The listeners laughed at "this nice case," all but the Reeve, who was a carpenter by trade, and did not like a carpenter to be mocked. He therefore tells a tale against a Miller, a proud and dishonest Miller, who suffers loss and infinite dishonour and has his head broken, at the hands of two young Cambridge men. This tale also may be judiciously skipped: the fourth is that of the Cook, and is only a fragment: manifestly it was to be matter of rude, mirth, but Chaucer dropped it. The Host calls in The Man of Law, whose story is told in stanzas; The Man of Law was himself told it by merchants. It is an early piece of work by Chaucer, fitted into this place. He had plenty of short stories of many kinds, written by himself at various dates, and he placed them into the mouths of the pilgrims; not always quite appropriately. The Man of Law's tale of fair Constance, daughter of an Emperor of Rome, herself a pearl of beauty and goodness, persecuted by elderly ladies professing the Moslem or heathen religion, and driven from Syria to pagan Northumberland, is partly based on a widely diffused fairy-tale. It is pure and tender, and more fit for the ears of the Prioress than several of the coarse comic stories. In these days, as Chaucer would learn from the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, ladies listened to very strange narratives. The Host next bids the Parish Priest to tell a story, and swears in a style which the good parson resents. The Host "smells a Lollard," or Puritan heretic, in a clergyman who objects to swearing, which suggests that the orthodox priests were very indulgent! The sailor, or shipman, a rough brown man and "a good fellow," cries _heer_ he shal nat preche, He shal no gospel glosen heer ne teche, he is a heretic, a sower of tares among the wheat; and, to check heresy tells a story far from creditable to the morals of a monk. This is in the "heroic" verse, rhymed couplets of ten syllables each, like the coarse stories of the Reeve and the Miller. As this measure was adopted late by Chaucer, in place of the earlier stanzas, it appears that his taste did not grow more delicate with his advance in years. The dainty Prioress, as becomes her, now tells, in stanzas, the legend of a miracle of Our Lady: how a little boy used to sing her praises through the Jewish quarter of a town; how the Jews slew him and cast him into a pit, and how he nevertheless continued to sing his hymn like "young Hugh of Lincoln, who cursed Jews," slain also in 1255, if ever the thing occurred: it was a common fable of the Middle Ages.