And here is Mr. Hazlitt’s annotation on the word wylle:—
“i. e. evil. In a MS. of the Tale of the Basyn, supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines:—
‘The lother hade litull thoght,
Off husbandry cowth he noght,
But alle his wyves will be wroght.’” (Vol. I. p. 16.)
It is plain that he supposed will, in this very simple passage, to mean evil! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us that “the explanation [of wylle] is correct.” He is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort himself withal! Wylle is simply a rhyming fetch for wild, and the passage means that the king rode at random. The use of wild with this meaning is still common in such phrases as “he struck wild.” In “Havelok” we find it in the nearly related sense of being at a loss, knowing not what to do:—
“To lincolne barfot he yede
Hwan he kam ther he was ful wil,
Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til.”
All wylle, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We would hint that a person must know something before he can use even a glossary with safety.
In the “King and the Barker,” when the tanner finds out that it is the king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints,
“He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,”
and subjoins the following note: “Radell, or raddle, signifies a side of a cart; but here, apparently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed ner adell.” Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation of raddle, which he got from Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. F. rastel) implies, means the side or end of a hay-cart, in which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do here? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humor, in the tanner’s forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt’s own notes. The tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. As it was, he got one word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, ner a dell, never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection,—
“For never a dell
He wyll me love agayne.” (Vol. III. p. 2.)