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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
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