edited by Miss Octavia Richardson.

[150] A slightly different version is found in _A Hundred Mery
Talys_, No. lxix, "Of the franklyns sonne that cam to
take orders." The bishop says that Noah had three sons,
Shem, Ham, and Japheth;--who was the father of Japheth?
When the "scholar" returns home and tells his father how
he had been puzzled by the bishop, he endeavours to
enlighten his son thus: "Here is Colle, my dog, that
hath three whelps; must not these three whelps have
Colle for their sire?" Going back to the bishop, he
informs his lordship that the father of Japheth was
"Colle, my father's dogge."

The same author asks who but the churchmen of those days of ignorance
corrupted and perverted the text of the New Testament? Thus, in the
parable of the lost piece of money, _evertit domum_, "she overturned the
house," was substituted for _everrit domum_, "she _swept_ the house."
And in the Acts of the Apostles, where Saul (or Paul) is described as
being let down from the house on the wall of Damascus in a basket, for
_demissus per sportam_ was substituted _demissus per portam_, a
correction which called forth a rather witty Latin epigram to this
effect:

This way the other day did pass
As jolly a carpenter as ever was;
So strangely skilful in his trade,
That of a _basket_ a _door_ he made.

Among the many curious anecdotes told in illustration of the gross
ignorance of the higher orders of the clergy in medieval times the two
following are not the least amusing:

About the year 1330 Louis Beaumont was bishop of Durham. He was an
extremely illiterate French nobleman, so incapable of reading that he
could not, although he had studied them, read the bulls announced to the
people at his consecration. During that ceremony the word
"metropoliticae" occurred. The bishop paused, and tried in vain to repeat
it, and at last remarked: "Suppose that said." Then he came to
"enigmate," which also puzzled him. "By St. Louis!" he exclaimed in
indignation, "it could be no gentleman who wrote that stuff!"

Our second anecdote is probably more generally known: Andrew Forman, who
was bishop of Moray and papal legate for Scotland, at an entertainment
given by him at Rome to the Pope and cardinals, blundered so in his
Latinity when he said grace that his Holiness and the cardinals lost
their gravity. The disconcerted bishop concluded h