But Chaucer has made a good thing out of the rhyme doggerel, and expresses the pleasant old-fashioned quality of the minstrels’ romances, as well as their absurdities.
His parody touches on the want of plan and method and meaning in the popular rhymes of chivalry; it is also intended as criticism of their verse. That verse, of which there are several varieties—there is more than one type of stanza in Sir Thopas—is technically called rime couée or ‘tail-rhyme’, and like all patterns of verse it imposes a certain condition of mind, for the time, on the poets who use it. It is not absolutely simple, and so it is apt to make the writer well pleased with himself when he finds it going well; it very readily becomes monotonous and flat—
Now cometh the emperour of price,
Again him rode the king of Galice
With full mickle pride;
The child was worthy under weed
And sat upon a noble steed
By his father side;
And when he met the emperour
He valed his hood with great honour