With an O (Yorks.) or an I (Salop.)? The
Middle English Lyrics of British Library Additional
45896
by
Ralph Hanna III
In 1951, A. H. Smith published three Middle English poems
which he found written on the back of a roll
assigned the shelfmark British Library, MS.
Additional 45896. All three belong to a small but
well-known genre of Middle English verse: each
consists of stanzaic units with a refrain which
opens "with an o and an i." The first and most
extensive of these works, "ʒeddyngus de Prust
papelard," is unique, a fully alliterative satiric
utterance put in the mouth of a non-feasant cleric
(assigned Robbins-Cutler number 2614.5); the other
two poems, as Smith notes (38-39), are variant
versions of pieces known elsewhere.
Although "The Papelard Priest" is certainly Smith's major
find in Additional 45896, he fails to investigate
either of the other two poems in any great detail.
But interrogating these remains will reveal some
vexing problems concerning both composition and
provenance. And these problems will in turn shed
light upon some large-scale conundrums about Middle
English literary history, perhaps an unexpected
benefit from such chancy literary remnants.
Additional 45896 is a seven-foot-long roll, comprising
five vellum members (for materials in this paragraph
and the next, see Smith 33-37 and the plate affixed
to his article). The roll itself was constructed for
non-literary reasons: it was designed to hold
materials concerning agricultural accounts, a common
purpose for such a manuscript form during the
English Middle Ages. The recto and most of the dorse
contain a Latin formulary on manorial accounting,
probably composed just west of Oxford around 1349.
The hand which copied the formulary (and
subsequently added the three poems to fill the blank
fourth member of the dorse) is an anglicana of a
type one can find in many documents of the 1330s and
1340s: the poems probably were copied not long after
the dated formulary. Thus, these works represent, at
the very latest, productions of the second quarter
of the fourteenth century.
Further, the Additional roll itself and the hand which
inscribed there the Middle English lyrics can be
generally associated with an area removed from the
composition of the formulary, the southwest
Midlands. Additional 45896 was discovered in 1941 in
a solicitor's safe in Rugeley, south-central Staffs.
There it seemed to be associated with a second
manuscript, a fifteenth-century rental for the manor
of Ripple, Worcs. (just northeast of Tewkesbury).
And, as Smith sees (40-42), the
scribal language of the lyrics is certainly
Southwest Midland (cf. such routine spellings as
"mony" MANY; "heo" SHE —and "freo" FREE;
"kunne" and "sunne" KIN and SIN, respectively). A
recent study by the master of Middle English
dialecticians, Angus McIntosh, would place the
scribe's training yet more precisely, in a third
western locale —southern Shropshire along that
county's border with Hereford and Worcester (see
Cox-Revard 44 n6).
[1] Since the deposit of the
roll in Rugeley appears to represent legal interests
of no greater antiquity than the nineteenth century,
the most likely hypothesis would be that a south
Shropshire scribe copied the roll, perhaps for a
Worcestershire employer; in the most attenuated
account of provenance, the roll could have been
acquired later for practical matters of estate
management by parties in Worcestershire.
Such a placement of Additional 45896 proves immediately
problematic when one begins to consider the Middle
English contents. The second lyric on the dorse
describes the Annunciation; as Smith is aware, this
poem in some way reproduces part of another Middle
English work with o-and-i refrain—in this
case, the Luke portions of "The Four Evangelists"
printed by W. Heuser (285-289; Brown-Robbins number
2020). Like "The Papelard Priest," "Evangelists" is
composed in alliterative stanzas, and, until the
discovery of Additional roll, the version Heuser
presented was thought to be unique.
That poem appears at the end of Bodleian Library, MS.
Rawlinson poet. 175, a manuscript produced later
than the Additional roll: the hand is usually dated
palaeographically in the second half of the
fourteenth century. This codex, an important source
for the widely dispersed Prick of
Conscience, was certainly produced in the
north of England, and equally certainly, within that
general locale, Yorkshire; the Middle English
dialect project places its scribe's training
narrowly, in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire (see Madan
et al. 3:321-322, number 14667; Lewis-McIntosh 116;
Doyle 2:47-49; McIntosh et al. 3:576-577).[2] Such a provenance ought to be
immediately surprising: it implies communication
between two quite distant literary communities, one
in the southwest, another in the north.
At least one question immediately arises from this
confluence of texts: can one determine the direction
of literary influence? Given that either the
Additional (hereafter A) or the Rawlinson (R) copy
of "Luke in his lesson" has been derived or redacted
from the other, can one determine which has
priority? Does the earlier fragmentary anthology on
the formulary roll reflect
a West
Midland poet's alliterative composition? Was this
then subjected to further expansions? And if so, is
the northern scribe simply the inheritor of work
done elsewhere? Or did a Yorkshire poet compose the
fuller account of selected moments from the gospels,
transmitted in part to the west and only by accident
surviving in a later copying in something like the
poet's dialect?
The evidence with which to answer this question is
spotty. On the whole, the two versions of the poem
are so distinct that they cannot be combined into a
critical text: they stand as fundamentally
independent renditions. But so far as it is possible
to say, the hypothesis of Yorkshire provenance for
the original of "The Evangelists" appears the
correct one. Several A readings appear either
editorial or scribal derivatives of parallels in R.
For example, in line 13, R Comly is confirmed by the insistent
alliteration of the northern version (much of it
removed from A); the latter copy here has Semely—which may be only
an unmotivated scribalism dependent upon confusion
of similar majuscules and of forms of o and e.
In line 9, R mowthed "named
(in speech)," again alliterating, corresponds to A's
pallid substitution mony
clepede (cf. also line 6, where alliterating
R was named is reproduced as
A me clepede). Or in line 21,
where A rewrites the entire line, the alliterating R
Be noght ferd appears to
have inspired the synonymous A Doute þe noust. Similarly, in line 45,
R said . . . þis tale
probably suggested A hast
talked. In contrast, no A reading looks
certainly prior to its counterpart in R.[3]
One can only guess at the logic for the A redaction. But
at least one possibility seems to be a sense of
stanzaic proprieties rather different from that of
the original. R is composed in monorhymed six-line
stanzas, but the A revision deliberately sets out to
differentiate the refrain from the remainder of the
stanza, a process which begins in the very first
line. There A extends R's line, "Luke in his lesson
leres to me," into ". . . lerede me to synge;" and
then converts the subsequent three verses into lines
ending in -ynge while
retaining the refrain, now rhyming separately on -é.
As this example suggests, the redactor behind A, in part
because he rejects many traditional alliterative
collocations, shows considerably less concision than
his source. Perhaps the surest sign that he is the
recipient, rather than originator, of "Luke" appears
in the middle of the poem. In his effort to follow
the account of Luke 1 closely, he rejects R's fifth
stanza, which heralds Jesus's might. But he appears
so bound by his textual model that he feels his
version should contain an equivalent number of
stanzas: this he accomplishes by splitting R's sixth
stanza into two and padding out its materials (with
partial retention of the rhymes of his source) to
twelve lines.
Further, a meagre amount of rhyme evidence suggests that
the Yorkshire scribe was copying a poem composed in
his dialect. The rhymes at lines 43-48 depend upon
the retention of OE long ā in the adverb WHOLE
(OE hāl), customarily taken as a sign of
northern Middle English. And in line 35, rhyme
confirms the alliterative set-phrase "more and
minne," a Scandinavianism of
restricted northerly occurrence (Olszewska 83).
[4] Both these uses are eradicated in
the A rendition of the poem.
But the rhymes in the A version of "Luke" raise some
further difficulties. For this
evidence—several forms prove to be senseless
in the scribe's dialect (although he does not change
them)—suggests that the scribe of A is not the
source of the redaction, but only a copyist of it.
The rhymes in R's sixth stanza cannot have been
exact in the A scribe's Shropshire dialect: begin, within, and myn would
there have short i, but -kyn,
wyn JOY, and syn, the short front rounded
vowel /Y/. In rendering this stanza, A converts
"wyn" JOY to "w[yth]ynne" (with short i) but has an
impenetrable "mynne" (probably from OE mynd-, thus
with Middle English rounded vowel) and retains
"syn"— which the scribe reproduces in the
dialect spelling indicating rounded vowel, "sunne."
Similarly, lines A 43-46 rhyme on short i, but again
include a word which would have /Y/ in the scribe's
dialect, FULFILL—which he again gives in a
dialect spelling which implies rounding, "folfulle."
Such rhymes imply that the A version of "Luke" is
not a western poem at all; indeed it could have been
composed in virtually any other Middle English
dialect, including that of Yorkshire.
Another rhyme may provide narrower evidence of
provenance. At line 46, postposited tille TO rhymes. This form,
while not exclusively northern, certainly would
limit the source of this redaction to that area or
parts of the Northeast Midlands, notably
Lincolnshire and Notts. (cf. McIntosh et al.,
1:461-462, dot maps 618-621).
Moreover, this demonstration of the northern provenance
of this A text can be extended to other items on the
roll. What Smith prints as the third poem of
Additional 45896, "Love him wrought," may in fact be
two or three separate productions, all vaguely
linked through their interest in the Passion. The
first of them, again, is known elsewhere in a later
copy: the lyric "Loue me brouthte" (Brown 84;
Brown-Robbins number 2012) appears in John of
Grimestone OFM's pulpit commonplace book, Edinburgh,
National Library of Scotland, MS. Advocates 18.7.21.
This manuscript is dated 1372 and written in forms
one would associate with Grimestone's Norfolk
origins. But he himself did have connections with
areas more proximate to the Additional roll: records
of the 1320s and 1330s associate him with the
Franciscan convent in Dorchester (Dorset; Wilson
xiii).
This portion of the third Additional text shows rather
minimal differences from Grimestone's version. In
the roll, the poem is not Jesus's address
from the cross but a doctrinal
statement about his purpose and mission, an emphasis
which recalls the redaction of "Luke in his lesson."
Two pairs of lines have been transposed in one
version or the other, and A ends the poem with the
long-line o-and-i refrain common to all three works
on the roll. But again, like "Luke in his lesson,"
on the basis of this second copy, the Additional
roll seems to present a bobbed
text—Grimestone's third tail-rhyme stanza does
not occur here.
More interesting are the two lyric sections which follow.
For these, both usually in trimeter arranged in a
single abababab stanza with long-line o-and-i
refrain, no parallel versions exist. The first
depicts the horror of the Crucifixion; the second
describes the loss and redemption of the world
through the rearrangement of three letters, EVA
becoming AVE.[5] The first of these
stanzas shows non-northern rhyme forms (e.g. 18
"non" NOON rhymes with "ston" STONE and "bon" BONE,
thus confirming non-retention of OE long ā).
But the second is certainly northern: there the
letter-name a rhymes with
"fa" and "wa" (OE fā
FOE and wā WOE,
respectively; the ms. instructively retains the
northern spellings). If the poem in fact represents
a unified composition from a single source, then
that probably reflects a northern border-area where
rhymes of OE long ā as either a or o
were equally possible, for example south Yorkshire.
If it in fact joins three fragments of different
sources, then at least one of these appears of pure
northern origin, as is "Luke in his lesson."
Finally, "The Papelard Priest" cannot be a local
Shropshire product either. Its rhymes again point
toward composition in the north. Lines 22-30 show
retention of OE long ā: "mare" 24 (OE
māra) rhymes with a string of words with ME
long a from lengthening in open syllables. The same
rhymeleash also confirms the form "ar(e)" for the
present plural of BE, normal in a wide belt running
from south Lancs. to the Wash (McIntosh et al.,
1:334, dot map 118)—as opposed to the expected
b-form in the dialect of
the A scribe (cf. "betz" 5 and "biod" 44). And, a
feature of similar distribution, the author's form
of the third person singular indicative was -es (not -ep), confirmed in rhyme at lines 51-57 and
62-68.[6] Again, in lines
41-47—the scribal forms are sore, wore WERE, more, lore LORE—the author of "Papelard
Priest" probably, although not conclusively, shows
northern forms. Whether representing ware or wore, his rhyme most likely reflects
Lancashire, Yorkshire, or Lincoln (see McIntosh et
al., 1:337, 338, dot maps 131 and 133).[7]
"The Papelard Priest" thus
resembles another mid-fourteenth-century rhymed
alliterative satire of deficient clergymen, "The
Chorister's Lament" (Brown-Robbins 3819) in
something more than theme: that poem, recorded by a
scribe at Norwich Cathedral Priory, on the basis of
its rhymes, travelled from its northern place of
composition to a very different literary
community.
Thus, what initially appears a Southwest Midland
manuscript in fact demonstrates persistent textual
connections with the north of England. Rather than
the property of a native southwestern alliterative
culture, often taken to have been the sole generator
of an "Alliterative Revival" in the midfourteenth
century (see Pearsall), Additional 45896 testifies
to some collison of separate local literary
cultures, cultures which existed at a considerable
geographical remove (see Lawton).
The first two poems of the Additional roll represent a
widely dispersed movement of c. 1200-1360 or so—alliterative verse
in stanzaic forms (see Bennett). Pre-eminent
examples of such work are quite provocatively
placed. Ten such poems occur in the Shropshire
collection of c. 1340,
British Library, MS. Harley 2253 (itself the product
of extensive compiling from diverse locales; cf.
Brook). And Lawrence Minot, probably a member of the
family which gave its name to Carlton Miniott (near
Thirsk, N. Yks.), composed five similar poems,
transmitted in the North Yorkshire British Library,
MS. Cotton Galba E.ix. These rhymed verses are
clearly related to the efflorescence of unrhymed
alliterative poetry coinciding with the decline of
stanzaic forms and composed in the same
areas—merely to cite one example from each
literary community, the south Gloucestershire William of Palerne (pre-1361)
and the Yorkshire fragments of "Will and Wit" (at
the latest, s. xiv2/4).[8]
While I choose to address issues of "Alliterative
Revival" and the originary arguments which support
this conception elsewhere, here I want to develop
further the link between Yorkshire and the Southwest
Midlands exemplified by the Additional roll.
Yorkshire sources allege that the holograph of
Richard Rolle's prose Psalter belonged to the nuns
of Hampole (W. Yks.), and copies of the work
apparently multiplied slowly. But one of the oldest
survivors, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 953, was
certainly produced for Thomas IV, Lord Berkeley, of
Berkeley Castle in southern Gloucestershire, and
probably, from the decoration, produced locally.
Again, the alliterative stanzaic poem "Susannah," on
the basis of its rhymes, is the work of a south
Yorkshire poet; but the earliest copies, both drawn
from the same deviant archetype, appear in
manuscripts customarily localized in northern
Worcestershire, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet. a.1
("The Vernon MS.") and British Library, MS.
Additional 22283 ("The Simeon MS."). Certainly,
literary traffic between Yorkshire and the southwest
Midlands was extensive and—so far as my
examples suggest—in the main one-way.
Although any variety of mechanisms might explain this
confluence of transmission patterns, I would direct
attention toward a pattern of a type generally
overlooked by literary scholars. The
mid-fourteenth-century "Gough Map," among other
things, provides an outline of the contemporary
"transportation system:" it carefully demarcates
major roads. In the main, these radiated from
London, and, outside the south, ran generally
northwest-southeast (Stenton 10-11; R. A. Pelham, in
Darby, 260, fig. 43). But Worcester was the terminus
of two important routes which, unusually, traversed
the Midlands. One of these roads passed through
Coventry to join the Old North Road at Grantham; the
second, more provocative for my purposes, ran "from
Worcester, Droitwich, and Birmingham, and pass[ed]
on to Derby, Chesterfield, and Doncaster" (Stenton
10), where it also joined the North Road. This
second route provides a direct link between the
Southwest Midlands and southern Yorkshire. Such
major arteries of the transportation system would
certainly have facilitated interregional contact: we
should consider them likely media for literary, as
well as commercial and military, interchange. Thus,
early evidence of Southwest Midland verse may in
fact not represent either an originary gesture or an
example of coincident polygenesis in diverse
literary communities; in fact, these remains may
have been stimulated by importation from outside the
region—and not simply from Yorkshire.[9]
Thus what began as strictly an editorial
issue—which version of "Luke in his lesson"
might be construed as prior to the
other—ultimately comes to address large and
fundamental issues of Middle English literary
history. As an editorial question, the "priority" or
"anteriority" of the Yorkshire version of this poem
turns out to be something of a red herring: the
Shropshire text of Additional 45896 cannot be
consolidated into a single text with the Yorkshire
version recorded in Rawlinson poet. 175. Some
currently fashionable opinions in Middle English
textual studies would find in such a result reason
to query the entire enterprise of editing medieval
texts. Although I concur that editorially the poems
can only be presented in parallel, as entirely
separate renditions, I would point out that only the
determination of anteriority can lead beyond
questions specifically textual—in this case,
to broader literary and cultural problems whose
importance far outweighs any possible adjudication
of poetic lections.
Works Cited
- Bennett, J. A. W. "Survival and Revivals of
Alliterative Modes." Leeds
Studies in English n.s. 14
(1983):26-43.
- Brook, G. L. "The Original Dialects of the
Harley Lyrics." Leeds Studies in
English 2 (1933):38-61.
- Brown, Carleton, ed. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1957.
- ___, and Rossell Hope Robbins. The Index of Middle English
Verse. New York: Columbia University Press,
1943.
- Cox, D. C., and Carter Revard. "A New Middle
English O-and-I Lyric and its Provenance." Medium Ævum 54
(1985):33-46.
- Darby, H. C., ed. An
Historical Geography of England before A. D.
1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1951.
- Doyle, A. I. "A Survey of the Origins and
Circulation of Theological Writings in English. .
. ." 2 vols. Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis,
1953.
- Hanna, Ralph III. "Alliterative Poetry."
Forthcoming in David Wallace, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval
English Literature.
- Heuser, W. "With an O and an I." Anglia 25
(1904):283-319.
- Lawton, David A. "The Diversity of Middle
English Alliterative Poetry." Leeds Studies in English n.s. 20
(1989):143-172.
- Lewis, Robert E., and Angus McIntosh. A Descriptive Guide to the
Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience.
Medium Ævum Monographs n.s. 12. Oxford:
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Literature, 1982.
- Madan, Falconer, et al. A
Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the
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- McIntosh, Angus, et al. A
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 4
vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1986.
- Olszewska, E. S. "Illustrations of Norse
Formulas in English." Leeds
Studies in English 2 (1933):76-84.
- Pearsall, Derek. "The Origins of the
Alliterative Revival." In Bernard S. Levy and Paul
E. Szarmach, eds. The
Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth
Century. Kent: Kent State University Press,
1981. Pp. 1-24.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope, and John L. Cutler. Supplement to the Index of Middle
English Verse. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1965.
- Smith, A. H. "The Middle English Lyrics in
Additional MS 45896." London
Mediaeval Studies 2 (1951):33-49.
- Stenton, F. M. "The Road System of Medieval
England." Economic History
Review 7 (1936):1-21.
- Turville-Petre, Thorlac. The
Alliterative Revival. Cambridge: Brewer,
1977.
- Wilson, Edward. A
Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of
Grimestone's Preaching Book. Medium
Ævum Monographs n.s. 2. N.p., 1973.
Notes