tract that William Thynne left no less than twenty-five copies of Chaucerian MS. to his son, doubtless but a small tything of the entire number extant, showing that there were men amongst the monks who could enjoy wit and humour even when directed against themselves, and that there must have been some considerable liberality if not laxness of rule amongst the orders of the day. It would, I fancy, be difficult to find amongst the monkeries of our own time (except possibly those belonging to that very cheery order the Capuchines) an abbot inclined to permit his monks to read, much less to copy, so heretical a work as the Canterbury Tales, however freely he winked at the introduction of French nouvellettes.

But though some may have enjoyed Chaucer in all good faith, there were others who saw how trenchant were the blows he dealt against the churchmen of his time, and what deadly mischief to their pre-eminence lurked under his seeming bonhommie. Wolsey thought it worth his while to exert his influence against him so strongly as to oblige William Thynne to alter his plan of publication, though backed by the promised protection of Henry VIII. And the curious action of the Parliament noticed in the tract (p. 7) was doubtless owing to the same influence:2 an assumption of the right of censure by the Parliament which seems to have gone near to deprive us of Chaucer altogether. The Parliament men were right in regarding the works of Chaucer as mere fables, but they forgot that fables have “morals,” and that these morals were directed to the decision of the great question of whether the “spiritual” or the “temporal” man was to rule the world, a question unhappily not quite settled even in our own time.

The notice of that other sturdy reformer, John Skelton (p. 7) is also very interesting, and gives us a hint of the existence of a “protesting” feeling in the Court of Henry VIII. before there was any reason for attributing it to mere private or political motives. From the way in which it is mentioned here, I suspect that the more general satire “Colin Clout” preceded the more directly personal one of “Why come ye nat to court?” which lashes Wolsey himself with a heartily outspoken virulence which would hardly have been tolerated by him when in the zenith of his power. It was not improbably written whilst its author was safe in sanctuary under Bishop Islip. William Thynne, court favourite though he was, could never have kept Skelton’s head on his shoulders after so terrible a provocation.

Wherever he may be placed, John Skelton stands alone amongst satirists, there is no one like him: possibly from a feeling that he was writing on the winning side, and sure of sympathy and protection, he scorns to hide his pearls under a dunghill like Rabelais, and utters fearlessly and openly what he has to say. Even in our own time,

Thynne’s note on the family of Gower (p. 14) is of value as agreeing with later theories, which deny that Gower the poet was of the Gowers of Stittenham, the ancestors of the