a modest clerk, who had come from the young University of Oxford, poor, patched, threadbare, with hollow cheeks, mounted on a lean horse, and whose little all consisted in
Twenty bokes, clad in blak and reed;
an honest country franklin, with "sangwyn" visage and beard white "as is the dayesye," a sort of fourteenth-century Squire Western, kindly, hospitable, good-humoured, holding open table, with fish and roasts and sauce piquante and beer all day long, so popular in the county that,
Ful ofte tyme he was knight of the shire;
a shipman who knew every creek, from Scotland to Spain, and had encountered many a storm, with his good ship "the Maudelayne,"
With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake;
a physician who had driven a thriving trade during the plague, learned, and acquainted with the why and the wherefore of every disease,
Were it of hoot or cold, or moiste or drye;
who knew by heart Hippocrates and Galen, but was on bad terms with the Church, for
His studie was but litel on the Bible.