Canterbury Tales and Other Poems | Page 3

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This e-text look best in a monospaced font, such as
Courier or Arial. Maximum line
length is 72 characters.
Transcriber's Notes:
Credits: This e-text was scanned, re-formatted and edited with extra notes by Donal O'
Danachair ([email protected]
). I would like to acknowledge the help of
Edwin Duncan, Juris Lidaka and Aniina Jokinnen in identifying some of the poems no

Longer attributed to Chaucer.
This e-text, with its notes, is hereby placed in the public
domain.
Preface: The preface is for a combined volume of poems by
Chaucer and Edmund
Spenser. The Spenser poems will shortly be available as a separate E-text.
Spelling and punctuation: These are the same as in the book as far as possible. Accents
have been removed. Diereses (umlauts) have been removed from English words and
replaced by "e" in German ones. The AE and OE digraphs have been transcribed
as two
letters. The British pound (currency) sign has been replaced by a capital L. Greek words
have been transliterated.
Footnotes: The original book has an average of 30 footnotes per page. These were of
three types:
(A) Glosses or explanations of obsolete words and phrases.
These have
been treated as follows:
1. In the poems, they have been moved up into the right-hand
margin. Some of them have been shortened or paraphrased in
order to fit.

Explanations of single words have a single asterisk at the
end of the word and at the
beginning of the explanation*. *like this If two words in the same line have explanations

the first* has one and the second**, two. *like this **and this Explanations of phrases
have an asterisk at the
start and end *of the phrase* and of the explanation *like this*
Sometimes these glosses wrap onto the next line, still in the right margin. If you read this
e-text using a monospaced font (like Courier in a word processor such as MS Word, or
the
default font in most text editors) then the marginal notes are right-justified.
2. In
the prose tales, they have been imbedded into the text in square brackets after the word or
phrase they refer to [like this]. (B) Etymological explanations of these words. These are

indicted by a number in angle brackets in the marginal
gloss.* The note will be found
at the *like this <1> end of the poem or section.
(C) Longer notes commenting on or
explaining the text. These are indicated in the text by numbers in angle brackets thus:
<1>. The note will be found at the end of the poem or section.
Latin: Despite his declared aim of editing the tales "for popular perusal", Purves has left
nearly all Latin quotations
untranslated. I have translated them as well as I could -- any
errors are my fault, not his.
THE CANTERBURY TALES
And other Poems
o f