The Knight is a flower of chivalry; he has sought honour everywhere, in the dangerous crusade against the barbarians of Pruce (Prussia), against the Moors, against the Turks: he is a fighting man who speaks no evil and bears no malice. His tale is from the old Romance of Thebes and Athens, and has its root in ancient Athenian literature, though its flowers are derived from mediaeval fancy, and mainly from the Italian poem, the "Teseid," or poem of Theseus, by Boccaccio. It is written in the rhyming couplets of five feet apiece which are practically the great metrical gift of Chaucer to English poetry: he took to them late in life, about 1385-1386, and his tales in this measure were made later than his stories in stanzas. The jolly Host of the Tabard, who directs the tale-telling of the Company, next asks, out of respect, the Monk to follow the Knight; but the rude Miller is drunk, and insists on being heard. For I wol speke or elles go my wey. Thus the noble tale is followed by a "churl's tale" for the sake of contrast, and Chaucer warns his readers that a coarse story it is, and that whoever does not want to hear it must turn the pages over and pass on. The Miller begins decorously enough with a description of a pretty young musical scholar of Oxford, that could read the stars and predict the weather, and lodged with an old carpenter that had a pretty young wife, and had never read Cato who would have advised him to mate with an older woman. The Miller's description of the pretty young woman is more delicate than we expect from this noisy drunkard. A parish clerk, not more godly than the scholar, is next introduced; and a peculiarly broad piece of rural pleasantry finishes the story of the Miller.