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 Turk, Saracen or Jew? I report me to you, O merciful Jesu, You support and rescue 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, 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. With language thus polluted 480 With sharp, twinkling trebles Against all such rebels Your high and lordly looks. A knight a knave ye make, 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 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. Will charge and discharge; This cannot be brought about To Margery and to Maud In open time 15 and in Lent. 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. |