In the British Museum there is a manuscript of English poetry of the thirteenth century, containing an old song composed probably about the middle of that century. It was first printed by Ritson in his Ancient Songs, the earliest edition of which was published in London, in 1790. The first lines are as follows:
"Mon in the mone stond ant strit,
On is bot-forke is burthen he bereth
Hit is muche wonder that he na down slyt,
For doute leste he valle he shoddreth and shereth." [25]
In the Archaeological Journal we are presented with a relic from the fourteenth century. "Mr. Hudson Taylor submitted to the Committee a drawing of an impression of a very remarkable personal seal, here represented of the full size. It is appended to a deed (preserved in the Public Record Office) dated in the ninth year of Edward the Third, whereby Walter de Grendene, clerk, sold to Margaret, his mother, one messuage, a barn and four acres of ground in the parish of Kingston-on-Thames. The device appears to be founded on the ancient popular legend that a husbandman who had stolen a bundle of thorns from a hedge was, in punishment of his theft, carried up to the moon. The legend reading Te Waltere docebo cur spinas phebo gero, 'I will teach you, Walter, why I carry thorns in the moon,' seems to be an enigmatical mode of expressing the maxim that honesty is the best policy." [26]
About fifty years later, in the same century, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Troylus and Creseide adverts to the subject in these lines:
"(Quod Pandarus) Thou hast a full great care
Lest the chorl may fall out of the moone."
(Book i. Stanza 147.)
And in another place he says of Lady Cynthia, or the moon:
"Her gite was gray, and full of spottis blake,
And on her brest a chorl painted ful even,
Bering a bush of thornis on his backe,
Whiche for his theft might clime so ner the heaven."
Whether Chaucer wrote the Testament and Complaint of Creseide, in which these latter lines occur, is doubted, though it is frequently ascribed to him. [27]