Now draweth cut, for that is myn accord. Cometh neer,' quod he, 'my lady Prioresse, Anon to drawen every wight bigan, And, shortly for to tellen as it was, Were it by áventúre, or sort, or cas, The sothe is this, the cut fil to the knyght, Of which ful blithe and glad was every wyght: As ye han herd; what nedeth wordės mo? 845 And whan this goode man saugh that it was so, 850 To kepe his foreward by his free assent, 855 And he bigan with right a myrie cheere His tale anon, and seyde in this manère. NOTES. 1. Aprille with his shoures: [Professor Skeat notes that 'April is here masculine like the Latin Aprilis,' and compares 'Zephirus' in 1. 5; but as his in Chaucer's time was the neuter, as well as the masculine, genitive, there is no evidence that Chaucer here personified either the month or the wind as a masculine.] 2. to the roote: not an adverbial phrase (radicitus) equivalent to 'hath thoroughly pierced,' but (usque ad radicem) 'to the root of each plant or tree.' 4. Of which vertú: Chaucer might have written 'in swich licour of which,' or 'in swich licour that of his vertu,' but he uses of which vertu' not strictly after 'in swich licour,' but loosely in relation to the sentence-in such moisture, that from this vitalizing power the flower is begotten.' The 'virtue' of a thing is its special property, what it is efficacious for. In 1. 307 vertu' has our modern pronunciation and modern meaning; here it must be accented vertú.' 7. the yonge sonne, the astrological year began with the entrance of the sun into the sign of Aries or the Ram on March 12 (old style); in April, therefore, the sun was still 'young.' his halfe cours: The course of the sun in Aries or the Ram began in Chaucer's time on March 12th and ended on April 11th. The first half course was run in March. From 1. 5 of the talk which begins the story-telling of the second day we learn that it was then "the eightetethe day Of April that is messager to May." If the second day of the pilgrimage was April 18th, the pilgrimage began April 17th and the company assembled April 16th. Thus, as a matter of fact, the story begins five days after the completion of the 31 32 sun's April half course in the Ram; but in the present passage, save that the opening lines point to April showers having had time to do their work, there is nothing to show to which 'half course' Chaucer alludes. 12. Thanne, then; answering to 'whan' in l. I. 13. Palmeres, originally pilgrims to the Holy Land who brought thence a palm branch as a token of their journey. The name was afterwards given only to such pilgrims as wore a distinctive dress, went from one holy place to another, and begged on their way, instead of, like Chaucer's pilgrims, making a holiday excursion to a single shrine at their own expense. [It is usual either to print this line as a parenthesis or to put only a comma after strondes so as to make To ferne halwes follow to goon. The punctuation here adopted was proposed by Professor Liddell and seems an improvement, despite the fact that it makes us want wende at the end of 1. 14 rather than 16.] 18. That hem hath holpen, who has cured them. It was common for sick persons to invoke the prayers of a saint on their behalf and to vow that they would make a pilgrimage to the saint's shrine should they recover. For the rhyme seke, seeke, see Introduction. 20. In Southwerk at the Tabard: see Introduction. 22. corage, disposition. We are not tempted to misunderstand corages in l. 11, but here 'courage' would give a seemingly possible, though wrong, meaning. The real pitfalls in reading Chaucer are the words we still use, but in a different sense. Cp. note to 1. 43. 24. Wel nyne-and-twenty. The number of pilgrims mentioned in the Prologue is 31; but see note to 1. 164 and Introduction. 30. was to reste. To here has the force of the modern at. The use survives in the Americanism to home' for 'at home.' 33. erly for to ryse, cp. 1. 822. They must have started early indeed, for the Tales of the Knight and the Miller are supposed to have been told, and Deptford to be in sight, by 'half-way pryme,' i.e. by about 7.30 a.m. Cp. A 3985. 40. whiche, of what kind. THE KNIGHT. The career of Chaucer's Knight is made difficult to follow by Chaucer's mentioning the scenes of his exploits as they came to his mind. If we put his battles and sieges in their chronological order it will be seen that not only do they fall into groups, but that these groups allow for the knight taking his fair share of fighting 'in his lordes werre,' although Chaucer has only specified campaigns against the infidel. [By Edward III.'s time the Moors in Spain had been confined to the province of Granada, but here fighting was plentiful. In the north-east of Europe the Teutonic knights had completed their conquest of Prussia and were engaged in a long struggle with the Lithuanians. In the south-east the pressure of the infidel was continually more severe, and the chief centres of resistance were the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus and the attenuated kingdom of Armenia in the angle of Asia Minor. It thus became we may almost say 'fashionable' for young knights to make a kind of military 'grand tour,' passing from one of the Christian outposts to another. Thus Henry, Duke of Lancaster, had begun his campaigning with the Teutonic knights in Prussia, and went thence to Rhodes and Cyprus, and finally to Granada. To quit England on such a tour it was necessary to obtain the king's leave and this would only be granted, as a rule, in time of peace. Now in January 1343 Edward III. concluded a truce with France for three years, and we must imagine that Chaucer's knight started off at once to fight the Moors, possibly accompanying the aforesaid Henry, Duke of Lancaster, at that time Earl of Derby, who in the spring of the year was sent on a mission to Alphonso XI. of Castile, and took the opportunity of doing a little fighting at the siege of Algeçiras (Algezir) in Granada. Henry, however, had to return to England, whereas our knight was at the capture of the town in 1344, and about the same time must have taken part in raids in 'Belmarye' and 'Tramyssene,' the two provinces in Africa immediately opposite Spain, from which the Moors poured over to Granada to help their kinsmen, passing back again when the tide of war went against them. In May, 1345, the truce with France was declared broken, and we may hope that our knight got back again in time to fight the next year at Crecy. For the next fourteen years there was small chance of his obtaining leave to go crusading. But in May, 1360, the treaty of Bretigny (ratified the following October) would set him free again, and he must have hastened at once to the aid of Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who the following year made a sudden expedition against Attalia (Satalie), a town on the coast of Asia Minor, a little to the west of Cyprus, which he captured August 24th, 1361. King Peter, on the ground of this success, started at once on a round of visits to the courts of Europe whence aid might be expected, coming to England, where Chaucer must have seen a great deal of him, in November, 1363. In England he only stayed some six weeks, but he was in no hurry to return to Cyprus, and it was probably during his absence that our knight went with the lord of Palatye Agayn another hethen in Turkye.' At last, in 1365, King_Peter was at work again, and the knight was among the numerous Englishmen who took part in the capture of Alexandria. Most of the Englishmen seem to have hastened home with their booty, but the knight must have remained with the king, since he was present at the capture of Lyeys (Lyas, Ayas) in Armenia, in October, 1367. Peter then went to Rome 'n quest of further aid, and on his return was assassinated on January, 16th, 1369, a tragedy which Chaucer's Monk is made to bewail (Canterbury Tales, B 3581-88). It was then, we may suppose, that the knight transferred his services to the Teutonic Order in Prussia, and raided in Lithuania and Russia, for the high honour of ofttimes beginning the bord' would hardly have been granted to anyone but a veteran. If we choose, we may imagine that these Lithuanian and Russian raids, which no Christian man of his degree made so often, filled up his time until 1386, the year in which the Lithuanians, much, it is said, to the chagrin of the Teutonic knights, turned Christian, and thus made the war against them no longer attractive on religious grounds. If this were so, our knight must certainly have been 'late y-come from his viage' when Chaucer met him, for it is about this year that the Prologue must have been written. course this reconstruction of the knight's career is quite hypothetical, Of |