rteenth-century Squire Western, kindly,
hospitable, good-humoured, holding open table, with fish and roasts and
_sauce piquante_ and beer all day long, so popular in the county that,

Ful ofte tyme he was knight of the shire;

a shipman who knew every creek, from Scotland to Spain, and had
encountered many a storm, with his good ship "the Maudelayne,"

With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake;

a physician who had driven a thriving trade during the plague, learned,
and acquainted with the why and the wherefore of every disease,

Were it of hoot or cold, or moiste or drye;

who knew by heart Hippocrates and Galen, but was on bad terms with the
Church, for

His studie was but litel on the Bible.

With them, a group of working men from London, a haberdasher, a
carpenter, dyer, weaver, and cook; people from the country, a ploughman,
a miller,

His mouth as greet was as a great forneys,

a group of men-at-law devoured with cares, close shaven, bitter of
speech--

Ful longe were his legges, and ful lene,
Y-lyk a staf, ther was no calf y-sene--

bringing out their Latin on every occasion, terrible as adversaries, but
easy to win over for money, and after all, as Chaucer himself says, "les
meilleurs fils du monde":

A bettre felawe sholde men noght finde.

Then a group of Church-folk, men and women, of every garb and every
character, from the poor parish priest, who lives like a saint, obscure
and hidden, visiting, in rain and cold, the scattered cottages of his
peasants, forgetting to receive his tithes, a model of abnegation, to
the hunting monk, dressed like a layman, big, fat, with a head as shiny
as a ball, who will make one day the finest abbot in the world, to the
degenerate friar, who lives at the expense of others, a physician become
poisoner, who destroys instead of healing them, and to the pardoner, a
rascal of low degree, who bestows heaven at random by his own "heigh
power" on whoever will pay, and who manufactures precious relics out of
the pieces of his "old breech." Finally there are nuns, reserved, quiet,
neat as ermines, who are going to hear on the way enough to scandalise
them all the rest of their lives. Among them, Madame Eglantine, the
prioress, with her French of Stratford,

For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe,

who imitated the style of the Court, and, consequently,

Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.

She was "so pitous" that s