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 THE ANCESTOR 71 nor less than noble. Thus in Trevisa's translation (1387) of the Polycbronicon^ the episcopi^ ahhates^ et tervce proceres^ who accepted Canute as king, figure as the 'bisshoppes, abbotes and gentiles of the lond.' If any doubt still remains in the reader's mind as to the identity in meaning of gentilis and nohilis^ I will refer him to the royal letter of 1363, which states • that in former ages the people of England, tarn nobiles quam ' ignohiles^ had practised the art of archery ; ^ to the letters of nobility granted by Henry VI. in 1448-9 to Nicholas Cloos and Roger Keys, who had been engaged in the works at King's College and Eton ; ^ and to the passages in which Matthew Paris speaks of the ' archbishops, bishops, barons, knights and other nobles' who were summoned to the Parlia- ment of 1225, and of the infinita nobilium multitudo which came together at Westminster on another occasion.^ Can it be seriously maintained that here nobiles denotes only peers of the realm ? If these instances do not carry conviction, we may turn to the lines in which Boethius and his translator speak of nobilitas as founded upon claritudo^ that is to say upon ' renoun and cleernesse of linage.' How does the reader think that Chaucer translates nobiles and nobilitas ? Not as nobles and nobility, but as ' gentilmen ' and ' gentilesse.' * In other pas- sages ^ the poet renders the latter word as ' noblesse,' for ' gentilesse ' and ' noblesse ' conveyed the same meaning to him. The word ' gentleman ' possessed then at this time precisely the same significance which to this day it conveys in France ; and indeed how could it be otherwise, for England was still a great continental power, and English kings were making grants of arms and nobility to their foreign as well as to their native subjects. The explanation of gentilis as equivalent to nobilis is after all only what Selden, Camden, Du Cange and Spelman have long since laid down. I do not claim that it is a new discovery ; the truth has always been plain enough, but our historians have been blind. Chaucer uses * gentilman ' also to denote that class of servants whom we still refer to as * gentlemen's gentlemen.' ^ Rymer's Fcedera, iii. 704. See also the statute of 1336, which is made by the common consent of the Prelates, Earls, Barons and other nobles of the Realm (Stat. i. 279). 2 Herald and Genealogist, i. 145. ^ Nichols' Leicester, i. 214.
 * Boethius iii. Prose vi. 26. ^ Ibid. ii. Prose iv. ; iii. Prose ii.