i. e. in the barn of Piers the Plowman; id. xix. 354.
'For Piers loue þe plowman';
i. e. for love of Piers the Plowman; id. xx. 76. Chaucer again alludes
to Sinon in the House of Fame, i. 152, and in the Legend of Good Women, Dido, 8; which shews that he took that legend partly from Vergil, Aen. ii. 195. But note that Chaucer here compares a horse of brass to the Trojan horse; this is because the latter was also said to have been of brass, not by Vergil, but by Guido delle Colonne; see note to l. 211. This is why Gower, in his Confess. Amant. bk. i., and Caxton, in his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, both speak of the Trojan horse as a 'horse of brass'; see Spec. of English, 1394-1579, ed. Skeat, p. 91, l. 67.
211. olde gestes, old accounts. The account of the taking of Troy most valued in the middle ages was not that by Vergil or Homer, but the Latin prose story written in 1287 by Guido delle Colonne, who obtained a great reputation very cheaply, since he borrowed his work almost entirely from an old French Roman de Troie, written by Benoit de Sainte-Maure. See the preface to The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, ed. Panton and Donaldson (Early English Text Society). And see vol. ii. p. lxi.
219. Iogelours, jugglers. See the quotation from Marco Polo, i. 340, in vol. iii. p. 473; and cf. The Franklin's Tale, F. 1140-1151, and the notes.
223. comprehende; so in the MSS. But read comprende; see Troil. iii. 1687; and pronounce lew-ed-nes fully.
224. 'They are very prone to put down things to the worst cause.'
226. maister-tour, principal tower, the donjon or keep-tower. So also maistre strete, principal street, Kn. Ta. 2044 (A. 2902); maister temple, Leg. of Good Women, l. 1016.
230. For slye, MS. Hl. has heigh, an inferior reading. Mr. Marsh observes upon this line—'This reasoning reminds one of the popular explanation of table-turning and kindred mysteries. Persons who cannot detect the trick ... ascribe the alleged facts to electricity.... Men love to cheat themselves with hard words, and indolence often accepts the name of a phenomenon as a substitute for the reason of it'; Origin and Progress of the English Language, Lect. ix. p. 427.