ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHAUCER, NO. VI.

Unless Chaucer had intended to mark with particular exactness the day of the journey to Canterbury, he would not have taken such unusual precautions to protect his text from ignorant or careless transcribers. We find him not only recording the altitudes of the sun, at different hours, in words; but also corroborating those words by associating them with physical facts incapable of being perverted or misunderstood.

Had Chaucer done this in one instance only, we might imagine that it was but another of those occasions, so frequently seized upon by him, for the display of a little scientific knowledge; but when he repeats the very same precautionary expedient again, in the afternoon of the same day, we begin to perceive that he must have had some fixed purpose; because, as I shall presently show, it is the repetition alone that renders the record imperishable.

But whether Chaucer really devised this method for the express purpose of preserving his text, or not, it has at least had that effect,—for while there are scarcely two MSS. extant which agree in the verbal record of the day and hours, the physical circumstances remain, and afford at all times independent data for the recovery or correction of the true reading.

The day of the month may be deduced from the declination of the sun; and, to obtain the latter, all the data required are,

1. The latitude of the place.

2. Two altitudes of the sun at different sides of noon.

It is not absolutely necessary to have any previous knowledge of the hours at which these altitudes were respectively obtained, because these may be discovered by the trial method of seeking two such hours as shall most nearly agree in requiring a declination common to both at the known altitudes. Of course it will greatly simplify the process if we furthermore know that the observations must have been obtained at some determinate intervals of time, such, for example, as complete hours.

Now, in the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" we know that the observations could not have been recorded except at complete hours, because the construction of the metre will not admit the supposition of any parts of hours having been expressed.

We are also satisfied that there can be no mistake in the altitudes, because nothing can alter the facts, that an equality between the length of the shadow and the height of the substance can only subsist at an altitude of 45 degrees; or that an altitude of 29 degrees (more or less) is the nearest that will give the ratio of 11 to 6 between the shadow and its gnomon.

With these data we proceed to the following comparison:

Forenoon altitude 45°. Afternoon altitude 29°.
Hour. Declin. Hour. Declin.
XI A.M. 8° 9′ N. II P.M. 3° 57′ S.
X " 13° 27′ " III " 3° 16′ N.
IX " 22° 34′ " IV " 13° 26′ "
VIII " Impossible. V " Impossible.

Here we immediately select "X A.M." and "IV P.M." as the only two items at all approaching to similarity; while, in these the approach is so near that they differ by only a single minute of a degree!

More conclusive evidence therefore could scarcely exist that these were the hours intended to be recorded by Chaucer, and that the sun's declination, designed by him, was somewhere about thirteen degrees and a half North.

Strictly speaking, this declination would more properly apply to the 17th of April, in Chaucer's time, than to the 18th; but since he does not profess to critical exactness, and since it is always better to adhere to written authority, when it is not grossly and obviously corrupt, such MSS. as name the 18th of April ought to be respected; but Tyrwhitt's "28th," which he states not only as the result of his own conjecture but as authorised by the "the best MSS.," ought to be scouted at once.

In the latest edition of the "Canterbury Tales" (a literal reprint from one of the Harl. MSS., for the Percy Society, under the supervision of Mr. Wright), the opening of the Prologue to "The Man of Lawes Tale" does not materially differ from Tyrwhitt's text, excepting in properly assigning the day of the journey to "the eightetene day of April;" and the confirmation of the forenoon altitude is as follows:

"And sawe wel that the schade of every tree

Was in the lengthe the same quantite,

That was the body erecte that caused it."

But the afternoon observation is thus related:

"By that the Manciple had his tale endid,

The sonne fro the southe line is descendid

So lowe that it nas nought to my sight,

Degrees nyne and twenty as in hight.

Ten on the clokke it was as I gesse,

For eleven foote, or litil more or lesse,

My schadow was at thilk time of the yere,

Of which feet as my lengthe parted were,

In sixe feet equal of proporcioun."

In a note to the line "Ten on the clokke" Mr. Wright observes,

"Ten. I have not ventured to change the reading of the Harl. MS., which is partly supported by that of the lands. MS., than."

If the sole object were to present an exact counterpart of the MS., of course even its errors were to be respected: but upon no other grounds can I understand why a reading should be preserved by which broad sunshine is attributed to ten o'clock at night! Nor can I believe that the copyist of the MS. with whom the error must have originated would have set down anything so glaringly absurd, unless he had in his own mind some means of reconciling it with probability. It may, I believe, be explained in the circumstance that "ten" and "four," in horary reckoning, were convertible terms. The old Roman method of naming the hours, wherein noon was the sixth, was long preserved, especially in conventual establishments: and I have no doubt that the English idiomatic phrase "o'clock" originated in the necessity for some distinguishing mark between hours "of the clock" reckoned from midnight, and hours of the day reckoned from sunrise, or more frequently from six A.M. With such an understanding, it is clear that ten might be called four, and four ten, and yet the same identical hour to be referred to; nor is it in the least difficult to imagine that some monkish transcriber, ignorant perhaps of the meaning of "o'clock," might fancy he was correcting, rather that corrupting, Chaucer's text, by changing "foure" into "ten."

I have, I trust, now shown that all these circumstances related by Chaucer, so far from being hopelessly incongruous, are, on the contrary, harmoniously consistent;—that they all tend to prove that the day of the journey to Canterbury could not have been later than the 18th of April;—that the times of observation were certainly 10 A.M. and 4 P.M.;—that the "arke of his artificial day" is to be understood as the horizontal or azimuthal arch;—and that the "halfe cours in the Ram" alludes to the completion of the last twelve degrees of that sign, about the end of the second week in April.

There yet remains to be examined the signification of those three very obscure lines which immediately follow the description, already quoted, of the afternoon observation:

"Therewith the Mones exaltacioun

In mena Libra, alway gan ascende

As we were entryng at a townes end."

It is the more unfortunate that we should not be certain what it was that Chaucer really did write, inasmuch as he probably intended to present, in these lines, some means of identifying the year, similar to those he had previously given with respect to the day.

When Tyrwhitt, therefore, remarks, "In what year this happened Chaucer does not inform us"—he was not astronomer enough to know that if Chaucer had meant to leave, in these lines, a record of the moon's place on the day of the journey, he could not have chosen a more certain method of informing us in what year it occurred.

But as the present illustration has already extended far enough for the limits of a single number of "Notes and Queries," I shall defer the

investigation of this last and greatest difficulty to my next communication.

A. E. B.

Leeds, April 29.