why? Cf. D. 688-696.

2308. 'As ever I desire to keep my tresses whole.' See Brouke in the Glossary.

2310. 'That would wish (to do) us a disgrace.'

2321-2. Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 10131-2:—

'Cerchant prés et jardins et gaus,

Plus envoisiés que papegaus.'

See also above, B. 1559, 1957.

2335. plyt, condition. 'An allusion to the well-known vulgar error about the longings of pregnant women.'—Bell.

2355. By confusion with l. 2357, MS. Harl. alters agayn his sighte to his sight agayn, and then misses ll. 2356, 7.

2365. From Ovid; see B. 2167, and the note.

2367. store, bold, rude, audacious, impudent; lit. 'great.' A. S. stōr, great; Icel. stórr, great, rough, strong, proud. Stronge must here have a similar sense:—'O bold rude lady.' Strong-e and stor-e both have final e, as being vocatives.

2410. 'He who misapprehends comes to a false conclusion.'

Epilogue to the Merchant's Tale.

2420. swich a wyf, such a wife as that described in the Merchant's Tale.

2422. bees, bees. Elsewhere, the pl. is been; see B. 4582, F. 204.

2431. in conseil, in (secret) counsel, between ourselves. For this use of conseil, see C. 819, and the note; also G. 145, 192.

2435. The phrase cause why is now considered vulgar; it is common in London. Caus-e is dissyllabic.

2436. of somme, by some, by some one. So of whom = by whom; in the next line. He says, he need not say by whom it would be told; for women are sure to utter such things, as is expressly said in D. 950. This alludes, of course, to the ladies in the company, and, in particular, to the Wife of Bath, who was not the person to keep such things to herself. outen, to utter; a rare word; it occurs again in G. 834, and in D. 521. Also in The Tale of Beryn, 2408.

NOTES TO GROUP F.

The Squieres Tale.

1. There is nothing to link this tale with the preceding one; hence it begins a new Group. In many MSS. (including E.) it follows the preceding Epilogue without any break. In other MSS. it follows the Man of Law's Tale; but that is the wrong place for it. See note to B. 1165; also vol. iii. p. 462.

2. An allusion to Prol. l. 97, unless (which is quite as probable) the passage in the Prologue was written afterwards.

9. Sarray, Sarai. This place has been identified, past all doubt, by Colonel Yule in his edition of Marco Polo's Travels, vol. i. p. 5, and vol. ii. p. 424. The modern name is Tzarev, near Sarepta. Sarepta is easily found on any good map of Russia by following the course of the Volga from its mouth upwards. At first this backward course runs N. W. till we have crossed the province of Astrakhan, when it makes a sudden bend, at Sarepta and Tsaritzin. Tsarev is now a place of no importance, but the ancient Sarai was so well known, that the Caspian Sea was sometimes named from it; thus it is called 'the sea of Sarain' in Marco Polo, ed. Yule, ii. 424; 'the sea of Sarra' in the Catalan map of 1375; and Mare Seruanicum, or the Sea of Shirwan, by Vincent of Beauvais. Thynne, in his Animadversions on Speight's Chaucer, speaks to the same effect, and says of 'Sara' that it is 'a place yet well knowen, and bordering vppon the lake Mare Caspium.' Sarai was the place where Batu Khan, the grandson of Gengis Khan, held his court. Batu, with his Mongolian followers known as the Golden Horde, had established an empire in Kaptchak, or Kibzak, now S. E. Russia, about A. D. 1224. The Golden Horde further invaded Russia, and made Alexander Newski grand-duke of it, A. D. 1252. (See Golden Horde in Haydn's Dictionary of Dates.)

Chaucer has here confused two accounts. There were two celebrated Khans, both grandsons of Gengis Khan, who were ruling about the same time. Batu Khan held his court at Sarai, and ruled over the S. E. of Russia; but the Great Khan, named Kublai, held his court at Cambaluc, the modern Pekin, in a still more magnificent manner. And it is easy to see that, although Chaucer names Sarai, his description really applies to Cambaluc. See vol. iii. pp. 471-2.

10. Russye, Russia; invaded by the Golden Horde, as just explained. The end of the Tartar influence in Russia was in the year 1481, when Svenigorod, general of Ivan III., defeated them at the battle of Bielawisch. In the following year Ivan assumed the title of czar.

12. Cambinskan; so in all seven MSS. (Six-text and Harleian), except that in the Ellesmere MS. it more resembles Cambyuskan. Yet Tyrwhitt prints Cambuscan, probably in deference to Milton, who, however, certainly accents the word wrongly, viz. on the second syllable; Il Penseroso, l. 110. Thynne, in his Animadversions on Speight's Chaucer, speaking of the year 1240, says—'whiche must be in the tyme of the fyrst Tartariane emperor called Caius canne, beinge, I suppose, he whome Chaucer namethe Cambiuscan, for so ys [it in] the written copies, such affynytye is there betwene those two names.' Now, although the celebrated Gengis Khan died probably in 1227, the allusion to the 'fyrst Tartariane emperor' is clear; so that Thynne makes the forms Cambius, Caius (perhaps miswritten for Cāius, i. e. Camius) and Gengis all equivalent. But this is the very result for which Colonel Yule has found authority, as explained in vol. iii. p. 471; to which the reader is referred. It is there explained that Chaucer has again confused two accounts; for, whilst he names Gengis Khan (the first 'Grand Khan'), his description really applies to Kublai Khan, his grandson, the celebrated 'Grand Khan' described by Marco Polo.

18. lay, religious profession or belief. 'King Darie swor by his lay': King Alisaunder, ed. Weber, l. 1325. From A. F. lei, law. See lei in Stratmann.

20. This line scans ill as it stands in most MSS. Tyrwhitt and Wright insert and, which gives two accented 'ands'—

And pí | tous ánd | just ánd | alwéy | ylíche.

The Hengwrt MS. has—

Pietous and Iust, and euere-moore yliche,

which, otherwise spelt, becomes—

Pitous and Iust, and ever-more y-liche—

and this is the reading which I have adopted in the text. However, I have since observed that Chaucer twice makes pi-e-tous trisyllabic, viz. in Troil. iii. 1444, v. 451; and the Hengwrt MS. has the same spelling here. The common reading, with this alteration, becomes quite right. That is, we may read—

And piëtous and Iust, alwey y-liche.

22. centre; often used in the sense of a fulcrum or pivot, or point of extreme stability. Cf. Milton, Par. Reg. iv. 533—

'Proof against all temptation, as a rock

Of adamant, and, as a centre, firm.'

The old astronomy supposed the centre of the earth to be the fixed centre of the universe.

30. Tyrwhitt inserts sone after eldeste; fortunately, it is not in the MSS. Whichë is a dissyllable, the e denoting the plural form. The words th' eldest' form but two syllables, the e's being elided; but we may fairly preserve the e in highte (cf. l. 33) from elision, for the greater emphasis, by a short pause; and we then have a perfect line—

Of which | e th' el | dest' high | te—Al | garsyf.

31. Cambalo. I have no doubt that this name was suggested by the Cambaluc of Marco Polo. See vol. iii. p. 472.

39. longing for, belonging to. Cf. longen, Kn. Ta. 1420 (A. 2278).

44. I deme, I suppose. This looks as if Chaucer had read some account of a festival made by the Grand Khan on one of his birthdays, from which he inferred that he always held such a feast every year; as, indeed, was the case. See vol. iii. p. 473.

45. He leet don cryen, he caused (men) to have the feast cried. The use of both leet and don is remarkable; cf. E. 523. He gave his orders to his officers, and they took care that the proclamation was made.

47. It is not clear why Chaucer hit upon this day in particular. Kublai's birthday was in September, but perhaps Chaucer noted that the White Feast was on New Year's day, which he took to mean the vernal equinox, or some day near it. The day, however, is well defined. The 'last Idus' is the very day of the Ides, i. e. March 15. The sun entered Aries, according to Chaucer (Treatise on the Astrolabe, ii. 1. 4) on March 12, at the vernal equinox; and, as a degree answers to a day very nearly, would be in the first degree of Aries on the 12th, in the second on the 13th, in the third on the 14th, in the fourth on the 15th, and in the fifth (or at the end of the fourth) on the 16th, as Chaucer most expressly says below; see note to l. 386. The sign Aries was said, in astrology, to be the exaltation of the Sun, or that sign in which the Sun had most influence for good or ill. In particular, the 19th degree of Aries, for some mysterious reason, was selected as the Sun's exaltation, when most exactly reckoned. Chaucer says, then, that the Sun was in the sign of Aries, in the fourth degree of that sign, and therefore nigh (and approaching to) the 19th degree, or his special degree of exaltation. Besides this, the poet says the sun was in the 'face' of Mars, and in the mansion of Mars; for 'his mansioun' in l. 50 means Mars's mansion. This is exactly in accordance with the astrology of the period. Each sign, such as Aries, was said to contain 30 degrees, or 3 faces; a face being 10 degrees. The first face of Aries (degrees 1-10) was called the face of Mars, the second (11-20) the face of the Sun, the third (21-30) that of Venus. Hence the sun, being in the fourth degree, was in Mars's face. Again, every planet had its (so-called) mansion or house; whence Aries was called the mansion of Mars, Taurus that of Venus, Gemini that of Mercury, &c. See Chaucer's Astrolabe, in vol. iii. p. lxxviii; or Johannis Hispalensis Isagoge in Astrologiam, which gives all the technical terms.

50. Martes is a genitive from the nom. Mart. or Marte (A. 2021), which is itself formed, as usual, from the Latin acc. Martem.

51. In the old astrology, different qualities are ascribed to the different signs. Thus Aries is described as choleric and fiery in MS. Trin. Coll. Cam. R. 15. 18, tract 3, p. 11. So, too, Tyrwhitt quotes from the Calendrier des Bergers that Aries is 'chault et sec,' i. e. hot and dry.

53. agayn, against, opposite to. So also in Kn. Ta. 651 (A. 1509).

54. What for; cf. Mod. Eng. what with. See Kn. Tale, 595 (A. 1453).

59. deys, raised platform, as at English feasts. But this is in Marco Polo too; see vol. iii. p. 473. Cf. Kn. Tale, l. 1342 (A. 2200); and note to Prol. l. 370.

63. In a similar indirect manner, Chaucer describes feasts, &c. elsewhere: see Kn. Ta. 1339 (A. 2197); Man of Lawes Tale, B. 701-707. And Spenser imitates him; F. Q. i. 12. 14; v. 3. 3.

67. sewes, seasoned broths. 'Sewes and potages'; Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, p. 151, l. 523; cf. p. 149, l. 509.

68. Mr. Wright's note on the line is—'It is hardly necessary to observe that swans were formerly eaten at table, and considered among the choicest ornaments of the festive board. Tyrwhitt informs us that at the intronization of Archbp. Nevil, 6 Edward iv, there were "Heronshawes iiijc." [i. e. 400]; Leland's Collectanea, vi. 2: and that at another feast in 1530 we read of "16 Heronsews, every one 12d"; Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, ii. 12.' Heronsew is derived from A. F. heronceau, variant of heroncel. Godefroy gives herouncel, from the Liber Custumarum, i. 304 (14 Edw. II.), and the pl. heroncaulx in an account dated 1330. Cotgrave only has 'Haironneau, a young heron,' and 'Hairon, a heron, herne, herneshaw.' Halliwell quotes 'Ardeola, an hearnesew' from Elyot's Dict. 1559, and the form herunsew from Reliquiae Antiquae, i. 88. Certainly heronsewe is the name of a bird, not of a dish, as some have guessed, by comparing the sewes in l. 67. In fact, the word heronsew (for heron) is still used in Swaledale, Yorkshire. And in Hazlitt's old Plays (The Disobedient Child), vol. ii. p. 282, we have—

'There must be also pheasant and swan;

There must be heronsew, partridge, and quail.'

See the quotations in Nares; also Notes and Queries, 1st Ser. iii. 450, 507; iv. 76; vii. 13; Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, p. 152, l. 539. Cf. handsaw, for hernshaw, in Hamlet, ii. 2. Heroncel, or -ceu, or -ceau, is simply the diminutive form; so also, lioncel, or lionçeau, as a diminutive of lion.

70. som mete; viz. 'horses, dogs, and Pharaoh's rats.' See vol. iii. p. 474.

73. pryme; the word prime seems to mean, in Chaucer, the first quarter of the day, reckoned from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M.; and more particularly, the end of that period, i. e. 9 A.M. In the Nonne Prestes Tale, B. 4387, the cock crew at prime, or 9 A.M. So here, the Squire says it is 9 o'clock, and he must proceed quickly with his story. The word is used in different senses by different writers.

75. firste, first design or purpose. I believe this reading is right. MS. Harl. has purpos, which will not scan: unless my be omitted, as in Tyrwhitt, though that MS. retains my. MSS. Cp. Ln. insert purpos as well as firste, making the line too long: whilst Hn. Cm. Pt. agree with the text here given, from MS. E.

76. The second syllable in after is rapidly pronounced, and thridde is a dissyllable.

78. thinges, pieces of music. Minstrelsy at feasts was common; cf. Man of Lawes Tale, B. 705; March. Tale, E. 1715.

80. The incident of a man riding into the hall is nothing uncommon. Thus we have, in the Percy Folio MS. ii. 486, the line—

'The one came ryding into the hall.'

Warton observes—'See a fine romantic story of a Comte de Macon who, while revelling in his hall with many knights, is suddenly alarmed by the entrance of a gigantic figure of a black man, mounted on a black steed. This terrible stranger, without receiving any obstruction from guards or gates, rides directly forward to the high table, and, with an imperious tone, orders the count to follow him—Nic. Gillos. Chron. ann. 1120.' Alexander rode into a hall up to the high table, according to the romance, ed. Weber, l. 1083. See also Warton's Obs. on the Fairy Queen, p. 202; the Ballad of King Estmere; and Stowe's Survey of London, p. 387, ed. 1599. In Scott's Rokeby, Bertram rides into a church.

81. stede of bras, &c. See note to I. 209, and vol. iii. pp. 465, 475.

95. Sir Gawain, nephew to king Arthur, according to the British History which goes by the name of Geoffrey of Monmouth, is always upheld as a model of courtesy in the French romances and the English translations of them. He is often contrasted with Sir Kay, who was equally celebrated for churlishness. See the Percy Folio MS.; Sir Gawain, ed. by Sir F. Madden; Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, ed. by Dr. Morris; the Morte D'Arthur, &c. Cf. Rom. Rose, 2205-12.

103. Accordant, according. The change from the Fr. -ant to the common Eng. -ing should be noted.—M.

106. style, stile. Such puns are not common in Chaucer; cf. E. 1148.—M.

116. day naturel. In his Treatise on the Astrolabe, pt. ii. c. 7 (see vol. iii. p. 194), Chaucer explains that the day artificial is the time from sunrise to sunset, which varies; to which he adds—'but the day natural, that is to seyn 24 houres, is the revolucioun of the equinoxial with as moche partie of the zodiak as the sonne of his propre moevinge passeth in the mene whyle.' See note to B. 2.

122. the air, pronounced th'air, as usual with Chaucer; see D. 1939.

129. wayted, watched; alluding to the care with which the maker watched for the moment when the stars were in a propitious position, according to the old belief in astrology.

131. seel, seal. Mr. Wright notes that 'the making and arrangement of seals was one of the important operations of medieval magic, and treatises on this subject are found in MSS.' He refers to MS. Arundel, no. 295, fol. 265. Solomon's seal is still commemorated in the name of a flower.

132. mirour. For some account of this, see vol. iii. p. 476, and note to l. 231.

137. over al this, besides all this. Elsewhere over-al is a compound word, meaning everywhere; as in Prol. 216.—M.

150. Compare Tale xv (The Ravens) in the Seven Sages, ed. Weber, about the child who understood the language of all birds.

154. and whom, &c., and to whom it will do good, or operate as a remedy; alluding to the virtues attributed to many herbs. So Spenser, F. Q. i. 2. 10—

'O who can tell

The hidden power of herbes, and might of magicke spell!'

162. with the platte, with the flat side of it; see l. 164. Cf. Troil. iv. 927.

171. Stant, stands; contracted from standeth; so also in l. 182. Cf. sit for sitteth in l. 179, hit for hideth in l. 512, and note to E. 1151.

184. 'By means of any machine furnished with a windlass or a pulley.' The modern windlass looks like a compound of wind and lace, but really stands for windel-as, variant of the form windas here used. The confusion would be facilitated by the fact that there was another form windlas (probably from wind and lace) with a different meaning, viz. that of a circuitous way or path; see note to Hamlet, ii. 1. 65 (Clar. Press). In the Promptorium Parvulorum, our word is spelt both wyndlas and wyndas; p. 529. The Mid. E. windas may have been derived from the Low-German directly, or more probably from the Old French, which has both guindas and windas. The meaning and derivation are clearly shewn by the Du. windas, which means a winding-axle or capstan, from the sb. as, an axle; so, too, the Icel. vindâss. In Falconer's Shipwreck, canto 1, note 3, the word windlass is used in the sense of capstan.

190. gauren, gaze, stare. Used again by Chaucer, A. 3827, B. 3559, and in Troil. and Cres. ii. 1157 (vol. ii. p. 225). In the Clerkes Tale (E. 1003), he has gazed. Mr. Wedgwood is perhaps right in considering gaze and gaure (also spelt gare) as mere variations of the same word. Cf. the adj. garish, i. e. staring, in Milton, Il Pens. 141. For the occasional change of s to r, see my Principles of Eng. Etymology, i. 379.

gauring, i. e. stupor, occurs in Batman upon Bartholomè, lib. vii. c. 7.

193. Lumbardye, Lombardy, formerly celebrated for horses. Tyrwhitt quotes from a patent in Rymer, 2 Edw. II—'De dextrariis in Lumbardiâ emendis,' i. e. of horses to be bought in Lombardy.

195. Poileys, Apulian. Apulia was called Poille or Poile in Old French, and even in Middle English; the phrase 'king of Poile' occurs in the Seven Sages (ed. Weber), l. 2019. It was celebrated for its horses. Tyrwhitt quotes from MS. James vi. 142 (Bodleian Library), a passage in which Richard, archbishop of Armagh, in the fourteenth century, has the words—'nec mulus Hispaniae, nec dextrarius Apuliae, nec repedo Æthiopiae, nec elephantus Asiae, nec camelus Syriae.' Chaucer ascribes strength and size to the horses of Lombardy, and high breeding to those of Apulia.

200. goon, i. e. move, go about, have motion.

201. of Fairye, of fairy origin, magical. I do not subscribe to Warton's opinion (Obs. on Faerie Queene, p. 86) that this necessarily means that it was 'the work of the devil.' Cf. the same expression in Piers Pl. B. prol. 6.

203. Compare the Latin proverb—'quot homines, tot sententiae.' See Hazlitt's Eng. Proverbs, pp. 340, 437. A good epigram on this proverb is given in Camden's Remaines concerning Britaine, ed. 1657, sig. Gg.

'So many heads, so many wits—fie, fie!

Is't not a shame for Proverbs thus to lie?

My selfe, though my acquaintance be but small,

Know many heads that have no wit at all.'

207. the Pegasee, Pegasus. In the margin of MSS. E. Hn. Hl. is written 'i. equs Pegaseus,' meaning 'id est, equus Pegaseus'; shewing that Chaucer was thinking of the adjective Pegaseus rather than of the sb. Pegasus, the name of the celebrated winged horse of Bellerophon and of the Muses. Cf. Lydgate's Complaint of the Black Knight, l. 92.

209. 'Or else it was the horse of the Greek named Sinon.' This very singular-looking construction is really common in Middle English; yet the scribe of the Harleian MS. actually writes 'the Grekissch hors Synon,' which makes Sinon the name of the horse; and this odd blunder is retained in the editions by Wright, Bell, and Morris. The best way of clearing up the difficulty is by noting similar examples; a few of which are here appended:—

'The kinges meting Pharao';

i. e. the dream of King Pharaoh; Book of the Duchesse, l. 282.

'The erles wif Alein';

i. e. the wife of earl Alein; Rob. of Gloucester, in Spec. of Eng., ed. Morris and Skeat, p. 11, l. 303.

'Themperours moder william,'

i. e. the mother of the Emperor named William; Will. of Palerne, l. 5437.

'Pieres pardon þe plowman';

i. e. the pardon of Piers the Plowman; P. Pl. B. xix. 182.

'In Piers berne þe plowman';

i. e. in the barn of Piers the Plowman; id. xix. 354.

'For Piers loue þe plowman';

i. e. for love of Piers the Plowman; id. xx. 76. Chaucer again alludes to Sinon in the House of Fame, i. 152, and in the Legend of Good Women, Dido, 8; which shews that he took that legend partly from Vergil, Aen. ii. 195. But note that Chaucer here compares a horse of brass to the Trojan horse; this is because the latter was also said to have been of brass, not by Vergil, but by Guido delle Colonne; see note to l. 211. This is why Gower, in his Confess. Amant. bk. i., and Caxton, in his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, both speak of the Trojan horse as a 'horse of brass'; see Spec. of English, 1394-1579, ed. Skeat, p. 91, l. 67.

211. olde gestes, old accounts. The account of the taking of Troy most valued in the middle ages was not that by Vergil or Homer, but the Latin prose story written in 1287 by Guido delle Colonne, who obtained a great reputation very cheaply, since he borrowed his work almost entirely from an old French Roman de Troie, written by Benoit de Sainte-Maure. See the preface to The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, ed. Panton and Donaldson (Early English Text Society). And see vol. ii. p. lxi.

219. Iogelours, jugglers. See the quotation from Marco Polo, i. 340, in vol. iii. p. 473; and cf. The Franklin's Tale, F. 1140-1151, and the notes.

223. comprehende; so in the MSS. But read comprende; see Troil. iii. 1687; and pronounce lew-ed-nes fully.

224. 'They are very prone to put down things to the worst cause.'

226. maister-tour, principal tower, the donjon or keep-tower. So also maistre strete, principal street, Kn. Ta. 2044 (A. 2902); maister temple, Leg. of Good Women, l. 1016.

230. For slye, MS. Hl. has heigh, an inferior reading. Mr. Marsh observes upon this line—'This reasoning reminds one of the popular explanation of table-turning and kindred mysteries. Persons who cannot detect the trick ... ascribe the alleged facts to electricity.... Men love to cheat themselves with hard words, and indolence often accepts the name of a phenomenon as a substitute for the reason of it'; Origin and Progress of the English Language, Lect. ix. p. 427.

231. The magic mirror in Rome was said to have been set up there by Vergil, who was at one time reverenced, not as a poet, but as a great enchanter. The story occurs in the Seven Sages, in the Introduction to his edition of which Mr. Wright says, at p. lix., 'The story of Virgil's tower, which was called salvatio Romae, holds rather a conspicuous place in the legendary history of the magician. Such a tower is first mentioned, but without the name of Virgil, in a Latin MS. of the eighth century, in a passage published by Docen and republished by Keller, in his introduction to the Sept Sages. Vincent of Beauvais, in the thirteenth century ... describes Virgil's tower; and it is the subject of a chapter in the legendary history of Virgilius.' See also the other version of the Seven Sages edited by Weber, and reprinted in Mätzner's Sprachproben, i. 254; where the mirror is mentioned. Gower tells the story of this mirror in his Confessio Amantis, bk. v. It occurs also in the Chronicle of Helinand, and in the Otia Imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury; Morley's Eng. Writers, iv. 225. Warton notes that the same fiction is in Caxton's Troybook, bk. ii. ch. 22. It also occurs in Higden, Polychronicon, bk. i. c. 24.

232. 'Alhazeni et Vitellonis Opticae are extant, printed at Basil, 1572. The first is supposed by his editor to have lived about A.D. 1100, and the second to A.D. 1270.'—Tyrwhitt. Hole's Brief Biographical Dictionary has the notices—'Alhazel or Alhazen, Arabian Astronomer and Optician; died A.D. 1038'; and—'Vitello or Vitellio, Polish Mathematician; floruit circa 1254.' See also the remarks in Warton (Hist. Eng. Poetry), on the Clerk's Tale. Alhacen (sic) is mentioned in Le Rom. de la Rose, l. 18234. In l. 18376 of the same, we find the very phrase: 'Par composicions diverses'; and again, in l. 18387: 'Par les diversités des angles.' Mirrors are there described at length. R. Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, bk. xiii. c. 19, declares that 'the wonderous deuises and miraculous sights and conceipts made and conteined in glasse, doo farre exceed all other.'

233. Aristotle, the famous Grecian philosopher, born B.C. 384, died 322. writen in hir lyves, wrote in their lifetime. Observe that writen is here the past tense. The pres. pl. is wryten; pt. s. wrat, wrot, or wroot; pt. pl. writen; pp. writen.

238. Thelophus. Telephus, king of Mysia, in opposing the landing of the Greeks in the expedition against Troy, was wounded by the spear of Achilles. But as an oracle declared that the Greeks would require his aid, he was healed by means of the rust taken from the same spear. Chaucer may easily have learnt this story from his favourite Ovid, who says—

'Telephus aeterna consumptus tabe perisset

Si non quae nocuit dextra tulisset opem.

Tristium, lib. v. El. 2. 15.

And again—

'Vulnus Achilleo quae quondam fecerat hosti,

Vulneris auxilium Pelias hasta tulit.'

Remed. Amor. 47.

See also Met. xii. 112; xiii. 171; Ex Ponto, ii. 2. 26; Propertius, Eleg. ii. 1. 65 (or 63). Or he may have taken it from Dante, Inferno, xxxi. 5; or from Hyginus, Fab. 101. Cf. Shak. 2 Hen. VI., v. i. 100.

247. Canaceës; four syllables, as in l. 631.

250. Great skill in magic was attributed in the middle ages to Moses and Solomon, especially by the Arabs. Moses was supposed to have learnt magic from the Egyptians; cf. Acts vii. 22; Exod. vii. 11. See the story of the Fisherman and Genie in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, where the genie invokes the name of Solomon.

253. 'Some said it was a wonderful thing to make glass from fern-ashes, since glass does not resemble fern-ashes at all.' Glass contains two principal ingredients, sand and some kind of alkali. For the latter, the calcined ashes of seaweed, called kelp, were sometimes used; or, according to Chaucer, the ashes of ferns. Modern chemistry has developed many greater wonders.

256. 'But, because men have known it (the art of glass-making) so long, their talking and wonder about it ceases.' The art is of very high antiquity, having been known even to the Egyptians. so fern, so long ago; Chaucer sometimes rimes words which are spelt exactly alike, but only when their meanings differ. See Prol. l. 17, where seke, to seek, rimes with seke, sick. Other examples are seen in the Kn. Tale, see being repeated in A. 1955-6; caste in A. 2171-2; caas in A. 2357-8; and fare in A. 2435-6. Imperfect rimes like disport, port, Prol. 137, 138, are common; see Prol. 241, 433, 519, 579, 599, 613, 811; Kn. Ta. 379, 381 (A. 1237, 1239), &c. For examples of fern compare—

'Ye, farewel al the snow of ferne yere,'

i. e. good bye to all last year's snow; Troil. and Cres. v. 1176 (see vol. ii. p. 394). So also fernyere, long ago, in P. Pl. B. v. 440; spelt uernyere, in Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris, p. 92. Adverbs commonly terminate in -e, but the scribes are right in writing fern here; see A. S. Gospels, Matt. xi. 21, for the forms gefyrn, gefern, meaning long ago. Occleve, in La Male Regle, 196, uses the expression fern ago, i. e. long ago; Poems, ed. Furnivall, p. 31. And in Levins's Manipulus Vocabulorum, ed. Wheatley, we find—'Old farne years, anni praeteriti, seculum prius.'

With these examples in view, we might interpret ferne halwes in Chaucer's Prologue, l. 14, by 'olden' rather than by 'distant' saints; yet the latter is decisively authenticated by a passage in his translation of Boethius, bk. ii. met. 7, where the expression 'renoun ysprad to ferne poeples, goth by dyverse tonges,' can only mean 'distant' peoples. Fern, in the sense of old, is explained at once by the Gothic fairnis, old; but, in the sense of distant, would seem to be corruptly and incorrectly formed, since the A. S. feorran, meaning far, is strictly an adverb, from the adjective feorr. But in course of time this adverb came to be declined as an adjective; see the examples in Stratmann, s. v. feorren.

258. Cf. 'What is the cause of thunder'; K. Lear, iii. 4. 160. The opinions of various ancient philosophers as to the cause of thunder are given in Plutarch's treatise, De Placitis Philosophorum (περὶ τῶν ἀρεσκόντων τοῖς φιλοσόφοις), lib. iii. c. 3. It was usually believed to result from the collision of clouds. 'Fulmina autem collisa nubila faciunt'; Isidore, Originum lib. xiii. c. 9. Cf. A. S. Leechdoms, iii. 281.

263. For a full explanation of this difficult passage, I must be content to refer the reader to Mr. Brae's edition of Chaucer's Astrolabe, pp. 77 and 86, and my own edition of the same (E. E. T. S.), p. lvi. The chief points that now seem tolerably certain are these.

(1) The Angle Meridional was an astrological term. The heavens were divided into twelve equal parts called 'mansions,' and four of these mansions were technically called 'angles'; the angle meridional was the same as the tenth mansion, which was bounded on the one edge by the meridian, and on the other by a semi-circle passing through the N. and S. points of the horizon, and lying 30° to the E. of the meridian; so that, at the equinoxes, at any place situate on the equator, the sun would cross this portion of the sky between 10 A. M. and the hour of noon.

(2) Since this 'angle' corresponds to the end of the forenoon, the sun leaves the said angle at the moment of noon, and l. 263 means no more than 'it was now past noon.'

(3) The 'royal beast' means the king of beasts, the lion, and (here in particular) the sign of the zodiac named Leo. This sign, on March 15, in Chaucer's time, and in the latitude of London, began to 'ascend,' or rise above the horizon, just about noon. An additional reason for calling Leo 'royal' is because the principal star in the constellation is called Regulus in Latin, Βασιλίσκος in Greek, and Melikhi in Arabic, all epithets signifying kingly or royal.

(4) But, before the Tartar king rose from the feast, the time past noon had so increased that the star called Aldiran, situate in Leo, was now rising above the horizon. In other words it was very nearly two o'clock. It may be added, that, by the time the whole of the sign had ascended, it would be about a quarter to three. Hence Chaucer speaks of the sign as yet (i. e. still) ascending.

The chief remaining point is to fix the star Aldiran.

Most MSS. read Aldrian, owing to the frequent shifting of r in a word; just as brid, for instance, is the old spelling of bird. But the Hengwrt MS. is right. The name Aldiran, Aldurin, or Aldiraan, occurs in the old Parisian star-lists as the name of a star in the constellation Leo, and is described in them as being 'in fronte Leonis.' The word means 'the two fore-paws,' and the notes of the star's position are such that I am persuaded it is the star now called θ Hydrae, situate near the Lion's fore-paws, as commonly drawn. The only objection to this explanation arises from the comparative insignificance of the star; but whoever will take the trouble to examine the old lists will see that certain stars were chosen quite as much for the sake of position as of brightness. When it was desired to mark particular points in the sky, bright stars were chosen if they were conveniently placed; but, failing that, any would serve the purpose that were fairly distinct. This is why, in a star-list of only 49 stars in MS. Camb. Univ. Lib. Ii. 3. 3, such stars as δ Capricorni, δ Aquarii, δ Ophiuchi, &c., find a place. The star Aldiran (θ Hydrae) was remarkable for rising, in the latitude of Paris, just before the splendid star α Leonis of the first magnitude, whose coming it thus heralded. That star is also found in the same star-lists, with the name Calbalesed, or 'the lion's heart'; in Latin, Cor Leonis; another name for it being Regulus, as stated above.

On the whole, we fairly suppose Chaucer's meaning to be, that before the feast concluded, it was not only past noon, but nearly two hours past noon.

269. chambre of parements. Tyrwhitt's note is—'Chambre de parement is translated by Cotgrave, the presence-chambre, and lit de parement, a bed of state. Parements originally signified all sorts of ornamental furniture or clothes, from Fr. parer, to adorn. See Kn. Ta. 1643 (A. 2501), and Legend of Good Women; Dido, l. 181.' He adds that the Italians use camera de' paramenti in the same sense.

272. Venus children, the worshippers or subjects, of Venus. It merely means the knights and ladies at the feast, whose thoughts then turned upon love, because the season was astrologically favourable for it; cf. Kn. Tale, 1628, 1629 (A. 2486). The reason is given in l. 273, viz. that 'hir lady,' i. e. their lady or goddess, as represented by the planet Venus, was then situate in the sign Pisces. This sign, in astrology, is called the 'exaltation' of Venus, or the sign in which she exerts most power. Hence the expression ful hye, and the statement that Venus regarded her servants with a friendly aspect. In the Wyf of Bathes Prol. (D. 704), Chaucer has the line—

'In Pisces, wher Venus is exaltat.'

'Who will not commend the wit of astrology? Venus, born out of the sea, hath her exaltation in Pisces'; Sir T. Browne, Works, ed. Wilkin, iv. 382.

287. Lancelot, the celebrated lover of queen Guinever in the Arthur romances. Cp. Dante, Inf. v. 128.

291. 'The steward bids (them) to be quick with the spices.' Cf. Joseph of Arimathea, ed. Skeat, note to l. 698. And see vol. ii. 506.

300. Hath is here used like the mod. F. il y a, for which O. F. often has a only. The sense is—'there is plenty.' The idiom is borrowed from French, and the text is correct. (I owe this note to a friend.)

316. 'You must twirl round a pin (which) stands in his ear.'

318. 'You must also tell him to what place or country you wish to ride.'

334. Ryde, ride; so in the Six-text; Hl. has Byd, i. e. bid.

340. The bridle is here said to have been put away with the jewels. So also, when Richard I., in a crusade, took Cyprus, among the treasures in the castles are mentioned precious stones, golden cups, &c., together with golden saddles, bridles, and spurs; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Iter Hierosol. c. xli. p. 328; in Vet. Script. Angl. tom. ii.

346. Tyrwhitt inserts that after Til, to fill up the line. It is not required; it is one of the many lines in which the first syllable is lacking.

347. 'Sleep, digestion's nurse, winked upon them, and bade them take notice, that much drink and exercise must require repose.' Cf. 2 Hen. IV., iii. 1. 6. Tyrwhitt supposes l. 349 to be corrupt; I do not know why.

351. To scan the line, retain the e in seyde, preserved by the caesura.

352. By the old physicians, blood was supposed to be in domination, or chief power, for seven hours, from the ninth hour of the night (beginning at 8 P. M.) to the third hour of the day. Tyrwhitt quotes from a book De Natura, ascribed to Galen, tom. v. p. 327—'Sanguis dominatur horis septem, ab hora noctis nona ad horam diei tertiam.' Other authorities were pleased to state the matter somewhat differently. 'Six houres after midnight bloud hath the mastery, and in the sixe houres afore noon choler reigneth, and six houres after noon raigneth melancholy, and six hours afore midnight reigneth the flegmatick'; Shepheardes Kalender, ed. 1656, ch. xxix. Chaucer no doubt followed this latter account, which he may have found in the original French Calendrier des Bergers; see note to l. 51, p. 373.

358. fumositee, fumes arising from wine-drinking. See C. 567; and concerning dreams, see the Nonne Prestes Tale, 103-149 (B. 4113-59).

359. no charge, no weight; to which no weight, or no significance, can be attached.

360. pryme large; probably the same as fully pryme, Sir Thop., B. 2015, which see. It must then mean the time when the period of prime was quite ended; i. e. 9 A. M. This would be a very late hour for rising, but the occasion was exceptional.

365. appalled, enfeebled, languid; lit. 'rendered pallid,' cf. Kn. Ta. 2195 (A. 3053); and Shipm. Tale, B. 1290-2:—

'"Nece," quod he, "it oghte y-nough suffyse

Fyve houres for to slepe upon a night,

But it were for an old appalled wight,"' &c.

373. 'Before the sun began to rise'; i. e. before 6 A. M., as it was near the equinox.

374. maistresse, governess; as appears from the Phis. Tale, C. 72.

376-377. Though the sense is clear, the grammar is incurably wrong. Chaucer says—'These old women, that would fain seem wise, just as did her governess, answered her at once.' What he means is—'This governess, that would fain seem wise, as such old women often do, answered her,' &c. The second part of this tale seems to have been hastily composed, left unfinished, and never revised. Cf. l. 382.

383. wel a ten, i. e. about ten. Cf. Prol. l. 24.

386. four. The Harl. MS. wrongly has ten. There is no doubt about it, because on March 15, the day before, the sun was in the third degree of the sign; on the 16th, he was in the fourth degree.

387. It means—'and, moreover, the sun had risen but four degrees above the horizon'; i. e. it was not yet a quarter past six.

396. her hertes, their hearts. lighte, to feel light, to feel happy; an unusual use of the verb; but see F. 914. In l. 398, the sudden change to the singular she is harsh.

401. Again hastily written. Chaucer says—'The point for which every tale is told—if it be delayed till the pleasure of them that have hearkened after (or listened attentively to) the former part of it grows cold—then the pleasantness of it passes off, on account of the prolixity in telling it; and the more so, the longer it is spun out.' Knotte is cognate with the Lat. nodus (written for gnodus), as used by Horace, Ars Poet. l. 191.

409. fordrye, exceedingly dry. The tree was white too, owing to loss of its bark. This reminds me of the famous Arbre Sec, or Dry Tree; see Marco Polo, ed. Yule, i. 119; Maundeville, ed. Halliwell, p. 68; Mätzner, Sprachproben, ii. 185.

428. faucon peregryn. 'This species of falcon is thus described in the Tresor de Brunet Latin, P. i. ch. Des Faucons; MS. Reg. 19 C. x. "La seconde lignie est faucons, qui hom apele pelerins, par ce que nus ne trove son ni; ains est pris autresi come en pelerinage, et est mult legiers a norrir, et mult cortois et vaillans, et de bone maniere" [i. e. the second kind is the falcon which is called the pilgrim (or peregrine), because no one ever finds its nest; but it is otherwise taken, as it were on pilgrimage, and is very easily fed, and very tame and bold, and well-mannered]. Chaucer adds that this falcon was of fremde lond, i. e. from a foreign country.'—Tyrwhitt.

435. ledene, language; from A. S. læden, leden, sometimes used in the sense of language, though it is, after all, a mere corruption of Latin, which is the sense which it most often bears. Thus, the inscription on the cross of Christ is said to have been written 'Ebreisceon stafon, and Grecisceon, and Leden stafon,' in Hebrew letters and in Greek and Latin letters; John, xix. 20. So also 'on Ledenisc gereorde,' in the Latin language; Beda, bk. iv. c. 1. Hence the word was used more generally in the sense of language; as, 'Mara is, on ure lyden, biternes,' i. e. Marah is, in our speech, bitterness; Exod. xv. 23. This extension of the meaning, and the form of the word, were both influenced, probably, by confusion with the sb. lēod, people. The student should learn to distinguish this word from the A. S. lēoð, G. lied, a song. Tyrwhitt notes that Dante uses latino in the sense of language; 'E cantine gli augelli Ciascuno in suo latino'; Canzone 1.

458. as dooth, so do, pray do. See Note to Cler. Tale, E. 7.

469. 'As verily as may the great God of nature help me.' Wisly, verily, is quite different from wysly, wisely; cf. Kn. Ta. 1376 (A. 2234).

471. 'To heal your hurts with quickly.' Note the position of with; and cf. l. 641.

474. aswowne = a swowne = on swoune, in a swoon.

479. Chaucer's favourite line; he repeats it four times. See Kn. Ta. 903 (A. 1761); March. Ta. 9860 (E. 1986); Prol. to Leg. G. W. 503. Also, in The Man of Lawes Ta. B. 660, we have it again in the form—'As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee.'

480. similitude is pronounced nearly as sim'litude.

483. kytheth, manifests. Cf. Rom. Rose, 2187-2238 (vol. i. p. 172).

490. 'And to make others take heed by my example, as the lion is chastised (or reproved) by means of the dog.' The explanation of this passage was a complete riddle to me till I fortunately discovered the proverb alluded to. It appears in George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum (Herbert's Works, ed. Willmott, 1859, p. 328) in the form 'Beat the dog before the lion,' where before means in the sight of. This is cleared up by Cotgrave, who, in his French Dictionary, s. v. Batre, has the proverb—'Batre le chien devant le Lion, to punish a mean person in the presence, and to the terror of, a great one.' It is even better explained by Shakespeare, Othello, ii. 3. 272—'What, man! there are ways to recover the general again: you are but now cast in his mood, a punishment more in policy than in malice; even so as one would beat his offenceless dog to affright an imperious lion.'

499. Ther, where. The numerous expressions in this narrative certainly shew that the falcon was really a princess (cf. l. 559) who had been changed into a falcon for a time, as is so common in the Arabian Tales. Thus, in l. 500, the roche or rock may be taken to signify a palace, and the tercelet (l. 504) to be a prince. This gives the whole story a human interest.

505-506. welle, well, fountain. Al were he, although he was.

511. coloures, colours; and, in a secondary sense, pretences, which meaning is also intended; cf. l. 560. On dyeing in grain, i. e. of a fast colour, see note to Sir Thopas, B. 1917.

512. hit him, hideth himself. The allusion is to the well-known lines 'Qui legitis flores ... fugite hinc, latet anguis in herba'; Verg. Bucol. iii. 92. Cf. D. 1994; and Macbeth, i. 5. 66.

516. Read kēp'th. MS. Hl. gives lines 514-6 thus:—

'Right so this god of loue, this ypocrite,

Doth so his sermonys and his obseruaunce

Under subtil colour and aqueyntaunce.'

517. sowneth in-to, tend to, are consonant with; see Prol. 307.

518. Cf. P. Plowm. B. xv. 109. Both passages are from Matt. xxiii. 27.

537. Chaucer clearly quotes this as a proverb; true man means honest man, according to Dogberry; Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 3. 54. The sense seems to be much the same as 'You cannot make a silk purse of a sow's ear,' or 'Once a knave, always a knave.' Compare the use of theef in Anelida, l. 161; also—

'Alas! I see a serpent or a theef,

That many a trewe man hath doon mescheef;

Knightes Tale, 467 (A. 1325).

548. The reading Troilus (in E. Hn.) must be a mistake, because he was not guilty of transferring his love to another; it was Cressida who did that, so that the falcon would take care not to refer to that story. Paris deserted Oenone for Helen, and Jason deserted Medea for Glauce. Lamech was the first to have two wives, viz. Adah and Ziilah; Gen. iv. 23. The whole of this passage is a recast of Chaucer's earlier poem of Anelida, where Lamech is introduced just in the same way (l. 150).

555. Imitated, but not with good taste, from Mark, i. 7.

558. This line resembles Troil. ii. 637.

579. 'Whether it was a grief to me, does not admit of doubt.'

583. 'Such grief I felt because he could not stay.'