“Truly I heard Robert Ireliffee say,
“Clarke of the Greene Cloth, and that to the houshold
“Came every daye, forth must part alway,
“Ten thousand folke, by his messes told–.”
The following is the only specimen that I have seen of The Ordinal, a poem written, by Thomas Norton, a native of Bristol, in the reign of King Edward IV.
“Wherefore he would set up in higth
“That bridge, for a wonderful sight,
“With pinnacles guilt, shinynge as goulde,
“A glorious thing for-men to behoulde.”
The poem on Hawking, Hunting, and Armoury, written by Julian Barnes in the reign of the same monarch, (about 1481,) begins thus:
“My dere sones, where ye fare, by frith, or by fell,
“Take good hede in this tyme, how Tristram woll teil,
“How many maner bestes of venery there were,
“Listenes now to our dame, and ye shullen here.”,
The only extract that I have met with from William of Naffyngton’s Treatise on the Trinitie, translated from John of Waldenby, about the year 1480, runs thus:
“I warne you first at the begynnynge,
“That I will make no vaine carpynge,
“Of dedes of armes, ne of amours,
“As does Mynstrellis and Gestours–."
I cannot adhere to the method that I have in general observed, by quoting the first lines of
