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is no longer intent on the clash between "Englishmen by blood" and "Englishmen by birth;" nor Creon's gathering of the noble folk" in the town, because statutes assembling the English proprietors of Ireland are no longer in Chaucer's thought. A comparison between the earlier and later poems thus emphasizes the distinctly allegorical character of Anelida and Arcite and its rich suggestions of contemporary life.

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The discovery of the persons and the circumstances that prompted the composition of Anelida and Arcite has a large bearing upon Chaucer's chronology and development. Few will deny the conclusiveness of Tatlock's argument 1 that Anelida and Arcite must have been written before "The Knight's Tale," both because Chaucer would not have debased Arcite of the Canterbury story, who embodies a high ideal and whom he sketches with strong liking, and because the break in the description at the end of the Anelida shows that he meant to use Mars' Temple in the later and greater work. But, as we have seen, the Anelida is based upon an incident of the middle eighties. Anne Welle could not have become Countess of Ermon or Ormonde ("Queen of Ermony") before October, 1382, when the third Earl succeded to the title, nor can it be actually proved that she was "Queen" before June, 1386, when we first meet together "the Earl of Ormonde and Anne, his wife." Since Chaucer is not writing of a child, but of a young woman, she probably did not gain her title by marriage before 1384 at the earliest. As her husband's infidelities and the births of his base-born children may very well belong to the middle eighties, I am inclined to place our poem about 1385, or indeed in 1386-in any

61

Development of Chaucer's Works, pp. 83 f. Tatlock runs directly counter to Ten Brink's contentions (Studien, 39, Eng. Lit., I, 190).

"only

case immediately before "The Knight's Tale," which is the "Palamon and Arcite" of the Legend Prologue, slightly, if at all revised." Hence there is every reason for stoutly denying to "The Knight's Tale," in its earliest form, a date as early as 1382. I should place it with Tatlock in 1385-or rather in 1386.

It may be objected that the date, 1386, for Anelida and Arcite and for the first version of "The Knight's Tale is the very year assumed for the earlier Prologue of the Legend, which, from its mention of "al the love of Palamon and Arcite," obviously follows our poems; and that we are therefore crowding all these compositions into too small a space of time. Twofold answer is ready. First, that, if the very real dates of Anne Welle and her husband do not coincide with a "Chaucerian Chronology," about which no two people agree, 62 let us use this new light to

62 Langhans, the writer of a very recent article on Anelida and Arcite in Anglia, XLIV, 1920, 226-244, dates the poem in 1373-1374, "just before the Parlement of Foules (1374)," on the basis of a chronology" supposedly long since extinct. Furnivall places it

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in 1375-1376, Pollard in 1380, Lowes in the early eighties, Koch in 1383, Tatlock in 1384-1385, Skeat 1384 (1385?), Ten Brink after 1390. Obviously the bugbear of "Chaucerian Chronology " is not a very formidable spectre. The year 1386, as the date of Anelida, seems to satisfy the two conditions of our problem, one of which has hitherto been entirely unknown, and the other misapplied: the Ormondes' early misadventure in marriage, and the indirect allusion to the poem in the Legend Prologue. Though, as we have already remarked, accurate knowledge of a very young noblewoman's years is not to be expected of a poet in his middle or late forties, Anelida's age, "twenty yeer of elde," might suggest a later date for the poem than 1386, when Anne Welle could not have been more than sixteen. But much, if any, later it cannot be. Ormonde and his wife were certainly reconciled by 1389-1390, as their heir was born the next year. Then it seems natural to trace to a liaison that won so wide a notoriety as to gain a court-poet's rebuke the birth of one, if not both, of the Earl's natural children, who, to judge from the dates

reshape the chronology, even though we shatter many assumptions. And secondly, that the writer will soon present newly discovered reasons for believing that the first version of the Legend Prologue was written after 1386which date has value in this connection only as a possible starting-point-indeed after 1387, the year of Philippa Chaucer's death.

In Anelida and Arcite, uneven and fragmentary though it is, we come very close to Chaucer-as close as anywhere else in his poetry. We see him not only browsing among "olde bokes," stories of Theseus and Thebes, but watching and recording, like the note-taking chiel that he was, the lives and loves of a man and a woman in his own redblooded day and hour. Where, save here and in the falcon's story of "The Squire's Tale," can we share his very real indignation, as he scourges a false lover not of an old fable of Greece, but of a modern family of Ireland—probably well known to him since his early manhood twenty years before a child of the Ormondes whom the young squire of its royal cousins may have dandled in its infancy? Where else is Chaucer so vocal with the big bow-wow thing of his day as in this cryptic but vivid narration of English wars in Ireland-the glare and glitter of the levies and triumphs and of the long and bloody feuds between the old Anglo-Norman settlers and the newcomers of English birth? And where, though his very words are borrowed and his meaning is cloaked, does he seem more a part of what he has met? And where else does he invoke in the

of their manhood, must have been in the world by 1385 or 1386; hence even 1387, the year in which Ormonde founds his Aylesbury house of Friars, perhaps as a penance for his sin, seems a bit too late. The Legend Prologue, the first version of which is a terminus ad quem of Anelida, is probably a product of the latest eighties; but more of that elsewhere.

deeps of his middle age the brilliant figures who were very near to his daily life when all his world was youngLionel, a very Theseus in his lordly grace, Elizabeth de Burgh spreading about Ipolita's golden car the brightness of her beauty, and Maud Ufford as Emily in the sheen of her youth? And all of this, and with it so much of the poet himself, readers for five hundred years have missed.

FREDERICK TUPPER.

XI. ATHELSTON, A WESTMINSTER LEGEND

Athelston is one of the most vigorous and independent of Middle English romances, yet it is one about which least is known. Various writers have commented on this strange neglect," but in the years since 1829 when Hartshorne first published the text in his Ancient Metrical Tales,' it has only twice been made the subject of serious study. Zupitza's edition in Englische Studien XIII-XIV (1889-1890) was primarily textual in character and devoted less than two pages to questions of origin. In Englische Studien xxxvI (1906), Prof. Gerould discussed "Social and Historical Reminiscences in . . Athelston." Frankly accepting Zupitza's brief conjectures as to the original personages and events of the story, he concerned himself with the study of sworn brotherhood, a custom prominently referred to in the romance, and with the interesting possibility that the characterization of king. and bishop in the romance had been influenced by the vivid personalities of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Certainly their memory was as living for the fourteenth century as it had been for the twelfth since it was continually renewed by the pilgrim hosts at Becket's shrine. A story which had to tell of the quarrel between a king and a churchman might well borrow something from the traditional violence of King Henry and the fearless courage of Becket, but such influence in Athelston, if it existed at all, must have affected simply the characteriza

'The poem was also printed by Th. Wright, Reliquiae Antiquae, 1845, 11, 85 ff., and by Lord Francis Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, London, 1907, p. 525 ff., a text unlisted by Wells, Manual of Writings in Middle English, 1916, p. 766. It was translated by Dr. Edith Rickert, Romances of Friendship, London, 1908.