The common assumption is, that Chaucer borrowed the pentameter couplet directly from French poetry. On the history of this in France, see Stengel, in Gröber's _Grundriss der Romanischen Philologie_.[20] The decasyllabic verse was fairly common in France in the fourteenth century (being called "_vers commun_" according to Stengel); but in the form of the couplet it was not. Professor Skeat says: "To say that it [Chaucer's couplet] was derived from the French ten-syllable verse is not a complete solution of the mystery; for nearly all such verse is commonly either in stanzas, or else a great number of successive lines are rimed together; and these, I believe, are rather scarce. After some search I have, however, fortunately lighted upon a very interesting specimen, among the poems of Guillaume de Machault, a French writer whom Chaucer is known to have imitated, and who died in 1377. In the edition of Machault's poems edited by Tarbé, Reims and Paris, 1849, p. 89, there is a poem of exactly this character, of no great length, but fortunately dated; for its title is 'Complainte écrite après la bataille de Poitiers et avant le siège de Reims par les Anglais' (1356-1358). The first four lines run thus: "'A toy, Henry, dous amis, me complain, Pour ce que ne cueur ne mont ne plein; Car a piet suy, sans cheval et sans selle, Et si n'ay mais esmeraude, ne belle.' ... Now as Chaucer was taken prisoner in France in 1359, he had an excellent opportunity for making himself acquainted with this poem, and with others, possibly, in a similar metre, which have not come down to us." (_The Prioress's Tale_, Introduction, pp. xix, xx.) Paris has shown that the real date of the poem in question was 1340; the title quoted by Skeat is Tarbé's modern French caption. Professor Kittredge has called my attention to the fact that there is another poem of Machault's in the same metre (P. Paris's edition of _Voir-Dit_, p. 56), and also a poem by Froissart, the "Orloge Amoureus."