The present position, then, is that the Labyrinth is the House of the Double Axe, the implication being that the Cretan example was not, as formerly believed, a miniature reproduction of the temple of Hawara, but that the latter was actually given the title by analogy with the building at Knossos. As regards the use of the word in our own language, it was probably well known to most of the churchmen of the early and middle ages, through the medium of the classic authors accessible to them, but it never passed into common speech. In Chaucer's works, _i.e._, in the fourteenth century, we find both _maze_ and _labyrinth_ employed; but whereas the latter evidently refers to the Cretan tradition, the English word seems to denote some figure familiar to the poet's readers--perhaps, we may conjecture, in the form of turf mazes. Thus, in "The Hous of Fame" (line 826, etc.), he says: "Tho gan I forth with him to goon Out of the castel, soth to saye, Tho saugh I stoude in a valeye, Under the castel, faste by, An hous, that _domus Dedali_ That _Laborintus_ cleped is, Nas maed so wonderliche, y-wis Ne half so queynteliche y-wrought"; and in his "Legend of Ariadne," one of his minor poems, we read (line 125, etc.): "This wepen shal the gayler, on that tyde, Ful privily within the prison hyde; And, for the hous is krinkeled to and fro, And hath so queinte weyes for to go-- For hit is shapen as the _mase_ is wroght-- Thereto have I a remedie in my thought, That, by a clewe of twyne, as he hath goon, The same way he may returne anoon, Folwing alway the thread, as he hath come." Seeing that the "hous" here referred to is the Cretan labyrinth itself, the "mase" with which it is compared must be something sufficiently familiar to Chaucer's audience to furnish them with a ready illustration of the nature of the legendary structure which he is describing and which elsewhere he calls The Labyrinth or the House of Daedalus. From very early times the classic authors used the word "labyrinth" metaphorically, and the mediaeval writers followed them. For instance Walter, a canon of St. Victor, towards the end of the twelfth century wrote a work which he called "A Treatise Against the Four Labyrinths of France," in reference to the great theological work in four books, known as the "Book of Sentences," a long and very metaphysical compendium of divinity, by Peter, Bishop of Paris. In Renaissance times we find the word commonly used as a simile for the difficulties of life or the vagaries of love. In Shakespeare's "King Henry VI" (Pt. I, V, Sc. 3) the Earl of Suffolk, after the exit of the gentle Margaret of Anjou, whose hand he has been soliciting on behalf of his royal master, exclaims: "O, wert thou for myself!--But, Suffolk, stay; Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth: There Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk."