These _quæstores_, or _quæstiarii_, as they were officially called, were, says Boniface IX, speaking at the very time that the poet wrote his tales, sometimes secular clerics and sometimes friars, most of them extremely impudent. They dispensed with ecclesiastic licences, and went from place to place delivering speeches, showing their relics and selling their pardons. It was a lucrative trade and the competition was great; the success of authorized pardoners had caused a crowd of self-appointed ones to issue from the school or the priory, or from mere nothingness, greedy, with glittering eyes, as in the “Canterbury Tales”: “suche glaryng eyghen hadde he as an hare”; true vagabonds, infesters of the highroads, who having, as they thought, nothing to fear, boldly carried on their impostor’s traffic. They overawed their listeners, spoke loud, and unbound upon earth without scruple all that might be bound in heaven. Much profit arose therefrom; Chaucer’s pardoner got a hundred marks a year, which was easy enough for him, since, having received no authority from any one, to no one did he render any accounts, but kept all the gains for {317} himself. In his measured language the Pope tells us as much as the poet, and it seems as though he would duplicate, line by line, the portrait drawn by the story-teller, his contemporary. First, says the pontifical letter, these pardoners swear that they were sent by the Court of Rome. “Certain religious, who even belong to one or the other of the mendicant orders, and some secular clerks, even endowed with privileged benefices, affirm that they are sent by us or by the legates or the nuncios of the apostolic see, and that they have received a mission to treat of certain affairs, . . . to receive money for us and the Roman Church, and they go about the country under these pretexts.” From Rome also comes Chaucer’s personage; he moves about the country, and in exchange for his pardons tirelessly asks for goods and money, which certainly will not go to Rome: “a gentil pardoner . . . That streyt was comen from the court of Rome . . . His walet lay byforn him in his lappe, Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.” * * * * * “What! trowe ye, whiles that I may preche And wynne gold and silver for I teche, That I wil lyve in povert wilfully? * * * * * For I wol preche and begge in sondry londes, I wil not do no labour with myn hondes . . . I wol noon of thapostles counterfete, I wol have money, wolle, chese, and whete.” “Thus,” continues the Pope, “they proclaim to the faithful and simple people (“the lewed people,” says Chaucer’s man) the real or pretended authorizations which they have received; and irreverently abusing those which are real, in pursuit of infamous and hateful {318} gain, they carry further their impudence by mendaciously attributing to themselves false and pretended authorizations of this kind.”