Chaucer's Sir John, The Nun's Priest Tells A Distracting Tale of a Poor, Widow Woman

It was that rooster Chanticleer that Chaucer and his Nun's Priest went on at length about for the retelling of the much older tale of the fox and the chicken. They were found in the yard of 'a poor old widow/ In a small cottage, by a little meadow'. She had two daughters, three sows, three cows 'and a sheep named Molly.'  Still, 'enough to keep them going.'

Just a few lines here gives a pictorial sketch in place, subjects, activity. But very quickly this priest of a nun slips easily into a confiding, conversational listing, in this localized telling. Chaucer's Priest, Sir John, strings rhymed couplets among many personal, even intimate details of this widow's little world - her diet, fashions, means of production - before launching into the particularities of the rooster and his abode.

"Sooty her hall, her kitchen melancholy,
And there she ate full many a slender meal;
There was no sauce piquante to spice her veal,
 No dainty morsel ever passed her throat,
 According to her cloth she cut her coat."

How could he know, from descriptions of her plate and coat, the priest turns to appetite, attitude and activity.

"Repletion never left her in disquiet
And all her physic was a temperate diet,
Hard work for exercise and heart's content.
And rich man's gout did nothing to prev ent
Her dancing, apoplexy struck her not;
She drank no wine, nor white, nor red had got.
Her board was mostly served with white and black,
Milk and brown bread, in which she found no lack;
Broiled bacon or an egg or two were common,
She was in fact a sort of dairy-woman."

repletion: n. anything filled, sated; as in any vessel, appetite or state of being filled. From Old French replet(e) or Latin repletus , past participle of replere, from re- 'again, back' + plere 'to fill'.

It makes sense to see the 'rich man's disease' for what is still called acute purine arthritis, or gout. The medical dictionary says even today that dairy use can decrease chances of gout. But it didn't effect her dancing, or strike as apoplexy of the tongue.  Fruits, we are led to believe, of a 'temperate diet'.

The woman had a yard - 'a stockade enclosed in a big ditch' - and in it some chickens.
But wait. Is there any more of the life of this woman beyond setting? Does the widow ever speak to us? No. Will we learn at least about her daughters or the sheep that has more of a name than she? No. The story turns to the cheeky hero.
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Nevill Coghill was an Oxford English Lit Professor of the twentieth century - and who reached a wider audience than many - with his 1951 translation of Chaucer quoted and excerpted  here. He works it happily into a mid-century idiom that makes sense and captures the rolling rhythms of Chaucer easily. It was a bestseller for decades apparently. Here's a charming bit about him and his papers.