So she consents if he'll bring her an angel of money. He goes home to
fetch it, and she covers the well over with a cloth. When he comes back,
and has given her the money, she pretends that her father is coming,
tells the Friar to run behind the cloth, and down he flops into the
well. She won't help him at first, because if he could sing her out of
hell, he can clearly sing himself out of the well: but at last she does
help him out, keeps his money because he's dirtied the water, and sends
him home dripping along the street like a new-washed sheep.

[Footnote 1: The since printing of the Romance in the Percy Folio MS.
Ballads and Romances, (_Lybius Disconius_, ii. 404,) will probably
render this unnecessary. (1869.)]

[Footnote 2: Chaucer brings off his Carpenter, though, triumphant, and
not with the swived wife and broken arm that he gives his befooled
Oxford craftsman in _The Milleres Tale_. (1869.)]

[Footnote 3: In _Political, Religious, and Love Poems_, E.E. Text Soc.,
1867.]




THE WRIGHT'S CHASTE WIFE.

[_MS. Lambeth 306, leaves 178-187._]


AlÌ´lÌ´myghty god, maker of all_e_,