University of Virginia Library

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.

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• ___, 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: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982.
• Madan, Falconer, et al. A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. 7 vols. in 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1895-1953.
• 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