The Pardoner’s Tale: Prologue

Glosses from the Purves edition of 1870, printed beside the lines (Project Gutenberg #2383). · W. W. Skeat, Notes to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1900; Project Gutenberg #43016)

1. advocates, counsellors · sely: nevertheless **innocent · profit · no force.: no matter · body · box · thrive · in term?: in set form · makest **grieve · heartache · unless **a remedy · unless · burst, broken · bel ami,: good friend · jokes · ale-stake: ale-house sign · lear: learn · wisdom, sense · surely
2. Line 7 'Alas! she (Virginia) bought her beauty too dear'; she paid too high a price; it cost her her life.
3. Line 25 cardiacle, pain about the heart, spasm of the heart; more correctly, cardiake, as the l is excrescent. See Cardiacle and Cardiac in the New E. Dictionary. In Batman upon Bartholomè, lib. vii. c. 32, we have a description of 'Heart-quaking and the disease Cardiacle.' We thus learn that 'there is a double manner of Cardiacle,' called 'Diaforetica' and 'Tremens.' Of the latter, 'sometime melancholy is the cause'; and the remedies are various 'confortatives.' This is why the host wanted some 'triacle' or some ale, or something to cheer him up.
4. Line 33 ale-stake, inn-sign. Speght interprets this by 'may-pole.' He was probably thinking of the ale-pole, such as was sometimes set up before an inn as a sign; see the picture of one in Larwood and Hotten's History of Signboards, Plate II. But the ale-stakes of the fourteenth century were differently placed; instead of being perpendicular, they projected horizontally from the inn, just like the bar which supports a painted sign at the present day. At the end of the ale-stake a large garland was commonly suspended, as mentioned by Chaucer himself (Prol. 667), or sometimes a bunch of ivy, box, or evergreen, called a 'bush'; whence the proverb 'good wine needs no bush,' i. e. nothing to indicate where it is sold; see Hist. Signboards, pp. 2, 4, 6, 233. The clearest information about ale-stakes is obtained from a notice of them in the Liber Albus, ed. Riley, where an ordinance of the time of Richard II. is printed, the translation of which runs as follows: 'Also, it was ordained that whereas the ale-stakes, projecting in front of the taverns in Chepe and elsewhere in the said city, extend too far over the king's highways, to the impeding of riders and others, and, by reason of their excessive weight, to the great deterioration of the houses to which they are fixed,... it was ordained,... that no one in future should have a stake bearing either his sign or leaves [i. e. a bush] extending or lying over the king's highway, of greater length than 7 feet at most,' &c. And, at p. 292 of the same work, note 2, Mr. Riley rightly defines an ale-stake to be 'the pole projecting from the house, and supporting a bunch of leaves.' The word ale-stake occurs in Chatterton's poem of Ælla, stanza 30, where it is used in a manner which shews that the supposed 'Rowley' did not know what it was like. See my note on this; Essay on the Rowley Poems, p. xix; and cf. note to A. 667.