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Trohetsvisan and Chaucer's Lak of Stedfastnesse 295
is exiled", "Fraud stands, love lies low, order weeps". 4.,
We can say only that such statements are a feature of the
genre.
The line "Thorugh couetyse is blent discrecioun" has
a similar idea expressed in the same image as Deuteronomy
16, 19: "gifts blind the eyes of the wise",46 but we cannot
say certainly that Chaucer recalled his Vulgate at this
point. For the hint may well have come through such
a phrase as this in Carmina Burana no. II, "Nummus
destroys the hearts of the wise, blinds their eyes"47 where
the bribery implied in the Scriptural text has been
adapted to the general nummus, in classical Latin 'a
coin', 48 but a word which has come to stand for all the evils
of money.
The contrast of the good past and evil present which
F. N. Robinson.s" (and, more recently, J. Norton-Smith 50)
found only in Boethius is a commonplace, not only in this
genre in Latin, French, English and Swedish as the
illustrations to lines 1-3 ShOW,51 but in numerous earlier
writings on the last age of the world as well. The"good
old days" could be the first age of the world as in Chaucer's
The Former Age, in Boethius, Ovid, Hesiod, Augustine and
so on, as Professors Lovejoy and Boas have so prolifically
exemplified. 52 But they could be any time in the past.
.. Translated from Bernardi Morlanensis De Contemptit Mundi in The Anglo­
Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, ed. T. Wright
(Rolls Series, 1872), II 47: "pax flet, amor gernit, ira stat et fremit, exule recto",
and 40: "fraus stat, amor jacet, ordo flet ...."
.. "munera excrecant oculos sapientum (et mutant verba justorum)."
""Nummus corda necat sapienturn, lumina cecat", Hilka and Schumann,
op, cit., 16 (No. II 1. 26). See their notes to this line (p. 19 in the last section)
for other similar statements.
.. A Latin Dictionary, ed. C. T. Lewis and C. Short, s.v. nummus.
•• The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (1957), 862; see
Appendix B.
6. 'Chaucer's Etas Prima', Medium. JEvum XXXII (1963), 123. "This balade
(Lak of Stedfastnesse) derives its major source material from Boethius's De
Consolatione II metre 8 ... In terms of sources it shows not a little similarity
to 'The Former Age'. The balade, moreover, opens with a contrast between
former times and the present ..." The statements above are somewhat
vague and, I take it, are derived from those of Robinson, but the assumption to
be made appears to be that the antithesis is Boethian.
.. See Appendix B.
52 A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas ill Antiquity
(1935), and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (1948).