We already find, in Guillaume de Machault's Confort d'Ami, near the end, the expression:—'Car je te jur, par saint Eloy'; Works, ed. 1849, p. 120.
The life of St. Eligius, as given in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, contains a curious passage, which seems worth citing:—'St. Owen relates many miracles which followed his death, and informs us that the holy abbess, St. Aurea, who was swept off by a pestilence, ... was advertised of her last hour some time before it, by a comfortable vision of St. Eligius.' See also Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, 3rd ed., p. 728.
There is, perhaps, a special propriety in selecting St. Loy for mention in the present instance. In an interesting letter in The Athenæum for Jan. 10, 1891, p. 54, Prof. Hales drew attention to the story about St. Eligius cited in Maitland's Dark Ages, pp. 83-4, ed. 1853. When Dagobert asked Eligius to swear upon the relics of the saints, the bishop refused. On being further pressed to do so, he burst into tears; whereupon Dagobert exclaimed that he would believe him without an oath. Hence, to swear by St. Loy was to swear by one who refused to swear; and the oath became (at second-hand) no oath at all. See Hales, Folia Literaria, p. 102. At any rate, it was a very mild one for those times. Cf. Amis and Amiloun, 877:—'Than answered that maiden bright, And swore "by Jesu, ful of might."'
121. cleped, called, named; A. S. cleopian, clypian, to call. Cf. Sir David Lyndesay's Monarchè, bk. iii. l. 4663:—
'The seilye Nun wyll thynk gret schame
Without scho callit be Madame.'
122. 'She sang the divine service.' Here sér-vic-è is trisyllabic, with a secondary accent on the last syllable.
123. Entuned, intoned. nose is the reading of the best MSS. The old black-letter editions read voice (wrongly).
semely, in a seemly manner, is in some MSS. written semily. The e is here to be distinctly sounded; hertily is sometimes written for hertely. See ll. 136, 151.