Notes to The Cook's Tale

by Geoffrey Chaucer

　　1. Cheapside, where jousts were sometimes held, and which was the great scene of city revels and processions.

　　2. His paper: his certificate of completion of his apprenticeship.

　　3. Louke: The precise meaning of the word is unknown, but it is doubtless included in the cant term "pal".

　　4. The Cook's Tale is unfinished in all the manuscripts; but in some, of minor authority, the Cook is made to break off his tale, because "it is so foul," and to tell the story of Gamelyn, on which Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is founded. The story is not Chaucer's, and is different in metre, and inferior in composition to the Tales. It is supposed that Chaucer expunged the Cook's Tale for the same reason that made him on his death- bed lament that he had written so much "ribaldry."