1145 ff. These lines are partly from Neckam’s Vita Monachorum, p. 192:
‘Porticibus vallas operosis atria, quales
Quotque putas thalamos haec labyrinthus habet.
. . . . .
Ostia multa quidem, variae sunt mille fenestrae,
Mille columnarum est marmore fulta domus.’
Gower alters the first sentence by substituting ‘valuas’ for the verb ‘vallas.’ ‘It has folding-doors, halls, and bed-chambers as various and as many as the labyrinth.’
1161. ‘historia parisiensis’ in the MSS. I cannot supply a reference.
1175 f. From De Vita Monachorum, p. 193.
1189 ff. The reference is to the Speculum Stultorum, where Burnel the Ass, after examining the rules of all the existing orders and finding them in various ways unsatisfactory to him, comes to the conclusion that he must found an order of his own, the rules of which shall combine the advantages of all the other orders. Members of it shall be allowed to ride easily like the Templars, to tell lies like the Hospitallers, to eat meat on Saturday like the Benedictines of Cluny, to talk freely like the brothers of Grandmont, to go to one mass a month, or at most two, like the Carthusians, to dress comfortably like the Praemonstratensians, and so on. What is said here by our author expresses the spirit of these rules rather than the letter.