p. [14]. Close your hand, &c., i.e., one hand over the over, to keep a secret.
p. [14]. Had I wist. Proverbial. See notes on The Good Wife, p. [186], below.
p. [15]. Let your right shoulder, &c., i.e., keep a step behind him to the left.
THE LITTLE CHILDREN’S LITTLE BOOK
MSS. Harl. 541, fol. 210, and Egerton 1995, about 1480. Sub-title Edyllys be. Edyllys may be the O. E. æthele, German edel, meaning noble; but the sentence is then incomplete. Ends “Quod Whytyng.” Whether he was author or scribe I do not know, more probably the latter. I have kept the rhyme in this version, because it is at once shorter and more interesting than the other.
p. [16]. Seven Arts. The quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, logic.
p. [16]. When Gabriel ... meet. It is interesting to note that a medieval writer connected courtesy with the worship of Mary, even although he includes no precepts which touch upon what we call chivalry to-day.
p. [16]. Villainy. The French equivalent of churlishness; what Russell calls “simple conditions.”
p. [17]. Beginning ... think. This kind of rhyme, not uncommon in the fifteenth century, seems to indicate a pronunciation as in the cockney nothink.
p. [17]. Mess. Here food, but sometimes table (Latin mensa), and again group of people at a table, as used still in the expression “officers’ mess.”