SOURCE: “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chaucer's Legend of Good Women,” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1987, pp. 170-74.

In the following essay, Delany discusses Chaucer's use of The History of the Kings of Britain for a line in his Legend of Good Women.

Chaucer took much of the material in his Legend of Good Women from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and this text, supplemented with the Ovide Moralisé, was his primary source for the legend of Thisbe.¹ However, one curious and unforgettable line from the legend occurs neither in Ovid nor in the OM: it is the oddly farcical phrase describing Piramus's death, when Thisbe finds him “Betynge with his heles on the grounde” (863).

The image is not original with Chaucer, but is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1136), a source not hitherto noticed in connection with this Chaucerian locus. In narrating the death of the tribune Frollo at...