§ 41. The Prioress's Prologue. This Prologue requires no explanation. The responsibility passes from the Shipman to the Prioress with perfect ease.
§ 42. The Prioresses Tale. The real Prologue to this Tale is contained in B 1637-1642. What is called, in MSS. E. and Hn., the Prologue is, more strictly, a Proem; and the Tale itself is, more strictly, a Legend, or (as the author calls it) a 'song'; B 1677. The Legend, although in stanzas, is told with practised skill, and probably belongs to the later period. The Proem resembles that to the Life of Seint Cecile, and contains a similar invocation to the Virgin. The third stanza reminds us of one in the A. B. C., viz. that beginning with M. We may note the introduction of the words 'quod she' (1644), and the line 'To telle a storie I wol do my labour' (1653).
The Tale itself is taken from a source similar to that of the Legend of Alphonsus of Lincoln, a story reprinted by the Chaucer Society from the Fortalitium Fidei; Lugdun. 1500, fol. ccviii. In another edition, printed in 1485, the Legend of Alphonsus is said to have been composed in 1459, and it is stated to be the work of a Minorite friar, whose name, according to Hain and others, was Alphonsus a Spina. The story is, that a widow residing in Lincoln has a son named Alphonsus, ten years of age, who goes daily to school, singing 'Alma Redemptoris' as he passes through the street where the Jews dwell. One day the Jews seize him, cut out his tongue, tear out his heart, and throw his body into a filthy pit. But the Virgin appears to him, gives him a precious stone in place of a tongue, and enables him to sing 'Alma Redemptoris' for four days. His mother seeks and finds him, and he is borne to the cathedral, still singing. The bishop celebrates mass; the boy reveals the secret, resigns the precious stone to the bishop, gives up the ghost, and is buried in a marble tomb. A similar legend is narrated concerning Hugh of Lincoln; see note to B 1874.
In Originals and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, pt. iii. (Chaucer Soc. 1876), is the story of the Paris Beggar-boy murdered by a Jew, printed from the Vernon MS., leaf 123, back. It is well told, and has some remarkable points of agreement with the Prioresses Tale. It clearly identifies the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater as agreeing with the second anthem mentioned in the Note to B 1708, which is partly translated as follows:—
'Godus Moder, mylde and clene,
Heuene ȝate and sterre of se,
Saue þi peple from synne and we' [woe].
The same publication contains a similar story, in French verse, of a boy killed by a Jew for singing 'Gaude Maria'; from MS. Harl. 4401. The author was Gautier de Poincy.
Tyrwhitt's account of the Prioresses Tale is as follows: 'The transition from the Tale of the Shipman to that of the Prioresse is happily managed. I have not been able to discover from what Legende of the Miracles of Our Lady the Prioresses Tale is taken. From the scene being laid in Asia, it should seem, that this was one of the oldest of the many stories which have been propagated, at different times, to excite or justify several merciless persecutions of the Jews, upon the charge of murthering Christian children. The story of Hugh of Lincoln, which is mentioned in the last stanza, is placed by Matthew Paris under the year 1255. In the first four months of the Acta Sanctorum by Bollandus, I find the following names of children canonized, as having been murthered by Jews: xxv Mart. Willielmus Norvicensis, 1144; Richardus, Parisiis, 1179; xvii Apr. Rudolphus, Bernae, 1287; Wernerus, Wesaliae, anno eodem; Albertus, Poloniae, 1598. I suppose the remaining eight months would furnish at least as many more. See a Scottish Ballad (Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, i. 32) upon one of these supposed murthers. The editor [Percy] has very ingeniously conjectured that "Mirryland" in verse 1 is a corruption of "Milan." Perhaps the real occasion of the Ballad may have been what is said to have happened at Trent, in 1475, to a boy called Simon. The Cardinal Hadrian, about fifty years after, mentioning the Rocks of Trent, adds—"quo Iudaei ob Simonis caedem ne aspirare quidem audent;" Praef. ad librum de Serm. Lat. The change of the name in the Song, from Simon to Hugh, is natural enough in this country, where similar stories of Hugh of Norwich and Hugh of Lincoln had been long current.'
The Ballad alluded to is called 'The Jew's Daughter' by Percy, and is to the effect that a boy named Hugh was enticed to play and then stabbed by a Jew's daughter, who threw him into a draw-well. His mother, Lady Helen, finds him by hearing his voice.