THE NUN'S PRIEST'S TALE
A fox, that had dwelt three years in the grove, full of sly iniquity, and fore-guided by lofty imagination, that same night burst through the hedges into the yard, where Chaunticleer, the splendid, was wont to repair with his wives, and in a bed of herbs he lay still, till it was past undern, biding his time to fall upon Chaunticleer, as all these homicides will do, that lie in wait to murder men.
O, false murderer, lurking in thy lair! O second Iscariot! Second Genilon! False dissimulator! O thou Greek Sinon, that broughtest Troy utterly to sorrow! O Chaunticleer, cursed be that morn that thou flewest from thy perch into that yard! Full well wast thou warned by thy dreams how that day should be perilous to thee. But what God foreknows must needs come to pass—according to the opinion of certain clerks. I take any perfect clerk to witness, that there is great altercation in the schools concerning this matter, yea, great disputation hath there been by an hundred thousand men. But I cannot bolt it to the bran, as can the holy doctor Augustine, or Boethius, or Bradwardine the bishop. Whether God's glorious foreknowing constraineth me of necessity to do a thing (necessity, I construe as absolute necessity), or whether free choice be granted me either to do that same thing or to do it not, in spite of God's fore-knowledge of it ere it was done; or whether his knowing constraineth only by conditional necessity; with such matters I will not have to do. My tale, as ye may hear, is of a cock that took the counsel of his wife—sorrow befall her!—to walk in the yard, upon that morrow when he had dreamed the dream which I described to you.
Full oft be women's counsels cold. Woman's counsel brought us first to woe, and made Adam to depart from Paradise, where
85
