Of which feet as my lengthe parted were,
In sixe feet equal of proporcioun."
In a note to the line "Ten on the clokke" Mr. Wright observes,
"Ten. I have not ventured to change the reading of the Harl. MS., which is partly supported by that of the lands. MS., than."
If the sole object were to present an exact counterpart of the MS., of course even its errors were to be respected: but upon no other grounds can I understand why a reading should be preserved by which broad sunshine is attributed to ten o'clock at night! Nor can I believe that the copyist of the MS. with whom the error must have originated would have set down anything so glaringly absurd, unless he had in his own mind some means of reconciling it with probability. It may, I believe, be explained in the circumstance that "ten" and "four," in horary reckoning, were convertible terms. The old Roman method of naming the hours, wherein noon was the sixth, was long preserved, especially in conventual establishments: and I have no doubt that the English idiomatic phrase "o'clock" originated in the necessity for some distinguishing mark between hours "of the clock" reckoned from midnight, and hours of the day reckoned from sunrise, or more frequently from six A.M. With such an understanding, it is clear that ten might be called four, and four ten, and yet the same identical hour to be referred to; nor is it in the least difficult to imagine that some monkish transcriber, ignorant perhaps of the meaning of "o'clock," might fancy he was correcting, rather that corrupting, Chaucer's text, by changing "foure" into "ten."
I have, I trust, now shown that all these circumstances related by Chaucer, so far from being hopelessly incongruous, are, on the contrary, harmoniously consistent;—that they all tend to prove that the day of the journey to Canterbury could not have been later than the 18th of April;—that the times of observation were certainly 10 A.M. and 4 P.M.;—that the "arke of his artificial day" is to be understood as the horizontal or azimuthal arch;—and that the "halfe cours in the Ram" alludes to the completion of the last twelve degrees of that sign, about the end of the second week in April.
There yet remains to be examined the signification of those three very obscure lines which immediately follow the description, already quoted, of the afternoon observation:
"Therewith the Mones exaltacioun
In mena Libra, alway gan ascende
As we were entryng at a townes end."