62 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



minor poems are known, they were written when the language 

 was in a transition state, and abound with various readings and 

 intei-polations. Had Chaucer acknowledged any one of these 

 written copies its authority would of course have been settled ; 

 but excepting a copy of one of the minor pieces written for 

 Henry V when Prince of Wales, and therefore before 1413, 

 the date of all is conjectural, and most likely none goes back 

 to the poet's lifetime. With the perfected system of printing, 

 absolute freedom from typographical error is next to impossi- 

 ble ; and it can be no marvel the ancient Scribe, chosen for his 

 writiiig skill rather than learning, and working with few of 

 the printer's aids to accuracy, should err. And err he did, 

 often and egregiously. How gross some of his blunders were 

 may be inferred from an instance quoted by Lounsbury from 

 a written copy of the Canterbuiw Tales. The Saxon verb 

 herian means, to praise. Wycliffe says : the shepherds when 

 thc}^ had seen the infant Saviour " turned glorifying and hcry- 

 ing God." When the Marquis of the Clerk's Tale has a son 

 born to him, of his folk it is said : " God they thank and hery^'' 

 that is they thank and praise. But in the written copy Louns- 

 bury quotes, the scribe, led away by the sound, wrote : " God 

 they thank, for he was hairy.'''' In another passage the monk 

 is said to fasten his hood under his '■'■ shin^'' when chin is the 

 word meant. 



Caxton printed the Canterbury Tales in 1478, and six 

 years afterwards learning his book was not according " unto 

 the book Geoffrey Chaucer had made, to satisfy the author " — 

 as Caxton cjuaintly writes in his preface — he printed another 

 edition. Only eleven copies of the first edition, and nine of the 

 second are now known to exist. Pynson, one of Caxton's 

 assistants, treading in his master's steps, attempted to gather 

 al) Chaucer's poems into one volume ; but his collection was 

 incomplete. A better attempt to form a complete collection 

 was made by Thynne, in 1532. Thynne, who served in the 

 househol'd of Henry VIII, obtained a royal commission giving 

 him authority to search all the libraries in England, that his 

 collection might be complete. For more than two centuries it 



