-forke is burthen he bereth
Hit is muche wonder that he na down slyt,
For doute leste he valle he shoddreth and shereth." [25]

[Illustration: moon06]

In the _Archaeological Journal_ we are presented with a relic from
the fourteenth century. "Mr. Hudson Taylor submitted to the
Committee a drawing of an impression of a very remarkable
personal seal, here represented of the full size. It is appended to a
deed (preserved in the Public Record Office) dated in the ninth year
of Edward the Third, whereby Walter de Grendene, clerk, sold to
Margaret, his mother, one messuage, a barn and four acres of
ground in the parish of Kingston-on-Thames. The device appears to
be founded on the ancient popular legend that a husbandman who
had stolen a bundle of thorns from a hedge was, in punishment of
his theft, carried up to the moon. The legend reading _Te Waltere
docebo cur spinas phebo gero_, 'I will teach you, Walter, why I
carry thorns in the moon,' seems to be an enigmatical mode of
expressing the maxim that honesty is the best policy." [26]

About fifty years later, in the same century, Geoffrey Chaucer, in
his _Troylus and Creseide_ adverts to the subject in these lines:

"(Quod Pandarus) Thou hast a full great care
Lest the chorl may fall out of the moone."
(Book i. Stanza 147.)

And in another place he says of Lady Cynthia, or the moon:

"Her gite was gray, and full of spottis blake,
And on her brest a chorl painted ful even,
Bering a bush of thornis on his backe,
Whiche for his theft might clime so ner the heaven."

Whether Chaucer wrote the _Testament and Complaint of
Creseide_, in which these latter lines occur, is doubted, though it is
frequently ascribed to him. [27]

Dr. Reginald Peacock, Bishop of Chichester, in his _Repressor_,
written about 1449, combats "this opinioun, that a man which stale
sumtyme a birthan of thornis was sett in to the moone, there for to
abide for euere."

Thomas Dekker, a British dramatist, wrote in 1630: "A starre? Nay,
thou art more than the moone, for thou hast neither changing
quarters, nor a man standing in thy circle with a bush of thornes."
[28]

And last, but not least, amid the tuneful train, William Shakespeare,
without whom no review of English literature or of poetic lore could
be complete, twice mentions the man in the moon. First, in the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iii. Scene 1, Quince the carpenter
gives directions fo