Note 177 — Chapter V

In one particular, this peculiarity of the Lollard must have administered a very wholesome rebuke to a sin of the times. He would not swear by any of the members of Christ’s body, which was the heedless fashion of the day, but would content himself with such an affirmation, as “I am syker it is soth.” (See the Rev. H. Baber’s Memoirs of Wickliffe, prefixed to his Translation of the New Testament, p. 35.) May not the phrase a “yea-forsooth knave,” used by Falstaff (2 Hen. IV, ii. sc. 2,) have been a popular term of obloquy, originally applied to the Lollards by the dissolute and profane? See also Chaucer, “The Shipmanne’s Prologue.”