3 Job. Protagonist of the Book of Job in the Old Testament, Job is a paradigmatic figure of human suffering and perseverance. To disprove Satan, who maintains that humans only love God when in good fortune and prosperity, God chooses a wealthy and happy man, Job, and tests his faith by sending him a series of cataclysmic misfortunes. Job loses his livelihood, his family, is afflicted with disease, but, though embittered, ultimately maintains his faith and gains insight into the mysterious and, from the human perspective, arbitrary workings of the divine.↩back to note source

7 And seide his lyf nas bote a breth. Compare Job 7:7: “Remember that my life is but wind, and my eyes shall not return to see good things.”↩back to note source

10 For his righte wol he not lete. The subject of this line is Death.↩back to note source

45 dedly synne. The Christian church recognizes two classes of sin: venial and mortal. Venial sins are a violation of the moral law that merit punishment on earth but do not break the covenant with God, although their repeated occurrence may predispose one to graver infractions. Mortal sins break the covenant with God through a severe violation of Christian precepts and, without full repentance and divine forgiveness, ratified through the Church, result in eternal exclusion from the kingdom of Heaven.↩back to note source

46 veyghe. An alternate spelling of ME weien, this word literally means, according to the MED, “To weigh (somebody, a soul, one’s deeds, etc. in or as in a balance) to determine worthiness of divine punishment or reward, damnation or salvation; weigh (the soul) on the divine balance at the Day of Judgment” (sense 1b(a)).↩back to note source

47 ginne. Ginne has the same wide semantic field as the French engin: thus, according to the MED: “Inventive talent, ingenuity, cleverness; an expedient, scheme; strategy; trickery, treachery; ruse, wile; an ingenious device or contrivance, machine; an instrument; a machine or structure used in assaulting or defending fortifications, a siege machine or tower.” The semantic breadth of the word lends richness to the characterization of Aventures.↩back to note source

53 Seint Poul bit we schulden awake. An allusion to 1 Thessalonians 5:6: “Therefore, let us not sleep, as others do; but let us watch, and be sober.”↩back to note source

68 hende. Literally “handsy,” the same adjective applied to Nicholas in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. See CT I (A) 3199.↩back to note source

100 hosel. The Eucharist is a Christian rite that goes back to the biblical New Testament, when Jesus instructed His followers during the Last Supper, on the night before His Crucifixion, to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of His body and blood. Still practiced today, the rite consists of parishioners imbibing wine and bread blessed by a priest at the conclusion of a church service.↩back to note source

Bereveth hem bothe hosel and schrift. The consequence of dying without repenting and receiving forgiveness for mortal sin is, according to the Christian church, eternal damnation. Compare note to line 45 above.↩back to note source

105 ure Lordes kniht. This phrase is apposite to Seynt Poul. On St. Paul’s illness, compare 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 and Galatians 4:12–14.↩back to note source

141–44 Wher ben heo . . . uppon heore steeden. This passage represents a well-known medieval motif known as ubi sunt, a lament for the death of revered figures from the past and for the inexorable passage of time that draws us, in the present, further from an imagined Golden Age. The convention of using the Latin phrase ubi sunt (meaning “where are they?”) goes back to an early use of the motif in the Book of Baruch 3:16–19. Modern readers may recognize the well-known phrase “But where are the snows of yester-year?” as exemplifying this motif; the phrase comes from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1870 translation of the medieval French poet François Villon’s Ballade des dames du temps jadis (1461). In addition to invoking the general ubi sunt motif, this stanza in “Three Messengers of Death” (DIMEV 5387) is a textual allusion to the Sayings of Saint Bernard, a popular Middle English poem composed c. 1275: see Furnivall’s edition of the Sayings in Minor Poems, pp. 511–22, especially lines 181–86 (p. 521).↩back to note source

163 Me may reche the helewowe. Surely there is wordplay here on helewough (end wall of building), continuing the architectural motif earlier in the stanza, and hell woe, or the suffering found in hell.↩back to note source

172 him. The antecedent of “him” is Death in line 160.↩back to note source

180 that is wormes mete. Proverbial. See Whiting W675.↩back to note source

186 Matussalé. Methuselah is mentioned in Genesis 5:21–27 as the longest-living person in the Hebrew Bible, dying at the age of 969 years old; he is also an important member of the genealogy connecting Adam and Noah, as the son of Enoch and father of Lamech. His name also comes up in passing in 1 Chronicles 1:3 and Luke 3:37.↩back to note source

191 prime. This indication of time refers to one of the set times for prayer, by which Christian clergy structure their day; this practice is known as the Liturgy of the Hours, the Divine Office, or the canonical hours.↩back to note source

194 seynt Austyn. St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) was a Christian theologian and church father (that is, a founding figure for Christian thought) living in a Roman province of Northern Africa, where he served as bishop of Hippo Regius. His writings, such as The City of God, On Christian Doctrine and his autobiographical Confessions, have been enormous influences on the development of the Western theological and philosophical traditions. The author seems to be invoking Augustine in this moment to lend his words additional authority.↩back to note source

208 Ne scholden him of pyne bringe. The antecedent of “him” in this line is the man in line 201.↩back to note source

222 Trinité. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity holds that the Christian God is one God in three coequal and coeternal manifestations that are distinct from one another but of one substance: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Ghost. A useful popular comparison is to consider the physical properties of water, whereby ice, water, and vapor are three different manifestations of the same substance.↩back to note source