Showed pilgrim from the Holy Land.[[184]]
The ‘Pardoner,’ with his pouch choked to the full (‘Walter le Pardoner,’ M.) with saleable indulgences, had but come from Rome. He was an itinerant retailer of ecclesiastic forgivenesses, and was as much a quack as those who still impose upon the credulity of the bucolic mind by selling cheap medicines. As Chaucer says of him—
With feigned flattering and japes,
He made the parson and the peple his apes.
‘Hermit’ I have failed to find as at present existing, though ‘Hermitage’ or ‘Armitage’ (‘John Harmaytayge,’ W. 3), as local names expressive of his abode, are by no means unfamiliar. Our ‘Anchors’ and ‘Ankers,’ however, still live to commemorate the old ancre or anchorite; he who, as his sobriquet implied, was wont to separate himself from the world’s vain pleasures and dwell in seclusion and solitude. In the ‘Romance of the Rose’ it is said—
Sometime I am religious,
Now like an anker in an house.
Piers in his ‘Vision,’ too, speaks of—
Ancres and heremites
That holden them in their celles.