But Chaucer follows still more closely, and verbally, a passage in Machault's Jugement du Roi de Navarre, ed. Tarbé, 1849, p. 72, which has the words—
'la foudre
Que mainte ville mist en poudre';
i.e. literally, 'the foudre (thunder-bolt) which reduces many a town to powder.' Machault nearly repeats this; ed. Tarbé, p. 97.
Curiously enough, almost the same words occur in Boethius, bk. i. met. 4, where Chaucer's translation has:—'ne þe wey of thonder-leyt, that is wont to smyten heye toures.' It hence appears that Chaucer copies Machault, and Machault translates Boethius. There are some curious M.E. verses on the effects of thunder in Popular Treatises on Science, ed. Wright, p. 136.
Foudre represents the Lat. fulgur. One of the queer etymologies of medieval times is, that fulgur is derived a feriendo; Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Nat. iv. 59. It was held to be quite sufficient that both fulgur and ferire begin with f.
[537]. Brende, was set on fire; cf. l. 163. The idea is that of a falling thunderbolt, which seems to have been conceived of as being a material mass, set on fire by the rapidity of its passage through the air; thus confusing the flash of lightning with the fall of a meteoric stone. See Mr. Aldis Wright's note on thunder-stone, Jul. Cæs. i. 3. 49.
[543]. Hente, caught. We find a similar use of the word in an old translation of Map's Apocalypsis Goliæ, printed in Morley's Shorter Eng. Poems, p. 13:—
'And by and by I fell into a sudden trance,
And all along the air was marvellously hent.'