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IN ‘The Franklin's Tale’, Aurelius's brother reflects on how he might best assist the love-sick young man in meeting the conditions imposed by Dorigen, the married lady whom the latter has courted: causing the black rocks of the Breton coast to disappear. He recalls his student days and his exposure to books of ‘particuler sciences’.1 Then, in an interior monologue (‘And to hymself he seyde pryvely’), he remembers active practitioners of necromancy:

    ‘My brother shall be warisshed hastily;

    For I am siker that ther be sciences

    By whiche men make diverse apparences,

    Swiche as thise subtile tregetoures pleye.

    For ofte at feestes have I wel herd seye

    That tregetours withinne an halle large

    Have maad come in a water and a barge,

    And in the halle rowen up and doun.

    Somtyme hath semed come a grym leoun;

    And somtyme floures sprynge as in a mede;

    Somtyme a vyne, and grapes white and rede;

    Somtyme a castel, al of lym and stoon;

    And whan hem lyked, voyded it anon.

    Thus semed it to every mannes sighte.’ (1138–51)

The objective of the present note is a richer understanding of the tregetours of verses 1141 and 1143. Variants found in the corpus of Chaucer manuscripts are tregettours, tregettourys, tregitours, and earlier attestations in Middle English are only in The Body and Soul2 and Gower's Confessio Amantis.3 Chaucer also includes tregetours among the illusionists listed in The House of Fame, practitioners of:

    Al this magik naturel,

    That craftely doon her ententes

    To make, in certeyn ascendentes,

    Ymages, lo, thrugh which magik

    To make a man ben hool or syk. (1266–70)

He names a number of celebrated magicians of antiquity, e.g., Circe, Simon Magus. The vision also includes a contemporary and perhaps a local.

    Ther saugh I Colle tregetour

    Upon a table of sycamour

    Pleye an uncouth thyng to telle–

    Y saugh him carien a wynd-melle

    Under a walsh-note shale.4

We shall return to this notion of disparities of scale, here in the form of a windmill hidden under a walnut shell.

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