h 17-18. Difficult. Perhaps 'The master smith lengthens a little piece [sc. of hot iron], and hammers a smaller piece, twines the two together, and strikes [with his hammer] a treble note'.
h 21-2. cloþemerys... brenwaterys: not in the dictionaries, but both apparently nonce names for the smiths: they 'clothe horses' (for by the end of the fourteenth century a charger carried a good deal of armour and harness), and 'burn water' (when they temper the red-hot metal).
i 4. Þat: dat. rel. 'to whom'; cp. VI 64. But lowte is sometimes transitive 'to reverence'.
i 6. This line, at first sight irrelevant, supplies both rime and doctrine. See in Chaucer's Preface to his Tale of Melibeus the passage ending:
I meene of Marke, Mathew, Luc and John—
Bot doutelees hir sentence is all oon.
An erased t after Awangelys in the MS. shows that the scribe wavered between Awangelys 'Gospels' and Awangelystes.
i 7. Sent Geretrude: Abbess of Nivelle (d. 659), commemorated on March 17. She is appropriately invoked, for one or more rats make her emblem.
i 11. Sent Kasi. I cannot trace this saint, or his acts against the rats. But parallels are not wanting. St. Ivor, an Irish saint, banished rats from his neighbourhood per imprecationem because they gnawed his books; and the charm-harassed life of an Irish rat was still proverbial in Shakespeare's day: 'I was never so berhymed' says Rosalind (As You Like It, III. ii) 'since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat'. In the South of France the citizens of Autun trusted more to the processes of the law, and brought a suit against the rats which ended in a victory for the defendants because the plaintiffs were unable to guarantee them safe conduct to the court (see Chambers, Book of Days, under Jan. 17). Even in such little things the Normans showed their practical genius:—A friend chancing to meet St. Lanfranc by the way inquired the cause of the strange noises that came from a bag he was carrying: 'We are terribly plagued with mice and rats', explained the good man, 'and so, to put down their ravages, I am bringing along a cat' (Mures et rati valde nobis sunt infesti, et idcirco nunc affero catum ad comprimendum furorem illorum). Acta Sanctorum for May 28, p. 824.