218. en son degré, ‘for her part’: cp. note on 139.
230. vont ... engendrant, equivalent to ‘engendrent,’ another instance of the use of pres. partic. with auxiliary verbs for the simple tense, which is common in old French: cp. 118, 440, 500, and the conclusion of this stanza, where we have ‘serray devisant’ and ‘est nomant’ for ‘deviserai’ and ‘nomme.’
238 ff. ‘As I will describe to you, (telling) by what names people call them and of the office in which they are instructed.’
253. celle d’Avarice, ‘that which is called Avarice.’ For this apposition with ‘de’ cp. 84, 14197.
276. grantment: corrected here and in 397 from ‘grantement,’ which would be three syllables. We have ‘grantment’ 8931.
296. Accidie. This counts as three syllables only in the metre, and it is in fact written ‘Accide’ in l. 255. A similar thing is to be observed in several other words with this ending, as ‘Vituperie’ 2967, ‘familie’ 3916, ‘contumelie’ 4067, ‘perjurie’ 6409, ‘encordie’ 6958, ‘remedie’ 10912, ‘pluvie’ 26716; and in general, when the accent fell on the antepenultimate, there was a tendency to run the -ie into one syllable. The accent, however, was variable (at least in Anglo-Norman) according to the exigences of metre, and in some cases where we should expect the above rule to apply we find the accent thrown on the penultimate and all the syllables fully sounded, as 2362,
‘Contumacie l’oi nommer.’
301. ceos mals: equivalent to ‘les mals,’ so ‘cel homme’ 305, ‘celle Alme’ 667, ‘celle amorouse peigne’ Bal. iii. 1. This use of demonstrative for definite article is quite common.
305. pot, perhaps meant for subjunctive.
307. Cp. Bal. v. 3: ‘Si fuisse en paradis ceo beal Manoir.’