The last words of Cresseid in Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (c. 1475) evoke the pained comment of Chaucer's narrator in Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Cresseid dies thus:

Attentive readers of Troilus and Criseyde will remember the precise moment in Chaucer's narrative that Cresseid evokes, when she gives the brooch, which had belonged to Troilus, to Diomede:

If we do recall the Chaucerian passage, we also are alerted to the issue of ethical need. Criseyde's donation of Troilus's gift to Diomede is simultaneously gratuitous and brutal, especially brutal because gratuitous. The gratuitousness underlines Criseyde's icy callousness toward Troilus even as she expresses apparent sympathy for Diomede (‘the bet from sorwe him to releve’).

Whether or not Henryson intended to evoke the striking, pained comment of Chaucer's narrator is impossible to say. That Henryson is intensely conscious of gratuitousness and its related category of need is, however, certain. For Henryson represents worlds of intense need, whether those worlds are inhabited by hungry animals or relentless astrological gods. On the eve of a sixteenth-century Europe about to be hit by a predestinarian religion, the narratives of Henryson's worlds themselves follow fixed, predestined lines.