Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
"Breath, lord methinks," said Giles, "wind, my lord, after periods so profound and sonorous!" "Lord Duke, right puissant and most potential, I would but tell thee this, to wit, that I did keep faith with thee, that I, by means of this unworthy hand, did set thee beyond care, lift thee above sorrow, and gave to thee the heaven of thy most warm and earnest desires." "How mean you, Pardoner?"
"Lord, 'tis what they call a Pardoner, that dealeth in relics, mouldy bones and the like, see you, whereby they do pretend to divers miracles and wonders " "Verily, verily," nodded the little man placidly, "I have here in my wallet a twig from Moses' burning bush, with the great toe of Thomas a' Didymus, the thumb of the blessed Saint Alban "
So they took this rascal friar and scourged him and set him in the water-dungeons where rats do frolic, and to-night at sunset he dieth by slow fire as a warning to Ah! sweet, noble, good my lord, what what would ye " for Beltane had risen and was looking down at the crouching Pardoner, suddenly haggard, pallid-lipped, and with eyes a-glare with awful menace; but now the Pardoner saw that those eyes looked through him and beyond living eyes in a face of death.
One of the principal personages in the comic part of the drama was, as we have already said, a quaestionary or pardoner, one of those itinerants who hawked about from place to place relics, real or pretended, with which he excited the devotion at once, and the charity of the populace, and generally deceived both the one and the other.
Thou art, I warrant thee, some ejected monk of a suppressed convent, paying in his old days the price of the luxurious idleness in which he spent his youth. Ay, or it may be some pilgrim with a budget of lies from Saint James of Compostella, or Our Lady of Loretto; or thou mayest be some pardoner with his budget of relics from Rome, forgiving sins at a penny a-dozen, and one to the tale.
Yet it seems unnecessary to conclude anything beyond this: that the feature which Chaucer desired above all to mark and insist upon in his "Parson," was the Poverty and humility which in him contrasted with the luxurious self-indulgence of the "Monk," and the blatant insolence of the "Pardoner." From this point of view it is obvious why the "Parson" is made brother to the "Ploughman."
The characters which appeared and disappeared before the amused and interested audience, were those which fill the earlier stage in all nations old men, cheated by their wives and daughters, pillaged by their sons, and imposed on by their domestics, a braggadocia captain, a knavish pardoner or quaestionary, a country bumpkin and a wanton city dame.
At length the pardoner pulled from his scrip a small phial of clear water, of which he vaunted the quality in the following verses: Listneth, gode people, everiche one For in the londe of Babylone, Far eastward I wot it lyeth, And is the first londe the sonne espieth, Ther, as he cometh fro out the sé; In this ilk londe, as thinketh me, Right as holie legendes tell.
One of the worst features of the religious decadence of the Middle Ages was the craftiness of such spurious types of men as those whom Chaucer painted in the Pardoner and the Somonour, and Charles Reade depicted in the peripatetic "cripples" of "The Cloister and the Hearth."
That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life one finds in old romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer riding behind his Maunciple and his Pardoner.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking