35. Perfection: Perfectly holy life, in the performance of vows
of poverty, chastity, obedience, and other modes of mortifying
the flesh.
36. All the sin must on our friendes be: who made us take the
vows before they knew our own dispositions, or ability, to keep
them.
37. Cope: The large vestment worn in singing the service in the
choir. In Chaucer’s time it seems to have been a distinctively
clerical piece of dress; so, in the prologue to The Monk’s Tale,
the Host, lamenting that so stalwart a man as the Monk should
have gone into religion, exclaims, “Alas! why wearest thou so
wide a cope?”