Chaucer was the major poet of his time, and it is clear from the number of surviving manuscripts and Caxton's two early printings that the Canterbury Tales were his most popular work, but they were not widely imitated, and in a time when the proprietary claims of authorship were treated very casually, remarkably few attempts were made to augment them, beyond the construction by scribal editors of links among existing tales. In some manuscripts the Cook's abortive tale is supplemented by Gamelyn, a popular romance in loose accentual verse about a young man of noble birth forced by adversity to become a sort of Robin Hood. A single manuscript includes the broadly similar but inferior tale of Beryn, adapted to the structure of the Tales by way of a long prologue which narrates the doings of the various pilgrims after their arrival in Canterbury. The narrator is careful to make the behavior of the different pilgrims conform superficially to their Chaucerian characters, and develops a sort of fabliau around the Pardoner, who is led by an ill-considered display of sexual bravado into a nocturnal adventure that ends in his being beaten by the lover of a barmaid at his inn. John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, though clearly intended as an independent work, has a similar preface which begins with a humorous imitation of the opening of the General Prologue (the main verb shows up in line 66), and describes Lydgate's encounter with the pilgrims at Canterbury.