_g_ 27. _am I þat?_ 'Is it I?', the interrogative form of _ich hit am_ or _ich am hit_. The editors who have proposed to complete the line by adding _wrech_, have missed the sense. The original rime was _þet_: _spec_, cp. note to I 240. _g_ 30. _cnistes_: for _cniste_ = _cnihte_ representing the OE. gen. pl. _cnihta_. On the forms _meist_ 6, _heiste_ 18, _eiste_ 20, _bitaiste_ 21, _iboust_ 26, _miste_ 29, _cnistes_ 30, _fiste_ 31, all with _st_ for OE. _ht_, see Appendix § 6 end. _h_ 17-18. Difficult. Perhaps 'The master smith lengthens a little piece [sc. of hot iron], and hammers a smaller piece, twines the two together, and strikes [with his hammer] a treble note'. _h_ 21-2. _cloþemerys... brenwaterys_: not in the dictionaries, but both apparently nonce names for the smiths: they 'clothe horses' (for by the end of the fourteenth century a charger carried a good deal of armour and harness), and 'burn water' (when they temper the red-hot metal). _i_ 4. _Þat_: dat. rel. 'to whom'; cp. VI 64. But _lowte_ is sometimes transitive 'to reverence'. _i_ 6. This line, at first sight irrelevant, supplies both rime and doctrine. See in Chaucer's Preface to his _Tale of Melibeus_ the passage ending: _I meene of Marke, Mathew, Luc and John— Bot doutelees hir sentence is all oon._ An erased _t_ after _Awangelys_ in the MS. shows that the scribe wavered between _Awangelys_ 'Gospels' and _Awangelystes_. _i_ 7. _Sent Geretrude_: Abbess of Nivelle (d. 659), commemorated on March 17. She is appropriately invoked, for one or more rats make her emblem. _i_ 11. _Sent Kasi._ I cannot trace this saint, or his acts against the rats. But parallels are not wanting. St. Ivor, an Irish saint, banished rats from his neighbourhood _per imprecationem_ because they gnawed his books; and the charm-harassed life of an Irish rat was still proverbial in Shakespeare's day: 'I was never so berhymed' says Rosalind (_As You Like It_, III. ii) 'since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat'. In the South of France the citizens of Autun trusted more to the processes of the law, and brought a suit against the rats which ended in a victory for the defendants because the plaintiffs were unable to guarantee them safe conduct to the court (see Chambers, _Book of Days_, under Jan. 17). Even in such little things the Normans showed their practical genius:—A friend chancing to meet St. Lanfranc by the way inquired the cause of the strange noises that came from a bag he was carrying: 'We are terribly plagued with mice and rats', explained the good man, 'and so, to put down their ravages, I am bringing along a cat' (_Mures et rati valde nobis sunt infesti, et idcirco nunc affero catum ad comprimendum furorem illorum_). _Acta Sanctorum_ for May 28, p. 824. XVI #Dialect#: Yorkshire. #Inflexions#: