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THE DATE OF Cocke Lorelles
Bote
by
Paul R. Baumgartner
The scholarly efforts of E. Gordon Duff, R. B. McKerrow, Frank Isaac and others notwithstanding, a number of the minor works printed by Wynkyn de Worde remain at best only tentatively dated. One of the most interesting of these uncertainly dated works is the anonymous early Tudor poem Cocke Lorelles Bote which survives in a single copy in the Garrick Collection at the British Museum. The surviving copy is not complete; the six A pages are missing, the poem beginning with B1. Except for the lost A pages, however, the book is in fair condition and the black-letter printing by Wynkyn de Worde is quite legible. As a literary type Cocke Lorelles Bote is related to medieval fool-satire literature, English popular literature (ballads, broadsides, jest-books), and sixteenth-century English rogue literature. Like the work of Sebastian Brant and his medieval predecessors, the poem makes use of the allegorical device of a ship and a religious order as well as an order of fools or knaves; it involves an allegorical voyage around England and is often satirical in tone. On the other hand, like the work of Harman, Awdeley, and Greene, Cocke Lorelles Bote is realistic, merry, and non-moral. Moreover, the poem gives the impression of dealing with local and contemporary events, cataloguing the crafts and trades of the time, crudely describing in great detail low-life characters, and naming specific persons and places. Thus the Bote marks a transitional stage in the development from medieval didacticism and allegory to the sociological realism of the rogue pamphleteers.
Cocke Lorelles Bote has been reprinted privately four times, the best reprint being that of E. F. Rimbault for the Publications of the Percy Society (Vol. VI) in 1843.[1] Each of the reprints, however, simply reproduces, more or less accurately and without critical apparatus, the original copy. No effort is made to date the poem accurately. Rimbault's introduction to the poem, for example, merely assumes that it was inspired by Barclay's Ship of Fools and was written not long after that work. Since both Cocke Lorelles Bote and the tradition to which it belongs have been the subject of a number of recent studies,[2] it might be well at this time to
Scholars who have commented on the poem tend to date it around 1510 or later, seeing in it the influence of either Barclay's or Watson's version of the Ship of Fools (both printed in 1509), but John M. Berdan, with little evidence, argued for a date closer to 1500. The stanza form, the frequent "monorime," the irregular scansion and the repetition indicated to Berdan that the poem belonged to the Medieval Latin tradition and was written before the kind of verse found in the Ship of Fools became popular.[3] C. H. Herford, on the other hand, believed that Cocke Lorelles Bote represented a fusion of two separate chapters in Brant (48 "Gesellenschiff" and 108 "Schluraffenschiff") which had been put together by Barclay in his adjoining chapters 108 and 109, called "The unyuersall shyp and general Bark or barge" and "The Unyuersall shyp of crafty men or laborers." Herford argued that the first stanza of chapter 108 in Barclay had directly influenced the author of the Bote and he further stated that "all five woodcuts in Cock Lorell's Bote are free imitations of the Ship of Fools."[4] This last remark suggests that Herford did not study carefully the relation of Cocke Lorelles Bote to the various versions of the Ship of Fools, for Aurelius Pompen in his detailed study of the English versions later demonstrated that the woodcuts used for the Bote were the same as those used in Watson's prose version of the Ship of Fools. From this fact, however, Pompen incautiously concluded that Cocke Lorelles Bote derived from Watson's translation and dated after it.[5] The four woodcuts in Cocke Lorelles Bote are the same as those used for chapters 18, 19, 77, and 108 of Watson's text, and woodcut #108, a picture of a ship full of fools with the motto "Gaudeam' Oēs," is used twice in the Bote just as in Watson. "It is this picture," says Pompen, "and little else that has inspired that remarkable fragment known as Cocke Lorelles bote." From Pompen's facts, however, it is not necessary to hold that Cocke Lorelles Bote was written after 1509. Though Watson's version of the Ship of Fools was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509, it is not known when it was written or when the woodcuts were produced. There is no sign of deterioration in the woodcuts used for Cocke Lorelles Bote. Moreover, as Pompen himself shows, the idea of an infinite number of fools and the allegorical device of a ship to carry them in were very popular around the turn of the century. The popularity of these ideas is sufficient to account for the writing of the Bote without supposing it to have been inspired by a single woodcut. Wynkyn de Worde may well have commissioned the writing of Cocke Lorelles Bote to test the popularity of the theme before coming out with a full-scale version of the
Internal Evidence:
In Cocke Lorelles Bote are the following interesting lines:
By syde London brydge in a holy grounde
Late called the stewes banke
Ye knowe well all that there was
Some relygyous women in that place
To whome men offred many a franke
And bycause they were so kynde and lyberall
A merueylous auenture there is be fall
Yf ye lyst to here how
There came suche a wynde fro wynchester
That blewe these women ouer the ryuer
In wherye as I wyll you tell
Some at saynt Kateryns stroke a grounde
And many in holborne were founde
Some at saynt Gyles I trowe
Also in aue maria aly and at westmenster
And some in shordyche drewe theder
With grete lamentacyon
And by cause they haue lost that fayre place
They wyll bylde at colman hedge in space
A nother noble mansyon
Fayrer and euer the halfe strete was (151-172).
What of the latest date for the poem? First, the events alluded to seem fresh in the mind of the poet. Secondly, the lines seem to imply that the "relygyous women" (prostitutes), having crossed the river in ferries ("In wherye"), settled chiefly at Colman hedge and that the stews on the bank side were by and large inoperative at the time of writing. Now we have seen Stow citing Fabian to the effect that "it was not long ere the houses there were set open againe." And Fuller, though he may be relying on Stow, assures us that the suppression was not long effective and that the stew houses were soon again in full operation (no dates are given).[11] Moreover in literature between 1506 and 1509 we find continued reference to the popularity of the stews. Though not conclusive, these facts argue that the poem was written not long after 1506 — two or three years at the most.
External Evidence:
In a study for the Bibliographical Society, Frank Isaac made a specific, though still preliminary, classification of Wynkyn de Worde's type for the purpose of dating that printer's undated books. Following E. G. Duff's
Types 95: s1 v2 w2 (small) y1
62: a d1 h1 s v2 y2
The Ordynarye of Crysten Men (1506 ed.)
Types 95: s2 v3 w2 y2
53b: a1 d1 h1 v3 s1
Richard Rolle's Contemplacyons (1506)
h1 s2 w2 (large) y2
Fisher, Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd (1508)
Type 116: h (pointed) s (with serif) v3 w2
Ovid de Arte Amandi (1513)
Types 95: s2 v3
62: a1 h1 s1 w5 (1513) w
53b: a1 d1 h1 v3
Further evidence for a date of 1506-8 for Cocke Lorelles Bote is found in the colophon to the poem. E. G. Duff tells us that "towards the end of 1508 when Pynson was appointed printer to the King, De Worde seems to have received some sort of official appointment as printer to the Countess
In 1938 A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley discovered and edited a valuable document called The Great Chronicle of London. In that work in the entry for the year 1509 during the mayorality of Stephan Genyn, the chronicler inserts several contemporary ballads dealing mostly with the villainies of Empson, Dudley, and one John Baptist de Grimaldi. In the longest of these ballads is this reference to Cocke Lorelles Bote:
Was evyr Capemarchaunt, of Cok lorellys boot.[17]
To passe the stormy sees, and here to take an ende
By paynfull deth, yit hast þu cawse to thank
Allmigthty God, that he such space the lend
To take Repentaunce, ffor If on sees bank
Thow had departid, ffrom this lyfe sodeynly
Then body & sawle, had been In Jupardy (p. 364).
Notes
Other reprints of Cocke Lorelles Bote are as follows: Roxburgh Club, 1817; Edinburgh, 1841; Edmund and Aberdeen, 1884.
See, for example, Paul R. Baumgartner, "From Medieval Fool to Renaissance Rogue: Cocke Lorelles Bote and the Literary Tradition," Annuale Mediaevale, IV (1963) 57-91; and Edward R. Rosenberry, "Melville's Ship Of Fools," PMLA, LXXV (1960), 604-608. Mr. Rosenberry suggests Cocke Lorelles Bote as a possible source for Melville's The Confidence-Man.
C. H. Herford, The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (1886), pp. 341-343 and n.
Edward Hall, Chronicle Containing the History of England During the Reign of Henry the Fourth and the Succeeding Monarchies to the end of the Reign of Henry the Eighth, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (1809), entry Yr. 1506.
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