FullReads

21. Dan: Lord; Latin, “Dominus;” Spanish, “Don.”

22. The “caduceus.”

23. Argus was employed by Juno to watch Io with his hundred eyes but he was sent to sleep by the flute of Mercury, who then cut off his head.

24. Next: nearest; German, “naechste”.

25. Clary: hippocras, wine made with spices.

26. Warray: make war; French “guerroyer”, to molest; hence, perhaps, “to worry.”

27. All day meeten men at unset steven: every day men meet at unexpected time. “To set a steven,” is to fix a time, make an appointment.

28. Roundelay: song coming round again to the words with which it opened.

29. Now in the crop and now down in the breres: Now in the tree-top, now down in the briars. “Crop and root,” top and bottom, is used to express the perfection or totality of anything.

30. Beknow: avow, acknowledge: German, “bekennen.”

31. Shapen was my death erst than my shert: My death was decreed before my shirt ws shaped — that is, before any clothes were made for me, before my birth.

32. Regne: Queen; French, “Reine;” Venus is meant. The common reading, however, is “regne,” reign or power.

33. Launde: plain. Compare modern English, “lawn,” and French, “Landes” — flat, bare marshy tracts in the south of France.

34. Mister: manner, kind; German “muster,” sample, model.

35. In listes: in the lists, prepared for such single combats between champion and accuser, etc.

36. Thilke: that, contracted from “the ilke,” the same.

37. Mars the Red: referring to the ruddy colour of the planet, to which was doubtless due the transference to it of the name of the God of War. In his “Republic,” enumerating the seven planets, Cicero speaks of the propitious and beneficent light of Jupiter: “Tum (fulgor) rutilis horribilisque terris, quem Martium dicitis” — “Then the red glow, horrible to the nations, which you say to be that of Mars.” Boccaccio opens the “Theseida” by an invocation to “rubicondo Marte.”

38. Last: lace, leash, noose, snare: from Latin, “laceus.”

39. “Round was the shape, in manner of compass,
Full of degrees, the height of sixty pas”

The building was a circle of steps or benches, as in the ancient amphitheatre. Either the building was sixty paces high; or, more probably, there were sixty of the steps or benches.

40. Yellow goldes: The sunflower, turnsol, or girasol, which turns with and seems to watch the sun, as a jealous lover his mistress.

41. Citheron: The Isle of Venus, Cythera, in the Aegean Sea; now called Cerigo: not, as Chaucer’s form of the word might imply, Mount Cithaeron, in the south-west of Boetia, which was appropriated to other deities than Venus — to Jupiter, to Bacchus, and the Muses.

42. It need not be said that Chaucer pays slight heed to chronology in this passage, where the deeds of Turnus, the glory of King Solomon, and the fate of Croesus are made memories of the far past in the time of fabulous Theseus, the Minotaur-slayer.

43. Champartie: divided power or possession; an old law-term, signifying the maintenance of a person in a law suit on the condition of receiving part of the property in dispute, if recovered.

44. Citole: a kind of dulcimer.

45. The picke-purse: The plunderers that followed armies, and gave to war a horror all their own.

46. Shepen: stable; Anglo-Saxon, “scypen;” the word “sheppon” still survives in provincial parlance.

47. This line, perhaps, refers to the deed of Jael.

48. The shippes hoppesteres: The meaning is dubious. We may understand “the dancing ships,” “the ships that hop” on the waves; “steres” being taken as the feminine adjectival termination: or we may, perhaps, read, with one of the manuscripts, “the ships upon the steres” — that is, even as they are being steered, or on the open sea — a more picturesque notion.

49. Freting: devouring; the Germans use “Fressen” to mean eating by animals, “essen” by men.

50. Julius: i.e. Julius Caesar

51. Puella and Rubeus were two figures in geomancy, representing two constellations-the one signifying Mars retrograde, the other Mars direct.