How ye break the dead's wills, Turn monasteries into water-mille, Of an abbey ye make a grange; Your works, they say, are strange;

So that their founders' souls

Have lost their bead-rolls,2
The money for their masses
Spent among wanton lasses;
The Diriges are forgotten,
Their founders lie there rotten,
But where their soulés dwell
Therewith I will not mell.
What could the Turk do more
With all his falsé lore,

Turk, Saracen or Jew?

I report me to you,

O merciful Jesu,

You support and rescue
My style, for to direct
It may take some effect!
For I abhor to write

420

430

440

AN ASTROLOGER. (Holbein.)

For mannes redemption,

Manner of cause to moan;

1 Tutivillus is a fiend in the "Mystery of Judgment," in the Wakefield (or Towneley) Mysteries, and represents the sin of the flesh in the moral play of "Mankind." Mr. J. Payne Collier, observing this, objected to the derivation of the word from Latin "titivilitium," a thing of small worth, and preferred the derivation from "totum vile," all vile. Mr. Dyce quotes from Heywood's works, ed. 1598:

"There is no moe such titifyls in English ground,
To hold with the hare and run with the hound."

2 Bead-rolls, lists of the souls to be prayed for.

3 Lay fee, laity, holders of lay fee or property.

Drowned in delights, in glory and riches, in honour to be wondered at; in glory and the shining of the glittering spear (Habakkuk iii. 11); living with little purity.

5 Glory, praise.

6 Eysell, vinegar.

7 Hippocras was wine spiced and sugared.

* By like to like, each being rewarded after his deeds.

After gloria, laus,

May come a sour sauce; Sorry therefore am I, But truth can never lie.

480

With sharp, twinkling trebles

Against all such rebels

Your high and lordly looks.
Ye cast up then your books
And virtue is forgotten:
For then ye will be wroken
Of every light quarrel,
And call a lord a javel,'

A knight a knave ye make,
Ye boast, ye face, ye crake,2
And upon you ye take
To rule both king and kaiser,
And if ye may have laisers
Ye will bring all to nought,
And that is all your thought.
For the lords temporal
Their rule is very small,
Almost nothing at all.
Men say how ye appal
The noble blood royal.
In earnest and in game
Ye are the less to blame,
For lords of noble blood

If they well understood

Alas, for Goddes will,

Why sit ye, prelates, still

And suffer all this ill?

Should open the broad gates

Ye bishops of estates

630

Of your spiritual charge

640

Scorn to learn anything except hunting, horn-blowing, &c. Of the land of Zebulon, of the land of Naphtali. The allusion is to Isaiah viii. 19-22; ix. 1, 2.

7 Mammocks, scraps, leavings.

And come forth at large

Like lanterns of light
In the people's sight,

8 Untwined, destroyed.

9 He who thinketh that he standeth.

10 Ears open and little on the stretch.

11 I fawn, thou fawnest.

12 I lie, thou liest.

690

13 Blear, blur. Probably from the Cymric "pluor," dust. Tho image of throwing dust in the eyes associated "blear" with magical delusion. An old Latin-German dictionary defines "Præstigia" as "Pler vor den Augen," blear before the eyes; and Milton makes Comus hurl his

"Dazzling spells into the spungy air

Of power, to cheat the eyes with blear illusion."

14 How the male doth wry. So in Skelton's " Philip Sparrow : "—

"Yet there was a thing

That made the male to wring,

She made him to sing

The song of lovers lay."

And in "Why come ye not to Court?"—

"The countrynge at Cales

Wrang us on the males."

The phrase seems to mean being reduced to extremity. Travellers carried, as we have seen in the "Geste of Robin Hood" (line 984), the money, &c., needed for their journey, in their mails or travelling bags. Squeezing or twisting the mail would, therefore, be equivalent to pinching the pocket, and the traveller would be in extremity when his bag was empty enough to be wrung. This is but a doubtful guess at the origin of a saying that has yet to be decisively interpreted.

From the seven starris. Now will I go

And tell of other mo

Semper protestando

De non impugnando 10

The four orders of Friars,

Though some of them be liars.
As Limitours 11 at large

Will charge and discharge;
As many a friar, God wot,
Preaches for his groat,
Flattering for a new coat
And for to have his fees;
Some to gather cheese,
Loth are they to lese 12
Either corn or malt;
Sometime meal and salt,
Sometime a bacon flick 13
That is three fingers thick
Of lard and of grease,
Their convent to increase.
I put you out of doubt

This cannot be brought about
But they their tongues file
And make a pleasant style

To Margery and to Maud
How they have no fraud;
And sometime they provoke
Both Gill and Jack at Noke
Their duties to withdraw
That they ought 14 by the law
Their curates to content

In open time 15 and in Lent.
God wot, they take great pain
To flatter and to fayne,16
But it is an old said saw

830

840

850

14 Ought, owed. The friars in a parish sometimes got to themselves the dues payable to its curate.

15 Open time, when there was no fast.

16 Fayne, fawn.

17 Melots. "Circuierunt in melotis" is the form in the Vulgate for what stands in the Authorised Version, "They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins." It is from a Greek word unλwri, meaning sheepskin or other skin. The melotes worn by monks were usually of badgerskin, reached from the neck to the loins, and were worn in time of active labour. 18 But deliver us from evil.

19 Dudum (lately)-by Pope Boniface VIII., our predecessor-was the beginning of a section of a compilation of decrees, &c., by Clement V., known as the "Clementines." It was the section giving a Papal decree, founded upon the dissension between curates, or parish clergy, and the friars who interfered with their work as hearers of confession and intercepted many of their dues. The Pope backed the Limitours, and gave, by his apostolic power, right to receive confessions, where a prelate refused to grant it to a friar who had been duly presented to him.