'She herd the foules grete and smale,
The swete note of the nightingale,
Ful mirily sing on tre.'
See also Romaunt of the Rose, ll. 613-728. But Chaucer's burlesque is far
surpassed by a curious passage in the singular poem of The Land of
Cockaygne (MS. Harl. 913), ll. 71-100:--
'In þe praer [_meadow_] is a tre
Swiþe likful for to se.
Þe rote is gingeuir and galingale,
Þe siouns beþ al _sed_[_e_]_wale_;
Trie maces beþ þe flure;
Þe rind, canel of swet odur;
Þe frute, _gilofre_ of gode smakke, &c.
Þer beþ briddes mani and fale,
Þ_rostil_, þruisse, and ni[gh]tingale,
Chalandre and wod[e]wale,
And oþer briddes wiþout tale [_number_],
Þat stinteþ neuer by har mi[gh]t
Miri to sing[e] dai and ni[gh]t,' &c.
1964. _as he were wood_, as if he were mad, 'like mad.' So in Amis and
Amiloun (ed. Weber), ii. 419:--
'He priked his stede _night and day_
As a gentil knight, stout and gay.'
Cf. note to l. 1949.
1974. _seinte_, being feminine, and in the vocative case, is certainly a
dissyllable here--'O seintè Márie, _ben'cite_.' Cf. note to B. 1170 above.
1977. _Me dremed_, I dreamt. Both _dremen_ (to dream) and _meten_ (also to
dream) are sometimes used with a dative case and reflexively in Old
English. In the Nonne Prestes Tale we have _me mette_ (l. 74) and _this man
mette_ (l. 182); B. 4084, 4192.
1978. _An elf-queen._ Mr. Price says--'There can be little doubt that at
one period the popular creed made the same distinctions between the Queen
of Faerie and the Elf-queen that were observed in Grecian mythology between
their undoubted parallels, Artemis and Persephone.' Chaucer makes
Proserpine the 'queen of faerie' in his Marchauntes Tale; but at the
beginning of the Wyf of Bathes Tale, he describes the _elf-queen_ as the
queen of the _fairies_, and makes _elf_ and _fairy_ synonymous. Perhaps
this _elf-queen_ in Sire Thopas (called the _queen of fairye_ in l. 2004)
may have given Spenser the hint for _his_ Faerie [190] Queene. But the
subject is a vast one. See Price's Preface, in Warton's Hist. Eng. Poetry,
ed. Hazlitt, pp. 30-36; Halliwell's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology;
Keightley's Fairy Mythology; Warton's Observations on the Faerie Queene,
sect. ii; Sir W. Scott's ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, &c.
1979. _under my gore_, within my robe or garment. In l. 2107 (on which see
the note) we have _under wede_ signifying merely 'in his dress.' We have a
somewhat similar phrase here, in which, however, _gore_ (lit. gusset) is
put for the whole robe or garment. That it was a mere phrase, appears from
other passages. Thus we find _under gore_, under the dress, Owl and
Nightingale, l. 515; Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. i. p. 244, vol. ii. p. 210;
with three more examples in the Gloss. to Böddeker's Altenglische
Dichtungen des MS. Harl. 2253. In one of these a lover addresses his lady
as 'geynest under gore,' i. e. fairest within a dress. For the exact sense
of _gore_, see note to A. 3237.
1983. _In toune_, in the town, in the district. But it must not be supposed
that much _sense_ is intended by this inserted line. It is a mere tag, in
imitation of some of the romances. Either Chaucer has neglected to conform
to the new kind of stanza which he now introduces (which is most likely),
or else three lines have been lost before this one. The next three stanzas
are longer, viz. of _ten_ lines each, of which only the seventh is very
short. For good examples of these short lines, see Sir Gawayne and the
Greene Kny[gh]t, ed. Morris; and for a more exact account of the metres
here employed, see vol. iii. p. 425.