Master Richard refused the meat and the ale, and took the bread.

The priest asked him his business, and he said he was for London to see the King.

The priest asked him whether he would speak with the King, and he told him Yes if our Lord willed.

“And what have you to say to him?” asked the priest.

“I do not know,” said Master Richard.

The priest looked at him, and said something about a pair of fools, but Master Richard did not understand him then, for he had not heard yet the tale that the King was mad or near it.

So he kissed the priest’s skirt, and asked his blessing; then he went down the steps to the little holy well (which makes me think it to be saint Pancras’s church) and drank a little water after signing himself with it and commending himself to the saint, and went on his way.  The sun was now high and hot, but he told me that when he looked back at the turn of the path the priest was at the gate in the full sun staring after him.

Of his journey that day there is not much to relate.  He went by unfrequented ways, walking sedately as his manner was, with devotion in his heart.  An hour before noon a woman gave him dinner as she came back from taking it to her husband who burned charcoal in the forest, and asked him a kiss for payment when he had done his meal, sitting on a tree, with her standing by and looking upon him all the while.  But he told her that he was a solitary, and that he had kissed no woman but his mother, who had died ten years before, so she appeared content, though she still looked upon him.  Then as he stood up, thanking her for the dinner, she caught his hand and kissed that, and he reproved her gently and went on his way again.

For many miles after that it was the same; he saw no man, but only the beasts now and then, walking beneath the high branches in the sylvan twilight, over the dead leaves and the fern, and seeing now and again, as he expressly told me, for it seemed he had some lesson from it, the hot light that danced in the open spaces to right and left.

He saw one strange sight, which I should not have believed if he had not told me, and that was a ring of bulls in a clearing that tossed something this way and that, one to the other:  he drove them off, and found that it was a hare, not yet dead, but it died in his hands.  He told me that this verse came to his mind as he laid the poor beast down under a tree; Circumdederunt me vituli multi:  tauri pingues obsederunt me, ["Many calves have surrounded me:  fat bulls have besieged me” (Ps. xxi. 13)] and there is no wonder in that, for it is from a psalm of the passion, and it was what befell him afterwards, as you shall hear.

Soon after that he bathed himself in a pool, for he was hot with walking, and desired to be at his ease when he saw folk again; and he dipped his sandals, too, to cool them.

Then he went in his white kirtle a little, until his hair was dried, and when the heat of the day began to turn he was aware that he was coming near to a village, for there was a herd of pigs that looked on him without fear.