, in addition to the
followers of Wyclif, were popularly included--yet his eyes and ears
were open; and he knew well enough what the world and its children are
at all times apt to call those who are not ashamed of their religion,
as well as those who make too conscious a profession of it. The world
called them Lollards at the close of the fourteenth century, and it
called them Puritans at the close of the sixteenth, and Methodists at
the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the vintners and the shipmen of
Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of the playhouse in Ben
Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, like their
successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely
between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when
Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests
from the "Parson," the jovial "Host" incontinently "smells a Lollard in
the wind," and predicts (with a further flow of expletives) that there
is a sermon to follow. Whereupon the "Shipman" protests not less
characteristically:--

"Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,"
Saide the Shipman, "here shall he not preach,
He shall no gospel here explain or teach.
We all believe in the great God," quoth he;
"He woulde sowe some difficulty,
Or springe cockle in our clean corn."
(The nickname Lollards was erroneously derived from "lolia" (tares).)

After each of the pilgrims except the "Parson" has told a tale (so that
obviously Chaucer designed one of the divisions of his work to close
with the "Parson's"), he is again called upon by the "Host". Hereupon
appealing to the undoubtedly evangelical and, it might without
straining be said, Wycliffite authority of Timothy, he promises as his
contribution a "merry tale in prose," which proves to consist of a
moral discourse. In its extant form the "Parson's Tale" contains, by
the side of much that might suitably have come from a Wycliffite
teacher, much of a directly opposite nature. For not only is the
necessity of certain sacramental usages to which Wyclif strongly
objected insisted upon, but the spoliation of Church property is
unctuously inveighed against as a species of one of the cardinal sins.
No enquiry could satisfactorily establish how much of this was taken
over or introduced into the "Parson's Tale" by Chaucer himself. But
one would fain at least claim for him a passage in perfect harmony with
the