Frenche men synne yn lecherye
And Englys men yn enuye,

let him read the astounding revelation made of the state of the early
French mind by the tales in the 3rd and 4th vols. of Barbazan's
Fabliaux, ed. 1808.)

The second story, told by Lydgate, is as follows:--A prioress is wooed
by "a yonng knyght, a parson of a paryche, and a burges of a borrow."
She promises herself to the first if he will lie for a night in a chapel
sewn up in a sheet like a corpse; to the second, if he will perform the
funeral service over the knight, and bury him; to the third, if he will
dress up like a devil, and frighten both parson and knight. This the
burges Sir John does well, but is himself terrified at the corpse
getting up: all three run away from one another: the knight falls on a
stake, and into a snare set for bucks, and breaks his fore top in
falling from the tree; the merchant gets tossed by a bull; the parson
breaks his head and jumps into a bramble bush; and the prioress gets rid
of them all, but not before she has made the "burges" or "marchaunt" pay
her twenty marks not to tell his wife and the country generally of his
tricks.--_Minor Poems_, p. 107-117, ed. 1840.




GLOSSARY.


And, 89, 292, if.