In whiche tour in prisoun put was he,
And with hym been his litel children three,
The eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of age.
Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
Swiche briddes[35] for to put in swiche a cage!
Quotations are scarcely needed to intimate how such colourless words as little—here sentimentally repeated—children, and even cruelty, had gradually been laden with fresh emotional significance by the Roman Church’s worship of the baby Jesus and its popular expression in carol and drama. We still have a few examples of these old Nativity Plays, from the individual scenes of which we take the word pageant, and about the same time that Chaucer wrote we know that the tailors of Coventry composed and sang the beautiful carol which begins:
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By by lully, lullay.
Herod the King
In his raging